Chapter Ten: Initiate

The Initiate's Handbook was thirty-six pages long and packed to the gills with information. As with most books of the sort (our school rule books, for example), the information within wasn't static - it would vary based on context. The first page never changed, though, for it contained the Creed of the Mistress:

Remember well the Creed of the Mistress, for it is the Writ of your Order, and She shall not be defied:
1) Do as thou wilt; judge and be judged. That is the first rule.
2) Do not subvert Freewill; all offerings must be freely given.
3) The strong shall dominate the weak; do so in kindness, for one day you shall be the weak.
4) Do not teach our ways to the uninitiated; our ways are not their ways.
5) Respect sanctuary when offered, even from the Enemy.

Aside form a few stickling details, the Creed was pretty flexible - do as thou wilt was about as flexible as it got. Basically, do whatever and take your licks if you pissed off the powers that be. Others were a lot less flexible - no teaching magic to outsiders or else. Or else what? Whatever the punishments for breaking the rules were, I was sure I didn't want to know - Headmistress Lily could lay down a heavy punishment for breaking school propriety, let alone a sacred creed. I didn't want to find out what would happen if I taught 'our' ways to the uninitiated or subverted free will (whatever that meant). By and large, I thought I could work within the strictures of the Creed.

Oh... and who was Mistress Starlight? That was something I'd definitely be looking into.

I sat in our room flipping through the booklet - I assumed that Cassie was at crew practice, since I knew that was today (Tiffany Chalmers being at the same practice, after all, had been part of my disastrously failed / spectacularly successful heist). I still had an hour until breakfast, so I idly flipped through the handbook. After the Creed were a few pages of guidelines - what we were expected to bring to classes, to rituals, and the like. Following this were pages of obscure symbols, perhaps thirty in all, difficult Non-Euclidean characters that couldn't be transcribed to page without magical technique - their very geometry changed depending on the angle you viewed it from, as well as the orientation of the page. Each character got a paragraph describing how to form it and how it related to the other symbols. Each of the symbols interacted within a complex semiotic network. There were, apparently, hundreds of other symbols, but these thirty were the important basics. Finally, toward the back of the handbook, there was a list of twenty-seven common potion reagents describing, the syncretic, appositional, and oppositional symbols influenced by each reagent, as well as how best to prepare each for longer or faster effect. I didn't yet have the expertise to design my own potion, but I could intuit how Cassie might have done so.

Speaking of whom... it turned out she hadn't been at crew practice.

She stormed into the room, spotted me curled up on my bed with the handbook, and hurled her backpack onto her own bed. "What the fuck, Natalie?"

It took me a moment to register why she might be angry - she'd been punished. They must have pulled her out of Best Behavior (which I was currently missing - I'd completely lost track of the time) and brought her into administration while I was curled up with my handbook. I could tell Cassie had been punished because she looked different.

The physical transformation parts of her punishment were essentially over - her rules specified a physique that she ought to have, as well as a behavior profile. Ultimately, it was the behavior that mattered but, just as in my case, Cassie's physical state was an important component to getting there - tall, confident, beautiful, and well aware of it. Honestly, she didn't need any more help in any of those things now. She'd maxed out her primary physical changes and was now onto the secondary. The tips of her hair now had metallic blue highlights that, however improbably, managed to work with her rich, brown hair. And did I see... yup. There was definitely a tattoo wending part-way up her ankle. The administration preferred to keep a visible component on all major punishments, just to have feedback as to whether the magic was working. Apparently, Cassie was getting tattoos and hair dye now - an odd choice for a future mining conglomerate CEO, but not my place to call.

"Natalie!" She stomped half-way across the room, at least a little intimidating from my vantage.

I threw my hands up. "I didn't rat you out, Cassie! We got caught, and the headmistress found the anti-potion! Look, I..."

I was prepared to explain the whole thing in as much detail as it would take to calm Cassie down, but she was already distracted: she'd spotted my Initiate's Handbook. Her eyes lit up, her anger forgotten.

"You're in the Sisterhood now?"

I nodded excitedly. "Thanks to you! Whatever you told your parents, they really sold it to Headmistress Lily. She's pretty pissed at the Bryces for landing me here and thinks I might be good at... well, whatever it is you do."

"Classics," Cassie said with a grin. "This is great! I've been wanting to tell you about this for so long, but, you know..."

"The Creed."

"The Creed!" She laughed. She looked at me, she looked at my Initiate's Handbook, she bit her lip. Cassie lifted me up in a great big hug and spun us around. "This is great! I just know you're going to be an awesome witch! Wait until I tell..."

"Cassie... breathing..." I croaked.

"Right. Sorry," with a bashful grin, she plopped me back down.

"We can't tell anybody," I said. "Nobody. Littles aren't supposed to learn witchcraft... and the Bigs would throw a shit fit. Headmistress Lily is going to teach me in secret."

Cassie pouted. "That doesn't seem fair - private lessons? And my whole class has to wait for fucking Hailey to catch up." She rolled her eyes. "Every. Time. But you're months and months behind - you tutored me in Calc, and now I can tutor you! This is great!"

+++++

I started my tutelage under Lily later that week. Learning magic was a huge upside, but the downside was that now I had to get up at the crack of dawn with Cassie, heading out across campus in the crisp autumn air - she toward crew or climbing practice and me to A010 to learn the ways of witchcraft under Headmistress Lily.

Actually, Lily only taught me once or twice a week - she was a busy woman. My other lessons she handed off to Monique Besson, an Advanced girl with a knack for witchcraft and a reputation for discretion. So I took notes, practiced my symbols, and read. And there was lots and lots of reading - a new book with practically every lesson, dense volumes with complex notation, all of which was (apparently) important for proper magic.

"Almost anybody can do magic," Lily said. "It's a bit like gymnastics. Almost anybody can do a somersault. With some effort and conditioning, most people can do a cartwheel or handstand, but that's about the extent of their ability - tricks of modest difficulty, impressive only to the uninitiated. People with moderate talent might start to string tricks together and expand their repertoire - many a hedge witch has a bevy of interesting tricks learned from spell books through hours of memorization. And only a few brave souls can and will trudge deep into the advanced material, the complex flips and twists needed to put together an Olympic performance… a deep intuition of kinetics and geometry beyond what any rote practice can bestow. As real witches, we learn the pattern within the pattern and, in so doing, we approach real power. Do you understand?"

"No," I said. "I understand the metaphor, but I don't see the pattern within the pattern. Not yet. But I will."

"Good - the greatest stumbling block to a beginning witch is her own arrogance. Do not assume that this will come easily the way things have come easily before. Mastering our craft will be a hard-fought battle."

The headmistress was right - the going was slow, at least at first… and none of it was easy. But my progress was steady - I've always found it easier to approach subjects with a well-defined goal in mind, and I certainly had a goal that I could start working toward: revenge. But, in the shorter term: Michelle's behavior plan. We'd smuggled her book, only slightly water-warped by its week in the custodial closet drain, back to the dormitory, and I got to work with understanding the thing.

Even with that goal, it was slow going. It took Monique Besson fussing over my technique for a whole two-hour session before I got the first two of the several dozen magical symbols down - the easiest of the bunch, it was said. To the untrained eye, those symbols looked like a forward slash and a little oval - though, of course, they didn't exist in Euclidean space, which was where the difficulty lay. Drawing a many-dimensional shape on 2-dimensional paper with a 1-dimensional pen line is literally impossible, so long as you are committed to perceiving the paper as a flat surface and the pen mark as a simple line. The first time I successfully drew a lumieh - a little slant of a symbol gradually projecting up and then spiraling back as you approach it - I shrieked and danced around the room as an amused Monique looked on.

I'd learned to recognize most of the basics and could actually draw four or five of them by the time I opened Michelle's behavior plan to take a crack at the thing. I was immediately floored - it was immensely complicated, well beyond my skill level… and ultimately, slowly realized, understandable. I just needed more time. But how much did we have? Eventually, somebody would do an inventory of the behavior plans or, worse yet, Michelle would get into the sort of trouble that would have them referring back to her book, and then what? We'd be fucked is what.

"So... you can change my punishments to whatever I want?" Michelle asked.

"No, at least not yet. With your own blood, we should be able to override the blood pact that your parents made for you to edit the book... but I have no idea what I'm doing yet. I might turn you into a slug by accident..."

"Is that possible?"

I shrugged. "Apparently. I don't think I'd do that by accident, but I can't decipher most of the program... spell, rather. I need samples to work from. I need to get a look at some more books."

Michelle frowned and flipped through her book for the umpteenth time - she couldn't make out anything past the first few pages, but she liked to puzzle over the non-symbols as a kind of Zen-ish meditation.

Her eyes popped open and her mouth made a cute little 'o' of surprise. "What if you got an assistantship under Doctor Sauvage? You might not be able to steal any more plans, but you'd probably get lots of chances to look at them."

+++++

I had to admit that Michelle's idea was pretty good. Doctor Sauvage's office was the place to be if I wanted lots of access to behavior plans. But I'd broken into her office on top of being one of the school's most problematic students… I might have burned that bridge already. The next day I made my way to the doctor's office to make my official apologies and to prostrate myself before her Grayness. Doctor Sauvage was partial to meek groveling, and I had enough experience in faking that. As a little, I had to be convincingly meek, humble, and contrite whenever Ms. Sturm was in a mood (often) or the Bigs were on the warpath (also often), so I turned up at her office with my best game face. Even so, she was none too happy to see me, and so I had my work cut out for me.

"I'm sorry... ever since that night in the ritual chamber, I've been terrified of your power, doctor... I wanted to resist you and fight you in any way I could, but now I know that isn't right," I said. "Your plans for St. Circe's are much, much greater than me. They're greater than all of us. And I want to help you, if I can."

She snorted in that derisive way of hers: "I already have assistants. Plus, I don't trust you… you're trouble. How could you help me, girl?"

"Lots of ways?" I sniffled. I looked up, but just barely avoided her gaze. I let my lips quiver ever-so-slightly. "I can clean... I can organize... I can go get students for you? I could free up lots of time for your other assistants to help you in important ways."

The doctor took several orbits around me, gazing down at my small form. With her hand on my chin, she brought my gaze up to meet hers, and I quickly looked away. Meek and humble. She took another lap.

"Only Advanced girls may be faculty assistants, but Beginners may be trainees. I'll offer you this ultimatum, Natalie: you can be my trainee assistant as long as you don't get into any further trouble. If I even suspect you're causing trouble, even if you aren't caught red-handed again, you're through. I can use obedient and well-mannered help... I cannot use a disruptive and corruptive ringleader. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, doctor."

"Good. I'm assigning you to three four-hour shifts weekly - two with Tiffany in the evenings and one with Helen Wheatley on Thursday mornings. You'll work under them, you'll learn from them, and when I'm not around, you'll do whatever they say. Is that clear?"

"Yes, doctor?" I allowed a hopeful smile.

"Good. Now off you go, before I change my mind."

I left the doctor's office meekly, humbly, the very image of a Good Girl, and then I jogged back to the dormitory, grinning like a madwoman. Getting intermittent access to Doctor Sauvage's office had been perhaps the biggest hurdle in my next nascent plan, and I'd just overcome it - tentatively. I'd have to stay out of trouble which, for me, could be a problem.

I looked down at myself as a jogged, annoyed at the amount of jiggling my breasts provided. I certainly didn't want to be punished any more - I was already conspicuously curvy for my size, and many more pounds of breast and butt against my otherwise slim and small-waisted body would have me inching into sexual parody territory. No more paddlings for me… no more padding on me. I was curvy enough, thank you.

None of our school-issued clothes had labels on them, obviously. They were custom-made and perfectly-fitted through some form of magic that I was gradually coming to understand. But we had a tape measure that Cassie had borrowed from crafts department and never returned - she'd borrowed it to measure her own burgeoning (well... burgeoned) form... a stereotypical 36-24-36 with high and proud H-cup breasts. That's what she told me, and I didn't quite believe her. That size had sounded way too big to me - she was busty, sure, but didn't sport absurd fetish proportions. But I was a newcomer to women's sizing, so she explained its byzantine system to me thus (I'd never remotely understood it as a man):

Take the cross section of the rib cage to be an oval. Let's say it's 36 inches around. If you were to add half an inch of padding onto the long axis of that oval, you'd be adding one inch (half an inch on either side) to the overall circumference. That's an A-cup breast, about half an inch of adipose and duct tissue added on to the front of the pectorals. Each cup size, then, added about half an inch of padding on top of that, a nice linear progression, but the growth in volume was exponential since it had two additional dimensions (width and height). So the bigger the initial circumference, the more total tissue was needed to add an inch, two inches, et cetera, and the more inches were added straight out the more were added up and down (and a bit side-to-side). So H-cups on a 36-inch chest stuck out four inches from a reasonably large frame and were quite prominent without being the absurd wonder-floats I'd assumed such a cup to be. As for myself? I was a 28 F-cup, three prominent inches of bust jiggling out from my much smaller frame. My overall breast size was much smaller than Cassie's, but they were about equally-prominent on my also-much-smaller body. Breasts had a lot to recommend them, but I definitely didn't want to add any more on to these things. No more punishments - both to keep Doctor Sauvage placated and to retain my ability to jog without wobbling over.

+++++

There was a lot of mischief that I could get up to without much risk of real trouble. On nights when the Bigs were occupied, I still had my pow-wows with my fellow littles, and we discussed and refined my plan. Ultimately, I had plans to undermine St. Circe's disciplinary program for all of the littles - they were my friends, and they didn't deserve the circumstance they'd been thrust into. But we were taking baby steps to get there.

"We can't even figure out how to edit the behavior programs yet, let alone get our hands on them," Simone pointed out. "None of us are allowed to even learn magic... what are we supposed to do?"

"Correction: none of us can take 'Classics'." I said. This was technically accurate, even in my case. "We're students at a magic school and we're smart. We can figure out magic... we made a potion, didn't we?"

"You made a potion with your roommate's help," Michelle said, "which you can only do because you're roomies with the only Big who isn't a sadistic bitch. Some of our roommates are hellions. And even in your bestie's case, I don't know how far we can trust her, no offense."

"I understand," I said gravely. I removed a yellowed sheet of paper from my pajama bottoms. "It's risky, and I understand that you're frustrated with my slow progress. So I'll understand if you don't want to help me with the super-secret ritual seance to undo Emi's bimbo potion."

"I'm not a bimbo!" Emi pouted unconvincingly.

The potion that Emi's sister had provided to the school was incredibly potent. The goal, after all, was to keep her in her ditzed up state indefinitely - with the hopes that a compulsion drawn out long enough might overtake the old personality. The theory was sound, if unproven, and even Headmistress Lily seemed to take this possibility seriously. Therefore, it was unconscionable that we should leave Emi in her muddled state any longer than she had to be. Of course, the potion being incredibly powerful, that also meant that it was extremely difficult to unbalance or otherwise override its magical effects. Still, we tried our best.

Rituals are a lot like potions - the right combination of timing and ingredients is needed. There's a lot less actual mixing, of course, but you need to be in the right place at the right times (especially if you have multiple people) and you need to pay special attention to geometry. That's why witches usually draw out the lines and arcs of their ritual circles - these lines aren't, strictly speaking, necessary, but it's just about impossible to follow a complex high-dimensional geometry without them. I certainly can't do it, and you can probably count the number of people in the world who can on one hand.

"Do you even know what you're doing?" Helena asked - it was her first return to our meetings since the Harvest Formal, so I tried to tread lightly.

"Yes," I said, mostly-honestly. "But I can use all the help I can get. Hold that string steady so I can trace a chalk line..."

She did so after some coaxing from Simone and we went to work. We set out our little ritual bowls, sat around the circle and, after some fussing over lines, set Emi in the middle. We all went over our parts again, and then I got down to business as the ritual leader. I mixed ingredients, poured and passed the bowl of 'ritual tea' (which, to be honest, tasted like dirt and sticks... possibly because it had a bit of both in it), and said the incantation. Most of it was the standard recitation of directions and powers. I had to dip my fingers in the tea and trace out several symbols in the air - all but one of them, I'd already had well-memorized and the last I did my best. Then I had to finalize the invocation:

"We humbly ask our Mistress Starlight to bestow upon us her blessing, to give passage to our humble circle and invigorate the powers within, that you take pity on she made victim by one who follows no Creed...

The power of the star, the power of the healing light,

and most of all the power of the night.

We call upon three signs to guide you.

Bless our circle with your holy might."

In that moment, I sensed something. I felt a chill along my spine, a breath in my ear and, though she spoke no words, I knew it was Mistress Starlight. I felt her warm lips upon the nape of my neck. In that moment, I knew that Mistress Starlight... I still wasn't quite sure who or what she was... had blessed the ritual. I'd completed my first ritual - semi-successfully! - with a gathering of rank amateurs.

"Who the fuck is Mistress Starlight?" Helena asked.

"Shush," Simone said. "Emi... did it work?"

"I... I, like, feel different?" she said. She certainly didn't sound different.

"It didn't work," Michelle sighed.

"I... uh, I think, like, maybe it did?" Emi said. "I'm... I can only, kinda, talk really stupid, but I can, like, I know it's stupid?"

"What's seventeen times three?" I asked.

"Huh? That's hard!" Emi giggled. "Um... fifty-one."

"Holy shit, guys," Simone whispered. "It worked. Well, mostly."

Out of the blue, Emi started crying. "Thanks you guys," she said. She pulled Helena into a hug. I felt a pang of jealousy but quickly quashed it: while Helena hadn't done much for the ritual, she needed the hug a lot more than I did. Emi wiped her tears away, blinked, and took in the scene around us. "Sorry, I'm just… I was, like, trapped in there and I thought it was gonna be like that, like, forever. And we... like, we should clean up. Cecilia would totally tell on us."

+++++

Having a 'Smart Emi' was a huge boon to us. Not least of all because we didn't have to worry about her all the time. She still sounded dense and acted dense around everybody but us, but she could actually understand and carry out complex tasks. And she could actually pick up on a lot that we couldn't because nobody paid poor dumb Emi any mind. But, despite appearances, she was now reasonably clever - she quickly ingratiated herself to Ms. Sturm and became her unofficial assistant. This got her access to the horde of office supplies and decorations that our Best Behavior teacher controlled. For the time being, that just meant we had as many pens or binders as we liked... but soon enough, would soon become crucial to my plan.

I, on the other hand, was encountering a bit more of a challenge. It was proving difficult to make inroads at Doctor Sauvage's office - Tiffany Chalmers knew I'd stolen her keys during our little gambit into the doctor's office. Accordingly, she was none too fond of me, watching me like a hawk. Tiffany gave me zero leeway and threatened to report me to Doctor Sauvage whenever I so much as blinked funny.

"Everything on the desk has to be at right angles," she'd say with an arch of her little black eyebrows. "Does that look like a right angle to you?"

"Yes?" It certainly looked like it to me. I'd even used a ruler.

"Think again! I swear..." she adjusted everything slightly. "I guess there are two dumb bimbos in the Beginner littles."

"Sorry, Tiffany. I'll do better next time." Docile. Meek. Subservient. That's what I had to project.

"If you still had your collar on, I'd magic you," she said.

I wasn't sure whether she meant the Collar of Contrition or the Command Collar - either would have sufficed, I suppose. At least they would have on most students… but not me. Perhaps owing to my natural talents, or perhaps for reasons none of us yet comprehended, the collars had utterly failed to adjust my attitude. To be sure, the school faculty had transformed my body in spectacular fashion, but they'd been powerless to smother the willful, smart-assed troublemaker beneath my tiny, adorably beautiful façade. But they didn't have to know that. Since I couldn't alert them, the going was tricky and my progress was slow. Fortunately, Tiffany provided an opening.

A week and a half into my tenure under Tiffany - our fourth shift together, I think - she showed up with a smirk and a Command Collar. By commanding me, her theory went, she could finally get me to do things correctly. She'd command me and I'd have no choice but to do as she asked. Or so her theory went. I pretended to express reservations but, as you might imagine, I was pleased by the prospect. If Tiffany thought she had control over me, then she'd keep a less watchful eye over me, which meant opportunity. But I had to feign reluctance.

"I'm not sure this is a good idea... did you get permission?"

"I don't need permission," Tiffany stated, hands on her hips. "I'm a Big and Bigs are in charge of littles." And she was a pretty typical Big - tall, lithe, and beautiful, with a generous bust and pale, porcelain-smooth skin. She couldn't match Cassie's supernova hotness (I may be biased, but I doubt it), but in any normal high school, she had the looks and temperament to be the unquestioned queen bee. She was beautiful, arrogant, and she thought she could control me - well, she could sure as shit try!

"Are you sure?" I asked - keeping the blame ball on her side of the court.

"Yes, I'm sure. Are you going to put it on or not?"

I shrugged and clicked the collar on. Tiffany swabbed the control potion around the thing and then started sending impulses at me - she was a lot stronger than Cecilia and a bit more nuanced than Cassie in terms of exerting control. Thus, I was able to loose my own control and let her commands flow through me, controlled, but not powerless against the control, waiting for the moment to take advantage. She had me start by sorting a big stack of the doctor's papers by date - but she hadn't specified which date. I watched on as the lower centers of my brain chugged along, sorting the papers based on the first date to appear on the page.

"You idiot, you're sorting them by… shit…" Tiffany said, grumbling when she realized my error had been her own fault - I'd done exactly as she'd commanded. She was in control, so whatever happened was now her fault.

She corrected her order and commanded me around for another fifteen or twenty minutes, having me pick all the lint from the carpets, see to the dusting and polishing of the contents of the display shelf, and putting all completed reports in the appropriate Send bin. I did as she said, not once seizing control of my body back, and eventually Tiffany's attention started to wander. She was overconfident in her control, sure that I'd do exactly what she asked, no more and no less. To her credit, she didn't have me debase or humiliate myself. She didn't have me do anything disgusting or dangerous. She simply had me do the repetitive tasks she didn't feel like doing - I'd have done the same thing if I was in charge, albeit without a collar. I almost felt bad for taking advantage of her like I was about to. Almost.

Once Tiffany's attention was off of me, I took control for small interludes without her noticing. Across our shift, I managed to examine the top of Doctor Sauvage's desk as well peek in all of the unlocked drawers. I examined the shelves and their contents, spots on the floor with more or less wear, the location of each and every cabinet that was locked, and identified which of the doctor's old and frightening-looking artifacts were genuine and which two were mere museum replicas (not the ones that you'd expect!). I even peeked in when Tiffany opened the locked cabinet that housed Emi's potion and, notably, not Michelle's book. I squinted, wondering if the doctor could notice that a single behavior plan was missing... I thought I could see the gap between Tessa Woolford and Vanessa Yan, but it might plausibly be the chance placement of the volumes.

I took a good gander and, before Tiffany turned back around, had resumed my duties at her behest, organizing school activities records and marking pages that needed duplicates for their secondary folders (for instance, rock climbing and crew had their own folders, but there was an 'outdoors activity' file that had both). The doctor took extensive notes on each student based on meetings with faculty coaches, as well as her own inspections around the campus, noting whose trajectory was in line with their behavior plan and whose needed nudging. I only took brief glimpses at each student's notes to avoid attracting attention (I gave my friends an extra second or so whenever I spotted their papers) and had the sorting job mostly done when Doctor Sauvage returned from her supper. She settled her briefcase by the desk, gestured for me to move the papers out of her way, and then frowned when I didn't respond. I almost had, remembering only at the last instant that I was being 'controlled' and had to follow Tiffany's impulses. The doctor took the collar between her fingers and pulled back hard enough to move me away from her desk.

"What is this? Tiffany - did you put this collar on Natalie?"

"No," Tiffany said - with enough hesitation that Sauvage knew she was being misleading.

"Don't play games with me, Tiffany Chalmers. Did you have Natalie put the collar on?"

"...Yes," she said quietly. "I... she wasn't doing anything right! I had to."

"Had to? Tiffany, it is your job to train Natalie in what to do, not to control her like a poppet. If you think Natalie is incapable of the job, I will need to revisit her suitability as an assistant... as well as your suitability as a student leader. What do you say?"

Tiffany chewed her lip and glanced in my direction. "I'll try to train her more."

"Good." The doctor nodded. "Let's hope you're successful. Now take that collar off her and put it back wherever you found it. I won't have you using that thing as a crutch."

Ring the bells - Doc Sauvage on my side of things for once. The event was so notable because it was so rare - and it gave me an opening. Adorable little Natalie Bryce was fast becoming a Machiavellian manipulator. To wit: I began a subtle campaign to instill doubt in Tiffany Chalmers. She might have been watching me like a hawk at the moment... but with the right pressure, she'd be watching her own ass too closely to keep much scrutiny on me.

+++++

"Can't you give a drop of blood?" Michelle asked.

I rolled my eyes - a gesture I'd re-adopted in my second teenage-hood. "It has to be your blood, Michelle. It’s a blood pact. And it has to be a blood pact stronger than the one your parents made."

It was pretty clear that Michelle had a fear of needles - a common-enough phobia, but inconvenient when I needed a drop of her blood. I needed it to seal her new behavior plan. I'd spent about thirty hours across a week cramming to learn all of the remaining symbols, figuring out how they worked together, and had nearly gone insane trying to wrap my head around the almost-inscrutable complexity of Doctor Sauvage's plans. I had to create new plans that wouldn't directly contradict the old ones. I agonized over the ordering of the new magical commands to create a new, altered behavior plan for my friend. Exhaustive work, a week of near-sleeplessness, risking my ass and my sanity for her, and Michelle couldn't even give me a drop of blood?

"Can't I just, I dunno, keep my eyes closed and you'll poke my finger?" she asked.

I shook my head and set the pin on her small palm. "The offering must be freely-given. You have to 'poke' your finger and press it to the page."

I was pretty sure the new behavior plan would work - I'd managed to gain access to a number of other plans in Sauvage's office. Those formed a sort of Rosetta stone for figuring out how the damn things worked. The breakthrough occurred during my assistantship shift after Doctor Sauvage ordered an audit of the Junior girls. As the senior assistant, Tiffany had gone about fetching all the behavior plans to notate and reorder. That meant audits for the Beginner girls would be happening soon after, so I had to get Michelle's book back into circulation ASAP. That forced my hand and kicked my butt in to fifth gear. Moreover, Tiffany, ever the overachiever, put it upon herself to catalog all of the plans, Advanced, Beginner, and Junior, instead of just the Junior plans under audit. That meant that, as she approached the third cabinet, she was about to discover Michelle's book missing.

That was a problem - fortunately, one that I'd come up with a solution for just that morning. During my morning magic lessons, I'd learned a new spell technique called 'interpolation'. It wasn't quite illusion, but it wasn't far off - it seamlessly filled in visual patterns so a subject wouldn't recognize missing details. It was a trick often used by thieves and museum curators - one and the same more often than you'd think. I didn't get the spell quite right, but the results turned out even better than I expected.

Tiffany had gone to the third locked cabinet and opened it with her little silver key. She read off the first few names. "Natalie, are you looking at the Junior names?"

"Yes, Tiffany," I said, waving the list.

"Okay... so let's start from the top..."

She'd started reading off names, starting with the S'es. Once she got to Michelle's missing page, our theft would be discovered... or at least they'd have to remake Michelle's behavior plan and launch a school-wide search for the thing. So I cast the interpolation spell at the little gap in the books - Tiffany would interpolate the missing name, and we'd all go home happy. Except my spell worked far too well - suddenly, Tiffany could only see the books that she expected to see, and they were all terribly out of order! Her interpolation, at the behest of my spell, and on account of her OCD-like anxieties, had just muddled up the names she saw in the cabinet...

"What the hell happened in here?" Tiffany muttered. She started rearranging the books, essentially at random - the names she saw and the names on the actual booklets didn't match up at all.

This was great news for me - as Tiffany arranged and rearranged the books, she transferred piles onto the doctor's desk as a placeholder. If she'd seriously looked at them on the desk, away from the interpolation zone, she'd have seen the real names and possibly discovered that something was afoot. But she only paid them an occasional glance. I got a lot more time with them; while Tiffany was distracted and agitated. I pretended to work at tidying the doctor's shelf, but was actually taking as much of a look at the books as I could get. I even managed to scribble down some of the symbol combinations (a wonderfully effective exercise for speed-symbols if I've ever seen one) onto some scrap paper, which I squirreled away in my blazer pocket. Those notes were the 'Rosetta Stone' I used to decipher and reorder Michelle's plan.

Doctor Sauvage came in twenty minutes later, spotted the disorganized cabinet (the interpolation having since faded), and chewed Tiffany out for getting her behavior plans outrageously out of order. Then she had me reorder them, as she had more important things for Tiffany to do. I almost laughed out loud, but instead, I nodded meekly.

"Yes, doctor," I said. More time with the books!

Within a day or so, I'd pored over the symbology of the behavior plans enough that I had a fair confidence in what I was doing. I wasn't sure it would do exactly what I wanted it to do… in fact, I was pretty sure we'd have to be satisfied with 'good enough'. But I was pretty sure whatever mistakes I made wouldn't inflict any horrible results upon Michelle.

"What do you mean 'horrible results'?" Michelle asked, understandably concerned.

I shrugged. "I won't turn you into a newt. I won't make things worse. But I might not get things exactly right. So... let's talk about what we can do."

Michelle's punishments had sucked the puberty right out of her. This was punishment from her parents, apparently, for her lascivious and destructive lifestyle as a young heiress. They'd thought to make her into an unassuming and virginal creature. They hadn't entirely succeeded - all of Michelle's memories and drives were still there, and she could be a real firecracker when the Bigs weren't around. But her drives were frustrated by a body that looked like an adorable twelve year-old's. By a stroke of good luck, Doctor Sauvage (or possibly the headmistress) had crafted an exact progression of symbols for removing the effects of puberty... all of the heavy lifting was done for me. I just had to reverse the process. Only I couldn't… restoring Michelle would be quite obvious and would void the contract with her parents. If she was suddenly bursting with curves and sexuality, then the faculty would know that something was amiss and there would be a lot of unwanted attention. But I had a workaround for that.

Michelle and I nestled in the C-wing lounge after hours, her behavior plan before her and my silver needle at the ready. We were ready for the blood pact to seal the new plan, but she had reservations - reservations about needles and about the plan.

"The solution is pretty simple," I reiterated. "We make you twelve."

"I'm already twelve," Michelle sighed. "That's the whole problem… I'm almost seventeen years old in a twelve year-old's body."

"No," I said slowly. "You aren't twelve. You might look like you're twelve. You might feel like you're twelve. But you're almost seventeen. And that's bad news - seventeen year-olds don't go through puberty… but twelve year-olds do. So what we do is add a nice big dose of puberty whenever you're punished, but we swap it out with age. You won't look much different at all, but your body will be actually younger. That way, you can age forward again and be as hot as before. Hotter, even."

"Hotter?"

I shrugged. "Probably. All of the good bits about puberty on top of the major cutes that your plan gave you, and we can cut out the bad stuff."

She nodded thoughtfully. "It sucks that I can't just zap back to how I was, but I guess that wouldn't actually accomplish anything if the administration is just going to undo it." She considered the needle for a moment. "I really have to poke myself?"

"I'm afraid so. I only need a drop, but it has to be you that gives it."

Michelle held her breath, looked away, and jabbed her finger. Even then, it was a small drop. I pricked my own finger, producing a bead of blood, and we both pressed our blood drops against the page, thus sealing the pact. All of my symbolwork shifted, becoming glossy and permanent as the pact settled firm. I steadied myself to weather the pulse of power it produced, and even uninitiated Michelle seemed to feel it.

"So I guess I just have to get in trouble now?"

"First we have to get your book back in the shelf before anybody notices it's missing. And we haven't got much time for that. Then you can get into all the trouble you want."