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.