Pre-Story Notes:
Can't stop me mother fuckers!
Chapter 04 - Blindsided
Jophiel had slept well. The bed was comfortable, the room nice and well-ventilated, not to mention lavishly decorated, and he'd gotten the recommended number of hours without interruptions…
So he didn't understand why he felt so pissy that morning.
He still felt kind of bad about snapping at that servant the way he had. The poor guy didn't do anything to deserve being growled at by a guy nearly a head taller than him first thing in the morning for doing his job and asking if Jophiel needed anything taken care of, especially after bringing him a clean change of clothes…
Shaking his head, and adjusting the modified Academy uniform he'd been provided, a simple white button-down and grey trousers, Jophiel continued to make his way for the woman's dorms regardless.
Not much had occurred the day previous, just Louise showing him around the academy so he could familiarize himself with the layout, following by him exploring on his own once she decided that she'd need to retreat to her room to study for the next day's classes.
She'd been absolutely giddy the entire time, and while she hadn't had the time to intimate him with everything in the fortress walls, he probably wouldn't get lost now, if nothing else.
As he was walking, the canuck couldn't help but notice that, much like the previous day, he was… attracting a lot of stares, from both the servants and students, and even most of the adults around the campus.
He'd also noticed that, Siesta aside, he seemed to be the only one in the entire school that had dark hair or eyes.
He'd seen a few young people with white hair, some of which almost looked like they had the vaguest hint of blue if he squinted his eyes just right, and varying shades of ginger ranging up to Kirche's eye-catching parrot red.
There were plenty of brunettes, but not a single lock of dark hair that hadn't come off of his own or Siesta's head.
He'd also not really had a chance to parse it previously, but… there were a fair amount of people with violet, and red eyes.
He shrugged it off in Louise's case because purple was extremely rare, but not unheard of for human eye colours. It seemed to be merely on the uncommon side in Tristain, though.
The red, on the other hand, was rather throwing him for a loop. He had a friend with ocular albinism back home, but in her case, her eyes had a distinctive… look to them when she wasn't wearing corrective contact lenses. The people he was seeing around here simply had varying shades of red eyes with properly developed irises and such.
But again, not a single hint of another set of dark eyes that weren't in his own sockets.
Not to mention that the people all had a distinctively Nordic look to them, with Kirche and Siesta being the only apparent exceptions.
Just more checks to add to the 'not on Earth' list, at this point.
"Ah, Jophiel," came a recognizable high-pitched voice from the hall, pulling the comparatively large man out of his own little world.
Louise had left her room early, by the looks of it. She also seemed… rather relieved to see him.
Jophiel himself was a little surprised at how he himself almost felt a weight lifted from his shoulders at the sight of her.
"Good morning, Louise. Did you sleep well?" he asked as she stepped past him, and he sidled up beside her.
She grimaced lightly. "I… have had better nights. Yourself?"
"Same," he shrugged.
"Was the bedding not to your liking?" She pressed, concern visibly knitting her brows.
"What? No, no… well, I mean the mattress wasn't quite as nice as my own back home, but it was hardly bad," indeed, while it looked fancy as all get-out, the mattress he'd slept on just wasn't as comfortable as his own Earth-made bed.
[Funny what one takes for granted in the modern world…] he idly thought to himself.
"I just kind of… felt bad, until just now, as a matter of fact," he asserted as he realised that he actually was feeling better already, for whatever reason.
"Ah, you too?" Louise cheerfully chirped. "Well, whatever the reason, that's good. We'd hardly want to look downcast for most of the day."
"Agreed," Jophiel said as the two continued to make small talk while she led him to the dining hall.
Referring to the dining hall as 'magnificent' would be doing it a grave injustice, Jophiel noted as he glanced up at the luxuriously decorated walls, hell, the floors- fuck, everything.
Jophiel had previously only seen such luxury and opulence in movies and video games set in the Early Modern era, where nobility was still a thing… Honestly, he'd been half expecting it to look like the Great Hall from Hogwarts, not a majestic court fit for the likes of Napoléon Bonaparte!
Shifting his gaze back to eye level, Jophiel instead found his eyes taken in by the beautiful, yet sturdily made great tables and chairs everyone was seated at.
Which he couldn't help but notice were slightly shorter than what he'd come to expect from his home. Much like… well, everything. The people included.
Louise, fun-sized beauty as she was, was turning out to only be a little below average in height compared to her peers. And the men weren't much bigger, maybe 5'4"?
Tristainians were smol, with Kirche being something of an amazonian outlier, by the looks of things.
That aside…
"Are you enjoying your meal, Jophiel?" Louise asked from the seat next to Jophiel.
"Ah, yes, it is fantastic, the stew is to die for," he replied, making a concerted effort to not acknowledge the looks he was getting from the blonde's classmates. He never liked being the centre of attention… Not that it would be wise to let that show. Nobles were the type to preen, after all.
"Fantastic," Louise began. "I was concerned that it may not suit your foreign palette-"
"What is the meaning of this, Guiche!?" Only to be cut off by a very angry sounding girl from somewhere behind them.
Turning in his seat to see what the commotion was, Jophiel noticed a young fop with golden blonde hair being accosted by a pair of girls, one with platinum blonde hair drills, and another with a simple chestnut brown ponytail. Both blondes were wearing grey cloak like Louise's, while the brunette was garbed in brown.
"You lecherous, treacherous, unfaithful-!" The blonde drillgirl heatedly began, which was followed by Jophiel promptly losing interest in the event and turning back to focus on his stew.
"Looks like Guiche finally got caught…" Louise began, still looking back behind her. She flinched when the distinctive sound of a pair of slaps resounded from the background, followed by the cries of one girl and the indignant shouts of another, and a man desperately attempting to salvage a bad situation. "He's lucky to get off with just being slapped, shameless git that he is."
The Canadian just shrugged, not caring much. [Not any of my business.]
After that, nothing of real note occurred during breakfast, and the day was a relatively uneventful one. Something that Jophiel sincerely hoped would be a regular occurance.
The next few days were calm. Louise continued to attend her classes, and Jophiel was left mostly to wander the academy grounds as he saw fit for the majority of the day.
The two would spend time together whenever she had time off, which she seemed to enjoy in particular. Jophiel quickly came to determine that Louise, depressingly, didn't actually have any friends to speak of at the academy. Seemed that her inability to cast magic made her something of a social pariah, her rather high status as the daughter of a Duke and a Duchess be damned.
Curiously, as Jophiel would come to find out, nobility wasn't tied exclusively to one's birth station, but rather, more importantly, their ability to use magic.
It seemed that on Alfheim, magic was genetic. You were either born able to use magic, or not. There was no inbetween, and commoners couldn't learn how to spellcast unless they just so happened to have noble blood.
That, unsurprisingly, greatly concerned Jophiel for obvious reasons. Though… it simply didn't come up. Nobody ever asked him to demonstrate that he was capable of magic, they seemed to just assume that he could, for some reason.
Not being one to look a gift horse in the mouth, he saw little reason to press the issue himself.
That aside, he had noticed Siesta a few times, and even made small talk with her on occasion. She seemed to be rather smart for a peasant girl, and was good at providing information on the simpler side of human life in Tristan.
Nobles, more often than not, actually took their duties rather seriously. Those duties being protecting the peasantry from the likes of monsters like orcs, treants and… whatever 'banderscatches' were. He swore that he almost recognized the name, but Jophiel shrugged it off when he couldn't place his finger on it.
Nobles were also typically not unkind towards peasants, apparently. Just… overbearing, but fair.
Siesta continued to be… unpleasantly aware of her station, so to speak, but was for the most part nice to talk to.
That aside, Jophiel and Louise both had, rather unfortunately and inexplicably, found that they'd both wake up feeling constantly miserable until convening for breakfast.
Something they'd decided to bring up to Colbert and the Headmaster on Jophiel's fifth day in the academy.
Jophiel stood in awkward silence for longer than he'd have liked as the Dumbledore knock-off of a Headmaster held his hand and stared at the runes on the back of his palm, as if doing so would cause them to reveal their secrets to the nobles gathered in the highest room at the academy, at the peak of the central tower.
"...Yeah, I've got nothing," the wizened old man dubbed Osmand eventually said has he released the bigger guy's hand from across his desk, upon which was a small black mouse resting on a tiny, specially-made mouse bed with a small water and food pail, and slouched back in his seat.
Louise quietly growled in frustration at that.
As it turned out, there were multiple different kinds of 'familiar runes' which appeared on the creature being bonded to a mage, and all known runes were pretty well documented by then.
It only figured that Jophiel's runes were completely unaccounted for, and on top of that, had the unique effect of being blindingly painful when they appeared. That was something that had never happened to a familiar before either.
[A mystery wrapped in an enigma enshrouded by secrets…] Jophiel internally grumbled at the situation, such as it was.
"Is there really no evidence of this rune's prior existence, sirs?" Louise asked from her seat next to the canuck, who had quietly sat back down once he no longer needed to be leaning across the headmaster's desk.
"I assure you, Miss Vallière, I pored over every known record we have, which is all of them, considering the Academy's station, and Lord Pholus' runes are one-hundred percent unique and indecipherable," Colbert asserted tiredly. "Whatever kind of familiar he is… it seems that his abilities will only reveal themselves to us in time," he declared, glancing at Jophiel's hand from the Headmaster's side.
Louise, again, huffed in annoyance.
"Now now Miss Vallière, you have your entire lives ahead of you to determine what the young sir's abilities are, both of you are in no rush to figure things out, I assure you," the elderly mage asserted.
His words didn't seem to comfort Louise all that much.
"Well, that aside, tell me, how have you both been faring since the summoning ritual? Notice anything out of the ordinary?" He continued regardless.
Jophiel shared a look with Louise before responding. "We've both been feeling absolutely miserable in the mornings since the day after I arrived, I guess."
Louise nodded in affirmation.
"The day after, you say?" Osmand reached up and began stroking his beard contemplatively. "Did anything change compared to your first night spent here?"
Colbert interjected, "Miss Vallière boarded Lord Pholus in her room with her on the first night, and afterwards he was moved to the guest quarters."
The beard stroking intensified as the old man contemplatively hummed to himself, and a few moments passed in silence.
"Well, the answer to what ails you seems clear to me," Osmand asserted.
"I'm all ears," Jophiel said while Louise leaned in, eager to be rid of unpleasant mornings.
"In order to feel good in the mornings, you two must sleep together!" The old man declared.
[Wait, what.]
"W-w-w-what!?" Louise cried out in outrage as she all but leapt from her seat. "Y-y-y-you- how d-d-dare- I am en-engaged-!"
Jophiel blinked. That was news to him. Though also unsurprising considering her noble standing...
"What the Headmaster means, Miss Vallière," Colbert interjected before the girl got more heated. "Is that the Familiar Bond seems to affect you both in spite of Lord Pholus being human, and that sleeping so far apart is likely what's causing such foul moods in the mornings. It is a well-documented fact that Masters and Familiars do not take well to being separated at night so soon after being bonded."
"Spoilsport," the elderly man pouted from his seat.
Louise, after a few moments, turned as red as a beet and dropped herself back into her chair, clearly quite embarrassed.
"Oh," she quietly intoned.
"So… considering that, I'd propose that you and Lord Pholus share a room again tonight, and if you both feel well in the morning, we'll know it worked and that keeping you separated while sleeping is a poor idea," Colbert continued.
"Why?" Jophiel piped up.
"Well," Osmand interjected. "Assuming the Familiar Bond is the cause of your irritable states upon waking, if you two are kept separate for enough consecutive nights in a row, you will both grow more and more unreasonably angry in the mornings until you start getting violent."
That caught Jophiel off guard. "Seriously? So you're saying that we're going to have to sleep next to each other for the rest of our lives or become violent loons?"
"No no," Colbert waved his hand dismissively. "Just until the Familiar Bond has had the chance to fully form and you both share a mental connection that will sustain itself across great distances. Making you both uncomfortable when apart for too long in the early stages of a Master-Familiar pairing is just to incentivise you to remain close enough for the bond to solidify itself."
"Meaning that we should just need to sleep in relatively close proximity to each other for a while, then we can sleep entirely separately," Louise elucidated. "It's purely a distance thing, so sleeping on opposite sides of a wall shouldn't count as being apart, but-"
"Let's just keep it simple tonight, Miss Vallière. Lord Pholus will bunk in your room again, and if you both awaken happy, we'll know it worked," Osmand cut her off in his high, raspy voice.
Jophiel sighed. It was really more of an annoyance than anything, he was no out of control hormonal teenager, but he'd just rather have his own damned room to himself.
"Understood, sir," the largest of the men in the room replied.
"Good, so, with that settled-" Osmand began.
"W-wait! What about our contract?" Only to be cut off by Louise.
Colbert sighed. "We still have yet to hear back from your parents on the matter, Miss Vallière. Regardless, I assure you we'll have it formalized and finalized in due time. For now, you just focus on your studies and practising your magic."
Louise looked put off by that, but nodded in affirmation.
Jophiel hadn't considered what Louise's family would think of their arrangement before then.
[Mother of fucking Christ, her parents are going to want me castrated, aren't they…?] He internally screamed.
"So, for now, I believe we're done here," Colbert declared. "I would suggest you spend the rest of the day practising, Miss Vallière."
Louise nodded. "That would be wise, yes."
At that, she rose from her seat, and Jophiel followed suit.
"I'd recommend you accompany her for the rest of the day, Lord Pholus," Osmand began. "You two should spend more time in each other's company, as most Masters and Familiars do."
Not having had any other plans for the rest of the day anyways, Jophiel nodded in agreement.
"May the Founder watch over your studies, Miss Vallière," Osmand stated.
"May the Mind expand your knowledge and keep your wisdom, sirs," Louise said back and slightly bowed before about-facing and heading for the door to the spiral staircase.
Giving the two men a nod, Jophiel set off after her. He'd heard that saying used a lot as a farewell lately, and figured it had something to do with their religion, but… wasn't feeling up to dipping his toes in that particular boiling pot yet.
With a shrug, he continued to follow Louise without much comment.
"Okay…" The tiny blonde began, holding her metallic wand in front of her, directed at a pail of water in the middle of her room.
"So… what're you trying to do here?" Jophiel asked from her side before she got started.
"Oh, uh, levitation practise. I'm going to try to lift the water out of the bucket, suspend it in the air for as long as I can, and return it without spilling anything," she explained simply enough.
"Well, alright, don't let me distract you from it," Jophiel nodded while gesturing towards the copper bucket.
He'd seen quite a few examples of magic in action since he'd arrived, and even the simplest of spells were a sight to behold.
Not that he could let it show, of course.
Louise refocused on the water, furrowed her brow, lifted her wand above her head, and thrust it downwards towards the bucket.
"Levitate!"
It took Jophiel a few moments to process what just happened as he was disoriented by a great, nearly painfully loud CRACK that rebounded off the walls of the room, and he was suddenly soaking wet, along with everything else.
He blinked owlishly as Louise remained in her place, water rapidly running down her clothes and pooling at her feet as she started trembling in place.
"...What just happened?" He eventually managed to ask through his stupification as his hair and clothes were weighed down and clung to his body unpleasantly. Because he just had to pick that day to not wear his waterproof rain cloak, right?
"The Zero failed to cast another cantrip-class spell! That's what!" The tiny blonde screeched as she threw her wand across the room, causing a distinctive metallic cling as it bounced off the wall and came to a clattering halt on the ground.
She remained still, her shoulders quaking as she clutched her fists hard enough that Jophiel was concerned that she might draw blood.
"Damn it… Damn it!" She cried stepping forward and kicking the bucket across the room and into her dresser, causing a terrible ruckus and sending what little water remained in it spilling all over the floor.
"W-whoa, Louise calm down-" Jophiel started in a half-panic, uncertainly placing his hand on her shoulder-
"No!" She shouted, slapping away his appendage and stomping her foot on the fine wood panelled floor, causing a pitiful splash of water as she did so. "It- it was supposed to be different! I- I was supposed to stop being a failure!"
[Fucking hell… this isn't how I was expecting this to go…!" Jophiel internally groused, completely caught off guard by the critically failed spell and Louise's resulting outburst.
"I did it! I summoned a familiar! I cast a spell! For the first time in my life, when I needed it the most, the Founder smiled on me, let me succeed!" She was shouting as her entire body was so tense she trembled from head to toe, not at Jophiel, just… letting a dam he hadn't realised was in place break open. "Why… Why!? My pedigree is without flaw! My siblings are natural triangles! I try! I try so hard! I practise night and day! I try so much harder than anyone else! And I'm mocked for it!"
Not knowing what else to do, being as overwhelmed as he was, Jophiel grabbed Louise and pulled her into a tight hug, hoping that holding her would stop her from lashing out again, if nothing else.
"I… I just want to make my family proud… For everyone to stop mocking me, looking at me like a misshapen dog…" She'd stopped yelling, and began quietly hiccuping and sobbing, trembling in Jophiel's grasp. "W-what did I do? W-why do the Founder and the Allfather punish me so? I'm devout, I adhere to their teachings, I do not abuse my authority… Why do they torment me, why tantalize me with success, only to snatch it away…?"
Jophiel had to shift his grip down to support the girl from the small of her back, as she started to go limp.
"Please… tell me why…" she whimpered as Jophiel quickly become the only thing supporting her.
He didn't know what to think. She'd been a little overly emotional since he'd met her, but for the most part seemed to have an even head from what he'd seen of her the past few days. He was not expecting her to just blow up the way she had, to just break down so suddenly.
Of course, he had noticed that she didn't seem to have any friends. None of her peers really acknowledged her despite her high station, called her 'the Zero' behind her back…
He hadn't realised it was so bad, though.
"...Hey, I'm here, aren't I? I'm not going anywhere, understand?" Jophiel quietly offered in an attempt at a soothing voice.
She weakly replied in a shaky voice. "Only because I stole you-"
"You stop with that," he cut her off, firmly yet gently. "Nobody is making me stay, I want to be here, I want to help you. Got it?"
That... wasn't entirely true, but calming and reassuring the girl took priority right then and there.
She was quiet for a few moments, and eventually, he felt her small arms tightly wrap themselves around his waist.
"...T-thank you… Jophiel…" She managed to choke out. "Thank you…"