Daily Story 161: A Quality Education

The door opens to an endless hall of screaming skulls, dark catacombs where every one of the thousands of bones paving the floor and framing the walls pulses with a dark malevolent energy. Definitely not my chemistry class. I close the door and look around for help, but the only other students around are years ahead of me and can't be bothered and so I head back downstairs to get my bearings. There's a map of the campus on the wall, covered in arrows and dotted lines showing which hallways are connected. I locate the 'YOU ARE HERE' dot (worryingly close to the one that says 'HERE THERE BE DRAGONS') and try to trace a line to the chemistry hall. Midway there one of the lines on the map shifts, and I storm off in frustration.

This entire school is bullshit, some sort of in-joke designed to make the new kids feel stupid. I spend half my time just trying to figure out where my classes are, because some joker thought it would be a good idea if walls and staircases rearranged themselves randomly. Here's a hint: that's a terrible, terrible idea. Not whimsical, not amusing or clever - terrible. It's the fifth day of school and I still can't locate most of the rooms on time. Worst of all is that sometimes I can't go to bed either, because the dorms were put together by the same lunatic as the rest of this place. I have to give a password to some stupid magic painting to get in, and it's almost never there. The frame is, yeah, but the subject of the painting is nowhere to be found. Like I said, it's bullshit.

Don't even get me started on the safety issues - I mean, aside from the obvious problems with having the architecture shifting around you (particularly dangerous on the stairs) there's a huge tentacled monster in the lake. There are plants all over campus that are not only ambulatory but aggressive carnivores. There are dangerous potions and experiments just laying around. But you know what? Let's pretend that all of that is completely safe and secure. The whole school is covered in Nerf and bubble wrap and nothing could possibly harm me... there's still the other students. Picture a place where hundreds of teenagers walk around with loaded weapons constantly at the ready. These kids can suffocate you with a glance, hurl you head-first into a brick wall, set you on fire - all with the flick of a wand. Nobody has a problem with this but me.

Also, there's no cell reception.

When I do find my classes I can hardly ever get magic to work. After the second day I rearranged my schedule some to get rid of Transmutations and Divination and replaced them with algebra and high school English - both of which are considered electives. I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm not supposed to be here at all - the headmaster of the school looked really confused and embarrassed when I showed up and he's a total ass so it wouldn't be surprising if he messed up the paperwork. He has students do most of it, as well as anything else that's his responsibility. Rumor has it he even sent three of them off to deal with some terrorist or something that would normally be his problem... I'm a little foggy on why the school in general or the headmaster in specific would be hunting down terrorists, but I do know that the kids were only second-year students and they came back in urns.

I seriously have to transfer out of here.