Soon, Niko would have to dock his houseboat for the rest of the year, so he could get on with teaching at Dame University. It wasn't Ivy League, but good luck telling the people who lived there. You'd get a long talk about how great Dame University is, the win against Princeton in 1978 and in 2004, famous alumni, the low acceptance rate, and on, and on, and on. Niko learned this the hard way several years earlier and started a fistfight in a tourist heavy street.

Niko's glamour was powerful enough to convince the humans in charge of Dame that Niko would make a good professor, even though he had very little credentials in teaching. Eccentricity was expected in Dame's professors, especially in art professors, so Niko deciding to decorate the art room like a Satanic cult's secret hideout was not met with any pushback from upstairs, though a couple of the more religious students had reservations. It wasn't helped by him putting his name as Niko Faustus.

The system that Niko used was a bit unorthodox, assigning each student with a number rather than calling them by their names. He never gave a reason why, but he did. The students found it amusing.

"Hah! 69!"

"I'm 420! I'm 420!"

"Are we not gonna address how Prof. Faustus has assigned himself the mark of the beast?"

Niko had put a sticker label saying "666" on his finely pressed dress shirt.

Niko introduced the lesson.

"All of us have people we hate, don't we?"

The response from the class was mixed, ranging from "Oh, yes, absolutely!" to "I don't really hate anyone."

"Is that person an artist? It can be you, of course..."

"The point of this assignment is to improve on a work that you feel is badly done. There's a museum of bad art if you need inspiration."

Niko regrouped with Mallomor during his lunch break. Mallomor had mostly kept to the shadows, not attracting any attention from others. He was in his human disguise to disperse suspicion.

"How was teaching?"

"It went smoothly, but I'll have a lot of work every evening."

Mallomor cupped Niko's face. "Really? Then I'll have to see you during lunch break every day."

Before kissing him, Niko said "I can't guarantee I'll be able to do it every lunch break."

"That sucks..."

At the end of the lunch break, Mallomor went back to Niko's houseboat. Niko went back to teaching, though a certain student gave the local demon hunters a tip that there was someone at Dame that didn't just call themselves Prof. Faustus but made a study of a demon that they were very familiar with.