Louise looked on with a petrified expression as her newly summoned familiar, a tall, beautiful woman wearing a nightgown began aggressively rummaging through various cupboards, her dresser, and pulling apart every book in her bookshelf and searching between.
'Just what are you doing?!"
She tried reaching for her wand, but to no avail, the woman had it.
She had no idea what kind of mage she was, how powerful she was, nor her affinity, but was irritated nonetheless.
"You said you summoned me, right? How far is this from Germania?" She asked as she frantically rummaged through books.
"That's not important, you still haven't explained what you're doing! I'm growing tired of your insolence!" Louise yells.
Ignis sighs and stops her actions.
"This is ridiculous. At first, I didn't believe what was happening until I looked around. This place looks nothing like Germania. I must be dreaming. Then you kissed me and runes started glowing from my hand and I woke up in a room with you." she said with a hint of irritation.
"This isn't Germania. We're in Tristain. This is the Tristain Academy of Magic," Louise explains.
"Tristain?" Ignis asks, sounding genuinely surprised.
She walks over to the window and gazes out, looking on at the rolling green fields, distant foothills, and other vibrant greenery that weren't common in her native land.
"I guess you'd be right…"
"O-of course I am! Now explain yourself! Why in Brimir's native tongue did I receive such a difficult familiar…"
"Familiar…?" Ignis asks questioningly.
She hadn't thought about the prospect of that yet as new information jettisoned upon her like a sharp blast of wind she hadn't fully recovered from.
When she was woken up from her sleep, she was still extremely delirious, and nothing from her then-present situation had settled with her in any way.
She gazed at her hand in deep thought.
What the hell…?
Of course, in Louise's mind, other issues were bubbling about which vexed her.
That anxious dread she felt was now gone, but had been substituted with a trial she hadn't anticipated she was going to face.
How could I summon a noblewoman…? She could be a Germanian princess or something! BAH! I don't want to think about the consequences of that.
There's no way she's a commoner. She has every right to refuse to serve me, if you consider her pedigree.
She pouts, and slumps onto her bed.
She even took my wand. BAAAAH! I'M SO USELESS!
As Louise pouted on her bed, broiling in her own self-pity, she glanced up.
"Ignis?"
She was gone.
The door slung wide open, carelessly.
And… Now she's gone?!
Louise reached her breaking point, and her brain short-circuited, causing her to let out a long whining sound with her mouth wide open in utter surprise.
"Give me a break…"
"B-but Guiche-sama… Isn't it true you're dating Montmorency…?" Katie, a first-year says as they stand in the torch-lit academy corridor.
His eyes light up with surprise. "Eh?! That's simply not true. You're the only fragrance this young heart can take," he says, taking her hand.
"Guiche-sama!~" She says in an enraptured voice.
"Oie!" A voice calls out from behind. A woman.
They both turn.
"Ignis!~ You're awake!" Guiche calls out in a slight ecstasy.
Because Professor Colbert refused to allow Guiche to levitate her up to Louise's room, as someone like him was not allowed to touch her unconscious body, Colbert and Louise carried her instead.
Although, he did catch a glimpse of her black lingerie on the way up.
His face blushes as he remembers, looking into her eyes.
He gets on a knee shamelessly.
"What's a beautiful soul such as yours doing at these hours, and how can I assist you, Madame~"
"Guiche-sama?" Katie says, sounding concerned.
"Huh?" Ignis says with an eyebrow raised. "Drop the formalities, you're embarrassing your girlfriend over there."
Katie blushes, smiling, thinking to herself, "G-girlfriend?"
Guiche twitches in shock at this remark. "G-Girlfriend?! N-no this isn't what it looks like! I was just walking her to her dormitory! I wouldn't date a first-year! Aha~"
"G-Guiche! You liar! How could you!" Katie runs off, crying.
"K-KATIE! THAT'S NOT WHAT I-"
She sighs, then suddenly hoists him up, clutching his shirt at the chest, and pulls him to her face closely, staring him down.
"Listen up. I need a map. Know where I can get one?"
She's surprisingly commanding and strong to boot.
Guiche gulps and laughs nervously.
Meanwhile, a sour Louise was still in her bed, musing to herself with her blanket pulled over her like a croissant.
"That idiot… She may be noble, but she's still my familiar, after all."
She sighs.
"If word gets around that my familiar ran out on me, I'll never hear the end of it."
She growls.
She gets up with an air of apathy, and opens the door, still in her nightgown much like her familiar still was.
"No way!" Guiche yells out. "A noble as a familiar?"
She had just finished explaining that she was indeed, a noble, and needed his help in finding out where she is, so she can deduce how long it would take to return to her manor.
He lets out a triumphant "Humph."
"I knew I sensed something interesting about you since I first saw you."
He gazes into her eyes as they walk side-by-side under the pale moonlight across the courtyard.
"After all. These eyes are more than capable of touching your very soul. That is, if you allow them to," he says, flaunting, rose in mouth suddenly.
Ignis glares at him soundlessly, then turns her head.
The two made their way to the old professors laboratory, nestled in a corner in one of the quadrants of the academy.
Guiche gesticulates his rose wand over the door handle, and it cracks open.
"That's Earth magic if I'm not mistaken?" Ignis inquires
"Aha! Correct!~ My full name is Guiche "Brass" de Gramont. There's no limit to what my abilities can do!~"
Ignis looks around. "Are you sure we can do this?" She sniffs the air. "What's that smell?" She asks with a concerned look.
"Of course. Professor Colbert hardly leaves his laboratory secured, he won't notice a thing."
The two head inside, and Guiche spots, then pulls out a leathery receptacle, brimming with sealed parchments.
Guiche had told her previously, that the Professor was a polyglot of knowledge of some sort, and it was likely his laboratory was a place they could search.
"These look like they could be them."
Guiche's eyes light up as she pulls one out labeled "Tristain-Germania, (labels included)"
"So you're really going to ditch Zero Louise, huh? How tragic~" He says with laughing sarcasm.
She looks up at him as she unfolds the huge parchment.
"I'm not sure yet," she says as she refolds it, and returns the leathery box to its housing, parchment under her arm.
"I wouldn't blame you, personally. I can't imagine sharing a space with her. Let alone being forced to serve her. Hahaha!~"
"Why not?"
He explains to her how she earned her nickname, "Zero", and how she's managed to affix herself as a pariah amongst the students.
She looks at him with a strange glare.
"Thanks, Guiche-sama."
Stupid familiar… Moron familiar… Stupid, big breasted useless familiar…
Louise grumbled as she descended the spiraling cobblestone staircase.
What was she looking for anyways?
I've heard stories from Éléonore-oneesama before of rich noblewomen who were convicted of heinous crimes and subsequently locked in their own manors as a form of imprisonment by their loved ones since they lived within a fief or a duchy and it was safer to keep them on their own land.
These women usually ended up losing their minds in the process.
The first thing she did when we met was attack me and then tore my room apart, so it doesn't sound too far-fetched, Louise thought as she drew nearer to the exit of the large dormitory tower.
This thought made her scared, and she mused about how to approach it.
Before she could finish her thought, she saw a familiar figure sitting at the end of the staircase, staring at a map blankly, and walked down to it.
"Idiot. Come back to my room, immediately. That's an order."
Silence.
She wasn't sure about herself at this moment.
Even with the most basic of spells, she was unable to cast, resulting in cataclysmic explosions that could be heard across the academy, she held her head up in confidence and authority.
It was a byproduct of her hoity-toity, aristocratic upbringing.
Somewhere in her mind, she had fantasized about situations like these.
In them, she summons a great familiar, and with every order she yells out, it complies happily, rearing its head upward at attention, ready to do her bidding as she sees it.
In some of them it was a dragon, others on days she felt more humble than others, it was something like an owl, a basilisk, or a bugbear even.
Regardless, it empowered her.
"I suppose you're no Zero after all!"
"Hmph. It was just a fluke, you know!" Kirche would yell out, as Louise smiles smugly at her with her big dragon in tow, ready to blow the blowhard redhead away at a moment's notice.
This was different.
Her familiar was there, it wasn't fleeting, and it wasn't running away, it was right there.
But she felt powerless.
The weight of her own falsely constructed hubris crashed down in a few seconds, and she muttered meekly.
"You can sleep with me if you want. You'll have to find clothes to wear, tomorrow. I don't want you walking around all the time like that."
With that, her familiar rose, and walked past her, coldly.
She felt a chill of wind rush through her as she did so.
"I'm that far away, huh?" Ignis says as she finishes drawing a line on the large, detailed map upon the parchment with a quill pen.
"You never told me much about yourself, you know. You're really rude for a familiar, especially a noble," Louise says as she sits at the edge of her bed.
Ignis sighs. "What's there to say… I'm the first, and only daughter of the Blaudgust duchy. It's in the Ruschmacht Mountains, bordering Nordland. It's really isolated, so we have a separate manor on the border of Tristain," Ignis explains.
"Your family are dukes?"
"Well, just my mother, Duchess Valynn Elize von Blaudgust. My father disappeared before I was born."
She continues as Louise looks on somewhat attentively.
"We're not the most fiscally flourishing family within Germania, but we're well known for our idiosyncrasies which give us a strange reputation. My mother collects Brimir-era relics, and my father was a knight."
Louise felt weird.
"Do you suppose your family is worried about you right now?"
"Probably not," Ignis says dismissively.
Louise pulls her knees up to her chest.
"But you're going to go back anyways… I suppose I can't stop you."
She pulls her blanket up to her, and scoots near her pillow, lying down on her side.
She suddenly feels an object hit her from behind, something light.
It's her wand.
"Sorry, I took it with me. And sorry about all the haste. I got the feeling you may have been worried, so I didn't bother leaving. I have no choice but to stay for a while, anyways.."
Louise grips her wand tightly, and her face forms into a scowl.
"I W-WASN'T WORRIED ABOUT YOU, STUPID…."
An incantation is muttered, and before she could react, Ignis is suddenly engulfed in an explosion and her freshly fished map flies off in tatters.
"IDIOT FAMILIAR!"
With that, after snuffing out the candles, she sets her head on her pillow to drift to sleep.
Ignis, covered in soot, looks on, still sitting.
"Maybe I've changed my mind…" A puff of black smoke emits from her mouth.
"Some things on these grounds stay the same, others just get weirder, and weirder," Old Osman utters as he inhales out of his pipe.
His assistant, Longueville eyes him with a sharp glare.
"Is that so…?"
She flicks her wand in the air, and the pipe leaves his mouth.
Aggravated, he shakes his staff up and down.
The ivory pipe was now centermost in a vicious game of invisible tug-of-war between the two.
"Osman! Please stop making this difficult!"
"You can kick this addled, aging professor all day long Miss Longueville, but you can have my smoking habits when you pry them from my cold dead-"
"Excuse me."
The door is opened, and the two settle down, the victor being Longueville who lets out a solitary "Hmph" as the aging headmaster growls.
A familiar student with strawberry-blonde hair enters.
"Ah, Miss Valliere, the girl who summoned that woman yesterday. What's the problem?" Osman says.
"My familiar… Have you seen her? I can't find her anywhere."
Osman looks on reflectively.
"Sit down, Miss Valliere."