Chapter 12

Of Small Oversights in Various Forms

Classroom 3B only sometimes was.

This statement is somewhat misleading, however. Classroom 3B always is- it just sometimes is somewhere else. It does not simply disappear into the aether, only to reappear on a whim. It generally exists in places with severe spatial distortion, or in areas with great magical influence. Like the Moving Pillars throughout the Academy, Classroom 3B is a kind of reality-balancer. It moves when other things can't (or won't), so that other things won't get broken, like the fabric of the universe. It has been previously mentioned that OFAC is caught in quite a predicament- teetering dangerously on the edge of time and reality, its existence secured only by a titanic effort from the Powers That Be, and from a touch of influence from lesser beings.

Nevertheless, this balance is so precarious that, metaphorically speaking, it could be knocked on its ass by a stiff breeze.

Thus, we return to Classroom 3B.

The door to the classroom was somewhere in the Southern Wing of the Academy. For most people it would be difficult to find, but for Charlotte and Asamoya, it was rather simple. They closed their eyes, sang a song, and hoped they wouldn't hit a wall. (They did, but by that time they were already where they needed to be, so it was all right.)

"Aagh," Charlotte grumbled, rubbing her sore head. "Well, I guess this is it."

The pair stood in front of a large and imposing door. It was made of wrought iron, with eldritch and slightly nasty-looking figures and shapes engraved in the metal. It glowered from the pleasant crème-colored walls like an angry demon. The doorframe also had letters engraved into it in a gothic style…

"'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here'?" Charlotte read. "Yeesh. Cryptic."

"Yup. Slightly cliché, too," Asamoya said. "Poor Dante, getting his gate inscription ripped off."

"Divine Comedy, right?" Charlotte said, grabbing the twisted iron handle. "I remember The Inferno was good, but Purgatory and Paradise were a little… um…"

"Purgatory was a bunch of dead blokes whining, and Paradise was hardcore church, yes," Asamoya replied. Charlotte nodded, and pulled the door open. It swung heavily, like a weighted pendulum, and moved on silent hinges. The two girls stepped warily across the threshold, into the large room within. They blinked as a startling scene met their eyes.

"What the hell is this?" Charlotte said, staring around her.

The whole room looked like a bag of holding turned inside out. The place was filled with unrelated objects- a Persian rug beneath an overused chemistry table, while on said table was not chemistry equipment but mountainous stacks of newspaper dating back to the mid-1800's. A multitude of clocks scattered the paisley-covered walls, some of them dripping á la Persistence of Memory. A ship walked around on blue legs in a bottle set on a Shogi table in one corner, while television from the 1960's set against the back wall showed Twilight Zone reruns to a small crowd of students sitting on bean bags and hot pink pillows shaped like the Rocky Horror lips. Several books pulled themselves off their glass shelves and switched places with others, apparently to get a better view of the show. Some of them were attached to their shelves with heavy iron chains, and when they opened their pages, they seemed to have teeth. The room as a whole was dominated by the large stone fireplace that lit and warmed it, with a pile of logs on its hearth. A small fire glowered between two massive logs, looking as though it were about to snuff out.

"Holy crap…" Asamoya murmured, venturing further into the strange room. She looked down and stared at the floor for a moment. "Hey, Char, look at this!"

Charlotte walked over, and looked down as well. "…Why is the Sistine Chapel ceiling on the floor?"

Asamoya shrugged, and started over towards the group around the TV. "Hey, 'To Serve Man'. That was a good episode."

A few of the students turned back to face her. Several of them shushed her, and turned back to the television just as Pat ran up towards Michael to shout, "It's a cookbook!" as he was taken away in the alien spaceship. Talk broke out among all of the students as the narrator closed the episode: "It's tonight's bill of fare in… The Twilight Zone".

"I liked 'A Kind of Stopwatch' myself," Charlotte said, leaning on the newspaper-infested table. "Although 'Perchance to Dream' is my favorite."

One of the girls turned on her beanbag chair and said, "Oh! That's the one with the guy who had the heart condition and thought that the carnival girl was gonna kill him…"

"So he went to the psychiatrist about it and the receptionist looked just like her, so he jumped out the window…" Charlotte continued with some excitement.

"And it ends up that he had just fallen asleep and gave himself a heart attack because of the dream!" They finished together and laughed.

"Yeah, that was a good one," the girl said, giggling a bit.

"Nah, the one with the hitchhiker was better," another girl (she had large cat ears) said. An argument broke out between her and three other students, each claiming that different episodes were best.

The first girl (the one who had talked about 'Perchance to Dream') stood up and pushed some of her hair out of her face before approaching Charlotte.

"I'm Mel," she said, and held out a hand.

"Charlotte Albshire," Charlotte replied, and shook the hand. "This is Asamoya."

"Pleased t'meet ya," Mel said. "I guess you came to see what's here, right?"

"Well, sort of," Charlotte answered, picking a bit at her sleeve. "How'd you know there was going to be The Twilight Zone, anyway?"

"Oh, it's been here for a few days now," Mel said, ducking as a pink lips pillow hurtled over her head. Behind her, some of the students were waging an all-out pillow war, and were taking no prisoners.

"I wonder where it came back from," Asamoya said, looking at the eccentric collection of objects.

Mel shrugged. "Who knows? Wherever it was, they really liked clocks and sci-fi TV."

As she said this, a clock dripped upwards from one wall onto the ceiling, which just so happened to look like the Sistine Chapel floor.

"This place is just weird," Charlotte commented, pushing a stack of newspapers out of the way so she could sit on the table.

"Isn't it great?" Mel said with a bright smile.

"Is there a fridge?" Asamoya asked. "If there's food, I might be willing to let the weirdness slide."

"Yeah, it's past the third bookshelf and to the left. It's got a nutcracker on it, you can't miss it. But the books bite, so be careful."

"Yeesh. Did this thing stop off in Discworld, or something?" Charlotte said, picking up a newspaper. "This is from The Ankh-Morpork Times. 'The truth will make you fresh'." She grabbed another. "And this one's from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse. How the hell do you get a newspaper from Betelgeuse?"

"Is it Betelgeuse Seven?" Mel asked, peering over Charlotte's shoulder.

"I dunno. Maybe. It's written in these spiky things." She turned the paper towards Mel, and pointed to the spiky writing it was covered in.

"Does it say what a Hrung is, and why it would choose to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven?"

"Possibly. I can't read Betelgeusian."

"I can see how that's a problem," Mel said.

There was, suddenly, the sound of flapping pages, a shriek, and a papery thud. A few moments later, Asamoya walked into sight dragging a flailing book behind her on a chain. She tossed the offending book into a corner (it fluttered off towards its shelf, shedding a few loose pages at it went), a piece of reasonably fresh pizza in her hand.

"Damn books. Where's an orangutan when you need one?" she said, gesticulating with her pizza. "The things were about to take my head off, I swear."

"Well, they're not really strong books. Although the Hamlet one can be poisonous if it's open to the bit where Hamlet and Laertes snuff it," Mel said.

"I actually think it might've been Moby Dick."

"Oh. That one's just big and a pain in the ass."

Then, from the pillow-war, the cat-girl shouted back, "Hey, Mel, the fire's going out! Couldja toss something for it?" She was promptly concussed from a Rocky Horror lips pillow swung at high velocity.

"Yeesh," Mel grumbled. She walked over to the fireplace, grabbed one of the logs, and tossed it in. As she did so, the fire pulled itself up from the ashes and snatched the log with arms that were sullenly glowing.

"It's about time you thought about me," the fire said heatedly. "I was about to go out."

"Shove it, Xanthus," she replied, and tossed another log at him.

(Meanwhile, Charlotte and Asamoya did a double-take at what was essentially talking embers.)

"Oh, sure, because I'm the one slacking off here," he said, catching the next log and resting on it as it began to char. "I only heat the place and keep it lit and power that silly television you're all enjoying, thank you, and there's a Dr. Who marathon on channel four, which is far better than old Twilight Zone reruns. How silly of me, of course I'm wrong. Just like I'm wrong about that twenty page essay you're supposed to be writing."

"Shit! Where's the rubric for it?" Mel gasped, having obviously forgotten about the paper. She began to search near the fireplace for it, while Charlotte and Asamoya glanced about in a rather unhelpful attempt at finding it.

"Well, it powered your television for about three seconds an hour ago," Xanthus replied acerbically, sinking further into his pile of kindling, "after I digested it along with the dusty, disgusting newspaper you gave me. I quote, "This stuff's not worth anything, right?". I stand by your previous statement- it wasn't worth anything. You weren't going to do it anyway."

"Xanthus!" Mel cried, turning to the fire-demon in anger.

"Am I wrong?"

"Yes!"

"No, he's not!" one of the girls commented, collapsing onto a pillow after the completion of a most vicious battle. "It's due in a half-hour, you'd never get it done."

"That doesn't matter!" Mel said. "Don't agree with him."

Charlotte and Asamoya raised their eyebrows and exchanged a few slightly puzzled glances.

"It doesn't mean he's wrong, or that Kaede-chan is," another one said, slumping backwards onto the floor.

"Ravenwing!" Mel cried, looking betrayed.

"Well, it's true, Mel," Kaede replied, tracing a pattern on the floor with one finger. "You weren't going to do it, and it's not Xanthus' fault that it got burned up… you did toss it to him, and he's fire and all…"

Asamoya, meanwhile, turned to Charlotte and whispered, "These people are really crazy."

"I know," Charlotte whispered back. "I don't think this is what we're supposed to look for."

"Me neither."

"I think we should get the crap out of here, before clocks drip on us and we go real crazy, too."

"Yeah."

The two girls glanced at each other, then back at the group of girls (and one fire-demon). With a determined nod, they both said "Gotta go!" at once, and bolted for the door.

They heard Mel shout, "Hey, where are you going?" just as they slammed the door behind them, closed their eyes, and dashed away.

Neither of them realized later that they couldn't remember exactly what Mel and her friends looked like.

Meanwhile…

"I still think you should tell someone else."

"I'm not going to!"

"Why not? I mean, other universities have had a few problems. No one's ever held anything against them for asking for help."

"Semp, I'm not going to. This is something I can handle myself. There's no need to get anybody else involved."

Cerberus was currently seated at her desk, with coffee cups piling high amid the paperwork scattered across the floor. Always in favor of the 'clean desk' policy, she had simply shifted everything to a slightly lower position.

Sempronia landed on Cerberus' desk and sat down on the edge, letting her legs dangle. "So you've got some sort of idea about what you're going to do?"

"Sort of," Cerberus said, and stood. "I've got a few things to check up on, though." She started out of her office.

"Where are you going?"

"Up."

There was a brief pause.

"Up? As in… up?" the fairy gave Cerberus a slightly startled look. "And you actually expect to get answers there?"

"I'll get something," Cerberus replied. "Not much, but something." With that, she was out the door.

She walked through the Staff Section, which was empty of people; no one was mercilessly grading papers, no one was furiously planning the next lesson and coming up with no ideas, no one was raiding the cabinet for Cerberus' supply of Ethiopian coffee (and not finding it). Everything was very still, and very quiet, and almost a little bit sad. This place was supposed to be… fuller. No ghost town in the world could quite compare to the sudden emptiness that encompassed this one silent room.

Somewhere, there was the distant echo of familiar voices.

She shivered briefly as she walked up a flight of stairs. These were not the ones that led into the rest of the Academy, however- they led to an entirely different place. This place did not exist, and she was the only person who had the key.

It sounds like those are mutually exclusive- a key to a room that does not exist.

It really isn't.

Cerberus, the Assistant Head Mistress, took out an iron key from her pocket and turned it in the lock of an unimpressive wooden door. If anyone had cared to look closely at the key, they might have noticed the faded letters engraved on it spelled out 'acta erit fabula'.

The drama will be acted.

And the door swung open.

Elsewhere…

Charlotte felt a sharp prick on her thigh. She pulled out her schedule from the recesses of her pocket.

In 5 Minutes: The Universe Is a Lot More Complicated Than You Think: On Paradoxes, Time Travel, and Why You Don't Do Either;
Classroom 42; Profs. Lucca and Gaspar.

Asamoya, meanwhile, pulled hers out as well.

In 5 Minutes: Being Tragically Noble Does Not Mean Being Damn Stupid; Classroom 358; Profs. Sir Cyrus, Frog, and Schala.

"I guess we'll meet up after classes, then," Charlotte said, peering over at Asamoya's schedule. "Maybe we'll find something to look into after that."

"Yeah," Asamoya said with a nod. "This was a little bit… silly. And I'm using 'silly' as a euphemism for 'really damn weird'."

Charlotte giggled a bit, and started walking down the hallway they were in. It happened to be in the Eastern Wing, actually not far from the dorms that had been demolished in the beginning of the year, but neither of them really knew that. It didn't matter anyway, because they could be wherever they wanted whenever they wanted by closing their eyes and sprinting.

"Let's meet after class in the Great Hall," Asamoya said as they began to jog. "We can see what we've figured out then."
"Sounds good to me," Charlotte replied. "See you later!" Both girls broke into a run and closed their eyes.
And neither could see what was in front of them.

A/n- Yes, I sort of lied and this took a looong while to get up. It happens. These things take a surprising amount of planning, I must say. But anyway… new applicants are always welcome, as are new adoptions. And, in case you didn't know, I got your application on the Lj, Wingnut. Thanks! Ciao, me hearties! (Yo ho!)