Chapter 55.1

Deep underneath Lysander Hall, in a subterranean complex only accessible through an elevator with a secret button or a series of hallways hidden with illusory walls, a lone wolf-like creature lay curled up on a pile of threadbare blankets. Its body slowly rose and fell in time with its breath, and each subtle shift of its position caused its thick fur to shimmer and tingle.The blankets under the creature had been graciously donated by members of the AV Club, and as such, contained an eclectic display of colors and patterns. Items donated by guys trended towards dry, muted colors, whereas items donated by girls were more vivacious, unafraid of more varied and interesting designs. The creature in question was curled tight atop the intersection of two such blankets, which helped shed light on the incredibly strange nature of the beast. Its fur, which had initially appeared to be shades of gray and brown with occasional splotches of green, had completely shifted its coloration to match the impromptu bedding underneath it. Half of the fur on its body now looked exactly like the dark, navy blue that rested beneath its head and some of its paws, whereas its back half was bright purple with bursts of white starlight.

Stranger still, the strange chameleon-esque camouflage appeared to take the angle of onlookers into account. When Tessa had first sat down just outside the room holding the creature, the lower angle meant that the colorful blankets weren’t entirely the backdrop of her vision anymore. Now, a small strip of fur atop the wolf’s back shifted to match the gray wall now directly behind it, at least from Tessa’s perspective.

Rudimentary tests revealed that the change in coloration differed entirely on the perspective of the onlooker. If Chloé floated directly above the wolf, she didn’t see the purported changes in color that other people did when they saw the fur change from bright purple to dull gray.

This visual inconsistency, as unusual as it was by Earth standards, was far from surprising given the wolf's home plane. It hailed from The Wilds, a plane of existence overrun with thick jungles, creatures of legend, and an incredibly tenuous connection with rhyme or reason. Rather than attempting to understand more about the creature, which she knew was impossible, Tessa was mostly preoccupied with her attempts to send it home.

Sheets of paper and tattered notebooks surrounded her on the floor as she attempted to decipher the dense, runic language of the magic circle under the Cafeteria: the one circle on campus that connected to The Wilds, and thus the only chance they had of returning this creature. If nothing else, Tessa was glad she had comprehensive notes on all the circles located throughout Aurelius University. She no longer had to skulk around in the shadows when attempting to research the circles; instead, she could hole up in her apartment, or in today’s case, the hallways connected to the strange chambers far beneath Lysander Hall. Here, she was able to both iterate on magic theory and keep tabs on the strange wolf they’d previously captured.

Tessa threw her head back, sighed in frustration, then kicked a leg out as she fell backwards against the wall behind her. “Ugh, this is pointless, I have no idea what I’m fucking doing.”

A few feet away, equally frustrated though far better at masking it, sat Imani. Her refined poise made her look effortlessly elegant despite her casual attire and pose, and she looked at Tessa with a look of surprising comradery. “You’re giving up already? What happened to the witch that built a bridge into the Purgatory circle in a manner of days?”

“That was different! My friends needed me!” Tessa protested.

“Ah, so that’s the secret of why you did so poorly at the Academy. The teachers weren’t holding your friends hostage in other planes of existence,” Imani said, laughing slightly as she set down her pencil.

Tessa glared at Imani. “Ha ha, very funny. Are you telling me you understand this stuff?”

“No, not really,” Imani admitted. “I understand what you mean, though. All the planes are inherently complex, but The Wilds operate on rules we don’t fully understand, much like our new friend here,” she said, gesturing to the wolf patiently sleeping on the other side of a makeshift barricade.

“Okay, see? You do get it, you’re just being an ass,” Tessa said, rolling her eyes. “This stupid circle has been nothing but problems. Did you know it was the first one I managed to find evidence of tampering on? Of course, I mistakenly expressed the changes incorrectly and got trapped under a thick blanket of vines. Although, that ended up working out in my favor, actually…”

The conversation paused briefly as Tessa recalled her first time fucking Amara, reigniting her frustration at her friend’s newfound monogamy.

“This whole chamber was being used by that cult, right?” Imani asked, pulling Tessa away from her debaucherous thoughts. “That’s how you found it?”

Tessa nodded. “Yup. They needed access to the Hell Circle, but we’re pretty sure a bunch of possessed cultists were living down here. We still haven’t cleaned all the rooms out, but at least this complex gives us a place to hide out when we’ve got nonsense like this guy,” she said, looking at the wolf again.

“Certainly a bit of good fortune, I won’t argue with that,” Imani said.

Silence fell between them again, and after a few minutes, Tessa rallied. She leaned forward again, grabbed a page of magic notes and attempted to bury herself in interplanar physics.

Despite Imani’s teasing, Tessa didn’t think her friends being stranded in Purgatory was the sole reason she’d successfully built her first bridge. Well, it might have been part of it, but as Tessa stared at her recreation of the Wilds Circle, it was hard to deny the increased complexity of the runic configuration. Purgatory was closer, in a manner of speaking, and operated on rules less foreign to denizens of Earth. According to Amara and Vee, it had even looked exactly like Aurelius University, which made sense; it was commonly seen as a Plane that served as a strange mirror to Earth, or possibly some kind of overlay? Theories on the topic heavily diverged depending on who was talking.

The Wilds represented chaos, change, whimsy, mutation, and a million other things. The only consistent feature was inconsistency, and the potency of the plane meant that its very inconsistency applied to the basic governing laws of the Planes.

The most terrifying creatures from The Wilds were the faeries. Their understanding was so heavily shaped by the twisted rules of their realm that their beliefs their governing rules of physics. If a faerie believed that rudeness could be punished by turning someone into a tree, then the rules of The Wilds made it happen. The fickle nature of these creatures, however, meant that “rudeness” could be anything from eating a fruit the wrong way or failing to do a cartwheel after taking exactly seven steps into their house. More chaotic fey creatures sometimes made up rules on the spot, which were of course enforced with the same ironclad consistency as gravity.

Attempting to connect Earth and The Wilds, then, was a truly staggering task; Tessa needed to somehow establish a magical link between two wildly different sets of magical physics. Every method she thought of for building flexibility in her runic designs failed to match the space restrictions of the magic circle under the cafeteria, and with each minute that passed, it felt more like she was hopelessly bashing her head against a brick wall with no tangible reward in sight.

“Have you ever thought about what kind of magic you want?” Imani asked out of nowhere.

Her question completely derailed Tessa’s train of thought, even startling her somewhat as she pulled her gaze away from the piece of paper she’d been staring at for the last few minutes. “Uh… shit, what?”

“Your magic,” Imani repeated. “You’ve only got basic telekinesis runes right now, but all witches get those. Have you given any thought to what you’d want to get next?”

“No, not really. I mean, with Davenport in charge, I always kinda assumed this was the end of the road, you know?”

“Okay, sure, but Davenport got ousted. Headmistress Bishop is way less cruel, and besides, aren’t you two super close or whatever?” Imani asked. “I imagine she’d be rather cross if you told her you weren’t planning on furthering your magical education.”

“Well, that’s… I mean….” Tessa stammered.

“Um, well, my mom had ice magic,” she said dismissively.

“That’s not an answer, Tess. Is that something you’d want?” Imani asked, sliding a few of their notebooks aside and inching closer. “Ice is a pretty tactile expression of magic, and there are lots of ways to play with runes to obtain some interesting effects.”

“Wait, you can get more magic?” Chloé asked, suddenly appearing out of thin air next to Tessa.

“FUCK!” Tessa yelped, flinching backwards and kicking up a pile of papers. In the nearby room, the wolf leapt up from its slumber and started barking at the chaotic events, and it took a minute before everyone managed to calm it down.

Chloé, her face bright red from embarrassment, sighed as the wolf finally settled down again. “I’m sorry! Ugh, stupid Chloé, you keep forgetting to announce yourself…”

After Tessa’s heart rate returned to normal, she smiled at Chloé, “Girl, it’s fine, really.”

“No! I should be better about respecting people’s boundaries!” Chloé said, staring at the floor as she floated several inches above it. “I just… I get so tired from manifesting for all my classes, and then, when I’m around you all, I get so excited that I don’t have to show myself if I don’t want to…”

“Chloé, seriously, it’s fine. You just startled me, that’s all. My partners do it too, sometimes, and they can’t even turn invisible.”

They smiled at each other, the conversation pausing for a moment before Imani spoke up. “Is manifesting really that difficult?”

“It’s like… hm…” Chloé paused, her eyes glazing over and her hair turning even more white as she turned her attention inward. As she played with her hair, she absentmindedly began tilting to the side. “Manifesting itself isn’t difficult, but holding it for longer periods of time is, especially the more present I need to be.”

“Like it’s a gradient?” Tessa asked.

“Yeah! I can individually control every aspect of my presence, which means my only hope of making it through the day is trying to take advantage of those different aspects. For example, if I get really lucky and score a seat in the back corner of class, I can usually get away with only manifesting visually, and often I can turn off gravity too. However, if there’s ever a chance that someone might bump into me without me realizing it, I need to stay physically present or else they might discover I’m half-ghost or whatever.”

“Wait, are you technically a ghost?” Imani asked, a flash of worry in her voice.

“Well, no, but it’s not like I have any real idea what I am,” Chloé admitted. “As best I can tell, I’m suspended between dimensions, my essence able to manifest on either side of the planar barrier, but that’s a pretty dense description. Realistically? I can be a person if I want, and I can be a ghost if I want, so I say half-ghost to make my life easier.”

There was another pause in the conversation as Imani furrowed her brow for a minute, her curiosity over Chloé’s condition more than evident. “What does it feel like? Manifesting?”

Chloé tilted her head for a moment as she thought about the question, then disappeared. A moment later, she appeared again, then she briefly fell to the floor as gravity reasserted itself, then she vanished again. When she finally spoke up, she was still invisible. “It feels like I’m made of falling snow. In my natural state, I’m a loose collection of flurries drifting across the wind, associated only through loose proximity. If I want to, I can reach out to all the different snowflakes and pull them together, making a snowball, and that’s kinda like making myself visible or allowing myself to see and hear things. Then, if I try even harder, I can pack the snow really tight, and that’s like turning tangible. Holding all that snow together takes a lot of effort, though, and the snowball is constantly trying to return to its natural state.”

“You said the Lysander Circle helps things, right?” Tessa asked. “If you take breaks to visit there, does it make it easier to recuperate?”

Chloé shook her head. “No, it doesn’t work like that. Whatever you did, that bridge thing you made, it just makes it easier for me to pack all the snow together. If I’m in my neutral state, it doesn’t matter if I’m in the circle or not. So, unless you have a way to pack up the Lysander Circle and let me bring it from class to class, it’s not gonna do much for me.”

Tessa paused for a moment, turning Chloé’s words around in her head.

Her thoughts were disrupted when her phone buzzed in her pocket. Stranger still, as she pulled out her phone to check the message, she saw Chloé do the same thing. After a few seconds of reading, confusion and apprehension appeared on both their faces, and they looked at each other with worry as they realized they’d received the same message.