Infernal Academia

Chapter 43 - The D- D- Date: Part 1

Cobalt stared hard at the multiple scraps of paper lying on the coffee table in front of him.  Over by a mug of tea that had long since gone cold, he could see the stack of Language assignments that he was supposed to be grading, but for some reason, the Incubus just couldn't concentrate on schoolwork for long enough to actually get anything done.  No, occupying his mind was nothing but thoughts of the Hellhound.

Who was he?  What happened when he was still around?  Why was his existence more or less erased? 

The mystery was starting to consume Cobalt, and he could feel his nerves suffer for it.  He was already floundering as a teacher; any more and Viola would be right to let him go.  He had to get his act together, and soon.

Taking a deep breath, the Incubus gathered his accumulated notes on the Hellhound up and pushed them to the far side of the table.  

"Come on Trayer... They put work in these, I'm sure..." he mumbled to himself as he pulled the stack of Language assignments over to the middle of the table.

He had given his class a creative writing assignment in the hopes of squeezing their best work out of them, and here he was, barely able to even get started with reading them.  How hypocritical.

As he began to skim over the first few pieces, however, Cobalt began to relax.  Surprisingly, his entire class had deigned to actually turn something in, which was more than could be said about their attitude towards schoolwork at the start of the year.  Maybe he was finally getting through to them?

Most of the pieces were simple stories written by mediocre hands, but they held up to the basic rules of storytelling that Cobalt was looking for, so they were easy to pass.  Lottie Deyeyr's was something of a rambling mess that constantly switched perspective, tense and even entire plots, but if the excited shakiness of her handwriting was anything to go by, the enthusiasm was certainly there, so she got a pass as well.  Whitney and Karazelle both submitted some excellent prose that explored the concepts of nature versus desire, though they were eerily similar, so somebody definitely copied somebody else.  As for Quinn, her story was just a blatantly plagerised version of a common Imp folk tale, so Cobalt was forced to fail her.

Reaching the final two submitted pieces after a good hour of reading and correction, the Incubus found himself gazing at Jelli and Izzbelle's works.  He frowned.

"The whole thing, really...?" he sighed disappointedly, squinting at the Glutton's story.

'Blau und Grün', an extensive story spanning four or five pages, penned entirely in German.  True enough, there was nothing on the assignment saying it couldn't be written in another language, but that certainly made grading it difficult.  With a heavy sigh, Cobalt set Jelli's piece aside for the time being and moved onto the final assignment; Izzbelle's.

He had expected her to write something violent or action-focused.

What she actually submitted was a love story.

Cheeks going red, Cobalt squinted hard and brought the page close to his face.

"Oh my... This is..."

Izzbelle's handwriting was messy and her handling of emotional storytelling was tenuous at best, but Cobalt could practically feel the passion with which she wrote her piece.  It was a short story regarding two heirs to opposing crime families forsaking their heritage and running off together, like a retelling of Romeo and Juliet with less tradgedy and more tommyguns.

Swallowing hard, the Incubus glanced over at his book shelf.  Sure enough, there were a fair few gangster novels gracing its shelves.

"She certainly knows her audience..." he muttered, uncapping his pen in order to correct the myriad of spelling mistakes the Oni had made.