Halfheartedly wished.
She didn’t skip grades for almost exactly the reason she received glares in Professor Kines’ class. A younger student in a higher age bracket would just be ostracized at best, relentlessly bullied at worst.
At least now she had her roommates and Jordan’s crew as friends. Juliana was blatantly more powerful than any of them, yet she managed to avoid alienation.
With the floor scrubbed clean enough to eat off of, Juliana wiped the sweat from her brow and leaned back against the wall. She took a long drink from a cool water bottle and let herself rest.
Not for too long. She had work to do.
Flipping open the tome she had
That finished, she flipped through the pages. There were a handful of others labeled as benign. Just because they were labeled benign didn’t mean Juliana would accept that label blindly. She liked to think she learned from her mistakes.
Gently rubbing the black ring on her finger with her thumb, Juliana browsed the few entries she had marked out earlier. One, Arioch, looked interesting, but Juliana didn’t have anyone she needed ‘vengeance visited upon’ at the moment. The fertility demon, Ishtar, definitely held no use for Juliana anytime in the near future.
She thumbed through until she found one that looked useful. Her hand froze before she could turn the next page. With a slight licking of her lips, Juliana stopped and read through the page.
“This might do,” she said as a smile worked its way onto her lips.
Juliana set down the open book and pulled out her chalk. She started the arduous task of copying down the circle. Carefully, of course. Summoning something wrong and having it escape would never be forgiven.
If she even survived such an event.
Runic Experimentation
The last few scribbles made their way from one paper to the next. Eva wasn’t using her good ink. This was just a test.
Besides, the less of the good ink Eva used, the more funds she had. While the privacy rune packs were profitable to be sure, it was still money from kids. Kids without a lot of money for the most part.
Drastically overestimating the budget for her supplies to her new employer was like taking candy from a baby. A really rich baby that had no identifiable source of income.
Funny how getting paid made her care much less about the money’s origins.
A mystery to solve later.
Eva took a drink of her… whatever it was. Some sort of bitter fruit drink. She’d told the man at the counter to recommend her a drink. Being unable to read had made menus very inconvenient.
It wasn’t a menu she was familiar with either. Eva had chosen this particular restaurant for her test due to the possibility of violence. The Liddellest Cafe wouldn’t do.
The place had also been chosen for the lack of patrons. Apart from Eva and the man behind the counter, there was a single other person.
A nun.
Any time Eva tried to leave Brakket’s campus on foot, she acquired a nun escort from out of nowhere. They never interacted with Eva. Instead, they chose to hang back and watch. None of them were ever very good about concealing their presence, though it helped that Eva could easily detect them by the little orb in the chest. Likely one of the eyes that Nel was covered with.
Eva had considered asking for or outright taking two of the eyes. The fact that all the nuns had them in their chests and Nel’s eyes squirmed around her body with minds of their own had turned Eva off to the idea.
The eyes were likely some sort of conduit for the nuns’ powers. That was an extra complication that Eva did not need at the moment. She had enough complications to go around.
Not to mention that Devon would be angry at further anomalies to account for in his experiment.
The nun that followed Eva into the shop today didn’t even bother trying to hide. She brazenly walked just a few steps behind Eva until they reached the restaurant. Without even an acknowledgement of her obvious spying, the nun sat at one of the other tables and ordered her own little brunch.
Exactly as planned. Eva needed her for an experiment of her own.
After ensuring the canceling runes on Eva’s hand and Arachne’s back were active, Eva readied the sheet of paper in front of her. The blood-tainted ink on the paper identified the runes as test thirteen. It was also the one she felt the best about.
Eva channeled her magic into the runes and waited.
She didn’t have to wait long. The magic of the wrath runes took hold almost immediately.
The man behind the counter tensed up. His heart rate increased as he glared at the nun.
The nun did not react in any way, Eva noted with no small amount of satisfaction. Not to the runic magic nor to the man’s glare. She was much too focused on her meal.
