Venus Academy, Vol. 1

Chapter 1 (Rewrite)

Darcy had never had friends.

As she dragged her raggedy old suitcase over the bricks, the thought kept echoing in her head. Maybe the realization that she really had flown to a middle-of-nowhere town in an unfamiliar state was settling in, or the ringing fact that she was about to introduce herself to a roommate on a campus where she knew absolutely nobody. Her parents were miles and miles away, her phone was halfway dead, and her damn suitcase's wheels kept sticking in between the bricks. She had a million things to be worrying over, to think about, but that one thought was all that appeared in her mind. She had never made any friends, at least in real life.

Homeschooling had been part of the reason, but it wasn't the only one. She had finally convinced her parents to let her go to school for her sophomore year. Darcy had known it wouldn't be easy but she hadn't expected it to go as badly as it did. She barely made it to Labor Day weekend. The last straw had been when the principal pushed a sheet of paper across his desk to her as he had explained that he was unable to help with the bullying problem. She had read over the paper as he reminded her that the students didn't know how to handle a mutant student, especially one with her mutation. The paper had been a letter home to her parents, listing several other options that the school recommended for Darcy. It had been her counselor who slipped her a pamphlet on the prestigious Academy of the Tuatha Dé Danann and a whispered confession that her cousin's kid was a mutant who went to the school. That night, Darcy and her parents had called the school and began the process of transferring her.

The clacky rumble of the suitcase's wheels dragged Darcy from the memories. She petted the soft ginger fur of the cat ears atop her head, though, as she recalled why she was at this particular school. While those ears were not the only feature that set her apart and displayed her specific mutation, they tended to be the most obvious. At a distance, people tended to miss her slitted pupils with their rings of green, and Darcy knew her tail made people nervous, so she'd learned to keep hidden by wrapping it around her under her clothes. Her ears, though, were harder to hide. She'd tried putting a headband over them once, pressing them into her hair, but then she really couldn't hear anything, and that made her more nervous.

Sure, mutants had existed in the world for more than two decades, but that wasn't a whole lot of time for the world to get comfortable with them by any means. Science had tried its best to make everything make sense when children began being born with different features and conditions. Names for each mutation were released with nicely worded descriptions, not that most people stuck to those names. Despite all the efforts, most people still considered all the mutations as different, and many of those people saw our differences as bad. In her small town, there were a lot of the latter.

Darcy's mutation was called Felinae Transmutation by scientists. To the common people, she was known as a werecat. The name was a bit confusing since werewolves were also a type of mutation with dramatically different features, but it's the name that stuck. And werecats were one of the most notable mutation types, which meant she had never really stood much of a chance when she entered school. Still, Darcy had fought to get out of her homeschool bubble. Maybe that had been a good thing in the end, considering where she currently standing.

The academy looked older than it was. Gothic building structures cast heavy shadows as approached. Plaques with delicate printing glinted in the morning sunshine. Ivy, wisteria, and some other climbing vines curled around the building windows and arches. The campus looked like it belonged in a magazine for some old fancy Ivy League college, and with good reason. Apparently, the academy had originally been a private college institute that went down when enrollment numbers dropped. Then some rich aristocrats from Europe who had created a mutant academy in Ireland decided to buy the old campus and create an American version of their school. Thus the Academy of the Tuatha Dé Danann was born.