Kritika Tamang was chilling in her homeroom.

Her socked feet were propped up on the desk, and eyes were immersed in the gory, bloodfest of a historical novel that was Lilies for Laila. She lifted her deep brown irises and saw the clock's minute hand stop at eleven.

She had five minutes before being herded into the school auditorium. Her knees still smarted from her fainting the day before during her prefect rounds. She had almost dragged out a classmate for her sparkly nail-job when her brain (according to her bestie) had decided to crash like a Cygneknight game server. The curled tips of her fishtail braid scratched the skin on her jaw, and she flipped it over her shoulder, trying to ignore the throb in her kneecaps. For someone as senile as the principal, he sure loved making long speeches on discipline.

Kritika's surroundings were classmate free, with three orphaned satchels watching over her from the front desk. The Art homeroom smelled of neem inflorescence, marker ink, and chalk dust. Oscillating branches of the neem trees planted outside the building shaded them from the tropical sun. Little, green berries hung from them on long, thin stalks, like jade beads on a necklace.

The satchels watched in helpless silence when one of them fell from the desk. Kritika could've saved the poor satchel. Unfortunately, that would have involved her wriggling out of her desk. So she didn't bother herself with it, and simply returned to her book. Laila, the Sultana of Sameerkhand, had just ignited a serial killer in public with a wave of her hand.

The urgent rapping on the door-frame made her look up once again. Her best friend, Esther Guinto, stood panting at the door. She tucked a strand of her baby pink hair behind her ear and licked her chaffed lips.

"What bringeth thee here upon this unholy hour, fair maiden?" asked Kritika from her seat.

Esther rolled her eyes and said, "Sorry to have interrupted your reading, madam, but we have an emergency meeting. Lamai looked pissed."

Kritika got up from her seat, dropped the novel into her satchel."I hath grievous tragedies awaiting my audience. Well, tarry not maiden, escort me towards the kingly lair."

Esther caught her by the right arm, and dragged her in the opposite direction."Are you going to talk like that all day? I should've smuggled my earphones into school."

"Wasn't it you who had reft a lass of her MP3 player? It would be best to cast aside Ari Larson and ReBeat, maiden, bigger problems are at hand," said Kritika, as she switched sides to interlock arms with Esther.

Sure enough, the first-year corridor lay long and treacherous between the sixth-year classes and the staircase leading to the principal's office. One of the top-ten bullying locations in the Academy, it separated the six sections from one another in a three-by-three arrangement.

The younger students were particularly restless that day for some reason.

While Esther wrestled through the throng of eleven-year-old imps, Kritika kept the paper planes at bay. Twice had she returned the paper-balls to the assailant's face. Both of them stopped as they reached the other end of the corridor, and turned around.

"Huh?" asked Kritika.

The boy, dribbling a ball of what was presumably saliva between his hands, repeated with a smug grin."I said, you weebs suck."

He then pitched the ball forward.

Kritika saw Esther's left hand rise from her skirt pockets and mimic a back-handed slap. The boy's spit-ball retraced its trajectory and dissolved into a huge splotch on his white shirt. The impact of the smack caught him off balance and he fell hard on his rear.

"Not as bad as you do at hydrokinesis, twerp," she retorted.

His minions gathered around him and helped the boy up. All of them glared at their seniors.

"Thou must never feed the trolls, Esther," Kritika said, covering her as they backed away slowly from the advancing mob.

"What was I supposed to do, then?"

The next spit-ball hit her on the side of her head and splattered over her school-uniform jacket. She spluttered. All of the little delinquents chortled like fiends from the Falghurur inter-dimensional rift.

"Kukur," She whispered under her breath in her mother-tongue.

Dog.

She didn't remember being this horrible when she was eleven. Kritika briefly wondered whether this was Karma catching up with her for the satchel. The mob only grew in number, firing away at them as if they were criminals caught in an encounter. The hydrokinect pulled her friend out of the path of a water balloon. She pulled up the fallen liquids to construct a thin barrier of water between them and the mob, hoping to slow down and absorb some of the balls.

The jeers and howls brought no adult intervention. More hydrokinects joined forces with the boy in the front, dragging out huge blobs of water from their bottles and their mouths.

Esther lifted both her palms and kept them parallel to each other. Someone from the group hollered a warning. The projectiles flew towards them.

Esther clapped her hands and separated her fingers. The motion tore the balloons apart and scattered the water in the projectiles into a thick fog. The screen worked well enough to distract the tweens, giving them ample time to flee.

Their descend down the stairs synced with the deep tolls of the school bell, shaking the very wood of all its three stories. The girls stopped by the yellow-glassed windows and watched the warding crystals gently rise into their positions like helium balloons.

⑅ ♾️ ⑅

Human saliva is made of ninety-nine percent water and one percent of other icky stuff that helps in digestion.

Esther was able to extract most of it out of her clothes and feed the potted money-plants.

Kritika wasn't sure how good of an idea that was. The money-plants had magically restored the school's bank balance since their installation. They had even paved the way for a long-denied field trip due in October.

Repaying that kindness with plaque- ridden spit felt wrong. But the spit had to go somewhere, and the first-floor girl's bathroom was a marathon run away. Thanks to the one percent of icky stuff, she stank like their football team after the inter-school finals.

A whirlwind of activity behind the door knocked the breath out of Kritika's chest. Lamai stood over a group of roughly twenty prefects, her ponytail upgraded into a bun held taut with a pencil. Her scrunchie-wrapped right wrist waved the pointer like a conductor's baton over the school map. The fifth-year prefects sitting on the floor took notes.

She dictated the demographics of the school that day and allotted duties. She also took classes full of mischief-makers that needed special attention by name.

Behind her, the Computer Club in-charge was stationed at the CCTV screens. The president's fingers hovered vigorously over the principal's laptop keyboard.

The clicking of the keys provided the background score to Vice President Rizal Farashi's page flipping. The boy was scouring through files for possible contacts to call for help. A magenta tube of special bubble-mix peeped from his shirt pocket, as he stowed a file in a bubble overhead.

"The phone lines are dead, Riz," said Emilio Knowles, the Computer Club president and editor of the school website. Rizal looked up, thumb on a dog-eared document."We can still Skype another school, right?"

"Nope, so's the Wifi."

Lamai collapsed in the principal's sofa chair as the prefects exited.

"We have six classes of sixth-year. And on this fine day, we have barely have two class prefects to help us," Esther whispered. Kritika nodded and caught the smell of tea. A pyrokinect, probably the janitor, was brewing tea in the staff-room below.

"What's the deal; did Nagisa's GERD act up again?" She asked Esther.

"Good morning, girls," Lamai the president said.

"Some morning it is indeed."

"Critic-a."

Kritika smirked."Che Guvera."

"What's that horrible smell?" Lamai asked, rising from her chair. Her nose crinkled and she sniffed her own collar quickly. Esther smiled sadly and leaned on the table. "We were spit-balled earlier today," she said.

Emilio snorted, and Rizal dropped a pile of files on his feet.

"Which year?" Lamai asked, with her elbows on the desk and chin on her palms.

"First-years, from most of the classes."

"Shit! Okay, Lamai, look they're still children. I know about your beef with them since the f-word incident, but that shouldn't marr your better judgement," Esther explained the moment she saw smoke rising from her hair.

She paused, took a deep breath, and did her meditation ju-ju."We'll murder them tomorrow. Let this issue get resolved first. Emil?"

"Yo!"

Lamai pushed them towards the four screened CCTV security system. Rizal called himself an ass in Urdu, excused himself, and rushed out of the office. Emilio had pulled up footage from a camera labelled '2A'. He rewound it to the minus-two-hour time frame and clicked the play-button. Esther placed an arm on Kritika's shoulder and leaned forward.

The grainy black and white video showed Principal Makoto Nagisa strolling down the cobblestone path connecting the school's main gate to the office building. His dragon-headed walking cane and all-seeing monocle made him look like the Japanese version of the Monopoly man. He grew a bough of white sakura out of the cane's thick shaft and placed it at the foot of the founder's statue. He paid obeisance as usual.

Then he disappeared into thin air.

Emilio stopped the video, rewound it, and played it in slow motion. Invisible termites right out of a slapstick cartoon ate the principal. The process had repeated everywhere, from the watchman's station to the janitor's closet.

"This is the Plague of Parnassa itself!" Esther remarked through a cupped hand.

"What did you say?" Emilio asked, mildly amused."Well, I think it's the Area-Carcina. Brush up on your Cygneverse knowledge, please."

"Emil, are there no adults at school?"

"Nope," he said. Pushing his glasses up his nose, he continued, "They got everyone above eighteen, even the students. Phone lines are down, the signal has dropped down to no bars, and we have no internet connection. The magical wards around the school won't be down till three p.m."

Esther asked, "So we're under fudging school-arrest now?"

"I can definitely see them going Lord of the Flies on us at this rate," Kritika muttered. She shuddered at the thought of being drowned in spit.

"Hey Lamai," Kritika asked, "what about the Camur Rulebook? Wouldn't it have instructions on how to shut the wards down?"

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