Violet, A Cute Freshman

It was just a normal day at the academy, a normal day that definitely wouldn’t include a large-scale magical disaster from the lab on the opposite side of campus… right? No way! Your life wasn’t that exciting, was it? You are Violet Philia, an unassuming freshman just getting your footing with campus life. You grew up in a peaceful town with loving parents and made your way through school right in the middle of the pack, somehow just making the cut-off for entering the kingdom’s prestigious academy of magic.

In fact, you suspected that you weren’t accepted into the academy based on your academic or magic skills. No matter how hard you tried, you always seemed to be a step behind the other students. You were small, cute, and got along with everyone. The amount of times you had been compared to a squirrel or hamster were too many to count. A lot of the super serious students were prone to stress and moodiness, but your cheerful presence helped to lessen the burden.

You suspected that you were accepted into the academy to be some sort of class mascot for the sake of the other students. If that really was the goal, then whoever admitted you to the academy knew what they were doing, but at the end of the day it didn’t feel great to be the equivalent of a class pet. You weren’t particularly proud of your role, but then again, pride didn’t matter when you were allowed to study alongside the top magicians of the future!

Being the entire class’ friend had its benefits as well as its problems. You only had one truly close friend at the academy, another girl named Lizz who was very solitary. It was kind of strange, but opposites attract or something. She only opened up to you, and was also the only person that took you seriously. You talked with her about worries you couldn’t tell anyone else, she was a special friend that you were thankful for. One of the issues you often discussed was your love life. All the guys in class basically had you firmly in the friend zone or cute pet zone! Even though they all liked you, no one thought you were real relationship material! You didn’t necessarily want the whole class to fall head over heels for you, just one person in particular.

You had a crush, a wonderful, terrible crush that sent your heart into a chaotic whirl. Hal, the coolest guy in the whole world. Sure he wasn’t the smartest student or the most powerful spell caster, but there was an infinitude of things that mattered way more! The way his bangs sort of half-covered his eyes and made him look cool as ice. The way he laid back in his chair during boring lectures. The way he picked up his trash that one time he missed the trash bin. And his voice! Its tone resonated with your whole body and made your core tremble. If you were to be loved by anyone in the world, you wished for it to be him.

A few times, when your heart was strong enough, you approached him and made small talk about classes and assignments and stuff. Unfortunately, you could quickly tell that he saw you more like a little sister than girlfriend material. At one point, he even patted your head and ruffled your hair, which was great in one way, but awful in another. You spent countless nights in Lizz’s dorm room strategizing and theorizing methods to get his romantic interest, but every attempt had failed so far. But still, you weren’t even close to giving up! Giving up basically meant letting some other girl have him, and you couldn’t stand the thought. You were determined to be the one holding his hand on a romantic date. It would be you interlocking fingers with him on top of the bed sheets as he took you in a passionate embrace. Surrounded by rose petals

You were lost in another fantasy for a moment, but got pulled back to reality when Lizz sat across from you. You were in one of the rec rooms, seated at a small table across from Hal’s handsome, manly back. He was seated at another table with his friends. You knew about his habit of eating a snack here between classes. Your seat was the perfect position to watch him without being noticed, but Lizz joined your table and sat in between you two.

“Vi, don’t stare too hard or you’ll drill holes through him.”

“C’mon, what are you talking about? I’m just looking, nothing wrong with looking right?”

“Wrong. Looking means you aren’t talking to him. No matter how much you learn about him, if he doesn’t get to know you, what’s the point? You need to pick your tray up and sit at his table.”

“What? No way! What if I say something dumb in front of him, or what if he thinks I eat weird? No no no, I can’t just go up to him like that.”

“You’ve already talked to him before, just do it again. Why are you so shy now?”

“Well I’ve been studying ‘Fall In Love: The Mysterious Transfer Student Can’t Be This Hot’ and I’ve learned some things.”

You could see Lizz roll her eyes, but you continued to explain anyway.

“Just going up and being friendly is gonna get me landed right in the little sister zone, just like all the childhood friend characters! There’s got to be a fateful event, where we like, run into each other or something. Like, I’ll bump into him and leave in a hurry so he wonders who I am or something. Then later, he sees me about to fall down some stairs and catches me in his arms, and we look each other deep in the eyes and we both blush.”

You were about to continue sharing what you had learned with Lizz, but suddenly you felt a hard shove hit you from behind. Instead of slamming into the cafeteria table though, you felt like you were tumbling forwards without anything to stop you. Your vision blurred as the whole world violently spun around you. You closed your eyes and felt like the spinning would keep going forever, but a pair of hands reached out and started to slow you down. You eventually stabilized, and opened your eyes to see Lizz’s face and the sky behind her. Wait, you could see the sky straight through her face. She was transparent! Looking down, you saw the rooftops of the academy, and your own transparent body. You looked back at your friend, and a torrent of questions spilled out of your mouth.

“What, Lizz, what’s happening? What’s going on? Why am I transparent? Why are you transparent? Why are we in the air?”

Lizz kept cool despite the situation, and answered in a calming voice.

“I don’t know, but you need to calm down. Deep breaths.”

You tried to do as she said, and it kind of worked. You weren’t really sure if your current transparent self could “breath” at all. After a moment, you asked another question that you dreaded the answer to.

“Are we dead? Did we die?”

“Maybe… I don’t know. If we are, then there’s nothing we can do about it. But if we aren’t, then…”

“Then what?”

“Uh… then… something. I don’t know exactly what, but we have to do something right? Let’s see if we can head back to the academy for now. Honestly I have no idea what to do, but that’s probably a good start.”

“Okay, I’ll follow you.”

Lizz started to fly downwards, back towards the academy. You realized that you had no idea how to move around in midair like her. You tried to make a swimming motion, kicking your feet and moving your arms, but you weren’t budging an inch.

“Hey stop! How do I move around like you?”

“Huh? Oh, I didn’t even realize. Uh, like, just go? Like, don’t think too much about it I guess, just go?”

Your friend’s advice sounded incredibly unhelpful, but you decided to “just go” like she said, and to your surprise it worked. You sort of just wanted to go in a direction, and would start to move that way. You followed behind Lizz and got closer to the epicenter of whatever just happened.

As the two of you approached, you saw that the two of you were hardly the only people affected. You could see a multitude of transparent forms moving around the outside of the academy. One whizzed past you in the opposite direction at quite the high speed. He was laughing and cheering as he flew around, clearly enjoying his newfound weightlessness. Clearly some of the others weren’t as worried as you were. Maybe they thought this was some sort of dream? Well, it definitely could be a dream, that was certainly a possibility. But even though everything seemed surreal, it didn’t feel dreamlike to you.

As we reached the roofs of the academy, we could see the situation more clearly. Up above, several transparent people flew freely through the sky, or flailed their limbs in an attempt to move. You even saw a couple holding hands as they flew together. Show-offs, you thought. Down below, on the academy’s campus, there was a different scene. Transparent people still floated around, but there were also normal, solid people walking too. Some of them were running around frantically, trying to restore order in this chaos, but a vast majority of people were laying on the ground motionless.

“Oh gods, the bodies… are they dead? We’re dead too aren’t we? I knew it!”

Before Lizz could respond, a new voice spoke up behind them.

“Don’t be so sure of that.”

You and Lizz looked at another ghost hovering nearby. The voice was masculine and he looked like a senior student. You didn’t recognize him, but he sounded like he knew something.

“Look over there.”

He transparently pointed at a body lying on the ground not too far away. You noticed a ghost floating towards the body. Looking more closely, the ghost looked identical to the body it was approaching. The ghost kept getting closer, until it reached its body and was sucked in. After a moment, the body stirred and got up.

“See? It looks like the bodies scattered around are not dead. I’ve seen several people return to their bodies and get up just fine. It’s fascinating isn’t it?”

A huge weight was lifted off of your weightless chest, as you realized that you weren’t in the middle of crossing over to the other side, and that you could return to your body. While that answered one question, there were still many more, and this guy seemed pretty smart, so asking him wouldn’t be a bad idea right?

“Do you know what happened? Why are we all like this in the first place?”

“I don’t know exactly what happened, but I have some speculations that I believe have merit. I speculate that we are currently souls that have been separated from our bodies. Everyone I’ve spoken with so far shared a common experience, I suspect a massive magical energy blast dislodged all of us from our familiar forms. Worry not, it seems that those bodies laying on the ground are simply empty of a soul, a carriage without a driver if you will. Our bodies are still alive, and our souls can return to them, as we just observed.”

What he said seemed to make at least a little bit of sense, and it was the best explanation of what was happening so far. Well, the only explanation anyways. Personally, you still hoped that someone had slipped a hallucinogenic potion into your food and this was all a delusion, but if it was real, at least it didn’t seem as serious as you first thought.

“You don’t have to return to your body so soon, they should be fine, basically asleep. This is an incredible opportunity to study the properties of a soul! How can we move about? Why can souls touch each other, but not solid objects? Why are people that have returned to their bodies unable to see souls anymore? How exactly are a soul and body connected? What about the magical energy blast that started all of this? Doesn’t it just fascinate the magic researcher inside you?”

Despite the interest that he was showing in research, you really only wanted to return to normal. It seems like Lizz shared the same opinion when she spoke up.

“Thanks, bye.”

There was Lizz’s closed-off, unsocial side. You quickly addressed the soul that had helped you.

“I think she means to say thank you for the fantastic explanation, but we just want to get back to our own bodies now. Good luck with your research!”

“Of course, come find me later and share any observations and findings please!”

You and Lizz started to fly throughout the campus, enroute to the rec room where your empty bodies awaited your souls’ return. As you both continued, you watched the chaos that the academy was in. There were still tons of empty bodies littering the walkways beneath the free souls flying around. Many souls were floating about, currently in the process of reuniting with their solid forms. Some of them weren’t so focussed, flying around in spirals, in and out through solid walls. You even saw a group of transparent floating boys pushing, shoving, and painlessly punching each other, laughing all the while. Of course it wasn’t all fun and games though, there were a few distressed souls shouting out, asking for help to look for their own bodies that had gone missing.

As you and Lizz kept going, something caught your eye. There was one soul in particular that was acting different from the rest. It was a male student by the look, but he looked kind of shifty. You had a good eye for people, and something about the way he was searching for his own body set off your sensors. Lizz noticed my gaze, and watched along as the soul started to head towards an empty body. But it wasn’t his empty body. No, he was flying straight towards the ****, empty body of a blonde haired female student that was sitting slumped against a tree.

With a mischievous grin on his transparent face, he flew straight into her defenseless, empty vessel. We watched, waiting to see if his soul would be rejected and flung back out or something. I felt my ethereal stomach flip when the eyes of the blonde student fluttered open. At first, she seemed surprised, perhaps shocked that it worked, but soon enough that same mischievous grin returned, this time on a new face. The blonde student’s hands immediately went to her chest, feeling up her breasts with a perverse curiosity and excitement.

You looked at Lizz with panic.

“Souls can take over other people’s bodies?”

Even though Lizz always looked calm and collected, the realization seemed to have shaken her a bit too.

“Looks like it…”

“Oh gods, what if some other souls took over our bodies? Lizz, we need to hurry!”

With a palpable air of urgency, you flew as fast as you could in the direction of the rec room, hoping to see your own body still there.