A cute duckling in an ugly world

Chapter 3: The symbol

By the end of the third year, Alcid was walking from the main school building to her dorm and walked by a group of demons. One big demon insulted her, she threw an insult back at him and stood looking coldly at him. He turned around, saw the way she was looking at him and that only made him angrier. He walked towards her, grabbed her with is left hand by the neck and slammed her against the wall.

"Who do you think you are you little pest? You think you could insult me and get away with it?" The demon said, squeezed his right hand into a fist and prepared to hit her face. Alcid was holding his left forearm with her hands, kicking him and trying to get free. The other demons yelled at their friend to stop but he ignored them. Alcid started to panic and out of fear the acid started to come out of her palms, dissolving the demons forearm.

The demon and Alcid fell to the floor. The demon screamed in agony as the acid completely dissolved his forearm and hand in a few seconds. One of his friends ran to get a teacher and Alcid was just sitting on the floor, looking at her palms baffled. The teacher arrived and they called an ambulance. The ambulance took the demon away and the teacher took Alcid and the other demons to the school principal.

"Explain what happened." The school principal said.

"The injured demon attacked me. He grabbed me by the neck and started choking me. I saw that was going to hit me and I defended myself." Alcid said.

"Is that what happened boys? And if you lie I will know." The school principal asked the two demons.

"Yes. That's what happened." They said, not wanting to suffer the same fate as their friend.

"All right. I will not punish you this time because it was self-defense. However, you have to be more careful with your powers young lady. Now off you go." The school principal said.

Alcid headed to her dorm thinking about what the school principal said. She had powers. Her acid came out of her palms, not just out of her flower. This has never happened before. On her way to the dorm, she picked up a rock and held it in her hand. She concentrated on letting acid out of her palm, but nothing happened. She repeated it all the way, until she reached the dorm. Maybe she couldn't control her powers at will, but at least, now she knew that she had them. Alcid told the news to Kheba who immediately gave her a bunch of things she wanted to get rid of.

"You can use those for practice." Kheba said.

"I'm not a garbage can Kheba." Alcid said with a serious look on her face, but she took the things Kheba gave her.

Alcid practiced controlling her powers every day and after two months, she successfully dissolved a doll head in her hand. She was so happy that she invited Kheba to go out to lunch and shopping with her.

"Yes! You did it! I'm so proud. Yeah, let's go out, just don't dissolve my fork." Kheba said and laughed.

They had fun out walking around town. They had lunch, went shopping, visited the City horror museum and walked past the City library. That's when Alcid remembered the paper and the symbol. Alcid made a mental note to come back here and search for the symbol. They made it back to school a few minutes before dinner. After dinner, they went to their room and had fun with dissolving things that Kheba gave to Alcid.

The next day Alcid went to the City library and asked the librarian about books with the demon symbols, but the old demon symbols that belonged to old demon families. The librarian gave her a piece of paper with a list of twelve books so she went and searched for them.

Alcid found them, she took the oldest book first and started to compare the symbols in the book with the symbol from the paper. In the oldest book, she found a similar symbol that represented the royal family, it dated back many thousands of years. It wasn't the same so Alcid kept looking. After a few more books, she found another symbol that looked similar to hers. It represented good fortune for the royal family, it was similar but it still wasn't the same. There were still five books left, so she took another one. That one was useless, but the next one had a symbol almost identical to hers, only one line was missing. The symbol represented the prosperity of the royal family. This was getting weird, all the symbols that were similar to hers had something to do with the royal family.