Belting

The Canteen was a huge building whose ground floor was given over to the feeding and watering of the students of Gorillamumps, the premier school for the supernatural in the country.  Of course there were other, lesser, schools that liked to bill themselves as schools of wizardry or magic academies or sorcerous colleges, but in all of them death was only seen as an occasional problem, perhaps when a lesson got a bit out of control or a teacher was unfortunately possessed.  At Gorillamumps death was considered a criterion of admission and possession an occupational hazard.  If you couldn’t handle a minor possession every few months then you probably weren’t fit to study at Gorillamumps, and many of the students and faculty had either conquered death at least once or at least considered him the kind of old friend you invite in for a sherry and cigar before tossing a coin to see who got a piece of whom.

The ground floor of the Canteen was called the Refectory and both Lunch and High Tea were served there.  Usually there would be about eight hundred students in attendance over a period of three hours, and they would be divided among four halls capable of seating about a hundred people each.  The first floor was Breakfast and Banqueting and served a meaty buffet in the morning and hosted parties and banquets of all kinds in the evenings.  The floor above that was the cocktail reception lounge that students were generally disinvited from, and the top floor and the basement were the actual kitchens themselves.

Jermander folded his cloak tidily around him, aware that it made him look skinny and malnourished with his pale skin, his jet black hair and his sunken, reddish eyes.  However, he was a vampire and he had a certain amount of reputation to keep up.  Compared with the young mummies who were gathered in a little clique of tatty bandages and dusty clouds near him, and the Dread Young of Shub-Niggurath who were literally indescribably horrible to look at he was exceptionally presentable.  The Canteen was full to bursting.  All the tables had been moved to the side and the chairs stacked outside in the quad to make room for the gathering, and at a guess he thought that there were nearly two thousand people crowded in there.  There were still more outside; some sitting on chairs that they’d unstacked and others looming, lurking, floating or shadowing as was their particular demeanour.  It was Beltane Eve, and they were all gathered to receive a piece of Beltane cake and see who who receive the Beltane Carline.

There was a murmur as something moved near the staircase, but it turned out to just be a dislodged Right-aligned Ancient of MuMu tumbling in slow motion.  Jermander sighed quietly and relaxed a little.  He was here more because it was an ancient ceremony and part of the school’s tradition than because he wanted to be.  Four days earlier they’d had the equally ancient and venerable festival of Belting, where the older students spent the day attempting to catch the younger students and beat the crap out of them.  Jermander had planned to spend the day hanging out with the Labouring Zombies as they were slow and tended to go to pieces when chased, but they’d given him the slip around lunchtime and he’d suddenly found himself surrounded by a small mob carrying pitchforks and burning torches and his ancestral fears had paralysed for just too long.  He winced a little as he relaxed too much and his bruises started aching again.

Another murmur, and this swelled suddenly into cheers as the Butler led a procession of cooks down the stairs, each bearing aloft a Beltane cake, iced in white and yellow, to present to the gathered throng.    The Butler was in all his desaturated glory, the black-and-white of his shirt and suit pulling the colour from everything around him and making the whole world seem a tiny bit flat and two-dimensional.  His grey skin was almost like a rip in reality, and his eyes glittered like very pure diamonds caught in the glare of burning thermite.  He led the cooks through a widening gap in the throng, and came to a halt in the dead centre of Jermander’s room.

“The Beltane cakes!” he proclaimed, his voice bouncing off the ceiling and descending on the crowd.  “First come, first served!”

There was a surge as the students and faculty alike pushed forward, each eager to receive a slice of Beltane cake.  Jermander, not actually pushing himself, was nonetheless pushed forward by the people around him, and he could hear eager panting and yelping, the gasping rasps of the young mummies’ excitement, and the ultrasonic scream of the undines.  For a moment it was all a little too much and he felt his teeth lengthen in his jaw and his nails harden and start to grow as well.  Then suddenly he was in front of a cook and he forced himself back to a more human state.  The cook silently thrust a piece of cake at him, skewered on the end of a thin, lethal-looking boning knife, and he pulled it free.  Then he was jostled aside and, like a cork bobbing on the waves, gently ejected from the Canteen and outside.  There he took a moment to look around and saw Banx, a Left-aligned Ancient of MuMu who was in his Religious Studies class, standing with a couple of her house-mates.  He sauntered over, and noticed that they all had pieces of cake too.

“Any luck?” he said casually, and received a deathly stare from a green-eyes Ancient of MuMu who was pulling her cake apart between fingers as long as his forearm without apparently eating any of it.

“It’s not lucky to find the Beltane Carline, Jern,” said Banx.  She lifted her piece of cake to her ear and shook it thoughtfully.  “Quite the opposite, really.”

“What do you mean?”  Suddenly the piece of cake in his hand seemed surprisingly heavy.

“Well, whoever gets the Carline gets set on fire, don’t they?  To appease Bel the sun-god, and beseech him to rise in the morning.”

“We don’t have much truck with sun gods,” said Jermander.  “Vampires and sunlight don’t always mix that well.”

“He’s also a fire god,” said Banx.  She poked a long finger through the middle of her cake and licked it when it came out of the other side.

“Nuh-uh, we have less interest in fire gods,” said Jermander.  “Does he do anything like darkness, prayers for the desperate, animating cold bone in the tomb or preserving flesh from corruption?”

“Pretty much just a burning god,” said Banx.  “Jer, why have you taken a slice of cake then?  If you get the Carline it’ll kill you.  We will set you on fire.”

“Not you, Banx,” said Jermander, but there was worry in his voice.  “We’re friends, right?”

“Classmates,” said Banx, “and yes, we would.  It’s important that Bel is appeased.  It brings the summer back, and it’s not like the ordinary humans do much of it any more.  The best they do is pretend.”

The green-eyed Ancient made a noise like a harp gently destringing itself, and Banx nodded.  “Well, some of them do it right, but only if they’re not caught by other humans.  It’s only really placed like Gorillamumps that still get it right, and that’s important these days.”

“Crap,” said Jermander with feeling.  “Swap you?”  He held his cake out.

“Hah,” said Banx.  “You already know that I haven’t got the Carline though.”

“You’ve poked the cake a bit, but it could still be hiding in there,” said Jermander.  “Why aren’t you eating it anyway?”

“Allergic to eggs,” said Banx.  “Oh, look!”

On the other side of the quadrangle there was a sudden cry and then a young mummy leapt for the wall and tried to climb the side of the building.  Its bandaged hands gave it no purchase on the old stones though, and it fell back, only to be seized promptly by the crowd.  A moment later and there was a whumph and then a growing empty circle around a young mummy set on fire and burning like a pitch torch.

“They found the Carline,” said Banx.  “I wonder if there was only one this year?”

Kneecappings

"What happened to that stagnant Undine?" asked Bastulia as she and Jermander walked towards their next class.  Jermander looked sideways at her, his eyeballs sliding far enough round in his head that he could see the details of the edge of his eye socket quite clearly.  Bastulia didn't look back at him, focused on gliding softly above the ground, seemingly just throwing the question out there as casual conversation.  Jermander didn't believe it for an instant.
Bastulia was a baseline-adjusted Ancient of Mu-mu and claimed that this explained why she floated permanently two inches above any solid surface, and that she was compelled to ignore all base things and spend her time involved only in higher thoughts.  Jermander hoped that this was true, as most of his thoughts when he saw her were really quite base.  She was stunningly attractive, literally so, and when she turned a corner without sufficient advance warning people would faint and collapse as they saw her.  Jermander rather liked watching people collapse as he approached, even if it was because of who he was with.
"Nicky?" he said, trying to sound equally casual.  "I don't know, I think maybe she spent too long out in the sun and just evaporated.  Don't you see her in your swimming lessons?"
Bastulia pouted at him.  "They're not going well, you know!  Water's just a little bit too solid, I can't seem to sink into it properly and splash about like everyone else.  And... well, it's wet, isn't it?"
"Isn't that why you go swimming with the undines though?"  Jermander had, like just about every other male and lesbian female at Gorillamumps, tried to find a way to spy on these swimming lessons, and had been easily defeated by the geases laid around the swimming complex.  "Can't they shape the water around you so you can practice?"
"Meh."  Bastulia made a gesture with a hand indicating her dislike for the idea.  "It's not like it's a skill I'll ever need.  How come you don't go swimming?"
"Mostly the running water thing," said Jermander.  "I can't cross running water, it's a family thing.  I'm fine with holy symbols, use holy water as aftershave, and love garlic, but running water just does something to my feet and I can't get over it.  So swimming's only really useful for the ocean or swimming pools, and my country's landlocked."
"You should come to my lessons."
"I tried!"  The words were half out of his mouth as he realised what he was saying and he desperately cast around for an explanation.  "I... I..., look, this is kind of embarrassing...."
"You can tell me," Bastulia said, stopping and looking into his eyes.  Jermander hoped this counted as a connection and not just mesmerism, which he also had trouble controlling around her.
"I said that maybe I should go to your lessons as well... because undines aren't running water!"  He smiled at her, aiming for self-deprecating while cheering himself on inside his head.  "I said that we had similar aversions so it might make sense to help each other overcome them."
"Well, that should be alright, shouldn't it?"
"They said that the undines didn't like the idea," he said, truthfully.  "They're a bit edgy around vampires apparently."
"Oh.  Well, that's a shame," said Bastulia turning and starting to glide forward again.  "That might have been a bit more fun."
They walked and glided on in silence for a few seconds, with Jermander wondering how to restart the conversation again, and then Bastulia spoke.
"But no, your Undine friend isn't at my lessons.  I thought maybe she had a problem with me because I've been talking to you."
"No!  No, no problem," said Jermander quickly.  "I honestly haven't seen her lately, I thought she was hanging out with the other undines more."
"That's curious," said Bastulia.  "Do you think we should tell anyone?"
"No," said Jermander flatly.  "This is Gorillamumps.  Students disappear from time to time, and that's just part of the learning process.  I mean, last month, Mouldyvort got staked by that Pirate Captain and the school barely acknowledged it."
"Yes," said Bastulia slowly, "but the Pirate Captain did say it was an accident.  He didn't know that Mouldyvort was hiding in his room, and he did have a wooden leg."
"It's still a death," said Jermander.  "And that young mummy, two months ago, who got all unravelled playing netball."
"Yes, that was gruesome in a dusty, smelly kind of way," said Bastulia.  "There's not really anyone to apologise to in that case though, is there?"
"They did put up a nice little memorial stone in the Garden of a Thousand Deaths."
"All student deaths?"
"Uh-huh."
They had arrived now at the Old Stone Lecture halls and workshops complex.  Bastulia looked up at the ancient stone building and shivered, possibly a little dramatically.  Jermander liked the way she moved when she shivered though.
"What class is this?" she asked.
"Kneecappings," said Jermander, holding up two lump hammers.  "Want to borrow a hammer?"

Mrs. Rancipopple

Mrs. Rancipopple was talking to the yeast.  The yeast was talking back, though rather slowly.  It seemed to be a poor conversationalist, but that wasn't stopping Mrs. Rancipopple.  It had taken her thirteen years to learn how to cast this spell, and she was going to make the most of it while she could.
Jermander sighed.  Like most of the rest of the class he was bored; talking with yeast was a trivial application of the spell, which allowed a person to converse with anything that presently had a mind.  Some of the lecturers at Gorillamumps had become legendary for their uses of the spell: they'd spoken with the nascent crystalline minds of mountains, they'd spoken with the titanic, pattern-obsessed mind of El Niño, and they'd even managed to talk with the hive mind of a hornet swarm.  And here he was, sat in a crumbling classroom in a draught, listening to Mrs. Rancipopple talk to yeast.
Mrs. Rancipopple was not one of the great minds of Gorillamumps, and was largely employed so that the careers master could point to her and hold her up as an example of what would happen to you if you didn't apply yourself to your studies and pass your exams.  She was also, though she quite possibly didn't know it, one of the first lines of defence at Gorillamumps: in the event of a supernatural intrusion or a supranatural attack she was considered a disposable unit who could be used as a shield, a distraction, or a sacrifice.
"Have you reproduced today?" asked Mrs. Rancipopple, seeming engrossed in her conversation.
"Have you?" whispered Jermaner to the Young Mummy sat next to him.  The Young Mummy tried hard not laugh, and ended up shaking tomb dust everywhere, causing the Fungi of Yuggoth behind him to start sneezing, and everyone else to look at it, trying to work out where its nose, or even its mouth was.
"Pay attention, students!" snapped Mrs. Rancipopple looking up from her yeast.  The answers to these questions will form part of your exam.  What... What is that noise?"
"H'brr'k, miss," said Nadine, one of the left-aligned Ancients of Mu-Mu.  The Fungi from Yuggoth held a wet, dripping appendage up in what might have been an apologetic fashion, but actually sent chills of horror through everyone who looked round at it.  "He's sneezing."
"Swearing," said Mrs. Ranipopple.  Everyone stopped looking at H'brr'k and looked at her instead, mostly puzzled.  "She's swearing," said Mrs. Rancipopple, looking slightly puzzled herself.  "Quite... inventively."
"You can understand its sneezing?" asked Jermander, knowing that he probably shouldn't draw attention to himself.  The faculty were still trying to track down who had let Taurus loose on the campus last Janusday.
"Her," corrected Mrs. Rancipopple.  "And yes, she's not sneezing, she's swearing.  Something about... mummy dust all over her good frotcockle."
"What's a frotcockle?" asked Nadine.  The whole class was entranced now.
"I don't know how to translate it," said Mrs. Rancipopple.  "It's like... it's like vagina-carrier, but you have to have a frot first, and it needs to be cold enough that it's partially collapsed, and needs to be far enough away from a knertrudle that there's no frilletting, just cockling."
"You're making this up," said Nadine, but she didn't sound certain, and the Fungi from Yuggoth was undulating in a way that made everyone feel nauseous but was generally agreed to be their way of saying Yes, yes.
"No," said Mrs. Rancipopple.  "The yeast has always been able to understand the Fungi, it thinks she got a lovely fruiting body."
The silence in the classroom was thick enough to cut up and build igloos with.
"Um." said Nadine, trying to break it.  The word hung in the air as though unable to fall to the ground and slink away in shame.
"Oh my," said Mrs. Rancipopple.  "Have I just found a way of decoding Yuggothian?"
Somewhere on the other side of campus, as though resonating psychically, the careers master let out a scream of anguish.

Janus day

Jermander walked towards the Singleton Quad not really paying attention to the things around him.  He knew most of the buildings on the way, and they were predominantly lecture halls and administrative buildings, so there wasn't very much activity either inside or outside of them.  He automatically detoured away from the Dragonlair, where Gorillamumps's Chancellor lived, but everyone did that.  The Chancellor was much-rumoured, much-feared, and never seen.  He skirted a small cluster of Mushroom Pups, the young of the Fungi from Yuggoth.  They smelled strange to him, a kind of chemical, preservative odour that made him think of embalming fluid gone somehow wrong, and when he was a bat they had a completely different shape in sonar than they did to his eyes.  They were otherwise popular though, as they always had the latest versions of the latest gadgets.  Sometimes ahead of the shops.  Finally he felt the ground vibrating through his feet and knew that the Left-aligned Ancients of MuMu were having one of their late-night chanting sessions.  He sat down to think.
Janus day.  Janus day was tomorrow, and he'd not even considered what he was going to do for it.  He had a vague memory of someone, a teacher probably, telling him that Janus day was also known as New Year's Day, but he couldn't remember which of the many New Years that the humans celebrated it was.  He rather hoped it was the one with the colourful paper dragons and fireworks as it was very easy to find prey on that one, but he had a feeling it was one of the duller ones instead.  For the undead, and the students at Gorillamumps, Janus day was something else entirely.
On Janus day lots of the portals and doorways between worlds opened.  Exactly which ones opened depended on the year, or more precisely, the Earth's location relative to everything else.  There were some that always opened: the portals to the Astral Realm were hard to keep closed at the best of times and impossible on Janus Day, and the Elemental and Astrological Houses were just as keen.  Some hardly ever opened: the portal to the Minion Realm opened once every thirty years and so the Minion Market only happened that frequently too, but equally the doorway to the Throne of Elder Things only opened once every fifty-thousand years and no-one really wanted to be around when that next happened.  The problem was never so much things coming through, as being able to push things back, and fifty-thousand years was a long time to improvise a prison for.  They still had another twenty-thousand years to wait before they had a chance to push all the humans back to where they came from, after all.
Normally Jermander liked to celebrate Janus day by hopping up to the fourth dimension and meeting up with his extended family; in the fourth dimension they could all travel just a short distance from anywhere in the world and meet up, making it very convenient.  Sometimes he and his cousins would pop over to the Elemental realms and borrow a couple of Elemental Pets to let loose in the houses of enemies and friends as a little Janus day prank, and sometimes everyone would just drink heavily until closing hour, and then they'd try and remember the way home.  Someone would always get lost and end up on the wrong continent, and Jermander looked forwards to the letters from home telling him who'd done it this time and how long it had taken them to get back.
This year was his first at Gorillamumps though, and he really wanted to do something that would let the campus know that Jermander was here, that he was someone to keep an eye on, that he was going places.  The Blistermas Herpes prank was a good start, but he couldn't stand out in the open and claim that one, he'd have to let people work it out for themselves, and although underground praise was good, it wasn't enough.  What could he do for Janus-day that would be remembered for years to come?
Still musing he turned himself into a bat, and felt dizzy for a few moments.  Thankfully, this time it wore off, and he fluttered up to the eaves of the dormitory of the Left-aligned Ancients of MuMu and listened in to their conversation.
"...the cobordism of souls necessarily requires an unbarrelled space and a pointed group," said a deep, resonant voice.  There was a noise like the tapping of a wooden stick on paper.  "In fact, the homological integral over seven fractal dimensions doesn't exist unless the group is pointed."
"Are you really integrating with respect to a Solomonic Seal?" asked another voice, which though just as deep had feminine qualities.  "Is that completely justified?"
Hah! thought Jermander.  I should totally find a Solomonic Seal and let that loose on the campus!
A moment later he fluttered down from his perch in the eaves and transformed back into himself on the lawn.  As usual, his clothes transformed back with him but in piles on the ground, and he had to hurriedly dress himself before anyone looked out of a window and saw him.  But that was it, that was what he could do for Janus day.  Go the Astrological Houses and 'borrow' Taurus for the day and leave him on campus while he went drinking!

Staff surgeon

The young mummies were taking up most of the beds in the Gorillamumps infirmary.  From what Jermander could gather, eavesdropping on Nurse Hearse's conversation with the staff surgeon, Nurse Hearse had a bad case of corpse-worms and the young mummies had been playing pass the parcel and come a little undone in the process.  The way she talked about it made it clear that the woman had sex on the brain and probably shouldn't have been working in a school, but Gorillamumps was unusual in many respects, and the corpse-worms would probably keep her celibate, if not chaste, for a while.
"And what are you here for?" said Nurse Hearse sharply, stalking back into the examination room.  She was tall and thin and had incredibly long arms, so long that she could actually touch her ankles without bending.  Her face was pinched and red, partly because she washed it every time she walked past a sink and partly because she was partial to the medical ethanol.
"I don't feel well," said Jermander reflexively.  It was a lie, he had already accomplished what he'd come there for.  While Nurse Hearse had been attempting to seduce the staff surgeon and, from the sounds of things, he'd been beating her off with a chair, Jermander had opened the basic medications cabinet and added a few drops from the Blistermas Herpes vial to everything in there.  He wasn't sure what most of it was for, but he was pretty certain it would all have the desired effect.
"Be specific!"  Nurse Hearse glared at him as though he'd told her that he had wet himself.
"Well, just after dinner in the hall today I started having these headaches," said Jermander.  "So I thought I'd better go and have a lie-down, only then I started getting all itchy as well."
"Dinner in the hall?  You're a vampire?"  Jermander nodded to each staccato sentence.  "You're also an idiot.  Dinner today included a side of roasted garlic."  Jermander had to stop himself nodding to that and giving the game away.  "Go away."
He left, glancing through the small head-height windows in the ward doors at the young mummies.  He had no idea if mummies could catch herpes, so it would be interesting finding out.
The infirmary building was one of many erratically laid out buildings that made up the Gorillamumps campus; their erratic layout was something Jermander had learnt quite intimately just a few days earlier when he'd clipped a wing on the Engineering building and then crashed face first into the Modern Persecutions block.  He'd had dizzy spells every time he turned into a bat after that, but he didn't want to tell Nurse Hearse about that in case she came to ask why he was flying so fast through the buildings in the first place.  Or, he thought now, decided to treat him from the basic medications cabinet.
He walked down the steps at the front of the building, and turned left, intending to go to the Singleton Quad and try turning into a bat again.  The Left-aligned Ancients of MuMu had their dormitory there, and eavesdropping on their conversations always made him feel like he'd just heard something deeply significant and yet impossible to fully understand.  He was quite surprised, then, when he almost walked into the staff surgeon.
"Watch it," said the staff surgeon, then recognising Jermander, "Wotcha!"
"Uh, hi," said Jermander backing off a little.  The staff surgeon, who'd never apparently shared his (or possibly her, maybe its) name with anyone was about three feet tall, covered in long, thin, greasy hairs that seemed to move in breezes that no-one else could feel, and had eight arms, all of which terminated in surgical steel claws.  Sometimes an arm had more than one claw at the end of it.
"You were just up in her office, weren't you?  Sweet Mephistopheles but that woman's unstoppable.  Did she try it on with you?"
Jermander wondered for a moment how desperate he'd have to be before the staff surgeon would look attractive to him, and then he realised what he'd been asked.
"Oh, no!" he said, slightly shocked.  "I don't think she likes me very much."
"You must be the only one then," said the staff surgeon, giggling in a way that suggested he/she/it might actually be drowning in their own mucus instead.  "Lucky you."
"What are corpse-worms then?" asked Jermander, figuring that he might as well ask someone who knew.  When the staff surgeon had finished explaining Jermander was glad that he wasn't capable of vomiting, sorry that he'd asked, and felt that he wouldn't be getting too close to any of the zombies for a while.
"So, what were you in there for then?" asked the staff surgeon.  "You don't seem ill."
"Food poisoning," said Jermander.  "I ate some garlic at dinner."
"Yeah, right," said the staff surgeon.  "And I'm a monkey's uncle."
Jermander considered this until he realised that his silence was telling the staff surgeon exactly what he was thinking.  "No, really," he protested.
"Doesn't bother me," said the staff surgeon.  "Whatever you're up to, it just means work for me, and I enjoy my job."  He snipped his claws like maracas and laughed in his horrible, gurgling, drowning way as Jermander flinched.
"Enjoy Janus-day!" he called as Jermander walked away, trying to look vampire-cool and not really succeeding.  Janus-day.  How could he have forgotten that it was almost upon them?

Blistermas

"I'm cold," said Nicky, and when Jermander looked at her she was looking a little bit opaque.  Being an undine, a magical creature made entirely of water, this suggested that she was near freezing point.  Jermander shrugged.
"It's Blistermas, Nicky, it's bound to be cold.  Especially here at Gorillamumps, the campus has psychoactive weather you know.  Why don't you put a heater in?"  There were very few undines at Gorillamumps, but the clever ones – that is, all the ones that weren't Nicky – carried small electrical heating elements with them in the cold weather.  Like the element of an electric kettle they could dip them into their bodies and heat their water up quickly.
"I know the campus weather is psychotic!  I experience it nearly every day.  What other campus has regular sunshine to the point of inducing a drought?"
Jermander shrugged again, not really interested in correcting Nicky or pointing out that psychoactive weather reacted to the students' unconscious expectations.  The regular parching heatwaves that Nicky experienced were a consequence of everyone's dislike for her.
"Why are we out here?"
Jermander actually groaned, and since he was a vampire it was an impressive, deep, resonant groan.  "I told you Nicky, three times already.  It's Blistermas, and Old Man Vinegar does his rounds tonight.  If he finds anyone sleeping who hasn't left him a gift out he gives them Herpes.  I want to see how he does it.  I want to find out how he manages to get round so many people in just one night."
"Franchise."
"What?"
"It's a franchise, Jer, that's how he does it.  My uncles have been running the undine franchise for years now."
"A franchise.  So there's lots of Old Men Vinegar then? And... wow, that's why you don't have Herpes, isn't it?  I wondered how you'd managed to avoid it all these years."
"I don't understand," said Nicky.  "How did I manage to avoid what?"
"It's ok," said Jermander.  "I get it now.  So who's the local franchisee then, do you think?"
"Can we go in yet?  I'm cold!"
"No!  I want to find out who the franchisee is.  They must have the vials of Herpes all year round, they must have to keep them somewhere safe.  This is potentially useful information, Nicky."
"I can get you vials of Herpes from my uncles," she said, sounding sulky.  "We don't have to sit up here on this roof in the cold all night."
"It's not the same," said Jermander, though he was wondering if Nicky's uncles might not be a good back-up plan.  Do you think it's a student or a teacher?"
"Did you leave a gift out?" asked Nicky.  "You could just put paint or something on that.  My uncles hate it when undines try and booby-trap their Blistermas gifts."
"GPS tracker," said Jermander.  "But this is more fun, trying to catch Old Man Vinegar in the act."
"But it's co-o-o-o-old!"
Jermander was going to reply, but while he was thinking about what to say there was a distant crack and purple lightning licked the underside of the clouds.  Then there was a small sonic boom that rattled the tiles, and an ancient Rolls Royce Silver Phantom screamed from a silver portal and roared down to the campus grounds like a dazzling meterorite.  It levelled off just above the playing fields, and came to a halt at the door of the dormitory block.  There was another sharp crack as air rushed into the space where Jermander had been a second before and a whiff of the charnel house, and Jermander had turned into a bat.  He fluttered his wings and launched, accelerating downwards towards the car at a speed that would have ripped the wings off a normal bat.
"Don't leave me!" yelled Nicky, but she was too late, she was alone on the roof.
As Jermander whooshed past the car, not slowing down in case the franchisee saw what he was, he was gratified to find he'd timed things just right and the franchisee was getting out of the car, a sack in one hand that rattled as though it contained many glass vials.
"Myrilla Chinchilla!" he whispered to himself, realising too late that he was travelling too fast amongst the erratically-laid-out buildings of Gorillamumps.

Memento Mori

"I've got an app for that!"
Jermander looked over at Nicky, who was supposed to be doing their Poisons homework.  He harboured a slightly guilty hope that she would accidentally absorb some of the poisons that they worked with so that he could hang around with the cooler kids at Gorillamumps without his mum getting upset, but despite her natural klutziness, her trouble with the curvy letters of the alphabet, and her obsession with Harry Plotless films she seemed to be able to avoid poisoning herself.
"Got an app for what?" he asked, hating himself for talking to her when he was supposed to be solving horror-dimensional equations with pan-Lovecraftian coefficients.
"The book-thingy, here, says that this is a Memento Mori, and I've got an app for that already!  I don't need to make this poison!"  Nicky looked thrilled with herself.  She was an undine, a creature made of water, and when she was happy like this she threw off rainbows in random directions.  Jermander, a vampire, was not terribly keen on them as they burned his skin a little if they hit him.  He pulled his cloak around himself and regretted, not for the first time, that bats were incapable of directed thought about higher mathematics.
"A Memento Mori is a reminder of the transiency of life," he said, shuddering slightly as memories of his childhood came back to him.  "Father was very keen that we understood that when we were growing up, he always said that being creatures of unlife we needed to know what effect we would have on the lesser classes.  Well, actually, he always called them scum, but that's a bit de trop these days.  So anyway, whenever one of the estate workers died, whether they were shot in the back by some idiot who can't tell the difference between a grouse in the air and a man on the ground, or fell into the combine harvester when Father was playing jokes on people, or just caught a bad chill one winter which turned into galloping pneumonia and drowned them in their sleep, their bodies would be brought up to our house for a three-day vigil.  Which meant, really, that we'd have this dead body on the kitchen table for three days."
"How horrible!" said Nicky, her mouth hanging open and dripping slightly.  "How did you eat?"
"We just piled the bigger dishes on the body, and tucked the rest around," said Jermander.  "Except for the combine harvester guy.  We think he got quite a bit eaten actually, so we stuck some chicken carcasses in the coffin with him."
"Oh wow," said Nicky.  "I don't think I could eat a Memento Mori.  I'd chip my teeth."
"You've got teeth?"  Jermander's eyebrows disappeared into his hairline with surprise.  "I thought you filtered krill or something?"
"I have teeth for special occasions," said Nicky brightly.  "They're shiny!  But I'd definitely chip them on this app.  It runs on my phone, you know?"
"Let's see?"
Nicky passes her phone, a slightly corroded black smartphone with a scratched glass touchscreen and little colourful stickers on the back.  Jermander peered at it, and tapped hestitantly at the screen, eventually finding the right icon and bringing it to life.  It purred happily, a bell dinged and donged, and then the screen filled up with information.
"Oh right," he said, reading quickly.  "This is just a death-clock, Nicky, not a Memento Mori. It tells you when you can expect to die, based on your online data."
"When are you going to die then?"
"I'm already dead," said Jermander.  "I'm a vampire.  This thing expects me to have stopped trending on Twitter by the end of February, and to be... oh!  Staked through the heart, apparently, by the end of the century.  That's a tad brutal!"
"It says I've died three times already," said Nicky in a small voice.  "It said that voided the warranty."
"You're not dead though."
"That's what I keep trying to tell it!"
There was an awkward pose, broken finally by Jermander.
"The poison can't be a death-watch though.  Where's the text book?"  Nicky pushed it over, glad to be away from it.
"Oh right, this potion is just intended to force you to relieve parts of your life again, until you've moved on from it.  It doesn't actually kill you, but it looks like it'll hurt a lot."
"What should I do with it then, Jer?"
"Drink it?" suggested Jermander sitting down and sighing as he looked at his paper.  The Lovecraftian variables were writhing around and trying to hide.

Gorillamumps

It was assault day.  At any other school it would have been illegal, but at the Gorillamumps Academy it was mandatory.  Even notes from your mother wouldn't be honoured on assault day, and anyone failing to turn up on the day would be best off never turning up again, as the punishments for missing assault day were arguably worse than asssault day itself.
There were some rules though; as Gorillamumps was the premier destination for the offspring of the world's mighty and powerful undead, there were rules about the amount of assault that was allowed, and the degree of the assault.  The zombie children could be assaulted as much as you like, but not assalted or in any other way attacked with salt.  Fire was also out, not just for them but also the vampire kids, the young mummies, and the Sporelets of the Creeping Mould.  It was also banned for the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, but no-one at Gorillamumps would admit to having met any of the Dark Young, so it was still a questionable point as to whether any were currently attending.  Skeletons, ghouls, Gelatinous Cubs and flame-efts were all fair target for fire, though if you were daft enough to attack a flame-eft with fire you deserved the consequences of your actions.
Nicky, an undine, stared at the piece of plastic in her hand and wrinkled her face again as she tried to understand the rules of assault day.  Little droplets of water splashed from her onto the plastic and trickled off onto the ground.
"Oh give it up, already," groaned Jermander, her vampire best friend.  He was dressed, as usual, like a New Romantic, having decided that the eighties was an iconic era and fitted somehow with his parents Victorian ideals.  He ran a hand through an impossibly stiff quiff and adjusted his lacy white shirt a little.  "It's simple, right?  On assault day we all try and kill each other with things we know won't have a big effect.  No-one's really supposed to die, but it's good training for after school when we go out into the real world and run the risk of discovery all the time.  Like, you're probably fine because you dissolve in a rainstorm, but for me, if I'm caught creating an army of pawns or influencing politics through blood, I might have to disappear for a few decades.  And no-one's going to just let me walk out of there, or trickle down a drain into the nearest body of fresh-water."
"But... but it's not like this in the films!" protested Nicky.  "In the films the humans all want to go the magic schools and join in!"
"You've got to stop watching that rubbish and start paying attention in lessons," said Jermander.  "You've failed every class you've taken so far.  We're only friends because our parents are neighbours."
"You're so mean!"  Nicky dropped the paper, giving up on trying to read.  She'd mastered about half of the alphabet, but the curvy letters all looked much the same to her.  The teachers felt she was lazy, the headmaster thought she was probably retarded and regularly told her so, and even her best friend was mandated.
"Look, what's your plan for assault day?  Maybe if you work out now what you're going to do you won't end up as a claim on everybody else's list."
"I don't have a plan," said Nicky hopelessly.  "What's yours?"
"Tridents," said Jermander looking pleased with himself.  "I did a bit of research and I reckon that most years everything's just improvised, which is a bit silly if you ask me.  I mean, that gives the edge completely to the Gelatinous Cubs, the Werewolves, and the Dark Young."
"Are there really Dark Young at Gorillamumps?"
"Absolutely definitely.  There's too many kids get admitted to the Mental Injuries Clinic each month for there not to be."
"Oh.  What's a clinic, Jer?"
Jermander ignored the question and got back to his tridents.  "See, a trident can pin the skeletons in place, pin down the mummies without hurting them.  Well, much.  The werewolves will be fine being stabbed so long as there's no silver or wolfsbane... by the way, did I tell you that I spotted wolfsbane growing the herbarium?  I reckon one of the teachers is going a bit rogue again."
"Again?"
"Dear Gods, Nicky!  Haven't you noticed?  It's like your Harry Plotless films, every year another teacher goes completely bonkers and murders a few students before someone works out what's going on and brings him to justice."
"Is that what happened to Dr. Pumpkinhead?"
"No, definitely not.  He just got a bit carried away with his barbecue and decided his own head would taste good."  Jermander stared at Nicky, remembering that sarcasm was something she had trouble with.  A bubble slowly rose through her face and popped at the top of her head, and he wondered how she ever remembered to breath.  "Anyway, Nicky, I've got myself some stashes of tridents set up and I'm going for the record this year.  The current record is by Miimelak back when the Frost Giants were allowed in Gorillamumps; he stamped on seventy-nine students and only two of them were disqualified for being actual kills.  I reckon I can do eighty with a bit of planning."
"I don't think I can hurt anyone, Jer," said Nicky plaintively.  She gurgled a little; instead of crying she just fell apart and splashed on the ground, and the gurgle was a fairly reliable indicator that that was about to happen.
"I thought you'd say that," said Jermander quietly.  "Don't worry, I've got an ice trident as well.  I figure that if I get you cold enough you'll be stuck in one place too, but you'll be fine when you thaw out."
"What?"
"Oh, just meet me here tomorrow," said Jermander.  "Assault day starts at nine, so let's get here for eight-fifty-five, yeah?"
"OK," said Nicky sounding a little more cheerful.  "Maybe tomorrow will be fun after all!  We're a team!"
"Yeah," said Jermander, smiling with his teeth.  "Now, what kind of trident do you think will stop a Dark Young?"