St. Mallory's Forever!

50 ABBY: The nose knows.

Drama, drama, and more drama. If I weren't certified sane and fit for service, I would seriously consider looking around for Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple to pop out of the woodwork, brandishing accusing fingers before sitting us all down with tea and scones to explain the mystery — or in Sherlock's case, why it wasn't mysterious at all and we were idiots to think it had been. I daresay he'd think we'd made a few 'singular errors' here.

Before you ask, don't worry, I'm not skiving lessons to write this post — my history teacher is ill, so we've been given a free period. Call me daft, but rather than using it to scribble out the last of the impossible maths prep we were given last week (may all quadratic equations pitch over in the shower and suffer painful slipped discs forever more!) I'm sitting here with a fat pad of paper trying to ascertain what in the name of all that is sane is happening with Tim, Sam the Bursar, Helen's mum and that wretched Nils piece. Oh, and Mrs. Walters too, of course. And Xuan.

I went to see Don Pedro earlier. She's coming back into lessons after break today — apparently the nurses were worried about some concussion as well as her broken nose, so she's been in the San over the weekend. Christie had ferried the Don's laptop down for her at some point, and the Don got straight back on the Nils mystery, apparently to distract herself from the ridiculously swollen appendage between her ears.

As cruel as this may sound, I cannot tell a lie; Don Pedro's nose looks absolutely hilarious in crimson when she peeled the bandage away for our delectation. The fact that she sounds like she has the mother-in-law of all blocked noses only makes it harder to avoid grinning when talking to her.

"Hey ho, Don Pedro, how are you doing?" was how the conversation started. I was sitting at one end of her bed in the San, while she was curled up on top of her pillows at the other end (yes, Don Pedro sits on her pillows rather than the rest of the bed. Don't ask).

"Beh," replied the pillow-crusher, prodding her packet of paracetamol morosely. "Been worse. Still hurts. Bery annoying."

I nodded sympathetically, but thought it best to change the subject before the Don remembered whose fault it was she was in that mess in the first place.

"What have you been doing down here? Don't tell me you've had to resort to watching those old Friends reruns."

Don Pedro nodded. "Yeb. Somebody's nicked ebisobe three though, bunno who. Wi-fi recebtion down here's bretty hobeless too, but it's not as if I hab much else to bo, is it?"

"Been trying to hack into the Pentagon or something, have you?"

Don Pedro shook her head in the sort of way cats do when you forget how to operate the can opener. "Been ob the hunt for more Nils stuff. Founb a really obscure website yesterbay — some creeby obsessib fan bust have set it up. Clearbly nob sense of spacing or HTML use, but I founb something you might like. Beant to ebail it to you yesterday, abbually."

"Let's see." I scooted up the bed and leaned over DP's shoulder as she opened up her laptop and maximised her right-most tab — the rest all looked to be YouTube windows, though as they were in Spanish I hadn't the faintest hope of understanding them.

Fun Fact: Don Pedro once set her laptop's automatic language to some obscure Turkish dialect for a week. At least, I think it was Turkish. Oddly enough she managed to get around the thing without too much hassle... until we had to bring our laptops to ICT class. Since then she's refused to do so much as try using the "English (Pirate)" setting on Facebook.

Anyway, back to the point. There wasn't much on the page — and the Don was right, the formatting was dreadful! Made my The Inside Blog look positively professional in places, I tell you. But, after spending a few minutes struggling to read some ghastly shade of green text against a really fuzzy photograph of what, I reckon, was either Nils or an artistic impression of Seven of Nine from Star Trek, I found this little gem:

"The only known autobiography of David Nils is The Life of David Nils."

Well, full marks for originality, Monsieur Nils. It went on, "Published in the early 1900s, the book sold relatively few copies before going out of print after only five years. Despite their scarcity, copies of the book are rarely considered valuable by collectors, and it is mostly used for sourcing in schools and some specialist universities."

Now, call me snobby, but if anyone were to own such a bizarre book as this, it would be the Strouds. Or at least, Mrs. Stroud. I'm sure Helen would have mentioned it already if she had it. Heck, on the flip side, we might even have the thing lurking in that labyrinth we call the library somewhere! Helen's at a music lesson right now, but the minute she comes back at break I'm going to tell her about this biography, and I suspect she'll have it hunted down before it has a chance to coagulate another dust bunny.

Still no news of Xuan. Needless to say Don Pedro hasn't seen her here in the San.

Well, I say that (needlessly), but actually I didn't even bother asking. Obviously the Don wouldn't have seen Xuan or anybody else from here, and I agreed with Helen there was no point getting the Don worried about Xuan's disappearance. Getting that nose fixed was more important.

Not least for my future survival once Don Pedro gave it further thought and remembered who put her on the lacrosse team in the first place.

But I am seriously wondering why nobody on the staff has raised her absence. Xuan's absence, I mean, not the Don's, obviously. Someone got themselves locked in the gardening shed a couple of years back, and there was complete pandemonium until she turned up in the dining hall about an hour later. Seems she'd climbed out a window, or something like that.

Xuan vanishes and no-one but Helen and I seem the least bit phased.

Which got me to thinking about the Bursar and what happened to Helen. If the Bursar has locked up Xuan somewhere and put the word about that she's on some legitimate errand... That would explain why the staff are carrying on as normal.

Meanwhile Xuan might be locked up somewhere. But where?

Heh, perhaps we ought to check the garden shed next. You never know...