A/N: I've decided not to go on hiatus (no dip Sherlock), but my updates might get slower. On the bright side, this is a long chapter!
A few hours later, when the students got to leave their dorms for an hour before lunch since we were on vacation, I sidled into the huge, dark Advanced Science storeroom, hoping none of the cameras caught me. In the storeroom, it was too dark for the cameras to see me, but the hallways were a different matter. I pulled my screenpage out of my pocket and opened the Notepad app, where I'd made a list of everything Kiara had asked for. I grabbed a large canvas tote I spotted in the corner of the room and looked it over appreciatively. It was big enough to carry all the supplies, yet it would attract little attention. As I turned a corner, I saw many bundles of dinef leaves sitting on one of the metal shelves. I grabbed three of the bundles and stuffed them in my bag. From then on, it was easy to find most of the items on the list. Soon, I had the leaves, the powdered basinture fangs, and wire. "Poisons, poisons," I muttered, forgetting to be silent. Finally, I found a few handy little poisons meant for Catrops. They wouldn't kill a human, but they'd definitely give whoever got the poisons in their systems a bad sickness. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself until I heard a voice.
"Who's there?" the voice shouted. It was definitely male, and definitely belonged to a member of the Order of Chaos. I heard footsteps approaching me. Panicking, I dove into a large crate. Thankfully, it only contained padding- or so I thought. As the footsteps grew nearer, I burrowed deeper into the crate. Then the first glass shard pierced my skin. It was followed by many more. The crate was very deep, and about half of it was filled with glass, which I had originally taken to be padding through the foot-thick block of it on top of the glass. I mentally cursed as the Chaos member drew closer to my crate, drawn to it by the tinkling sounds of the broken glass. I took a deep breath and frantically dug under the padding, glass cutting through my skin like it was paper. The man lifted the lid of the crate and peered in. Thankfully, he only looked for a second or two and then let the lid fall. I waited until I heard the sound of the storeroom door closing, then I crawled out. I groaned as I picked out the shards of glass embedded in my hands. Thankfully, my head and neck were in the padding and my arms and legs were covered in the protective material of my uniform. Still, a few shards had gotten in through the gaps between my ankle and the pants leg. When I was glass-free, I grabbed the bag, which I had stuffed in a nearby crate, and cautiously walked down the hallway and up the stairs to my dorm, hoping that nobody would notice my bloody hands. The second I'd locked the room's door behind me, I charged across the dorm to the closet and pulled out healing salve. I applied it liberally to my hands and ankles and sighed in relief as the salve did its work. I kicked the bag over to the foot of my bed and flopped down.
"What happened?" Kiara asked, concern in her voice. She, Tessa, and Ella were sitting on their beds, each with the item they'd been sent to collect. Tessa had a large coil of rope on her bed, Ella was clutching a lock pick and a hoop ring, and next to Kiara's bed sat a bag of bright purple dye that was easily the length of the bed.
I shook off my amazement at the fact that Kiara had managed to procure such a large bag and proceeded to tell the story. "I got all the stuff, though," I said. "Now you have to tell me how you got such a big bag of dye."
"Well," Kiara began, "since Ella managed to find a lock pick and hoop ring in about two minutes flat, she used her superspeed to raid the school for a bunch of plastic. I borrowed a high-powered iron from the engineering room and made a bunch of flexible plastic sheets, then fused them together. There was a huge supply of purple dye in the art room, so Ella used her superspeed again to bring up pitchers and pitchers of it. We filled the sack and I fused it together again."
"And I'm way too tired to do that again," Ella grumbled.
"That's brilliant!" I grinned.
