Chapter Sixteen
A Place of Comfort

 

After doing their homework, they were shown to their dorms. Because of the difference in sizes between the various familiars — and apparently many of them enjoyed sleeping in their animal forms — the Familiar dormitories were built in the kind of spaces that would give your average geometry teacher a headache. The front doors were the same as the communal room, varying in sizes and locations. After that, however, things went sort of… sideways. It was one of the first things Jonathan noticed. It was because he was standing on the ceiling. Sarah looked up at him. 

“So, where do you want to stay?” she asked, as if one of them being upside down was completely normal. She pointed to her left. “Boys dorms are over there.” She pointed up and to the right. “Familiar dorms up there.” She pointed somewhere behind her. He looked over (under?) her shoulder, and saw a hallway that seemed to curve slightly, while also being completely straight. It hurt his head to look at it. “Individual rooms down there.” She put her hands on her hips. “You won’t be starved for choice, at the very least.”

“Wait,” Jonathan said, and he took a careful step, steadying himself. “Am I the one on the ceiling, or are you?” Sarah cocked her head and gave him a sneaky grin. 

“Yes,” she said. 

“Fine,” he said, sticking his tongue out, “be that way. So… are the Familiar dorms mixed? That seems… Um…” He blushed slightly, not really wanting to elaborate on why that felt like a really weird idea to him. Sarah raised an eyebrow, daring him to continue. Wisely, he didn’t, instead raising an eyebrow right back and tapping his foot. 

“Yes,” Sarah finally said, relenting, “the Familiar Dorms are mixed, but there’s all kinds of spells to keep people from getting up to things.” She walked over to one side of the room, to a winding staircase. As she went up it, the staircase folded in on itself, and Jonathan felt himself go cross-eyed trying to follow it. Then, she was right side up, and standing next to him. “Come on,” she said, “let me show you.”

He followed her to the door, and as they approached, he noticed a little sign next to the door. There was a little paw-mark on it, and a hand symbol with a red line through it. “That’s pretty clear,” he said, and opened the door. Immediately, the floor approached him rapidly. Well, that was also pretty clear. Being in animal form past this door was mandatory, it seemed. Well, he enjoyed being a cat, so there. He enjoyed being Emily again.

“C’mon!” Sarah said, wagging a big fluffy white tail as she walked through the room. There were various alcoves and constructs and large boxes. In many of them, he saw sleeping animals. Large dogs sleeping in what looked like a box filled with pillows. Tiny birds snoring on perches in the rafters. There was a snake curled up into a wicker basket. 

“This…” Emily  said, looking around. It was all he could manage. The place had simply taken his breath away. 

“Close your mouth, catboy, or you’ll catch a fly,” Sarah said with a chuckle, and she pushed his mouth closed with her nose. He hopped backwards in surprise, his tail swishing back and forth, betraying his flustered state. Sarah winked, turned away, and slapped him in the face with her tail. “So yeah, you pick a spot, and that’s where you sleep!” She ran over to a large dog bed and threw herself down. “Come join me!”

Emily blinked and looked around. That wasn’t allowed, was it? But on the other hand, there didn’t seem to be anyone in the room who was going to stop them. He took a few steps forward, jumped and was immediately stopped. He’d been stopped like that once before, a long time ago. It was when his parents had first installed the sliding glass door to their backyard when he was a kid. The invisible barrier he had smacked into went Bowwowwong.

“Oh goodness!” Sarah said and hopped up over to him. “I didn’t think you’d jump!” she said while giggling. “I’m so sorry! I thought you’d just walk into it and you’d just boop your cute little nose.”

“I’b bot cude,” Emily said, and sniffed a couple of times to clear his airways.

“You’re very cute, kitty cat,” she said. “Anyway, you, uh, you saw what happened there. Every spot you can sleep in around here has a spell that limits it to one person per. The individual rooms are much the same. There’s actually a line on the ground, if you squint, that marks your ‘room’. It lets people be near each other while still giving everyone their own space.” She stepped outside the circle. “You go,” she said, wagging her tail. 

Emily looked at her a little suspiciously, and then extended a single paw, testing where the invisible barrier had been. It went right through. One careful step. And then another. “Huh,” he said. 

“Yeah!” Sarah said, and she jumped up, putting her paws on the invisible barrier and looking at him. “See, pretty cool, right? There’s a couple of places in the room you can hang out with other people, of course, but you’ll have a space in here if you want it.”

“What about our luggage?” 

“Oh, when you go to a changing room or one of the single rooms, it’ll always be your room. ‘There’s only one room, and it’s yours’, essentially. If you need something from your luggage, you can always go to the private room. The boys' dorms are pretty similar, if you want to go and check those out.”

“Nah,” Emily said, looking around. “I like it here. Do you stay in here too?” 

Sarah nodded. “Sometimes. Sometimes I like to stay in the girls’ dorms just because, well, I have really cute pajamas and sometimes I just wanna wear those, yknow?”

“Uh, yeah,” Emily said. “No. No, I don’t, but I believe you.” Sarah giggled. 

“Do you wanna pick a spot yet?” She looked around and sat down. Her tail curled around her front paws, the same way Emily’s did. 

“Not… not yet,” Emily said. “I’m not that tired yet.”

“Okay!” Sarah said. “Just throw your lil backpack somewhere in a circle. It’ll mark it as yours. When you come back in, there’ll be a little magic sprite that’ll show you the way.” 

Emily did as was recommended. He looked around, and saw a spot up high with what looked like a little igloo made of something very soft. A few careful jumps later, as he still wasn’t one-hundred percent used to judging those, and he shrugged off the little tube-pack and carefully put it in the center of the igloo. “Mine now,” he said softly to himself, and then turned around and looked down. Sarah looked up at him excitedly, her tail swishing back and forth and one of her ears flopped. 

“C’mon!” she said. “Jump! I’ll catch you!”

Emily looked at her for a few seconds, and then decided to go for it. He threw himself off the perch. Simon would’ve been proud. He had hoped to pounce elegantly, but then halfway through he thought his tail was the wrong way and he tried to adjust, and it was only a tenth of a second later when all of his legs were pointed in every direction except down. Only his head did that. 

He landed face-first in a mountain of fur, at which point his instincts finally decided to kick in. The fur gave way some and he heard Sarah getting the wind knocked out of her. A second later, the two of them were lying on the ground next to each other, alternating between breathless giggles and going ‘oof’. 

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An annoyed bear, roughly the size of a large dog, stuck its head around the corner, blinking two bleary eyes. “Can you girls keep it down,” they said, “some of us are already trying to sleep.”

“Sorry!” Emily said and hurried upright. He and Sarah hurried down the hall, still laughing softly. When he got to the door, he looked around. “Where’s Simon?” 

“Talking to his Wizard,” Sarah said as they walked out of the dorm. Neither of them seemed in a particular hurry to turn back into humans. “The two of them seem to have a lot to talk about, so they decided to go for a walk. Speaking of which…” She nodded at the door. “Night’s warm. We don’t have to be in bed until eleven.”

“Really?” Emily said. 

“Yeah,” Sarah said. “There’s health monitoring spells across the village, so if someone is too stressed and having an anxiety attack or hurt, or if two people are getting into a fight, someone will be right over to intervene. As long as we don’t leave the village bounds, they really don’t mind where we go.” She swished her tail back and forth as she stepped back outside. “They give us a lot of freedom here.”

“Yeah, that’s really cool,” Emily said. “It’s not something I’ve had a lot of before,” he admitted sheepishly as he followed her. They walked down a little stone path that snaked around the various buildings of the little village. There were gardens around some of them, beautifully kept and buzzing with some late night moths who were getting some pollination in. “How is this place so well kept?”

“Gardeners,” Sarah said coyly. “But not, as you probably might be thinking, magic.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured. What then?” The village really was immaculately kept. 

“Well, there’s actually quite a few non-magical people who live here. Or older Wizards and Witches and Warlocks who don’t have access to a lot of magic anymore. The village is a kind of commune for them, too. There’s a few places where we’re technically allowed to go, but they’d prefer us not to, because it’s just… where they live.”

“Does the Headmaster pay them?” Emily asked. “How rich is he?”

“We don’t really know,” Sarah said, “and I’m not sure it matters. Magic makes everything kind of weird.”

“Who is he?” Emily said as they walked past several small cottages with thatched roofs. “Who are both of them? They’re both so…”

“Mysterious?” Sarah said. “Yeah, nobody knows. I’ve heard some people say he’s really old, but that he’s like, a descendant of a really wealthy noble family from up north and that he was disowned.”

“For blaaack maaagic,” Emily said. “I mean, that would make sense, right?”

“Yeah,” Sarah replied. “I figure it’s probably something like that. But then there’s, yknow, people who say it’s darker than that, and that he tried to claim his inheritance by force.” Sarah raised her eyebrows dramatically at him. “I doubt it’s something that cool, though.”

“Yeah”, Emily said. “And the Headmistress?”

“Lady Ellen?” They rounded a corner and came to a small little pond. There were a few sleeping ducks in it, bathing in the moonlight. “I don’t know anything about her.” She sat down by the water and let her front paw dangle over the edge. Emily walked up to her and sat down, pulling his legs up underneath himself, and scooted up against her. “So, what do you think about your first day, Jonathan?” 

“Emily,” he said as her tail curled up around him. “When I’m a cat I’m Emily. I wanna get used to that.”

“Okay,” Sarah said. “Well, what did you think of your first day?”

“It was a lot,” he said. “A lot to take in. A lot stranger and then a lot more normal. Normal homework. Normal school stuff. But also weird and magic and so many animal people and just… yeah.”

“Not scared?”

“No,” Emily said, scooting up just a little closer. “Not scared. Quite comfy, actually;”

“Good,” Sarah said. “You deserve to be comfy.” She nudged him with the tip of her nose. “You’re awful cute when you’re comfy.”

“Mnot cute.”

“Liar.”

“I have claws now, I can scratch you.”

“Yeah, but you won’t.”

They both chuckled softly to themselves. It was probably getting late, but he wanted to stay like this for just a little bit longer. Tomorrow was going to be another day of magic and school and classes. But for now it was all fur and fluff.