Friday evening, after dinner for the students that weren't in the infirmary, Keinan and Chester visited her. Keinan had snuck her bread rolls from dinner, but Rose had to politely refuse them since her stomach was insistent that if she dared to eat those, it'd throw an even bigger fit than before.
The trio chatted for a while about classes. Rose had been excused from homework, but she didn't want to fall behind too much during her stay. As the conversation started to die down, Chester placed a bag on Rose's lap.
"Here, some of my favorite books."
Keinan's head snapped around and his eyebrows rose in genuine surprise. "You mean you're actually letting her borrow your trashy romance novels?"
"They are not trashy romance novels!" Chester defended, flushing.
Keinan looked Chester dead in the eye, and without blinking, he reached into the bag and presented a worn book with the cover of a pirate and a mermaid.
That looks like the books all the grandmas would hide when I came around, Rose thought to herself. And some grandpas. Pirate books must be really popular.
"They have excellent plots," Chester insisted.
Keinan stared at Chester. "Yeah. Plot."
"Hmph," Chester huffed, grabbing the book from Keinan's hand and placing it back in Rose's bag. "Here, Rose. I'm sure you'd be able to appreciate them."
"Um, thank you?" Rose tried out, deciding to give at least one book a try.
Romance wasn't very interesting to her, but all the elderly ladies from Sherry seemed to like these kinds of books, and if Chester liked them too…
Doctor Basileus poked his head out of the back room and said, "Boys, it's nearly curfew. Best to head back to your dorms."
"Okay," Chester said, "take care, Rose. We'll talk to you later."
"Sweet dreams," Keinan told her.
"Night, guys. Thanks for visiting," Rose said, waving her hands in goodbye. Both boys got up from their chairs and headed out, giving her one last wave before they left.
"Hungry?" Doctor Basileus asked her. Rose shook her head and he continued, "Okay, try to get some sleep, then."
Rose pulled the blankets back over her, unnaturally tired and glad she was able to get some rest.
Saturday morning half a dozen students—including Aella—hobbled into the doctor's office. Rose smelled them before she saw them, as a wave of burnt pork, tangy iron, and something acrid wafted into the office. It was such a vile, and unpleasant smell that Rose immediately looked over at the front door. When the students came into view, and Rose saw them, she literally screamed.
Her fellow students had stepped straight out of a horror movie, looking exactly like they had been blown up. Blood, burnt flesh, bits of hair still on fire… everything about what Rose saw was downright terrifying, and the young dragon couldn't resist letting out a scream of fright.
Her scream warranted confused looks from the students, and a positively thunderous Doctor Basileus to stand up from his seat beside Rose—he had been giving her a crash course on most common herbs used in potions—and glower darkly over at the group.
"Once," he said, "just once, I'd like to go a month without all of you limping in here. You experimented without supervision again, didn't you?"
They're missing limbs! Rose inwardly cried out, shock strangling her voice. All she could do was stare in disbelief at the apparently—actually—exploded students.
The group of students stared sullenly down at the ground, some of them shuffling their feet. One of them used their severed hand to scratch the back of their head sheepishly.
Doctor Basileus gestured towards the group and turned to Rose. "This is the blacksmithing club, Miss Rose. They are idiots. Do not join them next year."
Still bewildered by their maimed bodies—and the fact that Doctor Basileus and the students were apparently completely unbothered by such—Rose could only nod.
The doctor sighed in exasperation and with a wave of his hand, jars filled with glowing blue goop started to fly out of the backroom. He directed each of them to hospital beds and passed out the jars. The students seemed to have gone through this often enough they started to smear the goop on their bleeding injuries and murmur apologies about the mess to the doctor.
"You are all confined to the beds for the rest of the day," Doctor Basileus coldly informed them.
"But we almost got the adamanium ore stabilized for enchanting," one of the blacksmiths protested.
Rose couldn't see the look Doctor Basileus gave them, but it was enough to turn the students white and start apologizing again more profusely. Aella even whimpered and crawled over to Rose's bed, pulling her into a hug like a teddy bear.
Rose didn't mind being used as a teddy bear, though. She thought having your legs blown off warranted the right to hold someone else like a teddy bear.
Although apparently this was a common occurrence for the blacksmithing club that had a penchant for experimenting with dangerous and unstable ores their mentor would send them.
Wanting to steer the attention away from the maiming, Rose tried to strike up a conversation with Aella. However, trying to do so on the spot was difficult for the ten-year-old, and she ended up blurting out the first thing that finally popped into her head.
Well her first thought was actually: Why are you not freaking out? But Rose didn't think that would help distract, so she went with her second thought.
She asked, "Aella, why is the Hero Kingdom called the Hero Kingdom?"
Aella made a 'hmm' sound, leaning back down on the bed and pulling Rose with her since the young dragon was still in her grasp. She began to pat her hair like she was a pet.
"I think the change was done back in the, um, fifteenth century for the Surface Realm? I know it was more than a few centuries ago, since my great-great grandma was in the kingdom during it. It was around the time when humans dressed up as clunky knights and the Curtain tore in some places."
"Curtain?" Rose inquired, vaguely recognizing the term. She knew she had heard it somewhere, but she couldn't place where.
"Oh, yeah. The Curtain is what keeps humans from seeing us as us. After the Dark War, the Elders made a Crossroad that led us to the Surface Realm. Isn't that crazy? A Crossroad! A whole working Crossroad!"
Rose didn't understand the significance of that. Professor Yūei only briefly mentioned Crossroads in one of her lectures about dimensional travel.
Rose quietly asked, "W-would you please explain what a Crossroad is?"
"Oh, yeah, sure," Aella agreed easily. "So, like, we have a whole bunch of different worlds we live in. Some worlds are too dangerous to permanently live on—like Vol, which is a world with a lot of Wild Orange Magic—but we still need to go there for stuff and whatnot. Dungeons spawn on any world with Magic, y'know?"
Rose nodded, recalling that a book she read stated exactly that. Dungeons were such an integral part of the Community's economy that it didn't surprise her they would go to whatever lengths it took to find them.
"But all those worlds are really far apart, and traveling through space takes such a long time and can be risky. Thus: Crossroads!"
Aella let go of Rose so she could sit up, brushing back her long, golden hair. "Crossroads are when Wild Magic and Blue Magic has become dense enough that a—a—hole is formed. Experts can use this hole to connect it to another hole someplace else. Then it's like walking through a door, except that door transports you billions of lightyears away or whatever. That's the basic gist of a Crossroad. Of course, there's a whole lot more to it than that. We don't have any technique to verify which hole it connects to, and some holes will literally take us into black holes which are super-duper dangerous. We can't even see what's on the other side of the door until we step through."
"That sounds—that sounds scary," Rose noted, her brow furrowing as she considered that.
They could connect one spot to the other, but had no way of knowing which spot it connected to until they walked through it? "Does it ever… does it ever change spots?"
"Unstable Crossroads do," Aella answered, "but Crossroads are heavily monitored, so you don't have to worry about one of the common ones doing that. Once a connection is made, I guess it's really easy to maintain."
"So—so how do they test them? Do people really just walk through them blindly?"
"Yeah," Aella admitted. "They're called heroes, and they're part of the Adventurer Department in Unity. They don't just walk through, since a lot of Crossroads will lead us to uncharted worlds. They're actually the first to explore entire worlds if they're lucky."
"And if they're not lucky?"
"They don't come back, the Crossroad is reset after a year, and they try to form a new connection. Rinse and repeat," Aella said with a slight frown. "My dad and mom were heroes, but they didn't come back on their third trip."
Rose didn't know what to say. Stunned, she could only stare up at Aella with surprise and genuine concern. Sincerely, she said, "I'm sorry."
Aella shrugged with one shoulder. "It is what it is. I live with my grandmas and they're pretty neat. An-y-way! What were we talking about before?"
Rose hesitantly reminded her. She wondered if she ought to try comforting Aella, but the bubbly harpy didn't seem upset. Rose was good at hiding when she was sad, so maybe Aella was the same?
"Right! So back when humans were doing stuff with knights, kings, and paladins, there were some tears in the Curtain. Nothing big, but enough they were able to see certain Neheburs and it caused this huge panic.
"See, the Community forbids us from interfering with humans to prevent another Dark War from happening, so having humans see Neheburs through the Curtain was definitely a problem. We thought for sure they'd freak out, but they were actually really chill about it. That's around the time we started getting witches and warlocks—humans born with immunity to the Curtain and could use Wild Magic—and stuff.
"Well, there was this one witch born with complete immunity who wanted to be a part of the Community. The headmaster of Gardenia at the time took a shine to her and invited her to attend Gardenia. Of course she accepted, and she ended up being a queen of the Album Kingdom, which was the Hero Kingdom."
"Album? Like—like music?"
"Album means white in Latin," Aella explained quickly. "Since everyone in the Hero Kingdom has an affinity for White Magic… I guess all the kingdoms were named like that, except Logicke and Aisling. Chasm—while people with Black Magic affinity typically go in there—was originally made for people with unstable or chaotic magical cores."
Aella shifted on the bed, looking down at her missing leg. "Back to the story, though, um… the girl—the witch—she graduated and joined the Adventurer's Department. On her first mission, she, and five others, went through a Crossroad and… and she didn't come back.
"The Crossroad took them directly into a star. Magic is really strong, you see, and the shields those guys use are absolutely wicked, so most stars wouldn't immediately break them. They'd still have a couple seconds to turn back around, but I guess this star was really strong. Ever heard of a neutron star?"
Rose shook her head.
"Well they're really dense, and almost always are surrounded by some crazy magic and radiation. It broke their shields, but the witch was able to use the Wild Magic from the star and shield everyone again long enough for them to return… except using that kind of magic destroyed her, and she died. All her kingmates took her loss really hard and, they, uh, they voted to change the name to Hero Kingdom in honor of her sacrifice."
Rose wasn't expecting such a somber story—or the revelation of what happened to Aella's parents—and felt at a loss for how to reply. It took a solid minute for her to gather her thoughts enough to say, "Oh."
"Probably not the funny or happy story you were expecting, so sorry about that," Aella apologized. "I think the Warriors changed their name because of some silly bet with a teacher, so you might wanna ask Lanna about that."
On the off chance it was another sad story, Rose decided not to.
Doctor Basileus approached the two girls, giving Aella's missing leg a look of plain disdain. The harpy had already stopped the bleeding with the blue goo the doctor had handed out to everyone, but now it looked like it was her turn to get her limb reattached. Everyone else had gotten theirs done while Aella was telling Rose the story.
"You remember the rules?" Doctor Basileus asked evenly, his eyes narrowed.
"No running, and no switching out of the human skin until the stitches are gone," Aella recited.
"And why do we not do this?"
"Because while human skins are not part of us, they are part of our magical core and must be maintained with care, like any other part of our body," Aella mumbled.
"Go on."
"Aa-nd treating them too roughly might result in damaging our magical core," Aella finished, still mumbling and looking steadily at the floor.
It seemed none of the blacksmith club had been able to meet Doctor Basileus's stern glare while he fixed them up.
"That's correct," he said, pursing his lips. "One more accident this year and I'll be revoking your rights to the blacksmith club next year. You need to give your skin time to heal."
Aella visibly flinched. "But next year is the Exhibition!"
"Then you better take care not to experiment without supervision again," Doctor Basileus scolded the Hero knight, causing the girl to cringe and lower her head. "I understand how enthusiastic you all feel when receiving such rare ores, but please use a little common sense."
"Sorry, Doctor," Aella whispered, hanging her head. "I promise I'll be good."
"Mn," was all Doctor Basileus said in response, beginning to literally stitch her leg back on her with glowing green thread.
Rose watched, transfixed, as the skin and muscles and other gross-yet-totally-cool stuff started to regrow where he stitched. Doctor Basileus must have noticed her expression and tossed her a smile.
"This is called Vy Thread. It was invented by Elder Sylvania. It uses condensed Green, White, and Blue Magic to reattach limbs, and promotes rapid and safe growth."
Rose stared at it in amazement. How did that work? Fusing different kinds of magic together into one spell? She could barely get a hold on her magic as it was, but making it fuse into one thing…? She resisted the urge to exclaim her astonishment at seeing such wondrous skill, not wanting to seem childish.
Instead, she kept to her questions. She asked Aella, "Does it hurt?"
"It hurts my magic, but not physically," Aella said with a small head shake. "Kind of like touching a bruise? I mean the damage is really only to my human skin."
Rose bit her lip as another thought occurred to her. She had never asked it before because she thought it would be explained later, but that proved not to be the case. "What is a human skin, exactly?"
"A human skin is a tangible projection of your magic," Doctor Basileus explained. "It never used to be a human skin, of course. Prior to the Era of Men—when the first Crossroad that led us to humanity was discovered—it was merely used as a layer of armor or protection. As we integrated with humanity for the first time, we utilized this ability to mimic them. It was more convenient this way to talk with them as equals and befriend them. It definitely made it easier to go through their cities since larger beings, such as myself, wouldn't even fit in a street without toppling over many buildings."
"Does everyone have a human skin?" Rose asked next.
"No way," Aella said, shaking her head. "It takes a long time to be able to manifest it, and not everyone lives that long. If you live over three centuries, then the Community requires you to learn how to use a human skin, but if you don't, then you don't have to. Gardenia's one of the only two schools that encourages its students use human skins since almost all the students here will live for more than three centuries."
"Correct," Doctor Basileus agreed. "If you were to ever visit a magical city, it is doubtful you would encounter anyone using a human skin, Miss Rose, unless they are Neheburs of a larger size."
"Lanna has to use a human skin if she goes out since she's so big," Aella added. "While all of the doors and buildings are enchanted to expand, it's considered polite to adjust your size."
"Oh," came Rose, as another thought occurred to her. "Wait, if they're hard to maintain, how—I mean, I'm using a human skin, right?"
"Correct. Unfortunately, your skin is forced upon you by the same ritual that repressed your magic," Doctor Basileus answered, "at least that's what I would assume to be the case. Without examining the ritual itself, or running more invasive exams, it's hard to say. Since it's tied to your magical core, I'm hesitant to probe."
Doctor Basileus finished sewing and Aella gave a sigh, leaning back and pulling Rose back into her like a teddy bear.
"If human skins aren't really… skins, then how come I grew up like a human?" Rose asked, interested. "Everyone looks about the right age for their year, too."
"Learning how to age a human skin is tricky, but it is a requirement," Aella said, twisting her nose. "Um, can I show her, Doctor?"
"Briefly," he said.
Aella became immediately engulfed in white magic and her entire body shifted. Within minutes, in her place was a five-year-old version of her that smiled cutely up at Rose. "Once we pick a human skin, we have some control over it like age, and a little bit of the appearance. We practice aging it naturally at school, though, to prepare us for human society. It'd be queer if a bunch of ten-year-olds were walking around and acting like adults in human society, right?"
Rose nodded her head, and Aella changed back to her usual human skin. "Although we can't deviate too much from the first time we use a human skin. They're as unique as our magical signatures, which is why you won't see anyone matching each other perfectly. Not without Black Magic, at least."
Rose nodded at this, accepting the information. "But you have to think about doing all of that, right? It takes effort to age your… skin?"
"Yeah. No clue why you've been doing it naturally," Aella chirped.
"It is an oddity," Doctor Basileus agreed, "and that may very well remain a mystery until all of your magic is safely released from the seal and we can investigate it ourselves."
Rose pursed her lips, not liking that response.
Aella patted Rose's hair and asked, "Wanna hear the story of how Lanna got the nickname Thunderbutt?"
"Please."
...🌹...
Thankfully, Rose was able to return to her own bedroom by that night. She understood Doctor Basileus's distaste for experimental testing without supervision, though. Even if none of the students were severely hurt, it simply couldn't be a good habit to do such dangerous work.
Of course, no amount of detentions and lectures could deter them and from what Rose had gathered from Aella, their mentors—professionals who coached the clubs through letters, mostly—encouraged the behavior.
Apparently, a lot of them were alumni and thoroughly enjoyed their own experimental days at the school and wanted to keep that tradition going. Rose thought they were all crazy, but she supposed that could simply be her human upbringing. It ought to have been crazy to enjoy lava baths, but lo and behold, Rose loved spending time in her pools of lava.
After all that chaos on the weekend, Rose was really looking forward to sleeping in her own bed and praying things would go back to normal.
That, of course, did not happen.