I Can Do As I Please (2)
I took a sip of my tea.
The subtle fragrance of the leaves spread through my mouth, and I kept the same posture I'd held from the very start, smiling pleasantly.
Gulp—
I could hear someone swallowing nervously, though I firmly believed it couldn't possibly be my fault. I was, after all, just a single professor in charge of Divinity Studies — surely a student had no reason to be tense around me. Dorothy, for her part, wasn't paying me the slightest attention, wholly absorbed in her own experiments and research.
In the flask set before her, a mysterious violet potion was bubbling away. That had to be the Frenzy Potion — the one destined to cause the explosion.
As I understood it, the Frenzy Potion was a battlefield stimulant that temporarily amplified both strength and speed, its defining drawback being a period of crippling lethargy once the effects wore off. What Dorothy was brewing was a dilute version of it — or, more precisely, a formula with reduced potency and, ideally, side effects kept to an absolute minimum.
The problem was that the Witch Mushroom she'd added to suppress those side effects triggered a violent explosive reaction when heated in the presence of one particular ingredient. Professor Henry knew this all too well — which was exactly why he planned to sneak that ingredient into her potion at night, when no students would be around.
Well.
Whatever the case, I would be the one preventing the explosion, so it was no longer a problem. All I had to do was stave off my boredom by watching her craft the potion.
Dorothy crushed a mana stone into fine fragments and stirred them into the mixture. She plucked a petal from a frostbloom, dropped in a single leaf, and studied the way the potion boiled. She tilted her head. Clearly not the reaction she'd been hoping for, she plucked another petal and added it to the flask.
And slowly, the potion began to change color. The deep violet liquid paled by degrees, shifting into a soft lavender. Dorothy nodded along with it, gathering up the next ingredient.
Before I knew it, an admiring sound escaped my lips.
"Oh…."
"…?"
At the sound of my voice, she lifted her head slightly and looked my way.
Ah. Our eyes met.
Worried I'd interrupted her, I gave a small nod behind my smile, and she returned the courtesy with a dip of her head before resuming her work.
Truth be told, it was fascinating. Fascinating — no, utterly captivating, if I'm being honest. Call it a sight more wondrous to my eyes than any magic or divinity I'd ever witnessed. There were plenty of novels out there showcasing wizards, priests, and swordsmen, but stories that showcased potions or magitech devices were rare as hen's teeth.
Even in my own novel, the Alchemy Department had served as nothing more than a stage prop for the explosion incident. After Lutz caught the culprit, the department never appeared in the story again. Not that I could blame myself — you can't write what you don't know. Filling out the fine details of potions and magitech gadgets would have demanded knowledge my empty head simply didn't possess.
And so, until the lecture hour drew to a close, I simply sat there and watched her make the potion.
Morning, in my laboratory. As always, a lovely voice rang through the room.
"Professor Niger, why do you keep disappearing somewhere every day lately?"
The problem was that the voice carried far more emotional charge than usual — and the look in Elia's eyes as she fired off the question was a touch frightening.
But honestly, I had no idea why she was acting this way.
"Ah, um. Has something happened?"
"Something happened? You! You haven't shown up at the lecture hall, you're never in the library — you've been slipping off somewhere every single day!"
Oh. So that was it. I had been spending the last several days watching Dorothy brew her potions in the laboratory.
"My apologies — I've developed a bit of an interest in the Alchemy Department lately, so I've been observing their experiments."
"And I'm the fish you've already caught, is that it?"
"Er… I'm afraid I don't follow, my lady."
It wasn't as though I'd been out committing any misdeeds, and I clocked out with Elia every day without fail — so what exactly was the problem? I was mulling this over as I looked at her, and her face had gone a little red.
"…?"
I tried smiling at her.
Her face turned a shade redder.
"You're… you're doing it again. Trying to win your way out with that face."
"That was not my intention, I assure you. Besides, the observing should be finished within a day or two."
After all, the explosion would happen tomorrow. Tonight, Professor Henry would slip the fire lizard's magic stone into her potion, and the moment Dorothy began heating it tomorrow, the flask would blow. The perfect opportunity to work on her favorability. And my days of watching the Alchemy Department's experiments — of watching Dorothy — would end with it.
With that thought, I smiled all the more deeply, and reached out to gently pat Elia's head.
Her face flushed crimson, as if on the verge of detonating.
A tiny murmur escaped her.
"This is… this is cheating…."
Dorothy Haffen was the treasured daughter of a provincial barony — hardly a wealthy one.
More precisely: a noble house so poor it was almost embarrassing to call it nobility at all. And she had, by sheer misfortune, been born a girl — and by equal misfortune, had never received the blessing of mana. A defective product, by the world's reckoning.
Of course, her parents — Baron Haffen and Baroness Haffen — loved her dearly and raised her with every tenderness they had. But love, unfortunately, does not soften poverty.
Such was the Empire. Look closely at its near-centralized reality, and beyond the capital and the great cities clustered around it, it was a painfully impoverished nation. The provincial cities were battlefields in all but name, garrisons standing watch against foreign invasion, and the baronial house that had made its home in such a place was a genuinely sorry sight — nothing more than a frail frontier nobility obliged to levy soldiers month after month.
Which was doubtless why she had studied with such ferocious desperation, thrashing about in search of anything that might make her useful. The longing to escape poverty — that must have been the engine of it. Though of course, the restoration of her house and the wellbeing of its people weighed on her heart as well.
"Dorothy! Let's go get lunch!"
The reverie that had filled my head scattered at the voice beside me. The potion bubbling away before my eyes had settled into a distinctly pale violet now. A Frenzy Potion with reduced side effects. If this could be brought to mass production, wouldn't the soldiers dying on the battlefields get to live just a little longer?
That was what I thought.
I doused the flame of the small burner and looked up. There, as always, sat the priest in the shadowed corner at the front of the lecture hall, tea in hand. Our eyes met, and he set down his cup and spoke.
"It's a lovely sight, Sister, watching you so absorbed in your work."
And he wore a kind smile.
I answered the priest-professor with a little laugh.
"And you're a lovely sight yourself, Professor — so very handsome."
Unlike certain people who haven't washed in days and look an absolute fright.
I swallowed that thought and followed my friends out of the laboratory. We settled into our seats at the dining hall and began to eat — and as always, my friends, more interested in conversation than in their food, found their topic and started right in. Naturally, the subject of the last several days had been, as ever, that priest-professor.
"Dorothy, I've been thinking about this every day lately — Professor Niger really is handsome, isn't he?"
"How many days have we been having this exact conversation? You said it just yesterday, Lacey."
The dialogue circled like a broken record. Her voice from yesterday — so, so handsome — was still vivid in my ears, yet today it carried on as though it were simply obvious.
"But… there was never a priest that good-looking in the city where I grew up!"
"That's… fair, actually."
It wasn't a point I could argue. The temples of the provincial orders were tiny affairs, staffed by nothing but priests grown old and gray. And Lacey was supposedly a merchant's daughter from a decently sized city — if even that place had no priest on Professor Niger's level, well.
"Look at the other girls, though. Ever since Professor Niger showed up, every single one of them comes in washed every single day! And the boys must have noticed, because they've gotten a bit tidier too."
At that, I turned my head and looked around at the students. The backs of the girls' heads — which, any other week, would have been unmistakably tangled and greasy — looked terribly unnatural. Every head of hair hung neatly in place.
And the friends sitting around me were somehow….
"Lacey… you too? No, wait — it's not just Lacey. Rie and Sage, you're both fresh as daisies."
"Ahaha… well, going days without washing is just a little… you know…."
"Ahem… Dorothy, I think maybe you're the odd one out…."
One and all, my friends turned their heads away with sheepish grins.
So that's why everyone's hair looked so soft and clean lately.
No. Wait. Until last week they were all skipping baths for days on end, busy-ness as the excuse — and now they had the nerve to talk?
Though if I'm being strict about it, for me it wasn't an excuse. I truly had been too buried in research to spare even the time to bathe. But still — was I the only one who went around unwashed?
Even as the thought crossed my mind, my friends' chatter showed no sign of stopping.
"Oh, right! And Professor Niger hardly ever looks at anything but you, Dorothy!"
"That, I can definitively call a misunderstanding."
There was no world in which a man like that was looking only at me. When I flatly denied it, Lacey tilted her head and turned to the others.
"Hmmm, but every single time we glance over at him, he's always looking your way. Am I wrong?"
"Oh, I think she's right. Whether he's watching Dorothy or Dorothy's potion — his eyes are always on you."
"Same here!"
My friends nodded in unison, wearing envious, impish smiles, falling over themselves to tease me.
At their reaction, I let out a long, slow breath and prepared to rebut. After all, even supposing he were watching me, there could only be one reason for it—
Oh.
"Hold on… he's not watching me because I'm the only one who doesn't wash… is he?"
"Um…? N-no, come on… th-there's no way that's it…."
Lacey's voice was trembling ever so slightly. Having heard my panicked speculation, it seemed she too had begun to harbor the very same doubt.
There was no way I was the only student in this hall he was staring at for smelling like an unwashed rag.
No way. Surely not.
Before I knew it, my head had sunk all the way down. My face — and my ears — had gone scarlet.
I was famously obsessive about success, but I was still a woman in the full flower of her youth. Even mid-thought, I could have sworn I caught the sour whiff of old sweat.
Tonight. I'm absolutely bathing tonight….