Golden Girl: The Missing Piece (2)

9- We Pay For Our Crimes

Lines. Their detention, supervised by Professor Orion Vane, was to write lines. Now, that wouldn't have been so horrible but Vane was clever, he knew how to make something mundane into something dreadful.

Ember, Indigo, and Addy had walked into Professor Vane's classroom after dinner the next day, tense with dread as to whatever punishment the Dark Arts Defense professor was going to come up with for them. Honestly, they'd been incredibly lucky that Alaina hadn't taken away house points as well as assigning them detention. It was her house too, though, and so early in the term, Alaina probably hadn't wanted to diminish Horned Serpent's already minimal collection of points.

"Sit down," the man had ordered them without even looking up from his desk.

They sat down.

Ember wasn't scared of much. She'd seen too much danger, faced too many near-death situations to be scared of many things, many people. But even she had to admit that Professor Vane was intimidating. She'd thought the same of him last year, even as he worked with Trenchroot and Professor Sage to ensure her continued survival.

He was the one teacher here that no one messed with. Everyone was too scared of him to play pranks on him, even little inconvenient ones. Professor Vane got left alone. Of course, the man knew that students feared him, and he encouraged their continued wariness of him by coming up with increasingly creative punishments for whenever he was in control of detention.

The three girls stared as, still without even looking at them, the Professor waved a hand in their direction. Three pieces of parchment and three quills appeared on their shared table. Ember looked at her friends in confusion.

"You three are to write lines for the next hour," Vane stated, finally lifting his head to stare down the second years in front of him, "please write, 'I will never again break curfew.'"

He looked at his wristwatch, waited for a few moments, then said blandly, "You may begin."

A couple of things became clear very quickly. The first and biggest thing, was that despite the fact that he wasn't in Horned Serpent, Professor Vane was wickedly smart. In fact, Ember might use the word wicked in a number of ways. The quills that he'd supplied for them were heavy. Enormously heavy. Keeping her hand aloft as the time went by was harder than shooting down a fury. The quills weighed enough that Ember realized that the Professor had enchanted them to be that way. It took immense effort to drag the the utensil across the page, and even more effort to lift it and dip it into the ink well when she needed to.

That was another thing, the inkwell wouldn't sit still. It wasn't spilling or splashing everywhere, which the girls were grateful for, but it darted around the table like a hamster in a cage every time one of them reached for it. They tried several different methods, two of them grabbing for it at once, herding it towards the edge of the table... but nothing worked. It always evaded them. Eventually, Ember got a hand on it and the three girls frantically dipped their quills before the inkwell ripped free.

The other thing that nearly drove Ember crazy was that Vane had halted the progress of the clock on his wall. She had no idea how much time passed, and every time muscle memory bade her to look up at that clock, she found both clock hands sitting still.

It went on for what felt like hours, days. Of course, that could have also been the ADHD kicking in, but she could tell that Addy and Indigo were begging to get out of there just as much as she was.

"Alright," Professor Vane eventually said, finally looking at them again, "that's been an hour. Leave your pages on the table, you're free to go."

The speed in which those three girls left that room and darted upstairs couldn't be overstated. As they walked back up to the Horned Serpent tower, Ember shook out her aching hand and wrist, rubbing at the joints with her other hand.