Doom Valley Prep School

“So let me get this straight,” Naomi said as we ate our lunch. “You summoned the sister of the demon you traded bodies with.”

“Shapes, not bodies,” I corrected.

“What's the difference?”

“I have no idea, but seems important.”

“Fine, whatever,” my friend said, shaking her head. “So you summoned the sister of the demon you traded 'shapes' with. Then she burst out laughing after sniffing you. Then Blood Wing's mom looked you over really closely and started giggling. Now they think the demon Lil is connected to all of this, and they want to watch from far away. And apparently you have some kind of protection, and Blood Wing should stay far away, but also stay close to Ella. And they can't tell you what's going on or they'll get punished. Do I have that right?”

“I think so. It's really, really confusing to me. If someone is protecting me, I wish they'd do a better job of it. I'm sick of almost dying everyday, and I'm running out of clothes.”

“Your luck is really weird,” Ella said. “No one can be as unluckily lucky as you. You really should have permanently died at least three or four times. And succeeding at the pass or die test at the start of the term, in your nightgown, with no preparations, it's never been done before.”

“If I'm so lucky, how did I end up at Doom Valley? And why have I nearly died so many times? Why does fate seem to want keep humiliating me? Why does my magic always backfire? And why do so many strange, painful, and scary things happen to me?”

“Like I said, you're impossibly unluckily lucky. Anyone with your amount of bad luck wouldn't survive crossing a sleepy village street. Somehow the only wagon in the area would go out of control and run you over. But you survive. You'll be humiliated, in pain, and probably without your clothes, yet you will walk, or crawl away, and likely have gained something by the end of it all. You're like a lightning rod of improbable luck.”

I slapped my enormous breasts. “I wish I'd stop gaining things. If I gain much more, I won't be able to walk.”

“Could I have some of that luck?” Clarice asked.

“if I could, I'd let you have as much as you'd like,” I replied.

Garth looked at Ella. He hadn't been saying much for the last week or so, in fact he had stopped eating with us for a few days. It was nice to have him back. “So if Petra has such strange luck, is it affecting us?”

“Probably,” Ella said. “Having us meet like we did. That was a comedy of errors, that shouldn't have worked. We got a guide who didn't want to negotiate, and you had a guide that was willing to let us tag along just for laughs, strange coincidence. And you guys were nice enough to go with it without demanding something in return, saving our hides. How many boys here would have done that?”

“Not that many,” he said. The other boys nodded in agreement.

“Exactly. And there are other things that really shouldn't have happened.” She looked at Rocky, who was busy eating a big bowl of soup, ignoring the conversation.

“So we're caught up in Petra's weird luck. Is there anything we can do about it?” Clarice asked.

Calci shook her head. “Blood Wing asked if she should stay close to Ella or avoid her. Her mom said, yes.”

“But that's not a yes or no question.”

“That's exactly what Blood Wing said. Her mom said that was still the answer.”

Looking down at my food, I couldn't help feeling bad at bringing my friends into my insane situation. I didn't know what I'd done to deserve it, but it had to be something. They shouldn't suffer just because they were nearby.

“So,” Ella said, “we're already involved in this. If we ignore Petra, something will likely bring us back together, whether we want it or not. And if we stay close to her, we'll keep having odd things happen. Well I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm going to stick by my friend. We have done quite well so far, and she has helped us many times, suffering and nearly dying when she could have just walked away. We now know that something stranger than regular odd luck is going on, so we can prepare ourselves for it.”

“I stick with Petra. Petra pretty,” Rocky said, looking up from his lunch for the first time.

“She's stuck with us, we can do the same for her,” Naomi said. Calci and Clarice both nodded in agreement.

Gold gave Clarice's shoulder a squeeze. “If you want to stay with her, sweety, I'll do the same.”

The other boys agreed, a little more hesitantly but seeing their girlfriends had their minds made up they couldn't exactly disagree. Garth looked at me, then at Rocky, and shrugged. Since he didn't say anything or leave, it seemed he was willing to stay with us. I felt bad for him, but I wasn't dating him or Rocky, and except for the first time we met, when I needed to pretend to be his girlfriend, I had made it very clear we were only friends.

Ivy turned to look at me, putting down her raw steak. “You're good at math. Keep doing it.”

Ella gave us one of her perfect smiles. “Well it seems we're in agreement. After class I'm going to the library to see if we can find anything about Petra's problem. If any of you would like to join me, it would make things faster.”

“We'll be there,” Calci said, “ we're all in this together after all.”

I wont' lie, I almost started crying. After everything I'd been through, I'd expected them all to abandon me, but here they were not only staying by my side, but trying to help. I couldn't have asked for better friends.

The Doom Valley Library was huge.

The Royal Library back home was large, one of the largest in the world. Doom Valley's was bigger, much, much bigger. The rows of books faded into the distance, and the shelves were at least two stories high. That was just the first floor, there were five floors in all. Minor angels and demons flew, climbed, and jumped among the shelves, dusting, casting protection magic against pests, grabbing a book and running off with it, or putting one back.

A few students wandered through the aisles, usually with maps and a compass. There were some adults as well, some looked like teachers, others not so much. I didn't think the school had a hundred-foot-long dragon professor, but honestly the dragon could teach seniors how to care for monsters. It wasn't like I'd seen many non-freshmen in my two weeks at Doom Valley.

Walking over to the help counter, it towered over our heads. Well it towered over most of us, Rocky was the perfect height for it. The entire thing was made entirely out of black marble, and a small male angel with parchment skin looked down his nose at us.

“What do you require?” the angel asked.

“We're looking for information on what would cause a person to have abnormally good and bad luck, sir,” Ella said.

“Go to reading room 145-A in Section Green, Subsection Obsidian.”

“Could we possibly get a map, please?”

Scowling, the angel waved his hand and a pamphlet flew through the air straight at Ella. Thanking him, we walked a little ways away and opened it up to figure out where we were supposed to go. Then we turned it around, upside down, looked on the back of the paper, folded it again, opened it in the opposite direction, held it sideways, scratched our heads, and wondered what we had been given.

“I think we have to go through six dimensions to get to the second floor,” Naomi said.

“Does anyone know what language this is written in?” Calci asked.

“It looks a little like Hyperborean,” Gold said.

“Isn't Hyperborea a myth?” Naomi asked.

“Oh no, they existed. Daddy talks about them sometimes, usually reminiscing on their wonderful parties,” Ella said.

“Your father was around back then?”

“Yes. He doesn't remember much about that time. Anything from before the current gods and demons arrived is rather hazy for him. He blames it on the really good wine, and an apocalypse or three.”

Once again, I was reminded how different my roommates life was compared to mine. Trying to get things back on track, I asked, “So how are we to find room 145 Green Obsidian?”

Antoine, who was holding Naomi's hand, decided to finally speak up. “It's room 145-A in Section Green, Subsection Obsidian.”

“OK. So how do we find it?”

“We could ask,” Honey Suckle said, walking over to a demon. “Hi, we're looking for room 145-A in Section Green, Subsection Obsidian. Where exactly is that?”

The demon looked at the elf. Her beady little eyes seemed to be judging Honey Suckle and not liking what she saw. Slowly she held out her hand. When nothing happened, the ugly thing coughed gently. Then it waggled it's fingers.

Sighing, Ella pulled some money out of her purse and put it in the demons hands. “Now will you help us?” she asked.

“Follow me,” the demon squeaked.

We started walking, taking turns apparently at random. About five minutes in we turned right at an aisle full of nature books, turned right again onto an aisle about runes, took yet another right in the basket weaving aisle, and took a fourth right turn onto the aisle for complimentary magic spells. Then we came to a cliff. Letting the boys go first, we climbed up the rocky wall to the second floor. The tiles were covered in water, and several angels were trying to get a massive tome about the elemental plane of water to stop leaking.

We were almost past the leak when a sea monster came out of the puddle and chased us all the way to the section on fire magic, where Calci and Garth found a fireball spell that sent it running. We had to backtrack a bit to get back on course, and after paying a fee to use a troll bridge, we made it to the correct room.

Opening the door, my jaw dropped. There were ten piles of books on the table. Each stack looked to have between twenty to fifty books, ranging from massive tomes to tiny pamphlets. I heard my friends groan, gasp, and whimper at the sight of it all.

“How are we going to read all of this?” Clarice asked.

“I have no idea,” Ella said. “I didn't think there would be this many.”

“Everyone pick a stack and look for the one that sounds most useful,” Garth suggested.

Rocky edged past us all and looked at the smallest stack. “I read this,” he said. Picking up a tiny green book with two dice on the cover, he went to the corner of the room and started reading.

“Can he even read?” Naomi whispered.

“He's not an idiot,” I said. “He's just a little slow.”

Without any better idea, we did what Garth suggested. I picked up a book about curses, that had to weigh at least ten pounds, and went to the table of contents. There was a whole section on luck curses. Over the next hour I learned more about cursing than I'd thought possible. There was a curse to steal luck from a person and use it for yourself. Another one gave a person's luck to those around them, leaving only bad luck for him. There was a way to attach a tiny luck demon to a person, that would eat their luck. An interesting curse made someone appear really lucky, but would cause it to backfire horribly. There were a lot more, some fairly minor and some very powerful, but none that matched my problem.

I wrote down some of the easier curses. At Doom Valley, being able to give someone bad luck even for just a few minutes, or steal there luck for the next important task, could be invaluable. Hopefully I'd be able to cast them without it backfiring.

The next book was about probability. Flipping to the first page I was met by a wall of numbers. There were some sentences, and I could understand the individual words, like 'the', 'chance', 'possibility', and so on. But the way the author combined them together, turned them into nonsense unless you really liked math. There was no way I'd be able to figure out what 'The continuum of interested possibility field divided by Fate's quantifiable interest times chaos equilibrium equals probability,' meant by myself. Maybe it was important, but it looked like gibberish to me.

The rest of the books were equally useless. There were biographies of famous figures with odd luck. Historical works where large events were affected by an improbable event. I read a highly contentious essay by the famous scholar Jnyandeep. Wsing ancient myths and very private gossip of demons and gods, he claimed that Fate had defeated the original god of luck, taking his domain for her own. According to the scholar, Fate was annoyed at the god changing peoples fates without her permission. Interesting but not helpful.

Then I skimmed through a biography about Jnyandeep. It ended rather abruptly with him being eaten alive by a ravenous horde of rabid gerbils.

Once I was done with that book, it was time to go and do our homework. We'd wasted the entire evening, and none of us were any closer to finding out what was going on with me. Disheartened, we made our way out of the library, only getting lost three times. We eventually made it out after paying an angel to be our guide.

Parting ways with the boys, we went to our dorms. Then saying goodbye to the girls, Ella and I entered our spacious room, where I fell onto my bed with a groan.

“Don't worry Petra, just because we didn't find anything useful today doesn't mean we won't have better luck tomorrow,” Ella said, sitting down beside me.

“When has my luck been good?” I mumbled.

“You don't think getting me as a friend was very lucky?”

“OK, that was very lucky. I think it used up all of my good luck.”

“Well if you've used up all of your good luck, I'll just have to share mine when you really need it.” She patted me on the back. “You know what will make you feel better? A nice warm bath. You don't have any homework that needs to be done tonight, so go and relax.”

That did sound really nice. “OK. Thanks for sticking by me.”

“We're friends. You may not believe it, but you're the best friend I've ever had. I'm not going to let you go without a fight.” She dragged me to my feet and gave me a hug. “So enough pouting. Go relax, and make yourself feel better.”

Grabbing my housecoat and towel, I went to the bathroom and was actually smiling. Things weren't all bad as long as I had friends. Filling the tub with perfumed water and bubbles, I stripped out of my clothes, and looked at myself in the full length mirror. I really did look sexy. My eyes went down, studying my body, and then I stopped in shock.

Between my legs was an old friend I'd thought I'd lost forever.

Mr. Happy was back and standing at attention.

I cheered in delight. Maybe the transformations were finally going away. Maybe I could become a complete boy again.

And then my cheering became a whimper as reality slapped me hard. Boys weren't allowed in the girls dormitory.

The shadow monsters were going to eat me.