The Fertile Grove - Ch. 01

The Fertile Grove

Chapter One - The Beginning

A "Detachable" commission

Goddamn it. Even with the drizzling rain, the fireflies were running rampant tonight, and that was going to make this shit a lot harder than it needed to be, but I knew that my best option was to go tonight, because I knew something nobody else knew about. It was an ace in my back pocket that I'd been holding onto for four years since my older brother had told me about it.

I was atop of the alchemical studies building, overlooking the Kenaz Jera Dagaz Sorority House across the street, focusing much more on their garden behind their building than the building itself. It was the middle of April, and the fireflies had appeared early this year, much earlier than they normally would, probably the result of some frondmancer tampering with the local ecosystem for a class project. For all I knew, creating hordes of lightning bugs had been one of the assignments for Fauna Magic 304 or something. There were far too many classes being taught at Eternal Wayfarer College (EWC for short) for me to keep track of all the assignments and what got let out into the nearby area.

April was the month of all the senior challenges, though, and that meant all the professors were encouraged to introduce anything that caused spectacular mischief with the students' pranks and schemes. You see, every April, all the fraternities and sororities held these legendary skill challenges for seniors only. That meant there was all sorts of madness going on across campus, although only seniors were eligible to participate in the challenges, and even then, only seniors in good standards. Juniors had been expelled for less, and the one time someone too young had tried to sneak into the challenges, he'd nearly lost his life. These challenges are a Big Fucking Deal, so everyone treats them with the utmost respect.

There were some caveats to all the challenges - some ground rules that were unbreakable, designed to keep the classes running without too much disruption. Students engaging in the challenges weren't allowed to miss a single class session, otherwise they would instantly forfeit. But, that also came with a caveat - none of the Sororities or Fraternities could do anything to a student engaged in a class or school activity. Nobody wanted the weekly football game against another college to be disrupted by sorority sisters attacking a student who was out on the pitch, and no professor wanted to be mid lecture as two students broke out dueling or some such. While a student was busy with schoolwork, they didn't have to be constantly looking over their shoulder.

A century or so ago, when EWC had been founded, three fraternities and three sororities had sprung up, mostly composed of a mixture of noble highborn humans and erudite elves with the occasional wild card thrown in. The Secret Six, as the six orders were often referred to, each had their own specialty, and eventually expanded to have branches at other magical colleges across the planet, but the ones at EWC were the originals, and therefore, the most prestigious.

What you need to know about me is that I'm not human or elf - I'm a goddamn dwarf, and proud of it. My name is Wedge Deepcopper. I'm the youngest of five brothers, and only two of us displayed any magical acumen growing up, so us two were both eventually sent off to EWC. It was expensive, but our parents had always fostered any skills we had growing up, so when my brother Bellow and I both began to display magical talents at an early age, money was set aside so we could go and attend college when we were old enough.

My brother Bellow was something of a hero across Eternal Wayfarer College for his last few months because he had actually beaten one of the Secret Six's challenges his senior year, and a specific challenge that had perplexed students for lifetimes. It was something nobody had ever thought even vaguely possible. His success had been nearly a decade ago though, so his tale had somewhat been diminished. That was all the better for me because it meant few people had even considered that I might build upon my older brother's success, at least after the first few months of my classes anyway. They wrote me off as the odd kid, too mercurial to see anything through to completion.

Which was exactly what I wanted them to think.

I'd been planning this night's escapades since my arrival at EWC almost four years ago, and during those years, the plan had gone through multiple iterations. I would've loved to have been able to just coast on my brother's coattails and use his exact plan, but the housemembers of the sororities and fraternities that made up the Secret Six weren't idiots, and they had patched over what they thought was the most important part of what he'd exploited.

Each of the Secret Six houses specialized in a few forms of magic, and as such, offered different challenges to anyone brave enough to take them on, with prizes equal to boot. Gebo Sowilo Tiwaz Fraternity, for example, were known as the concealment masters. At the beginning of April, they as a group made their Fraternal House disappear and relocate. Each day after class, each brother would return to the house using secret pathways. Anyone who could find the Grebo Sowilo Tiwaz Fraternity House (who wasn't a member) during the month of April won their weight in diamonds and ten-year contracting gig with the Inescapable Dowager Brothers Bounty Hunters Club, generally an invite-only firm that specialized in hunting down the most troublesome magical criminals. They'd given away their prize four times in a hundred years.

My father had hoped I was going to take on the Ansuz Hagalaz Othala Fraternity and their so-called Invincible Challenge. During the month of April, all members of AHO had a simple proposition to any senior on campus who'd signed up for the challenges - draw a single drop of blood from any one of our members. The winner would claim possession of one of a legendary series of weapons made by the great dwarven weaponsmith Alaxion Chasmflame, as well as a high-ranking position in the Nightcloud's military army.

Dad had been drafted to serve in the Nightcloud army for a decade when he was younger, and had described several of the commanders, who were often AHO brothers, as entitled pricks. But I'd never been one for combat magics, and the idea of trying to find a way to penetrate a series of shield magics that had withstood a lifetime of challenges didn't much appeal to me. Having something made by the great Chasmflame was certainly appealing, but it didn't lean into the sorts of things I was naturally good at. Only two people had ever been able to beat the AHOs at their game, and I had no plans on trying to be the third.

No, my eyes were on the Kenaz Jera Dagaz Sorority, who were known for two things - their transportation magics and their defensive wards. Their challenge was simple - get into their garden in the back of the sorority house, take any of the protected objects and get out. Without being caught or detected, of course. You also lost if they were able to retrieve what you'd taken from them before the month was over. My brother had done it, nine years ago, and only just by the skin of his teeth, but he'd dined out on that story for a lifetime, and his now-wife always seemed to take great delight in him telling it to someone new.

The garden out back behind the sorority house was known during the month of April as The Fertile Garden, because that's exactly what it was, and why so many people would spend much of the month trying to break in. The women of KJD were so confident that their magics couldn't be beat that each of them hung a talisman from one of the trees in the back garden, each about the size of a teacup saucer, so they couldn't be easily moved or concealed, which was important.

Because each woman of KJD placed her very own pussy in one of these talismans and hung it in the back yard of the sorority house for any mage brave enough to make a go at it. They were connected to each woman via magic, a sort of portal kept open for an entire month, and if you could take one out of the garden without being caught, you could do whatever you wanted to with it for the rest of the month. More importantly, if you could prevent the owner from locating their pussy after it had been taken, keeping it with you for the rest of the month, then you won the challenge. You and the owner would be betrothed on the first day of May. You would also gain a ten-year contract with Impregnable Madeline's Potent Securities, or the IMPs, as a sneaker.

Sneaker was the shorthand term for someone who was hired to test security systems for flaws and defects. Sneaker teams were typically made up of ex-law enforcement and ex-prison management, but they had also been known to take on reformed ex-convicts and criminals, people who had spent a lifetime finding flaws in these sorts of things.

My brother was the only person who'd ever beaten KJD in a hundred years, and his wife, Eleanor Glassflower, the kind of beauty that every man on campus would've slit the throat of the guy next to him to just have had a chance with. Thankfully, Eleanor had been so impressed by my brother's sexual skills before they'd even met that she was already falling for him when she was formally introduced to him on the first of May, and they had been an excellent match since. Even had a couple of kids now.

"The key, Wedge, is that once you get it out, you have to be prepared to hide the thing for a few weeks, and that's where everyone usually gets tripped up," my brother had told me about five years ago, on the night we'd found out that I'd also been accepted at EWC. On that night, my brother had dared me not only to repeat his performance, but to improve upon it. "I'd say someone breaches the defenses about once a decade or so, and then about two-thirds of those make it off the grounds, but I'm the only one who's ever been able to avoid getting caught afterwards. I'll tell you completely how I did it, and I won't exclude the one detail that I have every other time I have or will tell the story, which'll give you an edge. It'll give you my way in. But you'll need to figure out your own method of not getting caught. Keep that in mind. If you want to do this, you're going to have to be twice as clever as I am, and at least twice as ballsy."

I intended to be just that.

During my tenure at EWC, I'd been a complicated student. The first year, it had been common knowledge that I was Bellow Deepcopper's little brother, and so initially everyone had expected me to go for KJD. That meant I'd had to work incredibly hard to throw everyone off the track for the first few months. So, while I was taking all the common curriculum my freshman year, I'd also taken a few optionals that had everyone confused, not the least of which was Magical Weaving 101, something that was usually taken by students intending to try and take the Wunjo Perthro Dagaz Sorority challenge, considered the most impossible of all the House challenges.

If you wanted to challenge WPD, just like any other the other houses, you had to drop off a letter to them sometime during the seven days before April announcing your intent, as well as listing your class schedule for the month. The WPD challenge itself sounded relatively simple - don't let a WPD sister touch your bare skin during the month of April. The prize was a title of nobility and your choice of WPD sister as personal concubine and bodyguard for life.

No one had ever beaten WPD.

By the end of my first year, everyone, and I do mean everyone was convinced I was going to try and take on WPD, so I found myself under even more intense scrutiny as I entered my sophomore year, especially since my grades were exceptional. In year two I took on specialties in teleportation and transportation magics, something that the bookmakers had felt signaled that I was definitely planning on attempting to evade the WPD sisters.

Oh, didn't I mention the bookies? When a student enrolls in EWC, they're given two categories by the bookmakers - who are they going to attempt to challenge, and will they succeed against whoever it is they challenge when their senior year rolls around. Only students and teachers were allowed to gamble, and you weren't allowed to bet yourself, naturally. You also weren't physically capable of telling anyone who you were taking on until you started the challenge, either. It was one of the spells cast on all incoming students.

By the end of my sophomore year, me taking on WPD was a sucker's bet, and would pay out so little as to not even be worth it, because everyone and I do mean everyone just knew I wanted to be the only student in EWC history who beat the WPD system. This, of course, meant the sisters of WPD had taken a severe interest in me, going out of their way to be friendly with me at any opportunity, hoping it might give them an edge in a couple of years' time. I even dated a few of them along the way. Man, were they fucking wild in the sack.

This, of course, meant my junior year confused the fuck out of everyone. I took things that made sense in terms of the WPD challenge - acrobatics, evasion, and the like - but I also took magical dueling, armor and defensive spells, temporal magic, illusion mastery and, most perplexingly, automation magic, specifically spells that could sustain themselves for long periods of time and adapt to unforeseen circumstances.

Automation magic was considered a dying art, something that had seen a massive decline in enrollment over the past few decades, so much so that the automation classes only had maybe half a dozen students each, which was fine by me. It meant nobody was around studying to see why I was taking the classes.

With only a couple of hundred students in each grade level, the sport of prepping for the challenges was the major pastime of students and faculty alike. During each of my first three years, I'd taken the month of April to watch and grade all the various attempts by seniors, both on offense and on defense, because there were a few things that I hadn't considered early on that were going to come into play tonight when I finally made my go.

First and foremost, student challenges weren't allowed in any form during a student's class hours, meaning that while a student was in a classroom, the WPD sisters couldn't try and touch your skin and no one could take a swing at an AHO brother to try and draw blood. The games were encouraged by the faculty, but never once were they allowed to interfere with education. This was a hard and fast rule and if someone from one of the Secret Six broke it to try and end a challenge, the challenger would be immediately declared a winner.

Along with that, casting magics to affect the mind of anyone during the challenge month was completely forbidden, so nobody could be forced to reveal anything while the games were going. No brainwashing someone to tell you how to remove their armor or where they'd hidden something.

To ensure all of this, each classroom had a large crystal in it, to detect when magic had been cast by a student. These were the failsafe guards, and if a student attempted to cast magic while a class was in session in that room, it would light up brilliant green, and proctors would be called.

They didn't know it yet, but I'd thought of ways to use these restrictions as weapons.

That brings us all back to here, tonight, April 18^th. I'd been under a lot of scrutiny since the last week of March, because I'd done something nobody had ever thought to do before - I'd declared my intent to go after each and every house in the Secret Six.

It had caused quite the riot when I'd done it, because the morning of March the 29^th, I'd headed over to the Wunjo Perthro Dagaz Sorority and dropped off a letter of intent. But while the fuss of that was just beginning to circulate on campus, I'd gone to each other house in the Secret Six and had dropped off a similar letter, announcing I was also going to be making a play for them as well. With each successive house, the more chaos I was generating and the more frantic people were getting on campus. Students were consulting the faculty rules regarding the declaration process left and right.

As astonishing as it was, there hadn't been anything in the rules stating you could only take one challenge during your senior year, only that you had to be a senior to take part in a challenge. And not only had I been insane enough to try more than one, but I'd also been out of my mind enough to try all of them.

It's at this point I'm going to let you in on a little secret - I never had any intention of doing all six challenges. In fact, up until February, I never intended to do more than one. The idea of signing up for all the challenges was a delicious smoke screen and it meant that the people watching me to see what I would do were tripping over one another so much, it was causing problems nobody could anticipate because nobody knew if I was a genuine threat to them or not.

Back in the middle of February, I'd gone to visit my brother Bellow and his wife, just to bounce a few of the particulars off them, which was permitted by the rules. I certainly didn't tell them everything - just a few specifics about how I intended to complicate things for all the houses. When I had Eleanor pointed something out to me - with a couple of minor tweaks, I was already likely to beat a second challenge anyway. So why not at least try and beat two? She even had a specific suggestion regarding another aspect of it, one that tickled my fancy greatly.

On the very first day of April, the WPD sisters made their first attempts to find me and touch my skin before dawn had even broken, only to find that I wasn't even in my home. I was actually offended by how little they'd estimated my skill that I would be inside of my home at all during the month of April. It was a rookie mistake, and one I very much did not intend to get caught up in.

They also tried to make a play for me again after my first class of the day, Theoretical Limits on Magical Scale, only to discover the first of my many complications, one that I imagine they still haven't stopped swearing about. When the class let out, every single person walking out of the classroom was encased in an illusion of me for five minutes. That meant it was impossible to pick me out of a crowd or even to guess which of the dozens of students leaving a room I might actually be.

The WPD sisters were working hard on illusion shattering spells, but the spell I'd devised only used my appearance as the template the first time, and each subsequent time, the copies were all of someone else. The sisters had to be sure it was me they were touching, so until they could find a way to mass banish illusion spells, they had no way of knowing where I was going once class was over. It also bothered the crap out of them how immediate the illusion spell went into effect as soon as class ended. But I'll let you in on another secret - the spell went into immediate effect at the end of every class because that's what it had been designed to do.

Remember me telling you about how I spent a lot of time learning Automated Casting, that thing nobody really studied anymore? Well, each of these illusion and disruption spells was, in fact, an automated casting, timed to coincide with the beginning and end of each of my classes. And because I'd snuck into the building in the middle of the night in March when I'd cast them, the crystals weren't going off. Because I wasn't casting anything. It had already been cast long, long ago.