These days were the most peaceful in Agatha’s life; they were like a dream come true. Each day she woke up with Christie at her side, her beautiful girlfriend with her fiery mane spread over the bed, strands of hair far longer than she was tall. There was just no more gorgeous sight in nature than that.
But she couldn’t say either that it had been easy for her.
While she had now discovered that the decency she had been taught her whole life was just a ploy by her mother to hide her regrets, that was something she couldn’t fix in a matter of days. Seeing a bit of skin – or having hers seen – truly made her nervous, and one would suppose that after having confirmed their relationship Agatha would never be as nervous around Christie, but for some reason, her nervousness just got worse.
Every time she saw Christie partially naked, she would just petrify. It wasn’t as bad as that day in the river when Agatha was finally able to say aloud that she loved her, which only made it more infuriating. Both her mind and body worked against her.
Those petrifications led them to create a system for the bathroom: they would leave an agate on the doorknob if anyone was doing sensitive stuff inside. Christie’s control over simple agate formations had grown enough that it was no longer an issue, and this system guaranteed that the dirty-blond girl wouldn’t get locked in place when she saw her beautiful, gorgeous, curvaceous girlfriend leaving the tub because she wanted to pee.
Perhaps a bit of shame had been had these starting days of a shared room, but overall, they were just amazing. They could just laze around in their room the whole day as classes had yet to start, letting themselves rot in marvelous company with a book in hand. Though talking about books, Christie had prohibited her from reading some of them. The redhead hadn’t given any reason, but Agatha wasn’t starved enough for entertainment to probe around just yet, so she let her girlfriend be.
And now, even if it was the first day of class, they still found themselves lazing around. Well, in a manner of speaking.
“Are we not going to be late?” Her girlfriend inquired with a modicum of worry.
“Class starts a bit late today, you heard the announcement too,” Agatha replied calmly as she moved her hands around.
“Yes, I guess I am worrying for nothing,” Christie sighed.
“Hey! Do not move!” The seamstress-in-training protested.
“Sorry!” The nouveau riche locked herself in place, becoming stiff at the villager’s command. “But do you not get tired of combing my hair each day?”
“I mean, we do not do it every day,” Agatha said as she picked up a bang and softly passed the comb, “but if I do it, it is because I enjoy doing so. It is like petting a cat!”
“Was I not a bunny according to you?” She saw her girlfriend squint in the mirror.
“They are not exclusive~” The petite girl hummed as she had finished dealing with knots and now could get onto the fun stuff: doing the hairstyle. Her petiteness – or Christie’s tallness – became rather obvious these days as Agatha had to step on and out of a stool to get the right height.
“What am I? Some sort of mythological chimera?” Her girlfriend added with faux annoyance.
“And I love you all the same~” Agatha responded warmly while swaying her head from side to side. She just loved to make braids out of her girlfriend’s hair.
“Mm,” Christie mumbled taciturnly. Perhaps out of embarrassment. Perhaps jealous of her girlfriend’s vivacity.
“And anyhow,” she said after a while, “your hair is so long that if we do not get it tied up, it will drag on the ground.”
“Oh, it is not that long,” the redhead rolled her eyes.
“Even when you are sitting down?” The dirty-blond girl arched a brow.
“I…” Her girlfriend smacked her lips. “You got me there. But it feels wrong to cut it. It has been a decade-long endeavor getting it this long.”
Agatha stepped down from the stool, grabbed Christie’s head with both hands, and then whispered in her ear. “No one said you had to cut it.”
Christie suddenly turned her head and kissed the petite girl on the lips as they now stood on the same height, but Agatha’s reaction wasn’t the common one of blushing, but a shriek.
“Christie! I told you not to move!” She shouted.
“Sorry, sorry!” The tall girl corrected her posture, but she didn’t sound sorry at all as she giggled while Agatha was occupied fixing the mess her girlfriend had made.
***
“You are lucky we were not late after your hijinks,” Agatha pouted with her arms crossed.
“I apologized, did I not?” Christie said weakly as they were already in class.
It was nearly full because not that many people had been kicked out the first year. Something told her that it was because their teacher hadn’t failed anyone during the fiasco that was the Agatecraft final exam. Agatha spotted Shayla and Mateo, and while the former couldn’t care in the slightest about her, the latter dedicated to her a smile and a wave. At least he doesn’t look as repellent as the start of the first year. We did a good job with him. He was too… scholarite. Maybe now he can even get a girlfriend. I mean, if I did…
Her thoughts were interrupted, not because she finally acknowledged Christie, but because the final integrant of the classroom made it in. He was none other than their homeroom teacher and one of the mightiest lithorist out there.
René Dago.
He and Agatha weren’t on the best of terms considering that she almost died after his botched exam, but the girl didn’t blame the man. At least not that much anymore.
Tall and vulpine he was, but not as lithe as Hasel Valasela. Agatha had only known of this until not that long ago, but Christie’s father was René Dago’s mentor. Which, in a way, made the soldier in front of her an equal, or at least, a senior rather than a teacher. But as she inspected him closer, the student realized that it wasn’t just Agatecraft he had learned from the miner. Mannerisms, too, and those were things that didn’t latch on easily or in the short term.
“I hope you all have had refreshing holidays,” René Dago announced as he walked into the classroom, “for you are going to need every grain of concentration you can muster to pass this year. The Skyscraper Academy and its peculiar rules already consider you fully-fledged students, but that does not mean you cannot still be expelled if you do not show the same type of commitment and progress you have shown during your first year.”
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Those words would have been intimidating once upon a time, but after discovering how powerful a lone agate could get, Agatha avoided anxiety. It also helped that she was sitting alongside her lovely girlfriend.
“First of all, we are going to do a quick check,” he announced. “Those who have managed to raise an agate to the Second Stratum, please raise your hands.” A lot of hands were raised. Enthusiastically at that. “Alright, that is more than I expected. Good progress, but I cannot count that many hands. Get them down, and those that have not managed to get to the Second Stratum just yet raise them.”
This time, instead of a forest, the classroom had become a desert. Though in that valley of nothingness, a monolith stood tall. The only one with their hand raised was Christie. Her girlfriend blushed after she noticed that fact. Christie… Agatha couldn’t help but feel sorry for the redhead, even if she knew her lithic might very closely. But fortunately for her, the class was well past the point of laughing at others’ shortcomings. Perhaps because they were also aware of Christie’s might, though not as thoroughly as Agatha.
“Hands down,” René Dago said professionally. “Now, hands up those who have agates beyond the Second Stratum.” Now Agatha was the only one to have her hand up. “Miss Malachite, you are not in the Fourth Stratum already, are you?”
“No, I am not,” Agatha responded with a slight squint. “Should I be?”
“Talking from experience? No, you should not be. But I am rethinking all my knowledge of Agatecraft as of late. Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on your point of view – for all of us, even teachers are constantly in a state of learning,” he then clapped. “Now that most of the class is on the Second Stratum, we can start with command series in Agatecraft classes, but for today, I have a surprise reserved for you all. All of you meet me at the training grounds in fifteen minutes.”
Then the man fucking vanished.
Agatha blinked several times as her brain processed what had just happened. She had to give it to the man, because he had been so smooth with his movements that she almost didn’t process how he instantly summoned an agate the size of his body, gave it the Gate command, stepped backward into it, and recalled it. All of that in a handful of heartbeats.
“He just did that to boast,” the dirty-blond girl muttered under her breath with a hint of annoyance.
“Maybe he wanted to remind you that command execution is more important than Strata,” her girlfriend added with a smile, but she couldn’t hide the fact that she was still annoyed after being singled out in front of the whole class.
***
Perhaps she had been changing into her military uniform in the dressing room for a year now, but Agatha still didn’t like that much nakedness. It made her uncomfortable. So she rushed before her fellow female classmates, even abandoning her girlfriend, and changed fast with the dexterity only someone acquainted with fabrics could have.
That and also the fact that she had purposefully modified her uniform so it was way quicker to change into. Maybe a seamstress-in-training, but Agatha had nonetheless inherited her mother’s urge to modify and wreak havoc on any textile she got her hands on.
By the time classmates started pouring in, she was putting her boots on. Yes, she had changed without removing her shoes. No, this was optimal.
Agatha took a deep breath once she was out of the changing room and fixed her hair a bit. “I need to cut it; this is getting too hot.”
With a grunt, she sat on the grades of the training grounds. René Dago was already there, and he was comfortably reading a booklet. Being able to ignore the continuity of space seemed to have its advantages.
“I have heard that you went to the Valasela Estate,” he said without taking his eyes out of the small book.
“Yes. Is there an issue?” She crossed her arms.
“No, not at all. I was just wondering how much you interacted with Hasel.”
“How come?”
“He values his daughter a lot, so I can guess that he would pamper one of her friends a lot.”
“How well do you know him?” Agatha squinted. Was he just a pupil, or was there something more?
“Enough,” René Dago snickered. “If you want that answer, ask him. Right now, I am your teacher, and I am under no obligation to respond to questions regarding my private life.”
“And I am under obligation?” The student arched a brow.
“Not at all, but I think you would be interested in answering them as they are related to your growth and academic performance.”
“How is that?”
“What did Hasel teach you?” The teacher’s answer was another question.
Agatha drilled into him with her gaze, but as the man portrayed apparent indifference as he continued reading his book, she sighed and gave in. “Protect and Invert.”
René Dago grunted and looked at her. “He should not have done that.”
“Why?” The petite girl huffed. She was getting tired of such empty statements and lack of answers.
Her teacher sighed. “Much alike with Strata, there is a reason why we hide things. Some things are outright considered military secrets, but even if they are not, most are still dangerous. Do not experiment with the Invert command unless you are under his, mine, or Terráquea’s supervision. I think I do not need to remind you of the dangers of Agatecraft.”
Agatha bit her lips, a dark image present before her, a memory that lingered no matter how much she tried to avoid it. “No, you do not,” she spat.
Perhaps she nearly killed a fellow classmate a year ago, but she remembered very well who the instigator of that situation was.
Their conversation died instantly as students started arriving en masse. Agatha sat in the grades with crossed arms and legs, sulking in a sour mood until Christie arrived. Once her gorgeous girlfriend was there, she couldn’t just sulk around. Sulking and Christie were incompatible words, after all.
After all the students had arrived, René Dago clapped his hands with lithic might. Both in the sense of the expression and the fact that powerful noise could only be produced with lithorica.
“Some of you might have expected this already, but now that you are all second-year students, we will start with lapiloquia.”
The class may be a bit older but they were not exactly wiser so they devolved into a cacophony of whispers. Some things never change, huh. Agatha looked at Christie as she thought that, and her girlfriend returned the gaze to her with an amused smile.
René Dago clapped again. Everyone fell into silence.
“I would like to make one thing clear to start,” his voice was commanding, his tone powerful. This was the soldier, not the teacher. “Much like what has happened with the Strata, that is, not everyone reached the Second Stratum, and everyone that did, definitely did not reach it at the same time, lapiloquia follows a similar – if more exaggerated – trend. Not everyone here will make significant progress with lapiloquia. And I do not mean this year. I mean ever.”
If he didn’t have the attention of his students, now he definitely did. Agatha knew he wasn’t personally attacking her, but it definitely felt like that. The soldier stepped on the ground and he raised a wide hexagonal pilar behind him that he used to sit in. Comfortably but still looking at his students sternly, he crossed his long legs.
“Lapiloquia is the discipline of commanding foreign stones. Not your own agates, but other stones. And before someone inevitably asks,” he added as some students opened their mouths, “yes, this means you are to command other people’s agate. And no, you will not be able to do it. Such a skill is very rare to even have, and even rarer to grasp. If you have the former, you can consider yourself one in a million.”
Lapiloquia was a subject so shrouded in mystery that every student was eager to ask questions, Agatha included, but the man’s powerful tone left no place for them. The only thing they could do was pay attention and listen to him.
“I understand you are all eager to start practicing this discipline, but alas, you will be sorely disappointed. The Strata analogy was more literal than I made it out. You will need a lot of time before you hear the stones, let alone command them. Am I making myself clear?” The students unanimously nodded at the teacher’s question, even if he was, indeed, not making himself clear. René Dago jumped out of his pillar and it retreated hastily into the ground in the time it took him to stand up. “Everyone to the grounds now.”
He didn’t need to say it twice. It didn’t take even a minute for all the students to be in the sandy flatness of the training grounds.
“Now we are going to use a command you are not familiar with, or at least, I suppose you are not,” René Dago summoned one of his agates – Agatha couldn’t keep track of which was which as he had a full rainbow, from carnelians to onyx – and pressed it into the ground. “Embed is a command that, in a few words, binds the agate to another object. It is typically used by agatecrafters to configure and program agate veins, but otherwise, it is without use. Unless you want to make makeshift grappling hooks. In that case, it is pretty useful.”
The man chuckled. Agatha had known him for a year now, and she had yet to understand his sense of humor. If whatever he had could be called that in the first place.
“But there is another niche use for this command,” he continued. “The Embed command, of course, allows you to embed your agate in stone. Whilst it is not exactly commanding stones, your agate partially becomes the stone itself. A very first solid step into the long and tiresome path of lapiloquia.”
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