After Class

Despite the knowing glances Mrs. Wentworth seemed to cast in John's direction, she didn't ask him to stay after class... even after the salacious events that transpired inside her classroom. Part of John was worried that she didn't ask him because she somehow knew he was going to be staying afterwards anyways.

It felt like it took hours for the rest of the class to clear out of the room to John. His attitude, which had been nervous and restless since he had pretty much gotten his powers, felt like it was coming to a crashing climax as he anxiously tapped his foot beneath his desk. The students left in John's history class slowly ambled out of the room while he continued looking at Mrs. Wentworth with a sense of utter focus.

He even went as far as to ignore the pointed looks that Mary was giving him from the room's exit just before she too disappeared.

By the time that John actually got up to go and talk to Mrs. Wentworth, there were maybe only a couple students left in the whole room. A jock who was always behind on his schoolwork, one man who was just too sleepy and unprepared to have all his stuff ready in time for the next class, there was Vanessa, and Cassandra as she was asked to stay behind to help wipe down the boards for the next class.

Vanessa, John noted as he walked down the aisles between the students seats, was blown off from the moment she walked up to the teacher's desk. Whatever she tried to say, or do, was immediately cut off by Mrs. Wentworth as she slapped down a pile of homework and ushered her off. The bitch queen, as John still loved to call her, actually seemed to gasp and pout at the curt answer she was given, but as if she no other choice in the matter, Vanessa was **** to turn and go on her merry way. Both she and the Jock were on the way out of the room by the time that John crossed the room over to Mrs. Wentworth.

"I'm not the person you are looking for, Johnathan" his teacher said when he got close. He didn't even have time to utter a syllable. The moment his lips parted to ask her about it, she was already speaking.

"I-it's just John..." he stammered and blinked in confusion. She couldn't have known what he had been about to try and grill her about... right? His words gave her pause, though, and his teacher turned to look up at him with a furrowed brow.

"Really...?" she asked. John numbly nodded. "Huh... I expected it to be short for something." It took her seconds to let that go and turn back to face the mountains of work piling her desk. "Regardless, you should direct your attentions elsewhere, John. This has already become a waste of time."

That was short, John thought and awkwardly turned to walk away from his teacher. He made it three steps before he noticed the pile of belongings and schoolwork set next to the door. Cassandra's belongings. Immediately noticeable, aside from the giant pile of books, was a bookbag, a large, paper-filled binder, and a black journal. Cassandra, beholden to societal expectations, had her attention pulled and focused on the giant boards at the front of the classroom. The whole situation was practically set up to be perfect for him to just... investigate.

A part of him, the part that was still suspicious of Mrs. Wentworth raised a simple question. What if it had been set up? If she had been telling the truth, and the teacher wasn't the person he had been looking for, then had she put this whole thing up for him? If so, then why had she done it? Why help him with something that she had no part in... It just didn't make sense.

It was his one opportunity though, and chances were that he wasn't going to get another opportunity.

Theft Successful

A little pop-up bleeped into existence next to John as he slipped the simple, black journal into his inventory. He closed it and quickly headed for the door.

"Mr. Newman," his teacher called out from across the room just before he reached the handle. He could feel her eyes boring into the center of his back as Cassandra turned to look at him with the sudden call of attention. "If you ever feel so inclined to interrupt my class again..." she paused, and John swallowed hard. "...don't."

"Y-yeah..." he mumbled and quickly slipped out the door.

John ran to the bathrooms after that. His classes, which once again involved the lovely Miss Summers after that, were also forgotten again as he went to search through the journal like he didn't even have anything else to do. It wasn't that hard to find a bathroom, and when he got to one, it took mere minutes before the whole room eventually emptied out. The other guys or jocks who had been spending their time skipping class all filed out when John walked in.

It wasn't a thing of intimidation or fear. They just left, simply because they didn't want to be the ones hanging out around him. It wasn't even surprising to John, not after the rumors about him that Vanessa and Frank had thrown out.

Hell, in this instance, it was even helpful as he went into a nearby stall and closed it behind him. The bathroom, with its faint echoes of swirling and draining water, slowly came to a silent still as John pulled the black journal out of his inventory and stared at it. It was a simple book as far as John could tell, now that he could actually take a good look at the thing.

It was made of a fine, smooth, black leather that wrapped nearly all the way around it and bulged from each side with a genuine thickness to the material. A simple, matching black sash was pulled taut all the way around the width of the journal and tied into a simple yet neat bow on the back of the book. On the front of this nameless book sat nothing more than a plain symbol in the top right corner of the book's cover; a symbol that had no colors, nor background as it was simply indented into the leather of the cover.

Embedded into the very material of the book itself, with a matching symbol within each individual page directly behind it, was the image of a sword pointing down. On one half of the sword's blade sat the outline of a blaze of fire trailing along the length of the blade to burn wickedly up and away from its center. On the other half of the sword was a serrated, uneven edge with hundreds of minuscule ridges and bumps across it's surfaces. It was uncoordinated in it's shape and design, seeming almost random, as if the designer's intent had been to just make an icicle for the sword's blade that at some point had just been sharpened radically and set aflame. This symbol was set into the center of a perfect circle with articulate little images of other things carved in around it. These images seemed to be of nothing in particular, just pictures of little random symbols with no apparent purpose other than to add flavor.

When John opened up the book, he found a copy of the symbol on each and every page after that; each page was found to be numbered, with the respective page number exquisitely written out next to the symbol.

At first, when John started reading through the journal, it was filled with random notes. Mostly it was just comments about little things, like how she felt about certain outfits or people. It talked a little bit, barely though, about Cassandra's mother and how she felt about having to move with her when her mother's job called for it. Strangely, her attitude towards her mother felt extremely empathetic to John when he read over it.

It eventually passed into the moving process itself and began to go into detail about what happened when Cassandra got into town, how she felt about the whole thing, and what the people in town seemed like to her. To John, it got a little rude pretty quickly. There were many moments when Cassandra commented on the lack of intelligence in his hometown or just how far below her the whole place was... It took a while before she seemed to come to terms with the whole place, and from what he could see in the book, she came to eventually find something that she liked about the place when she was eventually put into Ashcroft academy.

The impressions she gave of the people in the school were the first things John came across in that arc. Each one was personal in a way, with Cassandra's take on the person written as more of a profiling than anything else. There weren't many people in the book, as John quickly found out, but the work done on them was extensive. One of the first few that John noticed was the bitch queen herself. Vanessa, as Cassandra put it, was a narcissistic sadist. A personality trait that John was glad to have not been the only one to notice. Apparently, her love for causing other people pain was only eclipsed by the love that Vanessa held for herself and, when prompted or bribed with a compliment, was found to let up on the **** she provided to other people. All in all, the report she gave sounded like something he would have expected for the 'alpha of the cheerleaders'.

As he went through her journal, John found reports she had made up for a variety of people, including both Frank and himself.

The last report, the one that had been about John, was short and unfinished when John got a hold of it. The little information she had cooked up on him was brief and described him as both perverse and distracted. The bit about his sexuality was the most recently added bit of information however, and John assumed she had likely put it in during his last class when he had been messing with Mary.

After the last report, John found a whole new section entirely. At first he wasn't sure what it had really been. It started off simple, listing things in a descending order with the words 'Chemistry' and then 'free' at the very top. It continued like that for a while with Sociology and P.E and after a while John started to notice a trend...

It was his schedule listed in Cassandra's book, not her own. Ever since he had met her the previous day, she had been keeping track of everywhere he had gone somehow... She had everything from the day before and all the way up until Mrs. Wentworth's class. She even had the moments where he skipped class or went to work written down.

Below the list of his movements was one more entry written in by Cassandra's hand.

I saw that boy again later... the one with blatant disregard for the school's schedule. John something... He wasn't very stealthy or private with anything he did.... again. He was just walking, and partway through his walk, he stopped and just... I'm not even sure how to write this.

When he finally started moving again, I followed him. After what I saw, I couldn't exactly just let him get away. It's my duty to report something like this, but when I followed him... When I saw the things he could just do in private... I-I couldn't bring myself to tell anyone. There was something about the stuff he could do; it all just seemed so... freeing.

I can't help but want it.

John read through the scribbled notes with a furrowed brow. His eyes lingered on every word with a growing sense of worry, especially when he got to the last sentence scribbled in her journal and he read through the emphasized word that she scratched hard into the parchment. It just hung there. It was like a statement in his mind, and as he read over it a second time, it only felt that much more true to him.

If he wasn't at risk of being discovered on a larger scale... he was in trouble with who ever this chick seemed to be.

"What the fuck...?" John murmured to himself as he flipped back and forth between some of the pages. There wasn't anything else after that though. The rest of the book just seemed... empty. Which made even less sense...

If this girl was the type of person to write out whole profiles for people she just met, then why was there so little in her book? From what John had seen, she was always buried in the thing. It just didn't make sense.

"Where's the rest?" he spoke to himself again as he flipped through the pages again and again. The thick leather felt like it bulged awkwardly in John's hands as he skimmed through it. Eventually, it did hit him. A glorious epiphany struck John as he held the leather booklet in his hands and stared at the unusual thickness of the book.

Maybe there was a hidden opening somewhere in the book. It made sense to him at the time, especially if the leather had gotten that thick because of the extra pages she was hiding in it. The idea that he had been hiding out in a public restroom with a girl's journal like a pervert... that idea never occurred to him. John never found a hidden pouch unfortunately, even with the help of Observe.

In fact, he didn't find anything, until he directed his sights onto the symbol in the top right corner of one of the pages of the book.

Greater Mana Poly-lock: Trigger.
This rune of magic and mysticism was created to hide and seal the contents it was applied to behind the cover of something similar. The unique style with which this rune was written is more refined than most, with each line drawn bordering on near perfection, and hides the rune underneath the image of a drawn sword. Like all Mana Locks, it is unlocked and opened by the flow of mana through it's runes.

"A Mana Poly-lock?" John blinked at the pop-up that appeared above the book. It did say it was possible to unlock it with the use of mana, but John wasn't even sure if he could use his mana like that. The only things that he had found possible to use mana for had been his abilities, and none of those seemed like they would have worked for him in this instance.

Regardless, he had to try. For all he knew, he could have been on to something here...

It took a couple moments for John to catch his breath before he pinched the sword-like symbol at the top of the page. He was nervous and felt like it was understandable for him to feel that way. After all the worry and dismay he had gone through, it seemed like it might have been possible for the person who had discovered him to have just... kept his secret. Kept it out of some blind greed.

It took a couple minutes before John was able to do anything. He tried to spin his mana into working with him and twist it into something that was under his control, but nothing happened. Pretty quickly actually, all John was rewarded with was just a strange sense throughout his whole body... the best way he had of describing it was like it was similar to constipation. It was like something was trapped inside him, and no matter how hard he pushed, he couldn't get it out.

It wasn't until John practically started meditating that something happened. The first was an ability level... in meditation.

It didn't increase the regeneration bonuses he got from using the ability... or really change anything as far as he could tell... but he got a level.

The second thing that happened was that the book changed. The black leather exterior remained the same, with an unusual thickness to it that remained suspiciously unsettling to John, but the interior... the pages of the book all changed. John watched as the single, thin white piece of paper in between his pinched fingers stiffened suddenly and, before his very eyes, changed in a wave of color. The change started with a subtle brown shift, a tinting, of the paper that spanned out throughout the book before the paper itself thickened and shifted before his eye. It morphed from a simple white page, to a heavy, unruly sheet of papyrus, and it was one among many. The writing on the page followed after that. Little sentences of pencil or pen melted and deepened into a solid, black ink. The words themselves changed at the sudden influx of mana, and where once there had been mere pages of a journal, came the notes and writings of a tome. A work of forbidden and seemingly ancient knowledge mixed with the ideas of a new mind.

Even the pop-up with the Observe details on it changed for John, suddenly listing the book as something called the Arcana Iglaciem. It was joined by another pop-up.

-98 HP

A pop-up that John didn't even see before the book exploded in his hands.