Amity walked out of the classroom as the bell screamed, holding her books to her chest. She sighed and headed off down the hall toward the atrium, weaving between the throng of students.
"Hey, Amity! Amity!"
She stopped and looked up to the second floor of the atrium. Luz stood at the edge of the guard rail, jumping and waving at her. She smiled and raised a hand.
"Wait up!" Luz yelled. Amity watched her rush around to the staircase and race down to the lower level, dodging past other students until she closed the gap.
Amity raised a brow. "Luz, what is it?"
Clutching the stitch in her side and gasping for air, Luz held up her hand for Amity to wait. Amity rolled her eyes with an amused smile and kept silent until Luz straightened up and sucked in a deep breath. "Hoo boy, that's a lot of stairs! Anyway, you're on a study period right now, right?"
"Yeah. I have a history exam coming up I was going to review for. Why, was there something you needed help with?" She felt her face heat up and her eyes widened. "D-did you want me to tutor you on something? One on one, privately?" She took a half step back.
"Nah, I'm good," she said.
For a moment, Amity felt a pang of disappointment. She forced her expression to neutral and questioning. "Okay … so what's going on then?"
"I found something the other day that I want to show you," she said, then started walking toward the east wing of the school. "Think you can skip out on study hall today? It can wait until, like, after school or something if you really need to study."
Amity found herself falling into step with Luz, despite going in the opposite direction of the study hall. She gave Luz a questioning look. "Found something? Like, in the school? Is it a monster? It isn't the Cryptrattler in the girl's locker room, is it? Because he talks big about his hidden buried treasure, but some student found it years ago and it was just where he buried a pet rabbit."
"Whoa, really? Probably Eda who found it, I bet. But no, I wasn't talking about that, it isn't a monster. So you can come now?"
"Yeah, sure, I guess, I've already studied for the test. Where are we going?"
Luz stopped at a row of lockers that looked like they hadn't been used in years, their paint fading and half of them missing teeth. She tickled one under where its chin would be, then twisted a canine sideways. The whole row swung open, and she stepped into the Secret Room of Shortcuts. She waved for Amity to follow.
Amity stepped into the room with a distrustful look, glancing around, and the lockers swung shut behind her, seamlessly fusing into the wall.
"It isn't far with the shortcut. Though, uh … I have no idea how far it is without the shortcut, this is the only way I know how to get there." She stopped at one of the room's many doors and popped it open. She gestured at the dark room beyond, then crossed the threshold. Amity frowned, then followed.
She found herself in a hallway of the school that looked like it hadn't been in use for decades. A layer of dust coated the floor, disturbed only by a few errant sets of footprints here and there, most of them she guessed were Luz's. The walls had no windows and none of the torches were lit, just the emergency light beacons, casting an eerie, twilit glow.
Luz led the way down the hall, and Amity followed. "Where … are we?" she asked.
"No idea. The basement, I think? I'm just guessing that we're underground, anyway. There's not much here from what I've seen, lotta these are just classrooms that nobody uses and stuff, but check this out!" Luz stopped in front of a door that was relatively clean compared to the rest of the hallway, its blue paint spotless and fresh. The glass pane in the door was frosted to an opaque, golden white, save a relief in the center in the shape of a quill. Luz pulled open the door.
The chamber stretched out and up, two times bigger than a normal classroom and three times as tall. Despite its size, there was scant space to walk into the room, with jagged odds and ends catching glints of light from the hallway. Luz sidled into the room to the left, grasped a lever on the wall, and pulled. With a squeaking crunch, the sound of chains and gears whirred into life, and a hum of magic hit Amity's ears, almost in a range she could hear. Glass tubes lining the walls sparked to life with bolts of lightning crackling back and forth, throwing the room into stark daylight.
In the middle of the chamber sat a massive machine, taking up almost all of the floorspace. Luz grabbed Amity's hand and led her into the room, squeezing past the edge of the machine and heading to a small area that was open enough to not feel cramped. Amity's gaze stayed glued on the machine itself. It stretched up and up toward the ceiling, a massive clockwork of whirling gears and belts that churned and rumbled in time, and as the machine spun up, a huge roller lurched into life, rumbling with a mechanical purr. A steady stream of black smoke chuffed out from an exhaust pipe, turning the upper reaches of the machine hazy.
"Ta-da!" Luz said. "It's a printing press! I remember reading in the flyers that Hexside used to have a student newspaper, until the staff disappeared under mysterious circumstances. This must be what they printed it on!"
"Wow," Amity said, looking around the room. "I had no idea there was anything like this here." She frowned and spun slowly in place. "Where even are we that this could fit? We'd have to be really far down to not see this from outside."
"Beats me. But look, everything works!" She slipped back around the side they'd come from and pulled down on a lever. The roller screeched and dipped down sideways. A splash of black liquid sprayed over the sides of the tub that made up the bottom section of the machine. "Oops. Don't think that was supposed to happen. Hold on!" Luz swung the lever the other way and the roller sprung back up, spinning on its axis until it was level again. A ream of paper shot out toward the clearing where Amity stood. Rows and rows of text covered the sheet as it unfurled, glittering with wet ink.
Amity spun her finger in the air and grasped the corner of the unwinding paper in her magic, floating the end over to her. She frowned in thought at the printed words, laid out in repeating blocks of pages. A large gap sat in the middle of the typesetting, leaving room for a picture to be added later, she assumed. The text started in the middle of an article, but at a glance appeared to be a story about a teacher getting caught having a relationship with the parent of a student. She smiled in amusement, getting to the bottom of the page and looking at the date for the article. "This issue is from forty years ago."
"Yeah?" Luz said over her shoulder in a strained tone.
Amity glanced at Luz, then tried to stifle a giggle. Luz sported a big blotch of ink on her cheek and another on the tip of her nose. She wrenched the lever back and forth with a glare on her face as the press sputtered and whined, still spitting out copy at an alarming rate. With a sudden screech, the lever sunk halfway to the floor, and the paper jammed up in a knotted mess between the rollers. Luz let out a sigh of relief.
"Having fun, Luz?"
"I mean, obviously." Luz grinned and scratched her cheek, spreading the ink blob down to her chin. "This sort of stuff is so cool. And I bet it wouldn't take too long to figure out how to make it work right, it's totally usable." She wrenched the lever back into its starting position and the knot of paper popped free, spooling out from the belts and hanging to the floor. Luz wiped her brow and left a trail of black over her forehead.
"Luz," Amity said, fighting back laughter, "You, uh … look at your hands."
Luz jumped in surprise. "Whoa, oops. Did, um, did I get some on me anywhere?" She looked at Amity. Ink covered nearly her entire face.
"Um. A bit." She gave up and let herself snicker, muttering, "Why do you have to be so cute?" under her breath. She set her books down on the floor and stepped over. "Here, let me help, go like this." She held her palms facing up under her chin. Luz mirrored her, and she spun her finger. "Abomination, rise."
Luz let out an unsettled squeak as the ink ran down her face and onto her upturned hands. It pooled up into a glob of shiny tar, then rose upwards with glowing pinprick eyes, forming into an abomination barely an inch tall. Luz turned, and the abomination leapt back into the ink tub with a loud plonk. "Nice! You're full of crazy tricks, Amity."
"Oh, it was nothing," she said, waving Luz off while feeling her face heat up. "I figured out I could do that after I spilled an inkwell all over a library book."
"Double nice. Anyway, what do you think? We could totally get it to work."
She frowned in thought and looked over the contraption, which pumped and grinded of its own accord, belts and rollers spinning and rattling as it coughed up smoke into the far reaches of the ceiling. "Yeah, I'm sure we could get it working right, it was designed to be used and it doesn't seem broken, so it would just be puzzling it out. But why though? Did you want to use it? I suppose you could restart the school newspaper if you wanted to."
"Ehh," Luz grumbled, "not a newspaper, that sounds boring, I was thinking we could put out a zine." She grinned at Amity, her eyes glittering with excitement.
Amity gave her a confused frown. "A what?"
Luz faltered, then chuckled. "I guess they don't get called that here. A literary magazine or journal? We'd open up submissions for creative writing from anyone who goes to Hexside and wants to enter, we get a group of judges together to go through them, and then we publish the best at the end of the semester. My school back in the human realm used to have one before my mom was born, and I always wanted to restart it, but nobody would let me, because they didn't have a budget for it and I couldn't get anyone else to help. But now I totally can, because who needs a budget? We've got the stuff for it right here already, and I'm sure we could get some other people who'd be willing to judge with us, too!"
Amity pursed her lips in thought and looked at the printing press, still lurching along.
"Of course, like, I'm saying us here, but that's up to you, Amity. I'm asking you because you're who I want to do it with, but if you don't want to, or don't have time or whatever, I'm sure I can get it figured out."
"Um," Amity mumbled, looking back at Luz and suddenly feeling torn in several different directions. "I mean, maybe? It does sound interesting … just thinking about it a little, I'm now really curious what sorts of stories everyone here would write. Like, can you imagine the sort of thing Boscha would submit?"
"I know! She'd probably write a love poem to her Grudgby ball!"
They both shared a snicker, then Amity frowned again. "And I've never really made anything like that before, it would be interesting to learn how to do it. Not just the printing press, either, I mean. We'd have to figure out how to set up submissions, how judging would work, how to lay out a magazine, there are going to be a lot of things to learn. Honestly, the whole thing sounds fun, but … I really don't know if I'd be able to. My mom isn't very receptive to unapproved extracurricular activities." She sighed and shook her head. "I was allowed to play Grudgby, since it was a varsity club, and it's okay for me to go to the library basically whenever I want, but something like this …"
Luz frowned and rubbed her chin in thought. "That kinda sucks. Do you think if we do get approval from Principal Bump that your parents might be okay with it? You'd be in an official school club if we did, so maybe it wouldn't be so unapproved anymore. And plus, like, after we were done, you'd get to have a copy of the finished zine with your name in it as an editor! That's gotta be worth something, too, right?"
Amity's frown slowly turned to a smile as she considered it, stooping down to recollect her books. "You know, that might actually work. Okay, yeah, if we can get approval from Principal Bump and I can get approval from my parents, I'm in."
"Awesome!" Luz said, pumping her fist. She turned back toward the door and grabbed the main switch powering the room, pushing it back into place. The machine spun down with a groan, chugging and thumping back to stillness, while the tubes of lightning flickered out. She held the door for Amity, who stepped back into the dusty hallway. She started to close the door. "Anyway—" a loud clonk interrupted her from inside the printing room, followed by a splash and the sound of waves slapping back and forth.
They both looked at the room, then each other, then shrugged. Luz closed the door and led the way back down the hall. "Anyway-anyway, so like, no pressure if you change your mind or it turns out you really can't do it, but I was super hoping you'd do it with me and was worried you'd say no."
Amity felt her face heat up again and fought the urge to run off, half because she had no real idea how to get back to the rest of the school. "Oh, erm, well … I'm happy I didn't disappoint you, I guess!" She cleared her throat and tried to organize her thoughts. "Is there a, uh, specific reason you wanted me? To help—wanted me to help."
"Well, yeah," Luz said flatly. "You're the most well-read witch I've met, and I already know you have good taste, so I definitely trust you as an editor, and you're really artistic and creative, too. Plus, you're, like, the smartest, and I don't know if I'd be able to actually figure out that printing press on my own."
Her blush blossomed across her face and she could feel her pulse in her ears. She tried not to sound too high-pitched as she squeaked out, "Th-thank you, that's—um, er—" She took a deep breath and tried to get back to a normal-sounding register. "I guess I'm just surprised you didn't ask Willow or Gus first."
Luz pulled open the door back to the Secret Room of Shortcuts and held it open for Amity, not showing any signs of noticing Amity's color or wavering tone. "Okay, don't get me wrong, Willow and Gus are great, but Gus already spends all of his afterschool time at the Human Appreciation Society and doesn't have any interest in reading anything else, and I once asked Willow what her favorite thing to read for fun is and she said the binomial nomenclature of plants." She turned toward Amity while walking, raised her voice, and shook her hands for emphasis, repeating, "The binomial nomenclature of plants! She was so serious about it, she spent, like, two minutes teaching me how to say binomial nomenclature right!"
Amity paused mid-step and laughed. "Of course she did that." She shook her head and let out a long breath, relieved that the butterflies had passed. "Okay, I completely understand why you wanted my help now." At a different stretch of the Secret Room of Shortcuts, Luz tugged on a wall sconce and they slipped out into the main hallways of Hexside, halfway between the entrance and the atrium. "So I guess next step is talking with Principal Bump?"
"Yep!" The bell screamed overhead and classroom doors started to spring open. Luz's eyes shot wide in panic. "Oh, heck, I gotta get all the way to potions now, talk to you later, Amity!"
"See you later!" she called back as Luz raced away. She turned and walked toward her locker to switch out her books, smiling to herself, half thinking about the fun of working on a magazine with Luz, and half about all the possible stories that she could write for it.
The rest of the semester suddenly felt a lot more exciting.
