OW Tournament: Schrecken vs Shaya, Part 7

It was only a few days before Schrecken more or less fully recovered from the injuries that Shaya had inflicted, thanks to a combination of both his own resilience and the expertise of the Medical Studies department. He was back to his active, enthusiastic self, and at the moment, was sitting in a tree at the border between the campus and the forest and pretending that he was Robin Hood. He did not really know what had been going on with Shaya in the tournament, other than that she had apparently been under the control of some kind of evil force that spoke with an angry voice. He had heard that Shaya had some kind of dark secret or something, and he finally had realized that it was the Beast – or as Schrecken knew it, the Angry Voice Bad Guy – that had been what Shaya was trying to hide and suppress. He hoped she was okay. He knew that she was still alive, or at least as alive as a vampire could actually hope to be, which was a good thing. He did not know, on the other hand, whether she had actually broken free of the Angry Voice Bad Guy. He considered going back to the infirmary to see if she had recovered enough to actually talk to him about the potential of them becoming friends, but before he could, he was approached on all sides by a ghostly chill.

“Ah, there you are,” announced Sir Caradoc, as Schrecken saw the Knights of the Ever-Flowing Cauldron crowd around the tree in which he was sitting. Some of them still stood on the ground, whereas others, such as the angry woman who had been shouting at Sir Caradoc in the mirror near the end of the battle with Shaya, had more fully embraced their ghostly nature and floated around the branches of the tree instead. “As per the contract we had previously established, we have assisted you in defeating the vampire, and we are released!” The other ghostly faerie knights nodded in unison, murmuring amongst themselves in a variety of fae languages that Schrecken could not understand. The bogeyman himself had not really considered the bargain he had arranged with the ghosts to be any sort of contract – he had never planned to keep them in the mirror any longer than they wanted to stay, as he tended to care a lot more about the well-being of the spirits he caught than his reflection did. He had just asked the ghostly knights if they wanted to help him fight a vampire, partially just because he thought that ghosts fighting a vampire would be awesome, and the ghosts had agreed to help him fight the vampire. Come to think of it, that was probably technically a contract, whether he had thought much of it at the time or not. Even so, Schrecken was sad to see them go. Sir Caradoc was about as enthusiastic as Schrecken himself was, and he had been fun to get to know.

“I have also come to deliver you a warning!” Sir Caradoc continued, pointing up at Schrecken from his position at the base of the tree. “The vampire you battled in the arena is still alive! As we have seen her taken over by darkness and madness, she may attempt to strike you down and claim her vengeance if such forces persist within her!”

But Schrecken just shook his head and laughed. “Hoo hoo hoo! I have figured out a thing!” he said happily. “Shaya is not a bad guy, so she is not going to come and get me! She was under mind control by the angry voice bad guy who was very loud in the arena!” Schrecken did not know that it was known as the Beast, nor did he know that it was a force that was present within Shaya’s own mind as opposed to something affecting her from outside. “So when I am even stronger, when I am very, very, very strong, I am going to go find the angry voice bad guy, and I am going to fight him! Then, when I fight him and I win, then he will not be able to mind control any more good guys!”

Was it Shaya or the Beast who had been in control when Schrecken had finally defeated the vampire with the power of a tiny miniature sun? It was not easy for anyone to tell. Certainly not for Schrecken.

All in all, regardless of what had happened with the cruel and feral part of Shaya’s psyche taking over, Schrecken had been quite impressed with what Shaya had been able to do. Whereas the little bogeyman could only merge with shadows, Shaya had been able to manipulate them thanks to her Shadowmancy training and her natural abilities, forming the darkness into wings, tentacles and even an intricate black sword. Whereas Schrecken only knew one blood magic spell, the one where he could use his bloodstone to track people who were hiding or very far away, Shaya could use her own blood to form tendrils with which to attack people – though it was a technique that she had only actually used while she was under control of the Beast. Was that what Schrecken had to look forward to when he continued on with his blood magic classes? Being able to manipulate his own blood into different shapes and structures that he could use in battle? He was glad that he had chosen Magical Linguistics as his first department to study at Otherworlde Academy. And then, of course, there was the fact that Shaya was a trained warrior whom Schrecken could probably never hope to match in terms of physical capability. Yes, Schrecken had been quite impressed by all the cool things that Shaya had done in their battle. She even had that huge shadow wolf familiar. It almost made Schrecken reconsider his decision to not take the familiar magic classes in the Magical Linguistics department.

But what Schrecken lacked in terms of raw power, he more than made up with through his versatility and sheer persistence. Those new rune stones he had made certainly paid off, even if he had only used Berkano once to make Shaya crash into a tree because he thought it was kind of funny. Kenaz had certainly helped him. Not only did it produce those jets of flame, but it also had a tendency to provide all sorts of useful advice (and, as he had seen in the Alternate Realm when he had faced off against his reflection before fighting Shaya, it also liked to lecture him on things).

If he were a superhero and Zombie Joe were his sidekick, Schrecken decided, then the Kenaz rune was like his mission control, providing helpful advice and information on what to do next, sort of like a tutorial in a video game. If he was Batman and Zombie Joe was Robin, then Kenaz was probably Oracle. He thought about this for a while, trying to decide who everyone else he knew would be if he were Batman, but when he got to trying to associate the Knights of the Ever-Flowing Cauldron with the various members of the Justice League, he remembered that the ghostly faerie knights were actually all still there around the tree.

Schrecken looked down at Sir Caradoc. “So… uh… how did my reflection catch you? You are all very strong ghosts! You can break magic spells, like the cage and the thing where I almost lost the mirror! So how did you get caught?”

Sir Caradoc grinned and motioned for another one of the ghostly knights at the base of the tree to come forward. “Sir Silvanus, shall you tell him our mournful tale?” He did not sound mournful in the slightest. Perhaps it was a coping mechanism to deal with being dead, but Sir Caradoc had a sort of manic, theatrical cheerfulness that never seemed to waver in the slightest. “After all, you are a much better storyteller than I am! Perhaps I shall even make you our official storyteller! Haha!”

The knight who had stepped in to correct Sir Caradoc several times before spoke up again. “Excuse me, ah, Sir Caradoc, I do believe that Sir Silvanus is already our official storyteller.”

Sir Silvanus was a man who was very tall and very thin, and did not seem to have much interest in any sort of upkeep of his knightly trappings. He looked quite a lot like a scarecrow who was wearing armor. But he spoke with quite a calm and cultured voice, almost melodic, and it was obvious to Schrecken why Sir Caradoc had chosen him to tell the knights’ stories for them. “Our tale begins long before our journey into the land that you know as the Alternate Realm,” he began, and Schrecken listened with rapt attention. He had always liked stories about knights going out on fantastical adventures, even if he had a tendency to sympathize more with the dragons and giants the knights often killed instead of the knights themselves. “After our deaths at the hands of the Unseelie Court, we continued, in these spirit forms, bodiless but unwilling to leave this mortal world, on our many travels throughout the realms. After all, we are knights, and if we must continue our duties after death, so shall it be. Perhaps ‘tis even better in these forms, unbound by the laws and life and death, to see all the great sights that this world has to offer us before we move on to the next.”

“No, I think being dead is really annoying!” Schrecken interrupted as soon as Sir Silvanus paused in his tale. Schrecken had been in a dead, intangible form plenty of times before, only able to weakly manipulate the shadows around him to make them look spookier and to make a few strange sounds. Maybe it was different for Sir Caradoc and his ghostly band of knights, given that they could dispel magic, stay in a humanoid form, and had all those other ghosts to travel around with, but Schrecken could certainly remember his time spent in his Whisper Form and he didn’t like it one bit.

“Hush, child,” stated Sir Silvanus, seemingly unconcerned with Schrecken’s rather immature interruption. “Do you not wish to hear my story?” Schrecken, still sitting up in the tree, hopped down to the ground and nodded enthusiastically. “Yes I do! I think it is a very good story. It is just that I do not like being a dead ghost, because when I am a dead ghost, I can’t do a lot of things.”

And Sir Silvanus simply smiled, and continued on with his tale. “We traveled to many places, all across the corners of this world – and then even beyond.” Schrecken was about to protest that the world did not have corners, that he had seen globes and they had no corners, but for once he decided to keep his mouth shut. “We have seen fantastical sights that few subjects of Queen Titania and King Oberon have ever laid eyes upon,” the knight continued. “We have seen labyrinthine castles contained entirely within the astral plane, the mundane confines of the physical realm vanishing away before one’s very eyes to be replaced by the vastness of outer space. We have seen worlds once contained within storybooks, brought to life as the stories escaped their dusty paper prisons and grew into something far greater. We have visited the hedge witches who live on the highest mountain peaks, who travel into the realm of spirits every night to mediate disputes between the lost souls who live there. We have visited the deep ocean, home to the Cecaelia Nation, whose queen and her fae lover were once students of this very academy of magic. Yes, we have been to many realms and many worlds, and while some of those places have been fraught with danger even to bodiless souls such as ourselves, we have always escaped to tell another tale. Until now.”

“But you can make magic spells go away and everything!” Schrecken exclaimed. “You are very strong ghosts! Why did you get stuck?”

Sir Silvanus sighed, a surprisingly harsh rattling sigh that left Schrecken shivering from the ghostly chill. It was a purposeful expression of sorrow on the ghost’s part, as ghosts, of course, had no need to breathe. “Upon hearing that this was the very academy of dark magic that Queen Melusine of the Cecaelia had once attended, we, the Knights of the Ever-Flowing Cauldron, took it upon ourselves to travel here and see just what sort of grand school this must be. And we were, truth be told, not disappointed in its construction. While far less intricate than many of the schools of magic we have visited in our days long past, the aura of magic – magic of the darkest sort, I might add – around this place is unmistakable. It is a place of great and mysterious power. A power that may hold the most dire and sinister of intentions, perhaps, if our suspicions are correct, but it is power nonetheless indeed. And as we explored this great academy of dark magic, we encountered a sinister tome inscribed with the name of a terrible sorceress, a tome that threatened to ensnare us had we not made our escape with all our greatest efforts.”

The ghostly faerie knight paused for dramatic effect. “The name of this sorceress was Zila Hawthorn.”

Schrecken perked up at the mention of the name. “Oh! I have heard of that book! It is a book that I found, and the first time I saw it, I did not open it because I thought it would be a dumb boring biography book. But then, I found it again, and I got stuck in the book! And I missed all of my classes and failed all of them!” Schrecken shook his head. “It was very bad. Yes. But now I am going to pass all of my classes, and not fail!”

The ghostly knights were shocked to hear that Schrecken had also been trapped in the book that bore Zila Hawthorn’s name – Sir Caradoc more than any other. “You? This vile witch can trap even those with a true physical body in her book?” Sir Caradoc asked, quite blatantly taken aback by Schrecken’s comment. “How in the worlds did you ever manage to escape her clutches?!”

“Well…” Schrecken began, “I do not actually know. I do not even remember most of being in there! I figured it out, because I am smart and not dumb! Hoo hoo hoo!” He thought about the few vague memories he had of being trapped in the book. “I think there was an angry lady yelling a lot at me. Yes. A lot. So maybe I got kicked out! For being too loud!” Schrecken started to do his goofy hopping dance again, repeating his words in a silly sing-song voice. “I got kicked out… for being too loud… I got kicked out… for being too LOUD! Hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo!”

In truth, even though he did not know it, he actually had been kicked out of the book by Zila. However, it was not for being too loud. It was for being much too stubborn to listen to what she had planned for him to do.

“I know all too little about this Zila Hawthorn,” Sir Silvanus continued, “but she appears to be a spirit much like ourselves, torn between this mortal plane and the unknown world beyond. The spirit, perhaps, of some great and terrible witch, or perhaps of a spiteful forest spirit who refuses to simply go to her final resting place, or perhaps even a faerie much like ourselves. Whatever she may be, she resides within the pages of that enchanted volume, manipulating the words within its pages to shape a world in which she may reside until… until…” He paused, his voice trailing off as he tried to figure out what he was going to say. Zila Hawthorn had been waiting for something, he knew that much. But what it was, he did not know. “…Until her far-reaching and sinister plans have been laid in motion, to progress like the inevitable changing of the very seasons themselves,” he finished. Truth be told, he did not actually know that Zila was a very cruel and evil witch, or that she did have plans that, while not particularly complicated, were indeed quite sinister in nature. He and the rest of the band of ghostly knights had not been in the magical book that she was possessing for very long. But Sir Silvanus was a storyteller, and he had no problem exaggerating and telling half-truths. Especially not to Schrecken, who was unlikely to actually question much of anything he said. Besides, he did not like Zila very much, given that she had tried to trap him and his fellow knights in her book, so he had no problems casting her as a villain in his tale.

“Do you think that she is maybe the angry voice bad guy?” Schrecken asked, his eyes wide with curiosity, wonder, and more than a bit of surprise. “The angry voice bad guy who was doing the control of Shaya?”

Sir Silvanus shook his head. “I highly doubt that the two entities are one and the same. If so, she would have little need to reside in some cursed book.”

Schrecken looked a bit crestfallen. He thought he had figured out something clever. It seemed that there were two very different ‘bad guys’ here. Three, if you counted Geist in addition to Zila and the Beast. “Oh. Okay. And then you got out with the thing that made you stop the spells in the fight?”

The storyteller nodded. “If it is our power to dispel enchantments of various sorts to which you refer, as we allowed you to escape the confines of your invisible cage and protect the vessel that contained us, then yes, that is the means by which we freed ourselves. However, it was a great and truly strenuous effort that we undertook in order to escape the clutches of this foul sorceress, and once we were finally freed from that dark and terrible tome of magic, we were quite powerless to resist the necromantic spellcraft that kept us trapped within that mirror. Fearing the magic of the student necromancers learning their craft at this academy, we fled to the Alternate Realm, believing ourselves to be safe… but, in truth, as we soon learned, we were anything but safe in that realm.”

“And that was when the stupid clone reflection version of me caught you, and then I broke the mirror thing that did not look like a mirror on the inside, and you all got out because I am better at all of the Necromancy than he is!” Schrecken gleefully interjected.

By this point, Sir Silvanus could see that no matter what he said, Schrecken was going to just keep adding his own commentary, and decided to just let the story finish then and there, and just let Sir Caradoc do all the talking again.

“So what are you going to do now?” Schrecken asked.

“Why, we are going to go on more adventures, of course!” Sir Caradoc exclaimed. “Did you think that a mere book and a mirror would stop us? Of course not! Haha! There are so many places here yet to be explored, and perhaps even more great battles to fight! We could travel through the mountains, or the forest, or--”

“Oh! You want to be doing more fighting!” Schrecken exclaimed. “I am still in the tournament! And there will be fighting! So maybe when it is time for the next battle in the fighting tournament, you can come back and fight more!” He paused for a moment to think about this. “Also maybe you should not go in the forest. There was a big tree that eats souls!”

“It’s called an Amdusian Ash Tree, and I highly doubt you’ll find another one in the forest,” came a familiar stern voice from behind the bogeyman. “I did say that they’re exceptionally rare, you know.”

Schrecken turned around and saw Cressida standing behind him, broomstick in hand, presumably going out to the forest to gather some new potion ingredients or study some of the wildlife there. She was clearly not happy to see Schrecken, given that he had defeated one of her own students in the tournament – although Shaya relied much more on Magical Linguistics than Beast Studies, and Cressida did have a general disdain for the Magical Linguistics department. Of course, Schrecken was also a student of Magical Linguistics as well, and while it was only his secondary field of magical study at Otherworlde Academy ever since he had decided to start taking Necromancy classes, he did rely a lot on his Magical Linguistics-related abilities in the tournament. Cressida may have been interested in watching Schrecken’s Necromancy in action, but she was starting to like him less and less every time they met. She fully expected everyone in the tournament to fight their hardest and do everything they could in order to win – after all, she had done the same thing back when she was a student, which had led to some very nasty actions during her own battles, like slicing the wings off of one of her opponents and impaling another one on a tree (though, given his unusual anatomy and physiology, he had managed to survive, which was actually what Cressida had been counting on). But she was still bitter whenever she herself lost a tournament battle back in her student days, and she had shifted that to being bitter about her own students losing battles now.

“Who are you speaking to out here, anyways?” the witch asked, extending her hand to examine the chill that hung in the air. “Oh, right. Ghosts.” She had never been trained in Necromancy, and could not see ghosts without the aid of potions that would allow her to do so. But her best friend, Emily Renalds –who was perhaps her only friend – was a Necromancer herself, and Cressida had learned how to recognize when ghosts were present even if she could not actually see them directly.

“Yes! They are ghosts! Lots and lots of ghosts!” Schrecken exclaimed, not quite catching on to the fact that Cressida did not actually like him very much. “They are the ghosts of faeries, who were knights, and then they died, and now they are my friends! They helped me do fighting in the tournament, against Shaya the Spell-Casting Fighting Vampire--” his face lit up as he mentioned the title he had made up for Shaya, still thinking that she was an incredibly cool person – “and then I won! I did the winning! I am the winner!” Schrecken was very proud of himself, and every time he thought about the fact that he had actually defeated Shaya, he became quite giddy, despite – or perhaps because of – how long and difficult the battle had been. “A winner is me!”

Then Schrecken stopped in his tracks. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Now that I am the winner, before I have to fight again in the fighting tournament and see if I am also still a winner, I am going to go to the library. Yes. I am. And then I am going to read all about the ninjas. That is the thing that you have told me to do!”

A few of the Knights of the Ever-Flowing Cauldron exchanged surprised glances. They were still relatively new to the campus of the Otherworlde Academy, and considered the possibility of there being actual ninjas on the campus. They would have been quite worried if they weren’t all already dead.

Cressida was, honestly, quite surprised that Schrecken had even remembered her request for him to go to the library and read some books on actual historical ninjas. She had some rather mixed opinions of the little bogeyman – on the one hand, she was not happy in the slightest that he had defeated both Cordelia and Shaya, and his general lack of wisdom and common sense was something that the witch hated in people no matter who they were. Not to mention that he had gone into the field of Magical Linguistics, which, while Cressida recognized such magic as useful, she still had a tendency to dismiss its actual study as vague mystical rubbish. But, on the other hand, Schrecken was surprisingly useful, he was certainly enthusiastic about the various practical applications of his studies, and he did seem to have a lot of potential despite his goofy, immature attitude. He did act a lot like a little kid, and Cressida did like children a lot, but whatever leniency she might have had for Schrecken’s often childish demeanor was negated by the fact that she knew full well that he was actually much older than her. For the time being, she regarded him negatively, but he was still a resource that she would make the most of.

Cressida did not say anything about the ninjas. Instead, she changed the subject to Schrecken’s own studies. “Listen, there’s something else I want you to do, and no, it’s got nothing to do with your Zombie Jack this time.”

“Zombie JOE!” Schrecken responded quite heatedly, almost as though he had been offended by Cressida calling it by the wrong name. “It is not Zombie Jack! It is Zombie Joe! Zombie JOE!”

“Well, you’ve gone through three Zombie Joes already,” Cressida said somewhat dismissively, “if I were you, I wouldn’t even be giving them names. But this doesn’t require any sort of zombies at all. I understand that you’re taking Professor Mika’s NEC 302 class – that is, Reaping. Is that correct?”

Schrecken grinned at Cressida. “Yes! That is very correct! Hoo hoo hoo!” He clapped his hands together enthusiastically. “I am taking that class, and I am taking it with Professor Mika, who is not a girl! And I am going to make a scythe, and learn to get souls stuck in it. Yes. It will be a very good class. Hoo hoo.”

Cressida was not impressed. “I’m a professor, Schrecken. I know quite well that Professor Azarov is not a girl.”

The Knights of the Ever-Flowing Cauldron looked at each other in confusion. They had only seen Professor Mika very briefly, before making sure they got out of the Necromancy building as soon as possible. Even though they were faeries, and thus many of them already looked quite feminine, a lot of them had indeed mistaken Professor Mika for a girl. Or, at least, Sir Caradoc had, and he shared his opinion loudly enough with the other knights that most of them just ended up accepting it.

“Right, anyways,” Cressida continued, “once you actually get to the assignments that involve taking the soul out of something and placing it in your scythe, and you think you’ve actually got a decent idea of what you’re supposed to be doing, I want you to show me. I need to be able to compare this to Emily’s technique, as I’m not quite sure whether her natural Emere affinity for spirits makes this sort of thing easier for her.”

“Ooooooh, I get it,” the bogeyman exclaimed. Cressida noticed that his breath was… not particularly a nice thing to smell. This was primarily because, shortly before the Medical Studies department had declared him fully recovered and ready to go out and about again, he had been eating slightly spoiled cheese that he had found under one of the infirmary beds. “Oh! You just want to see how I can steal souls with my scythe! That I do not have yet. But I will. Heheha. Yes. I was thinking that maybe you were going to get me to make another Zombie Joe, and then you were going to punch it again so I would have to make a new Zombie Joe. That would be a not good thing. It would be a bad thing. Yes.”

Cressida rolled her eyes. “I already said it didn’t have anything to do with your Zombie Joes.”

“Ah, I believe she said it had nothing to do with any Zombie Joe,” added the one knight who seemed authorized to talk back to Sir Caradoc, the one who had corrected his leader on several facts already before.

“Right as usual, Sir Wintergreen!” Sir Caradoc replied with a hearty laugh. “Just like the time you battled Meridianna the Cruel and put a stop to her wickedness once and for all! We could not have done it without you and your clever strategy, my friend!”

“I must say, I am glad you finally remembered that was me,” muttered Sir Wintergreen.

Schrecken was listening to the ghostly knights just as much as he was listening to Cressida, which slightly annoyed the witch, as she could neither see nor hear them. It was a shame, as she would have probably gotten along quite well with Sir Wintergreen. “Why do you want to see me steal souls?” Schrecken asked, finally getting around to trying to figure out Cressida’s reasoning for all of her requests. “Is it so you will be able to see me do cool things with my awesome scythe that I do not have yet?” He mimed swinging a scythe (or at least how he thought a scythe might be used as a weapon, as, outside of television and comic books, he had only ever seen it used by farmers), making sound effects as he moved. “Whack! Whoooosh! Like that!”

“You know, a scythe really isn’t a practical sort of thing to use as a weapon,” Cressida commented dryly. She would not tell Schrecken the reason why she wanted to see him work with souls so much, whether it was raising zombies from the dead or trapping souls in a scythe. It was unlikely that he would be able to do anything to stop her, and besides, given his interests, he probably would have thought it was a great idea. But he could tell other people about her ideas and plans, and she could not allow that.

Despite all her secrecy and the rather creepy nature of the kinds of spells that had interested her, Cressida’s plans were not particularly sinister in the slightest. Ever since she had first come to Otherworlde Academy – and even before that, to some extent, even back when she was twelve years old and first discovered that she was a witch – she had been interested in the factors that allowed some humans to use magic while others could not. She wanted to know what made someone a witch. And then she wanted to apply it herself, to recreate whatever systems allowed someone to use magic, and artificially create a witch. And now, thanks to the presence of Cordelia and Baz at Otherworlde Academy, she had some idea of how to go about that. Cordelia seemed to be a normal human who was turned into a witch, whereas Baz was a magical android, albeit one whose design and practical abilities were not to Cressida’s satisfaction and thus he was absolutely nothing like the ‘artificial witch’ that Cressida planned to make. And she had been collecting parts, fusing them together by magic, using her position as the Beast Studies professor to research the magical systems of all sorts of creatures so she could find a way for her creation to use magic. Witch magic, to be precise.

Cressida’s magic was already quite reactive in nature. The thorny vines she constantly carried around on her hat and sleeves were once perfectly ordinary briars that had happened to resonate with her type of magic and become something much more unusual. Her broomstick, as well, had been an ordinary old-fashioned broom until she came into contact with it around the time of her magical awakening, imbuing it with magical properties of its own. She had even exploited her own reactive type of magic in the past to create a small golem, but it did not have a mind of its own, nor any magic besides that which had animated it in the first place. She needed something greater.

And that was why she had been watching the Necromancers. To understand how a soul is forced into a body or an object, so that she may do the same and animate the artificial witch she was working on so diligently. She had some idea of how to go about creating an artificial soul – though she was unsure whether or not the aether spirits she would be relying on for such a project would be particularly happy about that – but she needed a way to get it into the body that she had created. She figured that yes, Schrecken would indeed like this idea, given that it had to do with magical robots and was possibly reminiscent of Frankenstein, but if he went around telling people, someone might either try to stop her or they might try to steal her idea or her work.

Cressida wondered if Schrecken had actually ever read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

(The answer was no.)

Meanwhile, as all these thoughts ran through the witch’s head, the ghostly Knights of the Ever-Flowing Cauldron were having a rather heated debate on whether or not one could effectively use a scythe as a weapon. Sir Caradoc argued that if Grim Reapers and harvest spirits could go around carrying scythes as weapons, than anyone could, whereas Sir Wintergreen argued that those scythes were not used as weapons, but as farming tools, and that Grim Reapers and similar spirits were just harvest spirits who harvested souls. Sir Silvanus, still somewhat sore about how frequently Schrecken had interrupted his story, just kept his mouth shut. Schrecken had taken Sir Caradoc’s side on the matter, and was still trying to pretend to swing a scythe around, complete with sound effects, in anticipation of his Necromancy assignments where he would design a scythe and reap souls with it. “Is that why? Is that why you want to see me steal souls?” Schrecken asked again. “So you can see that I am going to look very cool when I have a big fight and I have a scythe and steal someone’s soul?”

“Perhaps,” Cressida said, and left it at that.

In the witch’s mind, that was definitely a no. But in Schrecken’s mind, it was a yes. “Hoo hoo hoo! Hee hee ha ha ha!” the enthusiastic little bogeyman chortled as he clapped his hands together. “I knew it! I knew it! You actually do think that I am cool! You are going to see me take so many souls! But only bad guy souls. Because I am a good guy. Yes. Hoo hoo hoo!”

The Knights of the Ever-Flowing Cauldron knew what Cressida had really meant, but a surprisingly fierce glare from Sir Caradoc kept them from telling Schrecken and ruining the moment for him.

Cressida was beginning to be slightly exasperated with the little bogeyman. But, even so, she needed to watch a Necromancer besides Emily in action, and she had already copied a few of his memories about some of his other techniques. She figured that she could do it again once Schrecken started trying to reap souls, and at least get an idea of the kind of magic that was involved, at least compared to what Emily did to cast the same sorts of spells. She was so close to her goal now. So close. And if she had to put up with a goofy monster who acted kind of like a child despite being much older than her, so be it. It was all for the sake of her project. Soon, there would be a new student at Otherworlde Academy.

If Cressida succeeded in creating an artificial witch, it could be sort of considered to be her child, albeit not biologically. So Cressida hoped that there would be no accusations of nepotism.

Though Schrecken misunderstood what Cressida had meant with her ambiguous response, it was that very misunderstanding that led him to be even more excited about his assignments this term at Otherworlde Academy. He was going to be learning to reap souls, as well as drain people’s life-force just as the ghosts he summoned did. And over in Magical Linguistics, he was learning about how to combine spoken magic with written magic – just as Shaya had done as she attempted to imprison Schrecken in that invisible cage during their tournament battle.

Schrecken was still wondering, however, about the force that had attempted to take control of Shaya – and had partially succeeded, at least temporarily -- near the end of their tournament battle. He still wanted to be friends with Shaya, just as he wanted to be friends with Apple and Cordelia, so if Shaya was being controlled by some kind of evil power, he wanted to be able to stop it. And, hey, Cressida was a professor, and thus probably very smart. Besides, she worked a lot with potions, and Schrecken had heard about mind-control potions, so he figured that maybe that was what had been used on Shaya to make her act like that. The bogeyman wondered if Cressida would know who or what had attempted to take control of Shaya in that battle. Or at least how they did it.

“Hey! Hey! I have a question for you,” Schrecken began. “And it is not about ninjas this time! It is about a thing that maybe I think you could answer, about a thing that happened when I was fighting in the battle! Can you answer my question?”

The witch raised her eyebrows. On the one hand, Schrecken had defeated one of her own students, and she did not want to see him gain any more advantages in his future tournament battles. But on the other hand, that battle was already over, and she could not change its outcome. And this time, Schrecken seemed to be asking a legitimate question, not some garbage about ninjas or comic books. She decided that she would listen to what he had to say, and if she did not want to answer it, she could simply refuse to tell him anything. Or give him an ambiguous answer. He had a tendency to jump to the wrong conclusions when he was given an ambiguous answer. “I suppose I can try,” Cressida stated. “Just don’t waste my time with a ridiculous question this time.”

Schrecken nodded enthusiastically, looking a bit like a strange and unkempt bobblehead toy. “Okay! When I was fighting in the tournament fight, and I was fighting Shaya, she did a thing where she turned into a bad guy.” He remembered what he had seen and heard as Shaya’s personality shifted and the Beast took over. “Her eyes got all glowy and she got really weird and angry! And she turned into a bad guy! But then, when she was flying up in the sky, she had an angry voice and said something about… not being controlled…?” Schrecken paused for a few moments, trying to make sure he remembered correctly. “So I was thinking that maybe, she is being mind-controlled by an evil bad guy! But I do not know what kind of bad guy. Or how he is doing it. I think it is a he because the angry voice sounded deep, like a man voice. But I guess it could be a girl bad guy. So I want to know who is the bad guy!”

Well… that was certainly a lot more coherent than Cressida had expected. And a lot more relevant, for that matter. And it wasn’t as though it was something that would give Schrecken much of an advantage in the tournament if he knew, since he had already fought Shaya. Cressida did not know all the details about Shaya’s particular Beast personality, nor did she know about all of the struggles that Shaya had with the Beast, but she had a general idea of what had happened out there in the arena. It was a very different kind of ‘beast’ than the ones that Cressida worked with, but she knew enough about vampires to at least recognize the effect.

“Well, I suppose this is something I can explain to you. Shaya, as I hope you’ve figured out by now, is a vampire.” Cressida began.

“Yes! She is a very cool vampire!” Schrecken blurted out before Cressida could continue. “She is the Spell-Casting Fighting Vampire! That is a very good thing to be!”

Cressida was mildly irritated by Schrecken’s interruption, though she continued on with her explanation. “Right. Well, you see, vampires are predators. They typically require blood to survive, though in the case of some vampires, they can instead consume normal food and their dependency on blood is more like an addiction.” Cressida paused for a moment to make sure Schrecken actually had some decent idea of what she was saying, and to make sure he wasn’t going to try to interrupt her again with something silly while she was in the middle of her explanation. “Now, a lot of vampires have difficulty controlling their predatory nature. They often have an innate desire to hunt and feed, or even simply to kill people as a source of entertainment. In Shaya’s case, it seems that the feral, predatory side of her vampirism has developed itself into a personality of its own. That’s what was affecting Shaya in the tournament. It activated against Silvia as well.”

“So it’s not an outside bad guy!” Schrecken exclaimed, his eyes wide with surprise. “It’s a split personality bad guy living inside her head! Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde!”

Cressida was not impressed with Schrecken’s comparison. “Schrecken, have you ever actually read that book?”

Schrecken just grinned back at her. “Nope!”

Cressida let out a harsh sigh, but Schrecken did not really notice. He was too busy trying to process the revelation that Shaya was not being controlled by an outside entity, but simply by another hidden personality that she had been trying to suppress. “How do we have Shaya get the angry voice bad guy personality out of her head?” Schrecken asked. He thought back to what he had seen in comic books and video games. From what he knew, when someone was being tormented by an evil side of their personality or another entity sharing their mind with them, they would travel into their own mind, which was usually represented by some sort of surreal landscape, find the mental representation of their evil personality or similar entity, and beat it in a fight. Of course, this was only what he knew from comic books and video games. Schrecken’s knowledge of actual psychology, supernatural or otherwise, was sorely lacking.

“I could give Shaya several different sorts of mind-altering potions that may or may not have some beneficial effect,” Cressida explained. “But this appears to be part of Shaya herself, an extension of the predatory aspect of her vampirism. I don’t know all the details of how it manifests for her, specifically, but I would think that getting rid of it entirely is something she’s got to do herself.”

Schrecken was actually quite interested in what Cressida had to say about Shaya’s condition. For the most part, sitting in a classroom studying magical animals seemed kind of boring unless they were dragons or something, but vampires were a topic that often interested him. Really, anything that had been featured in old black-and-white monster movies was probably something that Schrecken would think is awesome. And, since Cressida seemed to know a lot about vampires, Schrecken decided to ask her as many questions about vampires as he could think of.

“So do all of the vampires have the evil bad guy side like that?” Schrecken inquired curiously.

“Well, like I said,” Cressida explained, “vampires are predators, and many of them have difficulty controlling that predatory nature. Some of them may simply have urges, whereas in others, such as Shaya, it may manifest as a full alternate personality. I’m not sure if the manifestation of her particular alternate personality has to do with her Draculea bloodline, honestly. It seems probable, but then again, I highly suspect that Shaya and I are from parallel Earths.”

Schrecken liked the sound of that. Parallel Earths made him think of all the parallel universes that were in superhero comics, and as such, he accepted Cressida’s statement without question. The Knights of the Ever-Flowing Cauldron, too, were quite interested in the possible existence of yet another place that they had not yet visited, but this interest soon devolved into more bickering over whether or not Cressida was actually right.

“Can you have an evil bad guy side even if you are only a half vampire and not an all the way vampire?” Schrecken asked, his words speeding up and his tone of voice becoming louder and more enthusiastic.

The witch nodded. She supposed that for now, she could put aside her journey to the forest to collect some various potion ingredients in favor of answering Schrecken’s questions. At least, as long as they did not pertain to her own students or anything else that might give him any kind of advantage in his future tournament battles. Cressida was a professor now, and she considered it her duty to dispense information to those who actually cared enough to want to learn it, even if her students were people she didn’t particularly like. “If you’re some sort of creature that’s part vampire, such as a dhampir, you may still have issues with self-control. Could that also manifest as an inner voice or entire alternate personality? Perhaps.”

Schrecken was confused for a moment. “If I am a creature that is part vampire? But I am not any kind of part vampire. No parts of me are made of a vampire. I am a bogeyman.”

Cressida sighed again and shook her head. “No, I’m not talking about you, specifically. I’m just saying that someone who is part vampire may still have those same issues as a full vampire. Of course, not all vampires are even capable of reproduction. Shaya’s got children, but different variations of vampirism have different properties.”

“What does blood taste like to a vampire?” Schrecken asked. “Is it a different taste than if you drank a blood and you were not a vampire?”

Cressida let out a very slight chuckle. “You’d have to ask a vampire about that.”

She wasn’t going to worry about the possibility of a vampire actually biting Schrecken. She was an expert on magical creatures, after all, and knew quite well that the blood of a bogeyman would probably taste absolutely disgusting.

“If I eat lots of things with blood, will I turn into a vampire?” Schrecken asked. “Like this: if I went to a restaurant, and I got a big meat steak that was not cooked right and it had lots of blood. And I ate five hundred of them. Would I turn into a vampire?”

Cressida noted that Schrecken’s questions were starting to become more and more absurd. “I highly doubt you could eat five hundred steaks in the first place, and no, I don’t want you going off to one of the cafés and trying that in an attempt to prove me wrong. But, regardless, eating five hundred raw steaks will not turn you into a vampire. Where did you even get that idea?”

The bogeyman just shrugged, still smiling all the while. “One time I ate a meat that was not cooked. And sometimes when I see meat that is not cooked, it has blood. And vampires like to drink blood! So I thought that maybe if you ate lots of meat with blood, you could turn into a vampire!”

“There are several different ways one can become a vampire,” Cressida stated. “Eating five hundred raw steaks is not one of them.”

“Oh,” said Schrecken, slightly disappointed by the witch’s answer. “Can a plant be a vampire? Like a vampire grass. It could be half vampire and half grass. And then it bites you and eats your blood when you try to cut the grass! I think that would be a very dangerous thing! Hoo hoo hoo!”

Cressida raised her eyebrows. The longer she stayed around Schrecken, the less coherent he seemed to become. She really needed to start collecting her potion ingredients out in the forest. She would answer this one question and get out of there as soon as she could. “Well, there are actually some sorts of magical plants that consume blood, the foremost among them being the Jubokko, which is a sort of magical tree primarily native to Japan. It captures passers-by and sucks out their blood.” Cressida got on her broomstick, eager to leave before Schrecken could ask her anything else – he was providing a lot more nonsensical statements than questions. “Now, I’ve got to leave. Goodbye.”

And with that, the witch flew off into the forest on her broomstick, leaving Schrecken with only the Knights of the Ever-Flowing Cauldron for company once again.

“But I didn’t get to ask her if a vampire tree or grass would also have an evil bad guy side…” the bogeyman lamented.

“Ah, well! I am certain that you two shall meet again!” Sir Caradoc exclaimed. “I would say that it would be best for you to simply let fate take its course, but I once did the same. On the battlefield! And then I died! Haha!”

“Do you think that a vampire tree would have an evil bad guy side?” Schrecken asked.

“Well, I can’t say I have ever met a vampire tree, or at least one that I recognized as being a vampire,” Sir Caradoc replied. “They tend to leave ghosts like us alone! Haha!”

“Ah, I suppose you could always ask that woman about it the next time you meet her,” Sir Wintergreen added helpfully. “She seems to be quite knowledgeable about magical creatures. I take it she’s one of the professors here? We did not have time to see the entire grounds of the academy before we were trapped in that book, unfortunately.”

“Yes!” Schrecken exclaimed. “She is sometimes rude, but also smart! She is a professor and she teaches one of the classes but I forgot which one. It is not one of the ones that I am in. So I know it is not one of those ones. Her name is... it is…” Schrecken thought back to their earlier meeting before the battle with Shaya, when Cressida had saved his life – hey, there was an example of an evil tree, even if it wasn’t a vampire tree or some sort of vampire grass – and she had also destroyed his second Zombie Joe just to get him to dig up a corpse and create a new one. She seemed just as much of a harmful force in Schrecken’s life as a helpful one, alternating between hindering him and assisting him, all for the sake of agendas that Schrecken could not begin to fathom (or just had too short of an attention span to try). But he was sure that she had told him her name. Several times, in fact. “She is the plant lady teacher who does not teach the plant class,” Schrecken mused aloud. “And her name starts with a C. And it is not Canada, that is a country.” He thought about it for about another minute. “Oh! I have it! I have remembered it! Her name is Cressida! Cressida Hawthorn. Yes. Hoo hoo hoo!”

The Knights of the Ever-Flowing Cauldron were shocked, to say the least. “Hawthorn?” Sir Caradoc asked. “As in Zila Hawthorn, the sorceress whose spirit resides within that book?”

“Maybe!” Schrecken replied. “Sometimes, when there are two people and they are having the same last name at the same time, they are related!” Schrecken had not considered before that Zila and Cressida had been related somehow He barely even remembered his time spent trapped in the book in the first place. But, come to think of it, there probably was a connection. He wondered if Cressida had put the book there to catch people so she could shrink them down with a shrinking potion and study them in little bell jars later or something like that. Even now, he knew very little about Cressida, even less about Zila, and had a tendency to let his imagination run away with him. For all he knew, this might have very well been something that Cressida would actually do.

Unsurprisingly, none of this was even remotely close to the truth. Zila Hawthorn was Cressida’s grandmother, on her father’s side, and quite a cruel person whom Cressida herself wanted nothing to do with. She had encountered Zila’s spirit several times, as had her own reflection in the Alternate Realm, who was just about as bad as Zila herself but a lot more competent. Cressida had no idea that the book that Zila was currently possessing even existed, given that the last she had heard about Zila was that she was trapped under a rock in the middle of the lake while possessing mCressida’s hat. Then again, books that were possessed by some sort of spirit or similar entity were not too rare in Otherworlde Academy, and Zila had actually been plucked out of her prior residence by the book itself, which had changed its title and contents to suit her.

And, of course, Cressida had no interest in shrinking people with potions and placing them in bell jars. Tiny shrunken people were too hard to find if they escaped. It would have been very inconvenient.

Schrecken’s thoughts soon turned back to Shaya and her possession by the Beast side of her personality, or rather, as he knew it, the Angry Voice Bad Guy side of her personality. “We have learned a good thing!” the bogeyman exclaimed. “It is a very good thing that we have learned! Yes. It is. We have learned that Shaya the Spell-Casting Fighting Vampire is not being controlled by a bad guy that we have to fight!” He paused, mostly for dramatic effect. “We have learned that it is a bad guy in Shaya’s own head! And we have to tell her about the bad guy that lives in her head who is making her mind go bad, except maybe she already knows. And then she will have to fight it and no longer be bad! So when she is done at the medical place thing--” Schrecken could not precisely remember the word ‘infirmary’, as when he was there, he was usually either unconscious, very tired, simply too excited by the rush of actually winning a battle for once, or some combination of the previous three – “then I will tell her that there is an evil bad guy voice in her head that she will have to fight! And then she can be a cool hero vampire! Hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo!”

He was not aware that Shaya already knew about the presence of the Beast and its effects on her all too well. He knew nothing of all the time that she spent with her family trying to seal away the Beast so it would no longer be able to influence her in battle. He had no idea how afraid Shaya was of the Beast taking over and hurting her sister, or her children, or Cain. All Schrecken knew was that it was a ‘bad guy’, and if there was a bad guy around, whether it was within you or attacking from the outside, you had to fight it.

He wanted to be friends with all the people he encountered in the tournament. Cordelia had seemed like such a cool person, having stopped trying to set him on fire in their tournament battle long enough to go along with Schrecken’s efforts to put on a show with his illusion powers. And, of course, she had an umbrella that could shoot fire, which Schrecken was probably never going to get over. He still wanted to know where he could get an umbrella like that, even though he went out in the rain without an umbrella all the time. And then there was Apple, who may or may not have been a child. It was hard to tell, considering that she was a forest spirit and might have aged differently. Apple’s treant companion had certainly been impressive, and while Apple’s own laziness was quite opposite from Schrecken’s never-ending enthusiasm and energy, he thought she seemed like she could be a pretty good friend. He had even gone to the infirmary to check on her – one of the few times he had been in there when he was not badly injured himself.

And then there was Shaya. Schrecken may have been around at Otherworlde Academy longer than Shaya – or so he thought, anyway – but he had several terms where he did not end up doing much, whether it was because he had been trapped in Zila Hawthorn’s book or because he had simply gotten distracted, spent most of his time exploring the campus or reading comic books in the library, and forgot to do his work. As such, she was a significantly more experienced student than Schrecken himself. And, when it came to fighting, she certainly did not disappoint – first of all, of course, she was a vampire, and Schrecken thought vampires were impossibly cool (at least the ones who were meant to be scary and did not feature in paranormal romance novels). Then, there was the fact that she was a student of Magical Linguistics just like him, but she had taken more classes in the department – not only classes that were more advanced than the ones he had taken, but also the familiar magic classes that he had decided to skip. And there was also the fact that Shaya was a trained warrior, and kind of reminded Schrecken of various characters he had seen in video games, in comic books, and on television. Being able to fight Shaya was like a dream come true for him, and being able to actually defeat her even more so. He still hoped that they could be friends afterwards.