Harriet Jinjur vs. the Academy

Chapter 1: Welcome to the Academy of the Fantastical Mystics

She awoke with a shock. She thought this train ride would never end.

Actually, she didn't at one point, considering it's been taking her far from the orphanage in Gretna that she spent her whole life in.

And although it was taking her to somewhere just as harmless, somewhere every kid her age would be excited to enroll if given the chance, Harriet Jinjur just treated it with complete contempt.

And it's with good reason.

Eleven years ago, her parents were killed in her home with a gun, but it wasn't just any gun. It was a magic gun, which blasted her father to smithereens near her crib and probably did the same to her mother.

Harriet was lucky that she survived, but that didn't mean she didn't suffer the most out of this.

What she inherited after this ordeal was a foul mouth and an immense hatred for everything magic, or as everyone used to call it, the Fantastical Mystics.

That, and a certain brown cowlick that irritates her greatly if it's ever touched, which didn't help soothe her over the other two hardships either.

She soon lived in a dilapidated orphanage known as the Innsmouth Institution of Orphaned Offspring and although it isn't an ideal spot for a child to spend her formative years in, she tolerated it quite fine on her own.

That was, until June 26th, 1997, when she was invited to a small island in the North Altantic Ocean, known only as the Unknown Parts of Academica, to enroll in the Academy of the Fantastical Mystics, a long-shuttered school dedicated to magic that decided on that moment spring back up to being, both fugitively and literally.

Harriet, of course, was adamantly against this. So much so that she locked herself in her room and refused to come out, but that didn't stop certain officials from Academy Grounds from retrieving her and restraining her in her personal cabin on the train during the long, infinite blackness that came with the trip over.

Luckily, she wasn't harmed during this fiasco, but Harriet would say it differently.

Now, Harriet is now in the part of the world far from North America, taking part in a school that she had no wish in going to with only her hand-me-down school uniform she wore constantly, her slingshot, and a fresh pair of red sneakers she got as an early birthday present the day before.

So, she isn't entirely uncomfortable.

However, there's one extra tidbit to keep in mind as we go on. The reason Harriet got enlisted to the Academy after so many years wasn't just a mere happenstance. In the world of the Fantastical Mystics, some things tend to have a purpose attached.

She's supposed to be the one who will vanquish "He-Who-Shan't-Be-Named," the very same that killed her parents long ago. She would get someone else to do it, but that's not the expected behavior of a Chosen One.

As Harriet stepped out of the Cyclone Express of her own free will, stepping on the isle for the very first time, only two words came out of her mouth as the other students came out of the accompanying carriages from behind,

"Fuck me..."

A dozen horse-drawn carriages cross carefully from the train depot through the Forest of Outskirts as they made their way to its destination on the other side of these immeasurable woods.

Harriet cautiously sticks her head out the window, careful not to hit her head on one of the incoming trees, and saw in full view, a gothic learning institution perched on a rocky high-rise that looks an awful like a cat standing up straight. There's also a six-inch-high stone wall past the moat with four towers that's about six feet tall on each corner.