Rulebook Of Chaos || Elemental Academy ✓

🕦 11:30 - 12:00 🕛 [•K•]

No.

The stray dry cough pushed her head off the pillow. Her fingers scurried for the plastic jug placed near her cot and were stopped by a different set. Those fingers had trimmed nails and an odd one that stood speckled with white. The set of lights reflected the sunlight coming through curtains, reduced to lifeless glass in the sudden power cut.

Emilio lighted his left finger-tips with a loud snap. The gilded flame jumped from his thumb to the forefinger, using both of them as living wicks to relish his energy. A leather-covered book rested below his elbow, held up by a scraped knee.

"Whaa–ater," she croaked, trying to reach for the glass. The pair of brown eyes blinked through the cracked spectacles. His fingers grasped the handle of the jug and poured her a glass of water. The glass however stayed on his end of the table.

"Rizal and I were talking to Hera Anaikos and her friends in the corridor by the girl's bathroom. Anaikos, Jiang, Garcia and Carlton agreed that they had entered the bathroom at half-past ten. You went in a minute or so later, according to them."

His fingers tapped against the wood. "When you entered, there was no porcupine. When you ran outside, multiple witnesses saw a stone porcupine.  That thing's still trying to tear down that door."

"And it just occurred to me that I had never asked you what your element was." His taps echoed down the corridor, keeping rhythm with the deeper thuds against stronger wood.

"So," he said, letting the flame take over the whole palm. "What are you waiting for, umbrokinect? Kill me, take the book, and do your thing. Damn shame to see all that good talent wasted like that, we could've had a cool actor for a Jackal Carbon adaptation that too."

Kritika's throat constricted against her will. She retched and coughed, saliva dripping from her mouth. She clutched her throat and lunged for the glass. The streak of fiery gas singed the hairs on her forearm. She didn't have the energy within her to wrench it from his hands.

"Em–"

"Dios mi, alright," he muttered. He pushed the glass towards her, ready with the jug in his hands. Kritika grabbed it with both hands and downed it in one painful gulp. She peered at him with bleary eyes, feeling the weight of the glass growing as water collected within it from the jug. A second glass, and then a third found itself being consumed at breakneck speeds.

When the fourth glass stood empty as the jug in his hand, she lifted the glass and began to roll it on her palms. She could sense the patterning of the crystals that made the container, and each scratch on it became magnified a thousandfold to her fingertips. Glass began to flow under the command of her kinesis, arranging themselves under the blueprint she had wrought in her mind. The body of the glass condensed and then elongated into a rod. The top half pinched at the middle and smoothened its bottom into a bowl.

She slammed the newly formed wineglass on the table beside her bed.

"You seriously concluded that I was an umbrokinect, after being attacked by the Happy and a terrakinectic sparring porcupine, the latter being specifically designed to seek out terrakinects?"

Emilio placed his glasses on the desk, rubbed his eyes with the balls of his palm, and sank back in his chair.

"Look, I'm sorry."

"Thank you for your apology, now leave me alone, please," she said, lying back on the bed. Her fingers discovered the dust gathered on the sills of the Medical room window to her left. There were old friends of hers lying in wait; garden loam, beach sand, gravel, cement dust, and clay. Then there were the tiny flakes that didn't stick to her digits, what she knew to be dead skin. The thawed referee grunted from two cots away and turned over. A blanket-wrapping skill like that would've made him a much sought-after embalmer in King Tut's court, had he been alive in that era.