Mahou Sensei Negima was created by Akamatsu Ken. This is parody, protected speech.

Conquests of an Accidental Stud Monkey
Chapter Six

Makie frowned. She didn't like frowning, even if she supposed that it might be better exercise for the muscles of one's face on account of the whole 'using more muscles to frown than smile" thing. Of course, she'd also heard that was just an old story, and that smiling took more muscles than frowning. (She liked that idea much better, because she liked smiling more than she liked frowning, so of course it would be nice if it were better for her, too!) However, she'd also heard that the whole thing was rooted in some serious misunderstanding, and that the muscles involved in the tasks of smiling and frowning didn't do the same amount of work and that counting them up didn't really reveal ...

How had she gotten on this tangent, again?

Right. Makie was frowning. Something was off about her class, today, and she didn't like it. Yesterday, all of them - well, most of all of them - had been working together to chastise Negi-kun for making Yue-chan cry like that, even though Makie had later learned that it hadn't really been Negi-kun's fault and felt just awful about pummeling him, even if the faces he'd made while it were happening had been just so cuuuuute! Which excused everything, of course.

But today ... today was different. Even though everyone was working on preparing the banners to cheer each other on in the sports festival, people were acting a bit strangely, today. Take Yue and Nodoka, for example. After yesterday, you'd expect them to be a little different, of course, but they weren't different in the way that Makie would have expected them to be different. Nodoka was smiling and happy and cheerful and - maybe Makie was imagining it, but she thought that Nodoka maybe seemed a tiny bit smug. Meanwhle, Yue looked happy, but, well, a bit embarrassed about being happy. And she kept giving Haruna these looks.

For her part, Haruna seemed a bit tense, like someone who'd been buying popsicles in hopes of getting one with the stick that indicated a freebie only to never get even a single one, in an example that was wholly imaginary and not at all drawn from an episode in Makie's own life. And she was also going to great lengths to ignore the looks that Yue was giving her. Well, that was actually kinda sorta normal - whenever Haruna was in a fight with anyone, she always acted as though she was utterly ignoring that person and treating them as so far beneath her as to be unnoticeable.

Gee, did that mean that she was in a fight with Yue? Makie hoped not, she hated it when friends fell out. Well, they'd probably make up soon enough.

But then there was also the way that Kazumi and Chisame were acting, both kind of nervous - well, Chisame always seemed a little nervous, as though she were terrified that people would realize what a good, kind person she really was (as Makie had realized during the trip to the magical world.) But since Kazumi wasn't a good, kind person - she was nice but she was way too mischievous for her own good - she couldn't be afraid that people would realize it. So what was she afraid people were going to realize.

And that was without going into what was going on with -

As Makie pondered that, the door slid open with a sharp slam, and Fate entered with a look on his face which was a bit more menacing than his usual expression of bored superiority. "Good morning, students," he said with the air of one saying, "You're all going to die."

Everyone stared.

It fell to Makie to say, "Um, good morning, Fate-sensei."

"I had a very interesting experience last night," he said. "Would anyone like to know about my very interesting experience last night? Sasaki-san. Why don't you ask me about my very interesting experience last night?"

Makie did not really want to ask Fate about his very interesting experience last night. Makie did not really want to be on the same continent, nay, the same planet as Fate and his very interesting experience last night. But she managed to wet her suddenly dry mouth, and asked, "Could you tell us about the very interesting experience you had last night, Fate-sensei?"

"Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I'd be glad to do so. When I went to unlock the door of my room, it flung open - subsequent investigations revealed that a spring mechanism had been attached to the opposite side and that unlocking the door allowed the spring to recoil - and a large collection of cherry cream pies were launched in my direction. They hit me, of course, causing a great amount of damage to my suit. Not the suit that I'm wearing, of course, but a different one. I have several in this style. At that point, my stereo system began playing John Williams' Imperial March, a rather interesting music which I'm given to understand is associated with a fictional galactic empire and the evil-doings thereof. It was a rather amusing prank, really." His tone was calm and not at all accusatory.

Makie blinked. "Um ... amusing?"

"Certainly. The symbolism of red and white food adorning my person is particularly clever, those being the familiar colors of this nation's flag. And the association of the music of a quote-unquote evil empire, which exists only to be overthrown by the protagonists of a series of rather silly movies, is also fairly well-considered. Yes, as pranks go, that was a very admirable one. Whoever did that should certainly be proud of themselves."

"Um ... so then, you're not, ah, angry, Fate-sensei?" Yuna asked.

Fate looked a bit surprised. "I do not become angry. It is an emotion for which I do not have the capacity. No, all that I can feel when considering the lengths that someone went to set up this prank is admiration for a job well done."

Makie imagined that she could hear sighs coming from most of the class.

"Of course, despite my admiration, there is the matter of the serious felonies committed in the process. Breaking and entering, for example, is a serious felony. And there's the misdemeanor of a copyright infringment committed in using that particular music for what amounts to a public performance. Whoever set up this prank has committed a number of felonies and misdemeanors as well, and would certainly be considered to be in a state of moral turpitude.

"As it happens," Fate continued, glancing in Nodoka's direction, "I have recently had cause to study the statutes governing the interactions between teachers and students at this institution, and I discovered something interesting. If a teacher here is aware, or even suspects, that one of his or her students is in a state of moral turpitude, that teacher has the right - almost the responsibility - to refuse to allow that student to participate in extra-curricular activities. Such as the sports festival."

"... wait a minute," Yuna started to say.

"I would greatly prefer not to be suspicious of the entire class," Fate continued, like an avalanche. "However, since there was a declaration of war made to me, yesterday, before all this happened, I have no choice but to be. On the other hand, it is possible that whoever did this acted without the knowledge or consent of her classmates. That's the tragic nature of suspicion, the way that it tarnishes the best and the worst of us equally.

"So, in conclusion - unless the person responsible for arranging this prank comes forward, I will have no choice but to conclude that the entire class is responsible, and inform the Headmaster that all of the members of Class 3-A are in a state of moral turpitude and should not be permitted to participate in the sports festival."

"You -" Yuna started to say something else.

"Sensei, you can't!" Of all people, Akira - quiet, genial Akira - was the one to speak up. "Those of us in the sports clubs have made commitments to our team-mates to participate and -"

"How unfortunate for your teammates that they made commitments with someone so unreliable," Fate interrupted. "I'm waiting for someone to admit responsibility. I'll wait a little longer. I'm still waiting. Well? Last chance. Ah, well, then, I -"

"I did it," said Haruna, standing up and glaring cold death in Fate's direction. "It was me. Only me."

Slowly, Fate turned to look at Haruna. He just looked at her for a few moments, and then, finally, spoke. "Very well. You'll accompany me to the staff room, please." He gestured towards the door.

Haruna waved a jaunty good-bye in the direction of Nodoka and Yue, then proceeded to saunter out of the room. Fate followed her, but paused at the doorway to look back. "I would suggest that all of you carefully consider that your actions will have consequences, and that those consequences will not only affect yourselves, but others, as well," he said. And with that, he shut the door behind him.

"... I really, really, really hate that guy," Sakurako declared a moment later.

"Unbelievable!" Misa growled. "Just waltzes in here and -"

Chisame interrupted, turning to glare at Misa. "- and isn't it good that he didn't think to ask her -"

"I suppose that it would do me no good to ask you who your confederates were?" Fate asked blandly as he led Haruna into the staff room. The few other teachers who were there glanced at the odd pair, but didn't ask any questions. The rumors had already informed them about Fate's interesting experience last night.

"Not answering any questions without a lawyer," Haruna replied stoutly as she took a position beside the desk Fate had been assigned.

"I'll forebear from the obvious observation that you watch too much American television," Fate said as he sat down at the desk. "I also forebear from asking because I'm perfectly aware that you wouldn't be able to answer the question."

"Sez you," Haruna replied. She might not know but she could certainly guess, and she thought that her guesses were pretty good.

"Regardless, if you wish to offer yourself as a scapegoat for your classmates' misdeeds, I'd be foolish not to accept. Even if they continue to assail me, eventually they'll run out of willing scapegoats."

"You go right on telling yourself that," Haruna said, smiling grimly.

"Mm. You're suspended for a week, expected to remain in your room. I don't see any point in assigning any busywork, under the circumstances," Fate mused as he reached for the desk drawer, to withdraw the appropriate forms.

Clunk went the drawer.

"Clunk?" repeated Fate, as he looked at it.

He did so just at the right time to take the spring-launched pie - cherry cream, of course - right in the face.

"That one was me, too," Haruna supplied a moment later.

"On second thought, I'd appreciate an essay on the subject of 'it is wrong to humiliate teachers'. Ten thousand words, single-spaced," Fate said, evenly, as red pie filling dripped from his face.

"Hey!" Misa protested. "Hey, don't give me that, Hasegawa. I didn't ask her to throw herself on the grenade."

"But you weren't exactly rushing to volunteer yourself as the actual mastermind, either," Chisame snapped. "You or your little minions." This said with a glare at Fuuka and Fumika, who understandably bristled.

"Hey!" Fuuka snapped. "We're independent contractors, not minions!"

Fumika stopped bristling long enough to give her sister a depressed look. "Neechan, that's not the part that should be upsetting you."

"Okay, that's enough," interrupted Madoka. "We can't fight amongst ourselves, that's just what Fate wants us to do. We've got to be united, now. Are we or aren't we?"

There was silence in the classroom, and then a quiet voice spoke up.

"That guy is going down," said Satsuki.

Of late, Hasegawa Chisame had begun to notice irony a lot more than she had in the past. For example, it was ironic that the wave of self-congratulatory exclamations and statements of unity which followed Satsuki's declaration had distracted everyone else in the class from realizing that Chisame had walked out in disgust. It was also ironic that she was angry at everyone for basically throwing Haruna under the bus when Chisame had been just about to volunteer herself as the scapegoat when Haruna did, and it was also ironic that she was mad because she knew that she would have been just as mad if someone had tried to claim the 'credit' after she'd put herself out there as the scapegoat.

She was allowed to contradict herself. It was somewhere in the constitution, she was sure.

It was also ironic that she was maybe the only one who was aware that someone else had been right on the verge of volunteering. Chisame found herself briefly wondering why Naba had wanted to do that, and why there had been such a look of disappointment on the other girl's face when Haruna beat her to it. She wondered whether there had been a look like that on her own face.

Probably not. And maybe that first thing wasn't even ironic. Who knew?

But the most ironic thing definitely had to be how she felt about all of this. Despite the fact that she regarded that little jerk with every bit as much fear and loathing as anyone else in the class, she was just as dismayed by the audacity and inanity of the plans the other girls were devising to oppose him. He was an actual, genuine supervillain, for pity's sake, and they were throwing pies at his face. Pies!

They might be the toughest class in this whole crazy school, the ones who'd driven teachers nuts, but they were not equal to the task before them. If push came to shove, he'd say "screw the plan", start blowing petrifying dust all over the place and run off to let the whole freaking magical world collapse. She could see it happening, and it scared the hell out of her.

When did I start caring?

... why did I start caring?

They were not equal to the task of humbling the little jerk. The only one who'd ever done that was Negi. They needed Negi, and not only was he not here, he'd dragged Kagurazaka - and Yukihiro, not that that was much of a loss - off onto some other crusade. They needed Negi. They, very definitely not she. Even if she found herself, in idle moments, thinking about that ... episode ... in the changing room, far more than she liked to do. Even if she could see the same look which she knew that she had on her face when doing so on the faces of Asakura, and Miyazaki, and Ayase, now, too. Damn little Casanova.

And then, just as she was becoming frustrated and angry enough to start growling at herself, she saw him, and all such thoughts were banished from her mind. There he stood, leaning over a railing and watching the activities of the lead-up to the sports festival with genuine, fascinated interest. From time to time, a deep, quiet chuckle escaped from his lips.

Chisame drew in a deep breath, thought of several piercing things that she wanted to say to him at great volume ... then let it out. In silence, she walked over to stand beside him behind the railing, lifting up her elbows to rest them on top of it, and following his gaze.

He'd noticed her at once. She wasn't foolish enough to think she could ever get the drop on him. And, when it darn well pleased him to do so, he half-turned to look at her. "'sup?" he said.

"'sup?" Chisame repeated. "You never call, you never write, and then out of nowhere you're here on my planet and what do I get from you? 'sup."

"Awwww! You missed me?" Rakan said, leering.

"With every bullet so far."

"Bullets!" laughed the Man You Can Cut and Stab All You Like And It Won't Do A Damn Thing, Dammit. "That's pretty clever, glasses!"

"I have my moments. So, anyway, what are you doing here?"

"Other than annoying and infuriating you, you mean?" he asked, grinning.

"We can take that as read, yeah," Chisame agreed.

"Well, mostly, just playing tourist. It's an interesting place you got here." The hero nodded in the direction of the World Tree. "Don't see too many of those, even on our side. And this is the place where Negi and our Princess got their start in life, so that adds to its allure. You're gonna see a lot of people coming down the pike to visit this place in the years to come."

"As if I needed more of a reason to go elsewhere for high school," groaned Chisame, envisioning a parade of fairy tale people in disguise glasses as she shook her head. "Technically, didn't he get his start at that Meridiana place?"

"Yeah, but that burg doesn't have any kinda night life, if it ain't changed from how it was when Nagi told me about it, so I'm thinking ... ah, that's not important," he said, shaking his head. "Anyway, I'm also keeping an eye on our Princess. Making sure nothing happens to her."

"That's ... awfully responsible of you," she said, frowning.

"Mm-hm," Rakan agreed, avoiding direct eye contact. "Yeah. Gotta make sure nothing bad happens to the princess. Because, you know."

"... I'm abruptly not so sure that I do know," Chisame replied, frown growing. "Rakan-san, what -"

"Oh, I couldn't possibly talk about it," he said, with a very pious expression on his face. "Eishun, and Takamichi, and Kurt, they all said to me, 'Now, Jack, don't be a gargantuan idiot and go around telling people about how the Princess is going to have to sleep for a hundred years in order to preserve the Magical World. Especially don't tell her classmates. Especially don't tell that particular classmate who's the first girl in years to try and talk back to you, the cute one with glasses. That could cause all sorts of havoc! You don't want to cause havoc, do you, Jack?'" He paused, looked at the void beside him where Chisame had been, and shook his head. "And I said, 'Fellas, let's face it. I can't not do that,'" he added.

You can't be our teacher anymore.

It was funny how he hadn't really faced up to that reality until now. He'd spent days and weeks working on the project, away from the school and his friends here, and yet he'd always somehow thought that he'd come back here eventually. But the truth was, things were going to get harder from here on out, and he'd be drawn further and further away from this place and the people here.

Especially after Asuna was gone.

Negi closed his eyes as he lay on the rooftop of the dormitory, drinking in the sun in the way that he'd seen Evangeline doing from time to time, trying not to think about that. But though he loved his master - despite, and in some cases, because of all of her little quirks - he wasn't equipped to simply ignore the world the way that she could. To do that, he'd need a distraction.

"Negi-sensei?" asked a nervous voice.

Here comes one now, Negi thought happily, and opened his eyes. "Hello, Sayo-san, what are you doing up here?"

"I came up to look for you, sensei," the ghost told him as she hovered nearby, hands clutched before her in a rather prayerful gesture.

"Well, you have found me," he informed her calmly. "I'll be resuming my nap, now."

"Okay," she agreed ... then blinked. "Wait, what?"

He smiled. "I'm sorry, Sayo-san, I'm in a bit of an odd mood this morning." He supposed that he should feel ashamed of himself for being so flippant when Sayo was clearly a bit upset. On the other hand, Sayo was always a bit upset, to one degree or another. On yet another hand, he supposed that she had a lot to be upset about. He shook his head. "What seems to be the matter?" he asked at last.

"Well, for the most part, I'm worried about Asakura. I think something must have happened to her," Sayo explained. "She's been acting very strangely, as though she has something to hide. And this morning, she didn't remember to take my doll form with her to school, today, so I'm more or less stranded here, and ... sensei?"

Negi had laid back down and closed his eyes. "And here comes the headache again," he murmured.

"Eh?"

Eyes open once more, Negi sat up. "Never mind. Sayo-san, I'm fairly sure that I know what's preoccupying Asakura-san. However, it's something that she discussed with me in confidence." That was technically true. "I think that if you're really worried about her, you should tell her when you see her next, and she'll probably tell you all about ... the things that I can't tell you about," he concluded somewhat awkwardly. And another one of my students will know how badly I've fallen. Well, at least Sayo-san can't get involved with me like that.

"I guess you're right," Sayo said, but she still looked disconsolate. "It's just ... a few days ago, Asakura said that she was going to take me out to do some research about whatever it was that happened to me, when I ... well, you know. Died." She said the word very quietly, as though they involved a terrible crime that she'd committed, instead of - as they now suspected - one of which she'd been the victim.

"And you're concerned that she's forgotten that promise?" Negi asked, frowning.

"Oh, no!" Sayo quickly denied. "She'd never do that. But ... well, with the festival, and this stuff that you know about and can't tell me about, maybe she's gotten too busy to -"

Abruptly, Negi thumped his hand against the ground. "Sayo-san," he said, cutting her off. "I'm going to help you with that."

"Ehhhhh?" the ghost gasped. "But, sensei, surely you're too busy with -"

"Nope," he said. "I'm never too busy to help my students, when they really need it. How can I possibly do things to make the whole magical world a better place if I'm worrying about any of you? So I should help you when I can, and I can help you, right now." He started to stand up, brushing off his legs as he did. "Where you planning on heading to do this research?"

"Ah, well, Asakura thought that there might be some information on Library Island," she told him, starting to smile warmly.

And just like that his enthusiasm dimmed. "Ah. Library Island. That's ... um. Maybe we would do well to wait until a member of the Library Exploration Club is available to help us out then, and -"

"I have an astounding coincidence to report," said Haruna as she stood in the rooftop access, smiling maniacally.

"You should just go and apologize," Asuna advised, not bothering to look up from the history text she'd been asked to read.

Kotaro, who was slumped in front of the dorm room's window looking out with a surly expression, first turned to glare at her, then froze when he realized something a bit odd. "How'd you know what I was thinking?"

"Woot!" Asuna proclaimed, still not looking up as she punched the air. "Finally got that one mastered. I'm picking up all kinds of little tricks like that lately. Royal Magic stuff, I guess. Anyway, it's true however I got it, isn't it?"

"Actually, no, it ain't true! Apologizing was what got me into this whole mess!"

"Well, technically, I think having sex with Chizuru-san was what got you into the mess." Asuna replied. Honestly, she wanted to quiz him about what that had been like, what Chizuru had liked. It'd be useful for when she persuaded Negi to go after the girl.

"No, that was over, this is a separate mess!" Kotaro retorted.

"How can it be the a separate mess when your apology was about -"

"It was a different thing!"

She found herself starting to get annoyed. "No, it wasn't."

"It was a different thing!" insisted Kotaro.

"No, it was the same damn thing!" Asuna paused, took a deep breath. "Look, while I think you need to pay a little more attention to time, place and circumstances, this whole situation is completely solvable. You should just go talk to Natsumi-san, politely. That's what grown-ups do, and -"

There was a furious pounding on the door. "Kagurazaka! Open the fucking door right the hell now or I swear I'm going to kick it down!" yelled a female voice on the other side.

Asuna coughed.

"No, do go on," Kotaro said snidely.

All affronted dignity, Asuna rose from where she was sitting and walked over to the door, which was still being pounded on when she arrived. The pounding only stopped when she opened it. "Good afternoon, Chisame-san," said Asuna politely, and then promptly caught the punch which was flung at her face. "To what do we owe this visit?" she asked as she held the other girl's fist in her own hand.

"You fucking sanctimonious bitch!" Chisame shouted. "'if there's ever a time'? IF? When you already know that there's going to be a time like that coming up real damn soon? Where the hell do you get off?"

"Won't you come in?" Asuna said, as politely as one can when one is speaking through clenched teeth.

"A suspension?" Negi asked as he tromped down the stairs ahead of Haruna and Sayo, who was drifting along beside the other girl. "He actually suspended you?"

"Gave me paperwork and everything," Haruna confirmed.

"And he seriously thinks he can just do that?" Negi asked, pausing in the landing to turn around and actually look at her. He was Not Happy.

Haruna spread her hands before her. "I guess that he does, because that's what he did. And there were other teachers in the staff room, and they all must have heard him saying the word, but none of them objected."

Negi shook his head angrily. "Well, I think this whole situation has officially gone too far. You girls shouldn't be provoking him like that, but he shouldn't be responding this way, either. I'm going to have to have a little chat with Fate."

"By chat do you mean fist-fight that ends in another awesome handshake, because I know some people who'd pay good money to watch that," Haruna said.

"No, Haruna-san, we're just going to talk," he assured her. Of course, he was not even close to being sure that it was going to end that way, but he felt obligated to set a good example.

"I guess that this is going to keep you from doing that investigation, then," Sayo said, doing her best to avoid sounding upset about that. Her best ... wasn't, unfortunately.

Negi glanced at her, then took a deep breath. "No," he said firmly. "No, Fate will keep. And as for Haruna's suspension, if a teacher - which I still am - asks her to accompany him, I don't think she can be faulted for breaking the terms of her suspension."

"Wow, that's really sneaky, sensei," Haruna said approvingly. Very approvingly.

"Well, anyway," Negi said, abruptly uncomfortable. Which was ridiculous, of course. Surely not even Haruna would try to engage in sexual activities while someone as innocent as Sayo was present. Surely not! "Let's first go pick up Sayo-san's doll so that she can come with us. And we might want to ask Asuna to accompany us, too, just in case we run into something very dangerous on the way, like that dragon." Or Haruna, an unworthy thought occurred to him as he was speaking.

"Yeah, that's probably a good idea," said Haruna, but she didn't look too happy about it. "Let's -"

"Where do I get off?" roared a voice from the door to a certain room as they approached it. "Where do you get off, coming here, trying to hit me, and then yelling at me -"

"Oh, like I could hit you if you didn't want me to hit you, I've learned my lesson on that score!" yelled another voice, one not often associated with that particular room. "And that doesn't have anything to do with -"

"Oy, oy!" cried Kotaro's voice. "What the heck are you two screwy dames yelling about -"

"Stick it, puppy!" the two girls' voices chorused.

"... on second thought," Haruna started to say.

Yep, here came the headache, right on schedule. "I, I think Asuna might be a bit busy with something else," Negi agreed. "Let's not disturb her, then, let's just get the doll and be on our way." It was probably for the best, now that he thought about it. Asuna might not only have taken Haruna's side, she'd have encouraged him to find a way to do it with Sayo.

Which was impossible, of course.

"So let me get this straight," Kotaro asked, a few moments later. "You're going to be put to sleep -"

"Not euphemistically!" Asuna interrupted as she held Chisame in a headlock.

"I got that after you explained it to me the second time," the boy retorted. "Anyway, you're going to be put to sleep for a hundred years, and you haven't told anybody outside of Konoka-nesan, Setsuna-san and Pineapple Head - and she only found out 'cuz she was eavesdropping and promised not to tell anyone either. Is that right?"

"Yes," Asuna admitted, containing Chisame's struggles easily. "That's all there is."

"You are a total cunt."

Asuna was so startled by this quietly voiced declaration from Kotaro that her grip on Chisame loosened enough for the other girl to slide free. However, Chisame was just as startled, and didn't resume her attacks on Asuna once she was free. (Well, the fact that everything she'd thrown at Asuna had been completely no-selled probably influenced her decision a little, but the surprise was the major factor.)

"Excuse me?" Asuna asked after a moment to get over the shock.

"You're going to abandon all your friends without even telling them anything?" Kotaro asked, clearly not expecting an answer. "You're gonna just go off and never tell them goodbye or nothing?" He turned his gaze from Asuna to Chisame. "Damn, lady, I thought you were just pitching a fit for no reason like usual, but this is something that should piss somebody off."

"Thanks," Chisame said, in the least thankful tone imaginable.

"It's not -" Asuna tried to interject.

"You're not even gonna tell crazy aunt iinchou?" Kotaro demanded.

"She's -"

"She loves you!" the boy snapped.

Asuna recoiled. "No she do-"

"You're all she friggin' talks about, some days!" he cut her off.

"When Rainyday brought her into the magical world," Chisame said, her voice just about brimming with fury, "and she asked me what was going on, when I told her about Negi's troubles, she was freaking out, but when I told her about you, she stopped freaking out and got scary focused! Yeah, I'd say the twerp is right about that!"

"Yeah!" Beat. "Hey, twerp?"

"Don't use the c-word in my hearing ever again, and you'll get upgraded to brat."

"Look," Asuna said, taking advantage of their momentary focus on each other to try and regain control of the conversation. "This is a complicated situation."

"Like fuck it is!" Kotaro growled. "Can I use that word, your grace?"

"Do not push me right now," Chisame growled right back. "It's complicated?" she snapped at Asuna. "And I suppose the fact that you were just going to disappear when the rest of us were celebrating our graduation was your idea of simple? What the hell did you think that we were going to be told, anyway?"

"That I'd died!" Asuna shrieked, grabbing her twin-tails and yanking them in frustration.

Her two interlocutors stared at her in horrified disbelief.

"Or that I'd had some kind of whirlwind romance with a prince from the magical world and run off to get married!" she carried on. "Or finally run off in heartbreak over - that's not important, dammit! What matters is that it's a choice between my life and the lives of billions of people over there! What the hell am I supposed to do, tell them that their lives don't count?"

"What the hell are you supposed to do?" Chisame asked, very quietly, after a moment. "You're supposed to find a third option. That's what the hell you're supposed to do. Have you even tried that?"

"Yes," Asuna promptly replied. "Yes, we have looked for a third option, thanks for asking. Negi came up with the seed of the plan in a few minutes. He worked out the details inside of a week. And then he spent another week looking for ways to make his plan work without doing that to me ... before I told him to stop, and just focus on making sure that the rest of the plan was going to work."

"You gave up," Kotaro said.

Asuna spared him a glance. "Yes. I gave up. Negi hasn't, he still thinks he can find a workaround, but ..." She trailed off, then let out a sad laugh. "It makes sense, if you think about it. For hundreds of years, I slumbered at the heart of the world, and then the Entheofushias found a way to wake me up and use me for their own ends, and that's when it all started to go wrong. I am the original sin. Then and -"

"Bullshit!" Chisame angrily interrupted. "Didn't you hear me at all when we were trying to wake you -"

"'You are an idiot,'" Asuna interrupted right back, eyes closed. "'But I've always had faith that you were a normal and realistic person, that you never needed any stupid traits like being a magical princess. Don't you give in to stuff like this!'" Her eyes opened. "You're a very loud and opinionated person, you know. I never realized that about you until then."

Chisame choked on her reply.

"But I am a magical princess," Asuna continued. "And you -" Her eyes dilated to a degree almost frightening. "You have no idea ... I have borne babies. I have watched my children grow to adulthood. I have watched them gathering around my deathbed. I have seen them cut down in their youth. I have murdered them myself. I have killed babies. I have slaughtered whole villages, towns, cities -" Asuna drew in a deep breath, almost collapsing in on herself. "I am not just a magical princess," she almost whispered. "My mind touches and embraces all the souls within that world. In a sense, I am the magical world."

Chisame, appalled, stood there and stared at the girl in jeans and a t-shirt who'd just made that sonorous proclamation, and, after a moment, found that she could only do one thing.

So she laughed.

Asuna blinked as Chisame began giggling, but then her own lips turned up in a reluctant smile as well. "It's kinda crazy, isn't it?" she asked, chuckling a bit. And then more than a bit.

"Kinda?" Chisame demanded, before descending again into helpless, near hysterical laughter, in which Asuna promptly joined her.

Kotaro, who had found the previous conversation so far above himself, just stared at the two laughing girls in horror. "You're both nuts," he declared.

It didn't help. Quite the contrary, actually. And now he had the awful feeling that the two of them were laughing at him, in part. He sat and he watched and he fumed.

Eventually, though, the laughter died down, and Chisame reached up to remove her glasses so as to wipe the tears that she'd been shedding the whole while. "What are we going to do?" she asked, sounding so weak and helpless.

"Love him," Asuna answered promptly. "When I'm gone, love him, like I asked you to do." Her sad smile went a little naughty. "You've already got some practice at that, y'know."

"I don't love - okay, so, technically, I guess you could say that I, sort of, physically loved -" Chisame started to object.

"Oh, come on!" Kotaro finally spoke up, now really irritated. "Her, too?"

"Yep, and 'Pineapple Head', and Bookstore, and the one you call Chibisuke, too," Asuna informed him, blandly.

Kotaro gaped. "Holy shit. Ho-lee shiiiiit." He shook his head. "Man, Natsumi-neechan should definitely forgive me."

"Why's she mad at the twerp?" Chisame asked, trying to regain some standing in the conversation.

"He fucked Chizuru."

"You are a total dick," Chisame said, abruptly glaring at Kotaro.

"Hey!" he yelped.

"Yeah, and the expectation that Natsumi-chan should forgive him just because he's not done as bad as somebody else?" Asuna said. "Not very cool. Maybe we ought to make it even harder for him to ask for her generous forgiveness."

"Wha-"

"And after all, it'll be good practice for you, for when the growth pill finally wears off and you have to have sex with Negi the normal way, too," she added to Chisame as she started to pull off her shirt.

"I think I'll be on my way now!" Kotaro declared, turning towards the closed window and quickly calculating how much damage he was going to take smashing his way through it and dropping to the ground several floors below. Worth it!

"SIT," Asuna said.

"Dammit!" Kotaro cried as he did so.

Chisame finally found her voice. "Wait a second," she gasped, as Asuna began rolling down her jeans. "I never said that I was going to - stop looking at me with that skeptical expression, it's weird in a person wearing nothing but bra and panties!"

"Well, since they're going to come off anyway," Asuna answered blithely as she reached for the straps of her bra.

"That's not what I - shit, you went and did it all the same!" Chisame howled her protest. "Look, I don't want to have sex with either of you!"

"Well, then, you can leave, or you can stay and watch," Asuna said quite reasonably, as she folded the bra and set it down.

"I'm not some damned voyeur!"

Asuna noted that the option of leaving had been dismissed, but cleverly chose not to mention. "No, from what I understand, you're more of an exhibitionist." She pressed on, overriding Chisame's squawk of outrage. "I do think that being with me will be good practice for when you're finally with Chachamaru."

"Who says that I'm going to be with -" Chisame started to shriek.

"Wait, her and Mecha-neechan?" Kotaro asked from where he was obediently and nervously sitting on the floor. "Man, I thought I was kidding, but there really is something in the water here, isn't there?"

"She loves you," Asuna said angrily, ignoring the boy for a moment. "I talked to her, after we did it with Eva -"

"You did what with who?" Kotaro asked, this time genuinely appalled.

She continued to ignore him. "- and I asked her if she was upset about Negi and her mistress doing stuff, and she said that just like she'd told him after he was with you, she was happy that the people she loved were happy together. So yeah. She loves you. Chew on that." She turned her attention away from the stunned girl to Kotaro, then dropped down to her knees in front of him.

"Okay," she said. "Right now, you're thinking that you don't want to have sex with me and that you'd really rather be just about anywhere else, right?"

"Is that permission to leave?" Kotaro asked haplessly.

"No, don't be ridiculous. Kotaro-kun, let's make a bet, okay? I bet that I can tempt you to want to have sex with me, using just a few brief sentences. If I'm wrong, you can run off and do whatever you like. But if I'm right, you'll do it, okay?"

"This is a screwy bet -" he started to say.

"Backing down from a challenge?"

"- but I never back down from a challenge!" the boy quickly snapped.

"Right," said Asuna, then took a deep breath before aiming her most sensual expression at the boy. "You're still mad at Negi, right? You still want to show him up? Wouldn't this be a good way to do that?"

Kotaro stared at her. "Ah, maaaaaan," he said, after a moment. And then he pounced on her.

Asuna allowed him to push her back on to the floor, giggling faintly as his mouth instinctively found its way to her breasts and began licking and suckling at her teats. Clearly, though, he was going to need some help, and so she started to pull his jacket off as he began to lick down her stomach to where her panties were her only garment. As she got the jacket off, his freed hands went to work on getting the panties off as well, though they were only up around her knees by the time that the scents proved too tempting for her to ignore.

"Ah!" she gasped as he began to lick at her down there, her hands reaching out to run through the hair that was so different from Negi's.

Meanwhile, Chisame had collapsed to her own knees as she watched the two of them just go at it with nary a thought of the fact that she was present and watching them. She couldn't believe that anyone could possibly be so ... shameless.

Then again, reflecting on what she'd already known about Kagurazaka before all this, and what she'd just found out ("I've killed babies" - SHEESH!) it wasn't all that surprising that the girl was somewhat shame-deficient. And the twerp was an idiot hero, which was probably why Negi kept hanging around him - it was like being with his father, or with Rakan.

Uhhhhn? Chisame found herself thinking as that thought went through her head, for no reason she could readily understand.

"Get your pants down," Asuna said softly, between pants of her own. "Get your pants dowwwwn-nuh-nuh-nuh!" That repetition came just as he figured out that her clit was significant to this process.

Kotaro's left hand, until that point gripping the outside of Asuna's thigh as it wrapped around his neck. went down to fiddle with his belt buckle. The operation thus undertaken would normally require two hands to complete, but Kotaro's considerable manual dexterity let him get it done with only one. His pants came open and something came out.

"Stand up, stand up partways so I can see it," Asuna commanded, spreading her knees further so that he could do so. "Mmm, bigger than Negi's -" she started to say.

"What the crap are you talking about?" Chisame butted in.

"Bigger than Negi's when he's normal is what I am delicately trying to say," Asuna bit out while glaring at her. Eyes back to Kotaro, she continued in a soothing tone. "Aw, did the scary big sister put you off your game?"

"Since when am I the -"

"No, no," Kotaro protested. "I'm just, I, give me a minute, it'll get up again, definitely -"

"Or we could do this," she interrupted as she sat up a bit, then grabbed his flagging staff and stroking it twice.

Quoth Kotaro, "Glghghl."

"Bit less than a minute, wouldn't you say?" she directed over her shoulder at Chisame. "Now give it to me. Give it to me hard and fast and -"

He half-stumbled, half-leapt forward onto and into her, turning her words to a hiss. "I can do accurate, too, y'know," Kotaro growled up towards. "I ain't just rough."

"But rough is what I want," Asuna replied through gritted teeth. "Fucking pound me, you twerp."

With an outright snarl, he began to do so.

"Ah, yeah," Asuna said in a voice that was almost a hiss. "Yeah, that's it. Pound me, pound up into my tight warm cunny." Her legs lifted from where they'd been lazing alongside Kotaro's pistoning hips to cross behind his buttocks as though holding him in place. "I'm tighter than Chizuru, riiiiight?"

"Uh," Kotaro replied, momentarily pausing as, once again, his instincts told him that the correct answer would not be a welcome one. "Well, it was all, all so confusing and -"

But perhaps an answer hadn't been what she was after, only the moment of hesitation itself. "Uh-huh," she gasped, then rolled over so that she was astride him and pulled his torso up into a tight embrace against her own. Her hips began to jerk with dizzying frequency. "Ah, now that's it. That's it," she repeated.

"Ahhuhhh," Kotaro almost wailed in response to the sensations her jerking hips were drawing up out of his groin. "I'm, Asuna-san, I'm gonna -"

"What?" Asuna said, eyes open only to slits in a way that was strangely unlike the way that Kaede did the same thing. "Whaaaaat? Are you about to come? Are you going to blow jizz all the way up into your best friend's girl? Is that it? You've got to saaaayyyy these things!"

"Ruh-ruh-rival!" he managed to gasp out before he climaxed. "Rival," he repeated as he nuzzled up against her breaasts, mouth finding its way onto one of her nipples.

"Uh-huh," Asuna said, smiling down at him as her hands came up to pet his head. Her hips kept moving, but much more slowly, now. "Anything you say, little boy. Not so little, I guess, because I can already feel you getting hard again - oh, don't start moaning and groaning now - but someone else deserves a turn with you, I think." She turned to smile sensuously at Chisame.

Chisame blinked. "I, I - what? I never said I wanted a turn with -"

"That'd be a lot more convincing coming from someone who wasn't jilling herself off," Asuna blandly informed her.

That was when Chisame realized why her skirt was hiked up around her waist, where one of her hands had gone, to say nothing of what it was doing. "Damn fugue state!" she swore.

"Hu-uh?" Kotaro grunted polysyllabically as he turned to blearily stare at her.

So as not to be distracted by what was going on in front of her, Chisame reached up with her other hand to remove her glasses, without which she couldn't see, even if she might allegedly have spent all sorts of time running around without them which had only happened because shut up. "Okay," she said. "Now, look, I might have gotten a little bit excited just now, but I didn't -"

"Holy shit!" said Kotaro. "You're that Chiu girl Negi was telling me about and showing me all those pictures of -"

Chisame froze.

"- I never saw you without your glasses or out of costume or not being a loli before, so I never figured it out until now -" he continued heedlessly.

The thaw commenced.

"- but really, it's definitely you, I mean her, I mean, wow, who'd have thought you were so good looking without your glasses -"

"RAAAAARGHH!" Chisame declared as she stood up and tore off her blouse.

Kotaro yelped in genuine shock, just before the infuriated young woman, her skirt still hiked up around her hips, stormed over to him, yanked her panties to the side and slammed her crotch into his face.

"Lick me you twerp!" she snapped.

"Whurgh?" Kotaro inquired.

"I said, lick me! You wanted Chiu, right? Chiu was in allll your dirty little fantasies! Well here I am, now lick me, you damned wannabe idiot hero! Yeah, that's right, I said wannabe! A real idiot hero would be licking me by naaowww! Oh, you think that's cute, biting, huh? Yeah, I bet you think that's real cute, and - what the ffffuhhhh!"

With some difficulty, Chisame managed to twist enough to get a reasonable enough view of her own backside, sufficient to inform her that an orange haired head was pressed up against the part of it that she couldn't ever see without the benefit of the full-length mirror she had back in her room.

"What're you doing!" she gasped.

Asuna pulled back and smirked up at her. "It's not really surprising that you're such a tight-ass, Chisame-chan," she purred. "But that just makes it all the better!" And then she resumed her earlier endeavors.

Chisame gaped. "You, you've got to be kidding, you can't be - ahhh! But, but, it's dirty and -"

"Mmmmm!" Asuna responded.

This was too much, it was all so, so purient! It was as disturbing and twisted as ... as having sex with a teenaged boy who was really only ten in a store's dressing room. Or as bringing oneself shrieking to orgasm at the thought of thousands of people looking at suggestive photographs of oneself. Or as masturbating to faint memories of an enormous thing between the legs of an old man ...

Hasegawa Chisame shrieked her climax to the heavens as she tried to understand how Asuna could possibly know her so well.

"Damn," Kotaro muttered as, with some difficulty, he pulled out of the crazy lady's grip and tried to wipe his mouth clean of her juices.

"Hmmm?" Chisame blinked, looked down at him. "Uh? Oh. You think you're done, don't you? You think just because you gave me a little bit of satisfaction, that it's all over, don't you?"

"I honestly had not given it much thought," Kotaro answered. "Is it?"

Chisame shook her head.

"Figures," he muttered.

"Come on down here, Chisame-chan, and we can play with this thing," Asuna offered in between licks at the boy's erection.

The urge to tell her to stop calling her Chisame-chan almost overpowered the sexual frenzy into which Chisame had once again fallen, but she quickly dropped down to join her.

"Hmmm," Asuna said a short while later, poking the boy's member with a finger. "Doesn't have Negi's endurance, either, I guess."

Kotaro would probably have objected to that, but he was honestly well past understanding anything that he heard, and, in fact, was gradually slipping down into the black gulfs of unconsciousness. That was probably for the best, really.

Chisame, in particular, found herself envying him his serenity. "... what the hell did I just do?" she asked, rubbing the spending that had ended up on her face, as though it would stain.

Asuna rolled her eyes. "And here comes the denial of reality."

"I'm not in denial of - nnngghhh!" Chisame broke off in a growl. "That is so annoying!"

"Sorry," Asuna replied, manifestly not sorry, as she pulled Kotaro's briefs back up and arranged him so he could sleep a little more comfortably, petting his head once more as she did so.

Watching this in almost a daze, Chisame shook her head. "What was the point of all this?"

"Does it have to have a point?" the other girl asked back. "If it does, why don't you accept the point that I gave you at the start of this?"

"Because I don't believe it. Even if I did believe that you wanted to train me for when Negi goes back to being the annoying little ... person that he was before all this zaniness started -"

"You'd actually have to go way back to the start of his teaching career, if you want to be that general," Asuna told her dryly.

"- then what you did isn't consonant with that goal, is what I was trying to say!" Chisame concluded. "Also, stick it."

"Stick it," Asuna muttered. "That's a good one. I'll have to use it." She got up from where she was crouching on the floor, walking over to the window and gazing out of it. "It's a beautiful day, don't you think?"

Chisame, glasses restored, stared at her.

"I don't have a lot of beautiful days left. A few hundred, at most. And ... you know, I want to experience everything. Everything. I know I can't, but I want to experience so much more than I have in the last nine years. Maybe, if I do that, then the little bit that's me won't drown in the vast ocean that is her and all her borrowed memories," she murmured. "Maybe I'll be real."

She turned back to look at Chisame, and smiled. "And the sex isn't so bad."

Chisame slowly shook her head. "And what about -"

"What about poor Negi?" Asuna answered. "Do you think it'll hurt him, to know that I'm screwing around behind his back? Do you think he'll feel pain and sorrow?" A deep breath. "Do you think if he feels that, he won't miss me so much in all those years to come?"

"No," Chisame promptly answered.

"Oh well," Asuna replied with a shrug. "Now, I believe that I mentioned something about teaching you how to be with Chachamaru." She hopped up onto the window sill and spread her legs. "Come here and give us a kiss, Chisame-chan."

"It's times like this that I wish the concept of the yearbook existed in Japan," Negi mused as he leafed through the albums of class rosters.

"Well, technically, it does, but the time in question was a bit before instant photography, so it's not so surprising that we haven't been able to find any photographs of Sayo-chan from back then," Haruna replied. "There would have been one of her class on their class trip, but -"

"I don't even remember whether I went on a class trip," Sayo affirmed as she brought over another pile of albums, having possessed her doll and then started operating a golem-Sayo that Haruna had drawn. "I know that I didn't graduate, so there wouldn't be a graduation photo, either. And of course I can't remember being photographed." She sighed. "Or much of anything. But there is a photograph of me in one of these, Asakura found it and showed it to me. I'm sorry for not making a note of which one it was, I should've -!"

"There's no way you could have thought you'd have to find it again without her help," Negi said soothingly. "Don't worry, we'll find it." He smiled at her, willing her to be calm.

It didn't seem to work; Sayo's golem actually flushed. "Uh, yes, yes, of course. I'll, I'll go get more albums, then." She proceeded to dash off to do so.

Haruna and Negi waited a moment.

Sayo came back, set down the ones she'd already brought, and dashed off again.

"Why did you make a golem that can blush?" Negi asked Haruna, once he thought Sayo was out of earshot.

"Wouldn't it just blow your mind if I said that I didn't?" she asked. "Casanova."

"I'm not -"

"Uh-huh. Suuure. Anything you say, enemy of all women." She shook her head, becoming serious abruptly. "It's kind of weird, though. I've never looked at anthologies from this far back, but in modern ones, if someone in a class passed away in the course of the school year, there'd normally be some mention. An in memoriam photo, maybe even a sketch or a poem. There should've been something like that for her, shouldn't there?"

"There should," Negi said hesitantly. "But on the other hand ... there may have been a fair amount of official censorship involved." He used a rather delicate phrasing.

Haruna raised an eyebrow. "You don't have to be so delicate, you know. Negi, I'm a bisexual girl who is never ever going to be content to stay in the kitchen and be a mother to my husband and children. You would be hard-pressed to find anyone in our class who has fewer sympathies for the early Showa period than me." She paused. "They had snazzy uniforms, admittedly, but they got most of those from the Taisho, so -"

"Well, I'm just trying to be polite."

"We'd all be a lot happier if you were a lot less polite, y'know?"

Negi rubbed his head and elected not to answer that.

"More albums," Sayo announced as she stumbled towards the desk under the burden of several dozen albums. Negi, appalled, got up to help her with them.

"... and of course, just as that happens, I do believe we've found our girl!" Haruna announced, gazing at the page of the one already in front of her. Negi and Sayo exchanged a startled look, set the albums down on the table, and came over to lean over her shoulders.

"Yes, that's definitely me," Sayo agreed after a moment. "This would have been my, I guess my first year at school ... in 1938?" She frowned. "That doesn't seem right. I thought I died in 1940, in my second year?"

"That's what the note on the class register implied, but ... you know, maybe we've been reading this wrong, the whole time. Maybe the first year on that note was when you ... for lack of a better term, were transferred to our classroom, and what happened to you happened in the previous year," Negi speculated.

"You think so?" Sayo asked dubiously.

"At this stage, it's a reasonable hypothesis. I guess we're going to have to go looking through old newspapers to check."

Haruna had flipped through the rest of the photo album, and was now staring at one page in particular. "You know ... I think we might not have to do that after all," she said, sounding haunted.

Negi, following her gaze, saw that she was staring intently at a strange alphanumeric code - D34FV723J9 - written in white on the black lining of the album. "What is that?" he asked.

"Ah ... well, the thing is ... that expression is in the formula that the Library Exploration Club uses to record locations," Haruna explained. "I don't ... as far as I know, the club only got started after the war, so this shouldn't even be here -"

"Unless it was a later addition," Negi guessed quickly. "Could there be a connection?"

"Well, yeah, there could be a connection, of course there could, but there's no way of knowing, just from this whether there is or not," Haruna answered. "But you didn't let me to get to the weird part. I recognized this location, because it's in my own journals. I've been there, I've discovered what's odd about that area."

"Okay," Negi said, after exchanging glances with Sayo, who looked as mystified as ever. "What would that be, then?"

"Well, it's kind of a long story, so, if we're going to go there," she said, pushing away from the table and standing up, "it might be simpler to tell you as we go."

"... shouldn't we put these albums away?" Sayo asked.

"Uh, a page will probably take care of that, eventually," Haruna replied, distractedly. Her usual smirk was utterly absent; she looked, and sounded, just a bit dazed and confused.

"Well, you're the explorer among us. Um, is the way there trapped?" Negi asked, expecting the worst.

"What? Oh. No, actually, no, it's in the publicly accessible areas of the building, that's ... that's actually a part of the story."

"You see," Haruna said, a short while later, as she led them down a hallway. "I joined the Library Exploration Club in my first year of middle school, the first year that they allow students to join. And, on ... I think it was my second or third expedition ... no, no, it had to be the second, because Sakurako left the club to go play lacrosse after that -"

"Sakurako-san was in the Library Exploration Club?" Negi asked.

"Yeah, until she quit to go chase around a ball with a stick, that's what I was saying. Anyway, she was there, and Konoka was there, and I was there, and Yue and Nodoka were on a different expedition for whatever reason. At the time I thought they might be sneaking off to make out, but that was obviously wrong."

"Well, obviously!" Sayo said.

Haruna paused, turned to give Sayo a look, and coughed. "Riiight. Anyway, we were starting off from ... well, here," she said, as they arrived in a large foyer, with several exits carefully marked with 'Staff Only, Do Not Enter Without Authorization' signs, along with portraits of a few of the previous headmasters of Mahora Academy - not many, given the length of time in which Konoemon had held onto the role, but a few.

"And ... I don't even remember how she did it, but somehow, Sakurako ..." Haruna trailed off, shook her head. "I'd probably better just show you. Okay. From the only public entrance - over there," she gestured. "The facing wall is A. To the right, we have B. To the left, we have C. And the floor -" Tap, tap, went her foot. "- is D. Thirty-four steps, toe-to-hee, across the floor from the public entrance, along the heading revealed by the next part of the code, brings us to ... this portrait - who is, interestingly, of the headmaster who was running the place when Sayo was a student here, not that I knew that at the time."

"I don't know that now," Sayo said in a way meant to be comforting.

"Right. And J9 is a signal to examine the sconce that runs under the portrait, and -"

The click was almost deafening, and the opening of the rather large and startlingly well-concealed trap door in the foyer's corner threw up a great deal of dust.

"- that button opens up Bypass 12, running down into Level 10 territory," Haruna explained. "All the way to a certain vault we probably weren't supposed to find for quite some time."

Negi blinked. "Wait ... I think Konoka might have mentioned this. A vault that contains um, the headmaster's love letters?"

"Nope, it doesn't contain those, because we've never been there and don't know about it or them," Haruna clarified.

"Ahhhhh," said Negi, nodding his understanding.

"Huh?" asked Sayo.

"So what exactly is a bypass?" Negi asked as he peered down the newly exposed spiral staircase that led down into stygian darkness.

"It's pretty much what the name says, a shortcut - except usually only short by comparison - through the library's structure to a given location. They're high school-level explorer secrets, usually used only in an emergency, like if someone's hurt down there and the rescuers need to get to them in a hurry. Or for other purposes - I'm pretty sure that the initiation for the high school club is finding the bypass that leads down to Vault XX, where the exploration journals of the club are supposed to be archived." Haruna shook her head. "But I'm getting off topic. This is the only bypass that I actually know about, and I'm not supposed to know about it."

"Well, then, I suppose we should get on with the business of delving!" Negi said cheerfully, as he started down the stairs. "After all, there probably aren't any traps, if it's a short cut."

"Um, actually -"

TWANG.

"- there's traps, but they're kiddy-level, since if you've found the bypass you're assumed to be at a certain level of competence at trapfinding," Haruna explained.

"Negi-sensei!" Sayo gasped.

Calmly, Negi pushed the arrow out of his abdomen and tossed it into the depths. "So I see," he said. "I'm fine, Sayo-san, no harm done. And I will just have to be very careful from now on." Kiddy level? he protested inwardly. Kiddy level?

Despite Haruna's gentle suggestion that she should perhaps take the lead, Negi proceeded to walk down the stairs ahead of the two girls, on the theory that if anything happened he had the best chance of negating it or taking it on the chin. Haruna would have preferred to just make sure that everyone avoided the traps, but she settled for pointing them out when she had to do so.

"So, is any of this bringing back memories?" she asked Sayo a few minutes into their climb.

Sayo shook her head. "Not a one. Well ... I think I remember visiting this library at least once, when I was alive, but I definitely can't recall ever going this deep into it. I was scared enough of the parts that I did visit."

"Understandable," Haruna agreed. "Uh, Negi, that step is trapped to set off a flamethrower, you might want to step over it."

"Thank you," Negi said dryly. Flamethrower?

"But now that I'm here, this is actually sort of fun, isn't it?" Sayo asked, smiling broadly.

... I'm the only sane man. How can someone as messed up as I am be the only sane man? Negi wondered frustratedly.

"Okay, we're coming up on a trap that we might actually want to set off," Haruna announced. "It turns the staircase into a slide, and there's a cushion at the bottom. It's a lot easier than walking all this way -"

"I'm not tired, Sayo doesn't get tired, and if you get tired, I'll carry you the rest of the way," Negi interrupted, shaking his head. "I'm not giving whatever sadistic psychopath designed these things the satisfaction of knowing that I deliberately set any of his or her little games."

"Okay, then you'll want to avoid that step, there -"

Negi obligingly did so. In the distance, suddenly, there could be heard the a rapid series of cracking noises, as might be made by stairs folding into a slide.

"No, wait, sorry, it was the next one that you were supposed to -"

"Ha. Ru. Na. San!"

"It was an honest mistake!"

By the time the collapse of the staircase into a slide reached their position, of course, Negi had already whipped out his wand and was astride it, with Haruna perched on it just behind him and Sayo utilizing the rockets installed in her legs to hover in the center of the stairwell beside the two of them.

"Well, this probably isn't how the evil mind behind all this intended for the trap to be avoided, but I'd say that counts as one both triggered and avoided, despite everything," Negi mused while watching the steps continue to fold all the way down along the staircase.

"It really was an honest -" Haruna started to say.

"Yes, yes, I believe you," Negi assured her - in a way that honestly wasn't terribly reassuring. He sighed. "It's probably for the best, anyway. I should really get in some practice flying like this."

"You haven't gone flying since it happened?" Haruna asked.

He shook his head. "Haven't had time, what with one thing and another."

"I haven't been flying in a while either," Sayo agreed. "Well, technically, I'm always flying, but this is a little different from what I normally do." She did a little mid-air pirouette to demonstrate.

"Um, yyyeah," said Haruna, flinching a bit. "'Bout that ... um, Sayo-chan? It might be a good idea if you stop using that golem for a while, we don't know what exactly to expect here and keeping it active is kinda doing a number on my MP bar."

"... your what?" Sayo asked, bewilderedly.

"How did people ever talk about these things before video games?" Haruna asked no one in particular."

"She means that supporting the golem is leaving her a bit drained," Negi supplied.

"Oh! I'm sorry, um, hang on just a second." The golem-body flew onto the wand in front of Negi, leaning against him and taking a careful hold of his suit jacket. Before he could say anything, her head lowered sharply, exposing the cavity in her neck, from which Sayo's doll form promptly emerged. "Is this better?" she asked in slightly higher voice.

"It will be when I dismiss it, you should grab hold of him, too," Haruna said. Then rolled her eyes. "Of course, I don't have to tell any girls that, it just comes naturally, right?"

"Huh?" said Sayo as she continued crawling up out of the golem's neck.

"Never mind," Negi said forcefully, then blinked. "Wait, what do you mean, 'we don't know what to expect'?" he asked Haruna. "I thought you'd been here before."

"Yeah, but never like this." The artist gestured towards the wand, her hands somehow describing the way that they were presently defying gravity. "I don't know what kind of traps there are to deal with someone coming down the central core like this."

"... well, maybe there aren't any," Negi speculated as he started to descend ... crossing the invisible path of an electronic eye in one of the walls and setting off a wind machine further below.

"WHY DID YOU SAY THAT?" Haruna shrieked as she clutched hold of him tightly.

"Just - hold -" Negi ground out as he struggled against the surprising turbulence.

"Ahhhhh!" Sayo shrieked as her doll form was knocked loose. Shouting her name, Negi reached for her, his fingers barely brushing against the fabric of her doll's coating before she was carried up the stairwell -

And into the path of a second trap triggered - a pair of scissors that burst from the wall and promptly sliced her body in half.

"No!" Negi and Haruna both cried out.

"Oh, dear," groaned Sayo as she floated footlessly beside the pair of them, watching the fragments of the doll drop through the air. "Asakura is going to be so upset, that doll cost her so much money and now I've gone and gotten it wrecked. Maybe it can be fixed, though ... do you think?" she asked Negi, who was staring at her with eyes agape.

"S-Sayo-san?" Negi asked hesitantly.

"I guess that is a silly question, I'm sorry, sensei, I've never been a very clever girl, and sometimes I just think of very silly things when I'm supposed to be serious, and I should really really try to do better but -" Sayo began to babble.

"Oy! Sayo!" Haruna interrupted. "I thought you couldn't leave the school without help?"

Sayo looked at her oddly "I can't leave the school without help, that's why Asakura got the d-" Abruptly, the odd juxtaposition of the her current location and the absence of a certain doll occurred to her, and she stopped in midword. Silently, she examined herself, even reaching behind her to pat an incorporeal hand against an equally insubstantial butt. "This isn't right," she said at last.

"Sayo-san, what has happened whenever you tried to leave the school in the past? Before you got the doll, I mean?" Negi asked.

"I, well, when I tried it, it got ... hard to think, and then I sort of passed out, The next thing I knew, I was in the classroom again," Sayo answered, genuinely baffled at her circumstances.

"Do you understand this?" Haruna asked.

"I'm not really an expert on ghosts, but ... everything I've read on the subject says that one has to remain within a certain radius of places that were important to them when they were alive, or places that -" Negi's eyes opened wide. "- that became important to those who remembered them after they'd died! Like a grave, or something!"

"My grave?" Sayo quavered. "I don't want to see my own grave! Don't you think that'd be scary?"

"Or something!" Negi assured her, and interestingly did a better job than he had with Haruna. "But this means, this has to mean, that we're on the right track!" He frowned deeply. "But I've had just about enough of these goddamned traps in this goddamned library!"

"I think you mean motherf-" Haruna started to explain.

Her words were, perhaps fortunately drowned out as Negi called out, for the first time in quite a while, "Raskil Maskil Magister!" He then began to chant in Latin, far too quickly for Haruna (who'd picked up a bit of the language over on the other side) to understand what he was saying. But the effects were apparent, as a blue mist formed below them, with many dozens of long lines of light stretching between them.

"Are those -" Haruna asked.

"The sensors. We can avoid them easily, now. Come on, Sayo-san, we're finally making some progress!" He began to fly downward in a circle, easily avoiding the light paths.

"Yes!" Sayo cried back as she followed enthusiastically.

In less time than it takes to tell it, they had arrived at the bottom of the shaft, where Haruna pointed excitedly at the cushions spread around the bottom of the stairs. "See? I told you! It would have been fine if we'd just slid down, and we wouldn't have had to go through all that -"

"Mm-hm," Negi said absently, as he picked up the top half of Sayo's doll form, considering it a bit sadly. "Unless of course we slid down so fast that we slid off the slide before we reached the bottom and plummeted through the shaft, exposed to all those traps fast enough that I wouldn't have been able to protect us. This isn't a playground slide, Haruna-san, there's no railing to keep you in place."

Haruna blinked. She stared at the stairs-turned-slide, confirming that Negi's observations were correct. "Oh my god," she muttered. "We could've been killed."

"Yeah," agreed Sayo.

Ordinarily Haruna would have pointed out that Sayo was already dead. But right at the moment, she had other things on her mind. "No, not, not just now! Back then! I never even ... how the heck did we survive that?"

Negi sighed as he gave up trying to find the other half of the doll. "Because God looks after fools, small children, and ships named Enterprise," he told her, his tone not really suggesting which of the first two the young explorers had been. His tone lightened a bit. "Also, you had Sakurako-san with you. All right, I take it that the love letters you haven't read aren't in there?"

He was gesturing towards the only visible exit, a large doorway that lay across a short bridge spanning a moat of sorts that flowed around perhaps a third of the room's circumference.

Haruna nodded, glad to be distracted from thoughts of a past close shave. "The bridge is trapped, though."

"Of course it is," Negi replied disgustedly. "I suppose there's piranha in the water? Genetically engineered piranha that act like the ones in folklore? With lasers mounted on their heads, perhaps?"

"No, you'll just get wet and maybe have to change into the spare clothes we didn't bring," Haruna answered. "You're kinda getting paranoid there, Negi."

Sayo blinked at the familiarity, but all Negi did was make a rueful face and nod weary agreement. "All right, then. Sayo, float on over. As for us -" And without warning he grabbed Haruna, holding onto both of her shoulders with his hands, and leaped across the moat in a single bound, carefully angling the jump to avoid any of the still visible light beams. Haruna was too shocked to do much more than let out a gasp when they landed.

"Is the doorway trapped?" Negi asked.

Haruna shook her head as she tried to regain her equilibrium.

"All right, then, how are these letters organized -" he started to ask as he walked through, and then broke off.

"They, uh, kinda aren't," Haruna explained somewhat unnecessarily as she joined him and Sayo in gazing at the piles of yellowing paper that lay in the floor of the much smaller room on the other side of the doorway. The room was otherwise bare of adornment except for the light fixtures in the ceiling and another door on the other side.

"Of course not," Negi murmured, rubbing his head. "Well, we'll just have to start reading them and hope that we stumble across some sort of reference to whatever it was that happened. Incidentally, who were they sent to, if not the headmaster's wife?" An awful thought occurred to him. "And when -"

"Ah, the earliest one we found was one written in 1938, and the last one was written in, um ... I think it was 1951. Maybe a couple of years before the Old Man married her, actually, so it's not what you were thinking," Haruna hastened to explain.

"What were you thinking?" Sayo asked, curiously.

"Never mind," Negi said before Haruna could answer. "All right, then, who -"

"Tsukino Souko," Haruna said.

Sayo's eyes went wide. "Tsukino Souko?" she said, very quietly.

"Does that name mean anything to you?" Negi asked.

Sayo's mouth moved in silence for a few moments. "I ... I don't understand ..." she said. "Why was he writing to her when she was dead?"

"Huh?" Haruna asked.

"Tsuki no sou. The phase of the moon. Aisaka. One of the kanji in it means phase. It's a pun. Tsukino Souko was my pen name, when I wrote poetry. I ... I just remembered that now, when I heard the name. Why was the headmaster writing letters to me after I died?"

Negi blinked, stared at the pile. "All these are letters to Aisaka Sayo?" he said.

Suddenly, there was a rumbling sound. He tensed, preparing to grab Haruna and flee out the open door. But the threat of a collapse proved to be a mirage, for the rumbling noise was just small motors starting up and shattering a painted facade which was covering a third door to the small room. Once the motors ran down, the silence which fell was broken by a click as the door opened just a bit, revealing a strange red glow seeping through it.

With a glance at his comrades, Negi slowly walked up to the door and pushed it the rest of the way open ... then stared at what was revealed.

The other chamber was, if anything, a bit more sparsely decorated than the one where they now stood - beneath the letters, after all, there was carpeting, but the floor of this one was bare. But it was almost impossible to notice that, for the eye would inevitably be drawn to what was there instead - a giant red-glowing crystal the size of a dinner table, or possibly two dinner tables piled on top of each other. And within it, for it was translucent if not transparent, was the form of a teenaged girl, eyes closed and hands folded across her chest as she hung in mid-air.

And Negi, who had looked at her photograph every school day for months, couldn't possibly fail to recognize her.

"That's me," Sayo murmured from beside him.

"That's ... that is your body, yes," Negi agreed. "I don't understand what it's doing here, or what that thing is -" Then he broke off as a thought occurred to him. "Wait. Could it be -"

"No," Sayo interrupted. "No, that's not my body. That's ... that's me. Can't you hear it? Can't you hear the heartbeat?"

Negi could not, and, from a glance at the rather terrified face that Haruna was presently showing - as well as the shake of her head when she realized that he was looking at her for confirmation - he could tell that she didn't hear it either. But as he turned to look at Sayo again, in preparation for telling her, as politely as he could, that she was imagining things, his gaze swept across the girl in the crystal ... just as her chest very, very slowly, raised and lowered in what unmistakably a breath.

"She's alive," he gasped.

"I'm alive," Sayo repeated, as she began to slowly waft towards the crystal. "But I'm a ghost. How can I be a ghost when I'm alive? I don't understand. I don't -" She was beside the crystal, now, and her hand slowly lifted as if to touch it.

"Sayo-san!" Negi called out.

"I'm sorry, Negi-sensei," she said, without looking back. "I think I have to do this."

She touched the crystal ... and vanished.

Immediately, Negi dashed forward and pressed his own hand against the crystal structure, only to have nothing happen other than the sensation of touching something very smooth and very cool to the touch.

"Where'd she go?" Haruna asked, coming up beside him.

He looked at the body within the crystal. "I think ... I think she must have ..." He covered his eyes, shook his head. "I'm out of my depths. This is all beyond me. I've never dealt with this kind of magic, never ..." He steadied himself. Teacher and mage, he reminded himself. Your student is frightened.

"I'm not sure what happened," he said, turning to look at Haruna, willing her to become as calm as he was trying to seem. "But I think that she might have gone into her body, if this is in fact her own body. I'm not sure, but ... this is sort of like the magic which kept Asuna in suspended animation for all those eons, the one that she's going to be placed in again."

"Excuse me?" asked Haruna, blinking rapidly.

Negi sighed. "I'm sorry, I'm forgetting who knows which parts of all this." He shook his head. "Let's just ... come away from this thing, and we'll talk about it."

"So let me get this straight," Haruna said a few moments later as she sat with Negi on the carpet in the room of letters. "Asuna's going to sleep for a hundred years, so naturally, you and she decided to indulge your raging teenage libidos with each other. And Konoka and Setsuna found out about it, and Konoka, being the randy wench that she is, joined in and dragged Setsuna with her. And since then, but before you schtupped Yue and Nodoka right in front of me, you also knocked boots with Chisame, Eva-chan, and ... and ..."

"Kazumi," Negi supplied.

"NYYYYYAAAAGHHH!" Haruna replied appreciatively to this helpful assistance.

"Eh?" Negi asked, leaning away as Haruna began to yank on her head.

"With Asakura? You fucked fucking Asakura, you fuck? And the bitch kept her mouth shut about it?"

"Hey!" Negi protested. "Don't call Kazumi a bitch ... or, y'know, use those other words, either," he added somewhat weakly.

She of course ignored him as she stood up and began shaking her clenched fist at the ceilling. "Gardez-vous, Asakura Kazumi!" Haruna yelled. "Gardez-vous! Thou hast broken the Code of the Self-Serving Bitches of Mahora! We had common cause, you and I, you the gossip-monger extraordinare, I the natural-born shit disturber, but you have betrayed that common cause! Now, in the ancient traditions of our people, I declare vendetta upon thee!"

"Haruna! Don't declare vendetta on your classmates!" Negi gasped. Then he seemed to collapse in on himself. "How has it come to this?" he asked quietly. "When did my life become one where I have to ask people not to declare vendetta on each other?"

Then Haruna made a great show of calming herself. "All right. Now that I know who to blame, and who will suffer horribly because of it, I feel better about all this." She turned and smiled down at him. "And I understand that you probably aren't very happy, right now, are you, Negi?"

"That's something of an understatement," Negi admitted warily.

Haruna nodded as she slowly lowered herself to her knees. "You've had adolescence thrust on you, and all the hormonal challenges that come with it. The person who's always been closest to you is going to be taken away from you, and for all your power and wisdom, you can't prevent it. And horny girls just won't let you be, and even though most people would think of that as an enviable situation, it's probably very confusing and unhappy for you, isn't it?"

"You do understand," said Negi, staring across at her in wonder. "Haruna-san ... I've really misjudged you, haven't I?"

"No more of that," Haruna said, waving a hand. "I wouldn't blame you for wanting to completely forget I was here, and run off to study that, that thing in there, in hopes of gaining a better understanding of how such magics work, so that you can come up with something to change Asuna's fate."

Negi blinked. He turned to look at the red glow, undimmed in the brief while that they'd been talking. "You know," he said in amazement. "That's an excellent idea!"

Then Haruna's hand clamped down on his shoulder. "Yes, I bet you'd love to do that. But, in the words of someone whom I both love and respect, even if she too will suffer greatly ... I'm going to fuck you now."

And she fell on him to press her lips furiously to his.

"But, Haruna-san, if you empathize with me, why are you adding to my troubles?" Negi tried to ask, but since he was being kissed rather deeply as Haruna pushed him down onto the carpet, it mostly came out as confused mumbles.

She pulled away from him after a moment, allowing a thin line of drool to gleam in the air between them before she spoke. "I bet you're wondering why I'm doing this if I empathize with your hardships?" she asked, between gasps for breath.

Negi nodded, since he didn't trust her to resist kissing him again if he opened his mouth.

"Oh, Negi. Negi, Negi, Negi," Haruna said, shaking her head. "Did you miss the part where I mentioned the Code of the Self-Serving Bitches of Mahora? I'm doing this because I'm horny, and even if I understand them, your troubles aren't my problem!" she added as she reached down, grabbed the hem of her uniform's blouse, and pulled it up over her head, revealing her bra-covered breasts to his sight.

"But, Haruna-san - this is -" Negi started to protest.

"Oh, you were cute as a hapless little boy, you're hot as a teenager, but you are so far beyond cute when you're a hapless teenager like this!" Haruna nearly gasped. "I cannot wait to feel you inside me and -"

"WHAT IN THE WORLD IS HAPPENING HERE?"

Slowly, Negi and Haruna turned to look at the source of that great shout. Owing to their respective supine and prone positions, to them it looked like they were looking at a horizontal man in robes standing in the doorway through which they'd entered the room, and so it took them both a moment to recognize him. It was Konoemon.

"Oh no," Negi whispered.

Then he recognized them, and gaped. "Negi-kun? And ... Saotome-san? What ... what are you -"

"Sir, please, I'm sure that we can explain -" Negi started to say, mostly because he had to say something, and the notion of saying 'this isn't what it looks like' didn't appeal for some reason.

"You can explain?" Konoemon said hoarsely. "You can explain why you're clearly canoodling with one of the students I put into your care? When that student isn't Konoka?"

"Yes I what?" Negi said.

"Decades have I labored to bring about anew the circumstances which almost had my daughter married to the foremost mage of his age, and you wreck the work of all those years?" Konoemon asked, looking like he was about to start crying. "How could you, Negi-kun! How could you betray me in such a manner? How -"

"Kokkun?"

Slowly, Negi, Haruna and Konoemon all turned to look at the source of that quiet inquiry. Again, owing to their posture, she looked a bit different to Negi and Haruna ... and they'd never seen her in nothing but a towel with her feet touching the floor. But not, perhaps, to the old man.

"Sayo-chan?" Konoemon breathed the question ... and then, quite suddenly, toppled over in a dead faint.

Mukashi, mukashi ...

There was once a young man who had many gifts. He was strong, quick, and smart - though of course, he imagined himself to be stronger, quicker and smarter than he actually was. And as if these gifts were not enough, he also had magical powers, which he tried, though not always successfully, to keep secret as he had been taught by his teachers. He was, in short, rather full of himself, and something of a hoodlum, as well.

Yet for all this young man's deep faults, he had one great saving grace. That was his pure and gentle love for the girl next door, who was a few years younger but just a bit smarter - or perhaps more gifted with wisdom - than he. He cared for her, he protected her, and from time to time he envisioned taking her as a bride - though as he was a rather naive young man, his notions of what a marriage entailed were decidedly chaste and romantic rather than carnal. He did not tell her of these imaginations, and only she knew whether she felt the same way about him, for a girl's heart is a secret garden.

And then, one awful night, she was injured, rather horribly, the one time he was not there to protect her. It was he who found her mortally wounded form.

You must understand - while he had magical powers, his knowledge of healing was limited to recovering from such injuries as a young man might sustain while brawling with his fellow young men. He had never bothered to learn those spells which allowed for the healing of such harm as she had suffered. And so, for the first time, the young man was confronted with the idea that his strength and his wisdom would not allow him to overcome any challenge which confronted him, and that he himself would not be the only one who suffered from his failure to do so.

He took that notion somewhat poorly.

And so, gathering up the girl's form, he ran to the home of an acquaintance, one who possessed greater lore than he (and, though he did not admit it, greater strength as well.) He begged her for her help, but she sadly refused him. "Magic does not work miracles," she told him. "You should know that by now."

What he knew and what he chose to accept were two different things. And so he cajoled her into helping him work a magic which would spare her life. Time, it was said, could heal all wounds, and so he proposed to give her that time, to bend time around her. And since time was something of an interest of this acquaintance, she agreed to help him.

He strained his talents to the utmost in this task, perhaps damaging them and himself in the process. Yet when it was done, it was well done - the girl slept in peace in a bright red gem, her injuries slowly healing and her condition not further deteriorating. It would take years for her to be hale, and so he chose to lie to her family and tell them that she had passed away, in hopes that the truth, when fully told, would lead to the forgiveness of this minor misdeed.

Years passed, and within the brilliant red gem, the injuries of the girl healed. Years passed, and their nation went to war with the rest of the world, and suffered for its hubris. Years passed, and the young man was no longer young nor as strong nor as quick, and his acquaintance no longer present, when he at last attempted to free the girl from her gem ... and learned, to his horror, that something had gone terribly wrong. The girl within the gem lived ... but her soul had departed.

And he began to hear tales of a ghost haunting the classroom where she had once studied ...

"Astral projection?" he heard a voice asking.

"Even in my youth, I was able to alter my senses so that I could see and hear ghosts," replied another, far more familiar voice. "They frightened me, mostly, so I didn't use that power very often, and never told anyone, either. Once I was sealed, though, it was easy to separate my consciousness from my body and go wandering. But ... something went wrong, and I lost most of my memories in the process. I guess they were -"

"- stored in your brain, which was mostly shut down," continued a third voice. "When your spirit projection drew closer to the body, though, it started to wake up, and when it merged with you ... well. Here we are."

"It's kind of a surprise that you recognized him, though," said the first voice. "He has to have changed a lot."

"He has," said that second, dear voice. "But he still rants the exact same way ..."

"No fool like an old fool, except for a young fool," said a fourth voice, old and tired-sounding, and it took him a second to recognize that it was his own.

A face - Negi-kun, anxious and concerned to the point of fear - bent into his line of sight. "Sir! Are you all right?"

"I will be, my boy, once you help me to sit up."

The youth did so, and Konoemon blinked as he saw that, as in the strange dream that he'd been having, Saotome Haruna was indeed wearing nothing on her upper body but a bra - yet this was easily explained, for her uniform blouse was hanging loosely on the shoulders of Aisaka Sayo, who looked at him no less anxiously than Negi had been.

"I'm so sorry, Sayo-chan," he said. "You deserved better help than you got from me."

Her nervous expression lingered only for a moment, before her face was utterly transfigured by the sweet smile he'd always loved so very much. "I'm alive," she said. "You did that, Kokkun. I can never thank you enough for that."

"But I should have realized sooner -" the old man began to say.

Unhesitatingly, she reached across and bopped him on the head. At the very least, it silenced him, and put mildly boggled expressions on the faces of Negi and Haruna. "Girls don't like boys who moan and groan about their failures!" she told him sharply.

"Yes, Sayo-chan," he said, bowing his head.

She nodded twice, in total sobriety. This promptly disintegrated into giggles as she covered her mouth while looking at him. "You are such a little boy inside, Kokkun," she told him. "You and Negi-sensei have so much in common!"

Konoemon didn't look all that pleased about that comparison, but, as he stood the rest of the way up, all that he said was, "Under the circumstances, it seems that I was a bit hasty in lambasting you for coming down here, as I was doing before I had that dizzy spell."

Negi looked perplexed. "But ... sir, you were muh?"

Haruna had just covered his mouth with her hand. "- absolutely in the right to be so critical under the circumstances," she continued on his behalf. "We really had no business coming down here, even if it did work out so well."

The old man nodded solemnly. "Indeed. However, since you are here, I suppose there's no harm in showing you this." With that, he wandered over to one of the chamber walls and tapped it with his knuckles in what sounded a bit like Morse code. A small cupboard sprang open in the wall, revealing a small package which he promptly picked up.

Haruna gaped. "No way - there actually are S-type supply caches in here? I thought those were just myths."

Konoemon looked at her fondly, eyes twinkling a bit. "Ah, Saotome-kun. You still have so much to learn ... but I'm sure that you'll find plenty of people willing and eager to teach you."

"Uh ... thanks?" she said uncertainly. "Is he flirting with me?" she quickly whispered to Negi.

"Uh duhnuh," replied Negi, whose mouth she was still covering.

Konoemon handed the package to Sayo. "Some clothes I put aside for you in the event of a miracle," he explained. "I was always hopeful, even if I didn't understand how it could happen."

"Oh, thank you," she said gratefully. "Even if Haruna-san is a shameless hussy, I really didn't want to walk out of here wearing nothing but her blouse and this towel. Just a moment please." With that, she darted back into the dimly lit room where she'd spent the last sixty-odd years.

"Hey! Who's a - okay, I'll take that one," Haruna grumped, dropping her hand from Negi's mouth so that she could fold her arms over her semi-exposed bosom as the two males in the room gave it a significant look.

"In any event, Negi-kun," Konoemon continued a bit more seriously. "Since it's fairly clear that I didn't see what I thought I saw when I arrived here in response to the alarm that was set off, I hope you'll agree that you didn't hear what you might have thought you heard when that happened, either. Correct?"

It only took Negi a second to make up his mind on that score. "Yes, sir," he said. "Of course, sir." Good boy or not, free passes didn't come along often enough for him to squander them. "But ... I do have one question, about the sealing effect. Did you really do that on your own, or -"

"I had help," the old man confirmed. "And I did not, and do not, fully understand what I did back then. Ironically, the person who helped me is a mutual acquaintance of ours, though I didn't recognize her as such until I overheard her farewell to you, Negi-kun."

He blinked. "You mean -"

"Yes. Though my memories suggest that those events were probably much later in her personal timeline than your own encounters with her, the way that she chose to say farewell to me was just like the way Chao-san did to you."

Negi frowned as he considered what that might mean.

For his own part, Konoemon seemed a bit anxious to be on his way. "Now, I'm sure that it will be fine to leave Sayo-chan in your care, Negi-kun. I have to hurry to arrange matters so that she can resume attending classes and residing here as an actual student here, rather than a ghost. Do you think that Asakura-kun will mind having her as a roommate?"

He nodded quickly. "I'm sure that would make Kazumi-san very happy." He narrowly avoided yobisute, there, and hoped the old man hadn't noticed. Haruna clearly did, and was giving him a look that, while it wasn't nearly as menacing as Asuna's Look, still spoke volumes.

Just then, Sayo, wearing a school uniform which looked just like the one her spectral image had always worn, augmented with a pair of slippers, walked back into view holding Haruna's blouse. "Is this okay?" she asked.

"You look lovely, dear," Konoemon assured her. "I look forward to seeing you at graduation." With one more smile, he went out.

"... that's a few months away, you know?" she called after him. "We'll probably run into each other before that, you know? Ah, well, it's good that he thinks about less immediate things than he once did, I guess."

"Are you ready to head back to the dorms, now, Sayo-san?" Negi asked.

"Actually, there's a place that I'd like to go first ..."

It was already early evening when they left the library, and by the time they arrived, following Sayo's unfortunately rather vague directions, at the location she'd been rather coy about, evening had definitely arrived as well. Negi was sure that he'd passed this set of ruined buildings, with their long-stilled clock tower, dozens of times without ever really paying them any attention. He had to admit that the garden of wild flowers that nestled in their shadow was rather lovely, however.

Sayo walked right into the flowers, bending down to gently caress them with her hands, before she stood up again, and turned to look back at them. "This is where it happened," she said, softly.

"You mean, this is where you di- or rather, didn't do that thing I was just about to say," Haruna replied.

Sayo nodded, then looked up at the sky. "I remember it was raining, and I ran out to try and cover up these flowers ... not these flowers, of course not. Their many-many-times over ancestors. And then ..." A deep breath. "I suppose it's probably for the best that nobody can really remember pain. But I can remember fear. Oh, I can remember fear."

"Sayo-san?" Negi asked, when she'd been silent for a moment. "Why ... did we come here?"

She turned back to look at him, warmly. "This is where my old life ended. I came to mourn the loss, and also to begin a new life. It seems appropriate for it to start here, as well. And you are here, sensei ... because I love you, Negi-sensei."

"Eh?" Negi yelped, genuinely stunned by this revelation.

"Oh, come on!" Haruna protested.

Sayo ignored her. "When I was a ghost, you never ever looked at me as anything less than a person, Negi-sensei. It began building in me from the moment you looked at me and told me that I could make friends, this love that burns in my heart."

"I don't believe this," Haruna muttered, shaking her head.

"I didn't know what it was. Perhaps I couldn't, without the memories of all that I'd left behind. But that doesn't matter. Because when I saw you kissing Chachamaru-san, looking as you do now -"

"Seriously?"

"Haruna-san, please stop interrupting me," Sayo said, frowning at her. "You're here because you're a tag-along."

Haruna gaped, genuinely stunned to be getting attitude from Sayo of all people.

Into the silence, Sayo continued. "When I saw you kissing Chachamaru-san, and being so masterful, so commanding - just like Kokkun was, before he grew all old and wrinkly - somehow, even before I knew the whole truth of myself, I knew that you were the man I had been waiting for, all these long, lonely years. Will you accept my feelings, sensei?"

Negi drew in a deep breath. "I fear that you may be seeing in me more strength and courage than I actually possess, Sayo-chan. But nonetheless, I am honored to accept your feelings, and I care very deeply for you, as well."

Haruna was still gaping but now she was gaping at him. He ignored her, too.

"Then will you give me the sign of our feelings for each other?" Sayo asked, bringing her hands up to her breast. "A pactio ... and perhaps more than that?"

"Wait, more than -" Negi asked, losing a bit of his earlier poise.

"Sex," Sayo clarified.

"... yes, that's what I thought you meant," he said. "Um, let me guess, did Kazumi mention - ah, yes, she did," he said, as Sayo nodded. "Of course she'd tell you."

"I. Do not. Be-lieve. This. Shit," Haruna ground out, holding her head in her hands.

Negi sighed. "Yes," he said.

"What?" Haruna cried.

The scary thing was, it was getting easy to ignore her. "If this is truly what you want, if this is truly how you want to begin your new life, then yes, I will be with you in this way as well as the ways that a teacher and friend would be. I think you are making a mistake, and being far too eager to give your self and your heart away. But I will do it with you."

"It is not a mistake, Negi-sensei," she assured him, opening her arms to hold them out to him, beckoning him to come forward and take her in an embrace. "I know that it isn't."

"... can I at least join in, then?" Haruna asked a bit plaintively, as she watched Negi march forward to do as Sayo was bidding him.

"No, of course not," Sayo said promptly. "I am willing to share Negi-sensei with anyone else who cares about him, but I have no interest in any other romantic partners for myself. Especially not female ones!"

"Has it occurred to you that you might be missing out on something?" Haruna said, desperate enough not to care how desperate she sounded. "Can you really be sure that you won't like that stuff if you've never tried -"

"I have tried that sort of thing," Sayo said, now sounding really annoyed. She sighed at the startled look on Haruna's face. "Oh, good grief, did you think your generation invented schoolgirl lesbian relationships? I was a student at an all-girl's academy, Haruna-san, I had plenty of opportunity for 'experimentation', and realized quite quickly that it was not for me. So, no, none of that for me, no thank you."

"I sense a challenge!" declared Konoka, looking up. Yue promptly grabbed her hair and pushed her face back down to her yoni, which Konoka had just been licking and fingering as the smaller girl writhed on the toilet seat. In the next stall over, Nodoka was fiercely scissoring against Setsuna, who was fortunately too blissed out to start crying about her circumstances again.

"All right but still -" said Haruna.

"In fact I would really rather you left," Sayo added.

"Oh, I bet you would," the artist started to growl.

"I'd really rather not have any arguments," Negi sighed, stepping back from Sayo's embrace and looking at her unhappily, before looking back and forth between the two young women. "Can't we reach some sort of compromise?"

"Y'know," said Haruna, teeth clenched. "I kinda think we can. Hey, Negi-kun, did you ever learn to draw the pactio circle yourself?"

Negi blinked. "Um. Well ... it's not that complicated, but ... I have to admit that I've usually relied on Chamo-kun for that sort of thing." His eyes went distant. "I wonder where he's gotten to, anyways? After the visitors from the other side arrived, he said that he was going over there to do some shopping, but that was a while ago and -"

"Uh-huh, interesting tangent," said Haruna. "On the other hand, there's me, an extraordinarily talented graphic artist who is really stunningly good at drawing from memory, and has actually practiced drawing a pactio circle a couple of times, just, y'know, in case it ever became necessary." She feigned surprise. "And oh look!"

Sayo was giving her an unimpressed look. On noticing that Negi was giving her a hopeful look, though, the former ghost sighed. "Very well, I suppose that I would be obliged if you'd create the circle so that Negi-sensei and I can enjoy our mystical union as well as the more intimate one which will follow."

"Obliged to the tune of letting me join in?"

"Obliged to the tune of letting you watch," Sayo replied. "As long as that's all right with Negi-sensei, at least," she added, gazing up at him.

"That's fine," he said, nodding. "I'm used to that, by now."

"It must hard having so many demanding girls around you," Sayo said sympathetically.

Fighting the urge to smite the girl for her hypocrisy - for she was surely at least as demanding as any of them had ever been - Haruna coughed. "Okay, if you could head over to this little bit of remaining stonework, and stand on it, aaaand ... yeah, that should do it. Kiss away!"

They did. The kiss was not nearly as passionate or intense as his pactio with Ayaka had been, but Sayo was clearly striving for one on the same level as the one she'd witnessed him giving Chachamaru. As always, it was the sincerity that got to him, the awareness that these girls viewed him as a much better person than he actually was, and viewed his protestations against that as humility, rather than honesty. When she finally drew back, she was smiling dreamily at him. "I couldn't have asked for a better first kiss," she said, rather breathily.

Negi flushed. Then, after a moment, he frowned. "Wait, first kiss? But I thought you said -"

"First kiss in this lifetime," Sayo quickly clarified.

"Ah," he said, nodding understanding.

"Does anyone wanna look at the card?" Haruna asked from off to the side, holding said item up and fluttering it in the air a bit impatiently.

As cards went, it wasn't terribly dramatic, depicting Sayo in the very same student uniform she was now wearing, with chairs floating in mid-air behind her. "Ooh, some sort of telekinetic ... thingie?" Sayo guessed as she peered at it.

"Would you like to try it out and discover -" Negi offered.

She shook her head firmly. "Not really. I'm sure that whatever I gained from this can't possibly compare to anything you can do, sensei, and I'm all right with that. What matters is that you know that I'm always in your corner, and will always be on your side. And that I will never, ever allow you to lose hope, no matter what. This is just the symbol of that, nothing more. I don't need anything else ... nothing else at all."

I think I'm going to be sick, thought Haruna. Fricking yamato nadeshiko and their-

"Um ... well, then, I guess ... we should move on to the other part of this," Negi said hesitantly. "Of course, we don't have to do it here, we could go somewhere else and -"

"Here," Sayo said, drawing him into another embrace. "And now. Take me, Negi-sensei. Make me your woman."

"No foreplay?" Haruna asked dryly.

"Shut up, Haruna-san," Sayo replied warmly, and kissed Negi as the two of them slowly descended to the concrete where they'd been standing just a few moments earlier.

There was foreplay, but not very much of it. Her eyes slammed shut as he penetrated her, and her breaths were quick and shallow. But she made no cry, not then and not when he, sensing that her pain had eased, began to move back and forth, unconsciously slipping one of his hands up under her blouse to grasp at one of her small but plainly sensitive breasts. She smiled at that, and kissed him some more as her legs tightened around his waist.

That sensation awoke a bit of his self-awareness, however, and he pulled back from the kiss. "Sayo!" he gasped. "I'm, I'm going to -"

Understanding dawned in her eyes, and the legs unwrapped from around him. "Outside, please!" she cried out.

He pulled all the way back, just in time, splashing his seed on her thighs. She gazed at it, fascinated, and reached down with tremorous fingers to dab them in it, then brought them back up to her mouth. "Ew," she said, making a face. "Girls actually like to take this stuff in their mouths?"

"Some of us, yes," Haruna said. She was now sitting, her own skirt up around her hips and her hands working furiously between her legs. "About that whole sharing thing ..."

Sayo sighed as she moved away from Negi, making an effort to clean herself up a bit. "I suppose that I did say that, so -"

"Great!" said Haruna as she rolled up into a semi-standing position and stumbled over to where Negi was crouched.

"- so, if Negi wants to be with you, then I guess there's no problem," Sayo continued, just a bit more loudly. "Do you want to be with this person, Negi?" she asked, putting a certain amount of emphasis on 'want'.

"Yes, Negi, do you want to be with a girl who is really, really horny, to the point where she will probably lose her shit if she doesn't get some action real soon now?" Haruna asked, a faint touch of madness in her voice.

Negi gave her a look which clearly indicated that he wasn't fully convinced by her argument.

"Come onnnn!" Haruna whined. "Okay, look, we all know that I'm not a good person."

"Now there's an understatement," Sayo muttered.

"Man, the minute you grew a backbone, I - mmnrghh!" With difficulty, Haruna brought herself under control. "No, I'm not a good person. I've done rotten things to other people, even my friends, and laughed myself sick about them because, face it, they were funny! But this? This isn't funny! And you know why?"

"Because it's happening to you?" guessed Sayo.

"Yes!" Haruna agreed.

"... that's remarkably honest statement, if sort of -" Negi started to comment.

"But also because you're a good person!" Haruna resumed her lecture. "Good people shouldn't lower themselves to the level of bad people like me, and that's what you're doing now!"

"An argument could me made that good people shouldn't have sex with their students, either," Negi said mildly.

"Oh, for pity's sake! Thirty-one pretty damn hot chicks in your class, the headmaster wants you to score with at least one of them, and nobody expects you to be a saint!" Haruna declared, waving her hands in the air.

"... all right," said Negi, at last. "Come here, Haruna."

The artist nearly broke down in tears. "That is the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me, you cute little Casanova!" She collapsed on top of him, her hand streaking down to wrap around his flagging hardness and massage it back to full strength as she kissed him again.

Higurashi Kosuke had been a groundskeeper at Mahora for some forty-five years, first as a green apprentice - pun not intended - then as a full, salaried employee, and now, in his twilight years, as a volunteer whom none of his successors could bear to ask to stop coming around and poking around, mostly because he had trained most of them himself. He was particularly fond of checking on the growth of a certain flower bed in the shade of one of the old buildings, making sure that it was doing well and harassing the actual groundskeepers into checking in on it if it wasn't. He was heading over there to do the first part of that right when he heard the noises.

It took him a moment to recognize them as the sounds of conversation, just a bit out of earshot - for he was slightly hard of hearing - and thus unintelligible. But when he did, he was also able to identify them as the voices of a boy and a girl. Arguing, from the sound of it. And then he heard the voices become softer and quieter ...

Higurashi frowned and took another step towards the building ...

Then paused as he looked up at the setting sun.

His frown faded, and a smile crossed his face, an indulgent smile of remembered warmth. With a shrug, the old man turned and headed off, planning to terrorize the young groundskeepers of another area of campus.

Haruna had moved on to fellatio after only a few brief moments of manual stimulation, bobbing up and down as she stared up at him. "You like this, huh," she said, dabbing the tip of his erection with her tongue. "Oh, yeah, you do."

"Apparently she knows your mind better than you do," Sayo commented dryly as she sat and watched from some distance.

"Hey! Did I give color commentary when you were getting busy?" Haruna snapped, breaking off from what she was doing for a moment.

"It's not my fault that you're more verbal than I am, and give me more opportunities," the former ghost replied.

Haruna growled but determined to ignore that. Give her opportunities, huh? She'd show her. And also show Negi a thing or two in the process. She forced a grin onto her face - easily, since it was her natural expression - and slid up to wrap her big, juicy tits around him and rub him that way. Followed up by a cocked eyebrow as she gazed up at him.

"Ah!" Negi said. "Yes, you're very good at this, Ha-haruna ..."

Of course she was, not that he could have had much -

"Yes, almost as good as the Master ..."

Haruna felt her teeth start grinding, and was more or less glad that he wasn't in her mouth at the moment. Okay. Time to ride the little Casanova and show him who was top of the class.

A few moments later, as he pumped into her as she lay beneath him, Haruna tried to reflect on what had just happened. She had been sure that she was about to take command of their sex by riding him - that had been her exact thought, just that - and yet now he was thoroughly in control, just like he had been with Sayo. Except that on reflection, when he'd been doing it with her, he'd been doing what she wanted him to do to her, so that meant Haruna was even less in control than a former ghost who'd been afraid of ghosts while she was being a ghost!

"Ahhhhhh!" she cried out in protest, or something like that, before he claimed her lips once more.

Well ... maybe this wasn't so bad, after all, she thought dizzily. It might be fun to pretend to be the uke for a while, and - wait, was Sayo curling up behind him? Was she going to crowd in on their time, that bitch, Haruna had sat back and watched but she was wait, no, she was only whispering in Negi's ear, too soft for Haruna to hear over the pounding in her head. And Negi was blinking in surprise, so maybe whatever he'd just heard was confusing him more than anything else, and yet, holy shit, he was pulling her leg up, bringing Haruna's ankle up to where his mouth was and kissing it, sending sensations screaming up Haruna's spine and driving her straight out of her ever-loving mind!

How had she known, Haruna thought vaguely, beneath the overflowing feelings of climax. How had she known that ... oh ... she'd probably watched all sorts of things over the decades, hadn't she? Only stood to reason. Even if she'd been stuck in a classroom all that time, there would have been bound to be kids sneaking in to get busy, just like this ...

Now Negi was saying something, and she was honestly too blissed out to really understand it ... oh, he was probably saying he was about to -

"Inside," Haruna gasped. "Inside!"

And as he sprayed up into her, she honestly thought that the startled look on Sayo's face probably gave her even greater satisfaction than the second orgasm she felt at that moment.

"Oh my goodness," Sayo gasped. "Isn't that a little bit risky to -"

Haruna weakly beckoned for Sayo to come closer. Hesitantly, the other girl did so. Haruna managed to lift her head from where it lulled to whisper, right into Sayo's ear, "Birth control pills." Followed by a gust of air blown by pursed lips.

Blushing, Sayo jerked away.

And that was even more satisfying.

Early evening had graduated to mid-evening as the three of them made their way back to the dorms, not really talking - for they found that they had surprisingly little to talk about, under the circumstances. That wouldn't have stopped Haruna, normally, but Sayo's presence somewhat curbed her enthusiasm. (Since Sayo was deliberately going for that, it would be fair to record that as a win in her column, were one inclined to keep track. Which she was, incidentally, and counted herself as being in the lead.)

When they were on the path leading up to the dorms, Negi finally found himself speaking up. "I wonder if the headmaster has told Kazumi that you'll be moving in with her?" he asked Sayo, who only shrugged in response.

"You mean like how he told Asuna and Konoka that you'd be moving in with the two of them?" Haruna asked dryly.

Negi swallowed. "Well, perhaps he'll have learned from the experience ... Haruna, it's not nice to laugh like that."

She was still chuckling faintly when the front door to the dorms slammed open and Asakura came running out. "Sayo!" she gasped. "I've been worried sick, I got back to the room and your doll was gone and if you were going to go out with Sensei - hello sensei - you should have left a note or something and ... and ... and ..." Slowly, she grew quiet as she took in Sayo's slightly altered appearance. "Sayo?" she asked quietly. "When did you get feet?"

"Hello, Kazumi," Sayo replied, smiling with just a touch of the old shyness once more. "At last we meet."

Asakura drew closer to her, slowly, tremblingly reaching out to softly press the fingers of her hand to Sayo's cheek. The former ghost tilted her head into the touch.

"You're so warm," Asakura whispered.

Before Sayo could say or do anything in response to that, Asakura had swept her up in a hug, laughing and crying all at once. "Negi!" she cried out, whirling them both around so that she could look at the teacher without letting go of her friend. "How in the world did you -"

"It's kind of a long story," he admitted with a shrug.

"I bet!" Asakura laughed - and then her laughter died in her chest when she realized that (a) Haruna was looking at her, (b) Haruna was looking at her in a particular way, and (c) Haruna was not smiling. "Uh ... Haruna? Did you -"

"I helped," Haruna said. "'Cause that's what I do, you know. I'm a helper. Yeah."

Asakura blinked, pulled back out of her hug with Sayo long enough to exchange looks with her. Her face fell as Sayo nodded in response to the inquiring look she'd just been given. "Ah-heh-heh, oh boy,'" she said, smiling ruefully.

Now Haruna was smiling, and it wasn't a pleasant sight.

"Ummm," Asakura considered.

"It's all right," Sayo reassured her as she led her friend towards the door. "We can handle her. Really."

Haruna's face didn't fall until the two of them were out of sight. "How did she do that? That thing where they understood each other without saying a word or even making an gestures?" she asked irritably.

"It's called friendship, Haruna," Negi told her, with obvious sympathy in his voice. "You might want to try mending your own friendships for a while. Meanwhile, I'm going to try and talk Fate into having your suspension lifted, once I check in with Asuna and Konoka."

"You don't have to do that -"

"No, but I'm going to do it anyway, since ... well, when you get right down to it, I'm the reason that he's here in the first place." Negi sighed. "I hoped that this would help him develop a little empathy, but I think that might not be working out."

"Ah, British understatement, how do I love thee?" Haruna muttered. "Okay. Message received. I'll go make nice with Yuechi and Nodochin." She threw him a mock salute and started to march in.

"... and speaking of empathy," Negi muttered, then shook his head. He was learning, however slowly, to pick his battles.

"I'm home," he announced shortly after as he went in through the door.
"Welcome back darling, would you like dinner, a bath, or me?" Asuna asked without looking up from the history texts she was studying once more.

"You," he answered honestly.

"Ah, gee," she said, looking up with a smile. "We're all out. Maybe later, okay?"

"Okay," he replied, looking around. "Where are -"

"Kotaro-kun has some kind of job for the headmaster, Konoka and Setsuna are off on a double date with Nodoka and Yue, so it's just you and me for now. How was your day?" she asked.

"Well, I found out that Fate has given Haruna a suspension, helped Sayo discover her body and woke it up so that she's alive again, told Haruna about your situation, and had sex with the pair of them," he informed her calmly. "How was yours?"

"Got yelled at by Chisame after Rakan told her about the situation, had sex with her and Kotaro - did you want to say something?"

"Nope," Negi said, shaking his head and closing his lips firmly.

"Good. Good. I don't really want to tell any more people about the situation, Negi."

"So you're ready to tell everyone in the class?" he asked hopefully.

"No, that's not what I said. Iinchou, maybe. But only her, and only ... Chisame has this weird idea that she loves me or ... oh, not you, too."

"I didn't say anything."

"You didn't have to."

The World Tree was a wonder of Mahora. If you were outside and your vision wasn't impaired, you could see it at all times, and it threw parts of the campus into shadow at pretty much all hours of the day. Generations had grown up beneath its bows. Even among those who wondered at it, as well they should, it was largely taken for granted.

Some things should not be taken for granted.

One of the main branches of the tree began, ever so slowly, to break away from the trunk.

To Be Continued.