Something whirred as the bursar turned to face the janitor. She had made him wait for a full minute before looking up from her papers. Miniscule gears whined as her eyes focused on the janitor and the exquisitely interlinked metal plates that formed her brow knitted together.

  “What. Do you need. Now?” she said.

  Her voice was a loud metallic whisper. It sounded like getting a papercut. The janitor shivered.

  “Well, I just need some forms.”

  “For. What?”

  “Well, I need to requisition a new tool to replace one that was destroyed.”

  The bursar looked like it would have sighed, if it could have. It kept its gaze locked to the janitor and extended one of her arms backwards. It grabbed a small pile of papers and moved them to the desk in front of her. The janitor started to reach out, but the bursar slapped three hands on the papers and left them there.

  “Which. Tool?”

  “Well… a broom. The janitor’s broom.”

  “The most expensive piece of equipment in the academy. The level Epsilon artefact. Including multi-action fire/water nozzle and DustAway disintegrator attachment AND an unbreakability enchantment.”

  “If the next one could have a bit more unbreakability enchantment, that would be great,” the janitor said, and immediately regretted it.

  Something smelled like it was going to catch fire and there was a sound like metal teeth being ground together. The janitor held his breath and waited.

  Suddenly, the bursar raised her arms and moved them away from the pile of papers.

  “Can’t afford a meltdown,” she said. “The chancellor is giving a tour. Always ends in catastrophes. Multiple. Take your forms.”

  The janitor grabbed the papers. One of the bursar’s arms twitched, but she held it together. He started to back away slowly towards the door. He was just starting to reach toward the door handle, when the bursar started talking again.

  “You’re going to do me a small task. An expression of gratitude.”

  The janitor stopped. He was not surprised, but he had dared to hope for a moment.

  “My ambrosia is late. I require a refill soon. You will solve this problem.”

  “Ambrosia? We should have ample amount of the stuff in the storage?”

  “I require higher grade. Twice the normal proof."

  “Twice! How in the…!” the janitor started, but she cut him off with a sharp wave of her arm.

  The janitor recoiled back reflexively from the swing. The sound the bursar’s bladed arm made in the air was remarkably similar to her voice.

  “I will finance your broken tool. Somehow. You too, will manage.”

  Janitor gripped the papers harder. There was a slight pause as they stared at each other.

  “Yes, bursar,” he said finally.

  “Good,” she said and turned bak without a pause to work on her papers again.

  “This is turning into a goddamn questline,” the janitor muttered.

  Lunch was uneventful. The academy was built around the most powerful necromantic artefact in existence and one of its side effects was that food didn’t sort of taste like anything. The janitor saved all the healthy lunches for days when he ate on the academy grounds proper. Today he was having a salad.

  “Double proof ambrosia,” he said out loud and sighed.

  It was an absolute nightmare to get ambrosia that pure. Maybe if he just didn’t and the bursar would stop working. Someone would get her running sooner and later though and then she would kill him. She was the one thing the janitor really did not want to anger at the academy. He was going to go through the market anyways, so he might as well ask around for the stuff there.

  While eating, he spotted the chancellor on the opposite wall of the academy. The academy building was basically a square tunnel that stuck out from the ground: two huge walls opposite to each other with an equally thick roof laid on top of the walls. The inside walls were criss-crossed with walkways that connected the facade doors that led to classrooms, personal quarters, sport halls and all the living spaces of the academy. The artefact side-effects made living on the academy grounds impossible. Food not tasting like anything wasn’t so bad. The real problem was sleep. The artefact didn’t just cause insomnia, it negated feeling tired completely. People felt fine, until they went insane and died.

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  Facade doors solved this problem. The side effects didn’t reach into the spaces behind the doors. The janitor did not really understand how facade doors worked, but the general idea was that they tied the space behind them into a knot. Once a door was installed, it took the minuscule space left behind it and twisted, mangled and stretched it into whatever expansive area was actually found once it was opened. It all made very little sense to the janitor, but luckily he did not really need to understand it anyways. Facade doors were someone else’s problem. He handled running the basic physical building.

  The janitor watched as the chancellor was walking briskly along the walkway and gesturing with his hand towards the market below. He was followed by a group of things that sort of resembled the lack of humanoids in the space where they should have been, flickering and shifting around in like they were sped up. The janitor tried to focus his eyes on them, but it just made his teeth start vibrating in a really disturbing manner and made it feel like he was going to get a headache. Judging by the gesturing, the chancellor seemed like his jovial self, but something was making the janitor uneasy. He made a mental note to keep an eye on the situation. He needed the chancellor to handle the forms.

  Janitor tossed the scraps of his lunch to the bag and rose up. It was time to take care of the snow. He wondered why the academy hadn’t built two more walls. Or at least one. The climate inside the structure was much warmer than it should have been thanks to the furnace and some really ingenious magical engineering, but the wind was always bringing in snow from the north and the ice kept advancing constantly.

  The route to the market was the janitor’s responsibility. He landed on the corner of the market towards the entrance. Entrance might not have been the correct word as there was no gate or a door, but there was a single road that all merchants used to travel to the academy. The janitor picked up the large snow scoop that was stuck on a pile of snow and set to work. The snow around the academy was always dry and powdery, so it was easy to move around. The problem was where to put it. Once he had tried to shovel it into his bottomless bag, but realised his mistake later when he poured ten cubic metres of snow into the furnace. Steam had covered the whole academy and soon absolutely every surface had also been covered by a thin layer of ice. The amount of skeletons that had slipped and shattered had been truly amazing.

  Anyways, the janitor had decided to start building a sort of a makeshift wall from all of the snow. It would give some protection to the market from the wind. Some new merchants arrived while he was at work and waved at him. Later one of the merchants came over when the janitor was leaning on the snow scoop and smoking a cigarette. It was unusually late for his first cigarette of the day. The sight of Fek smoking the slightly gooey zombie-mouth cigarette still haunted him.

  “You’re working hard. It’s pretty cold out here,” the merchant said and stomped his feet.

  He seemed to be one of the more exotic merchants. He had colourful clothes, some sort of a cone-shaped hat and shoes that had small bells all around them. He looked very ill equipped for the climate.

  “Just keeping the road bearable, mister,” the janitor replied.

  “Oh, just call me Anglhromendiabilis,” the merchant said.

  “Erhm, sure, mister. So, what brings you to the academy? Have you been here before, need any help setting up?”

  “It would be a huge help, thank you! Me and my associates have not been here before, but we’re hopeful we have some pretty special wares that the academics would find interesting.”

  The janitor flicked the butt of the cigarette into the bottomless bag on the cart. The merchant raised an appreciative eyebrow at the distance. Suddenly the janitor perked up.

  “Say, you wouldn’t by any chance happen to have unnecessarily strong ambrosia? Like double the strength of the usual stuff?”

  “Of course we do! Anglhromendiabilis’ Assortiments carry all things rare and useful or unnecessary.”

  “The academy has a need for the stuff. Could you head to the bursar’s office and tell her I sent you? She would be…” the janitor started, but the merchant cut him off.

  “Ah, heh, I’ve unfortunately been informed of the bursar beforehand, so I have to respectfully and absolutely decline. I’ll be happy to do business with anyone else!”

  The janitor sighed.

  “Sorry, I had to try. How much is the stuff?”

  The merchant named a price that was high, but not exorbitant.

  The janitor squinted at the merchant and waited. The merchant also waited.

  “Is the price too high? It is an unstable liquid and notoriously hard to stop from evaporating, not to mention contraband in many places, but I might be able to negotiate…?” Anglhromendiabilis said finally.

  “No, no no. Sorry. I was just expecting there might be some task I would need to handle first or something,” the janitor said. “It’s been one of those days. I’ll come get the stuff from you directly after I’ve finished. And if you don’t have it when I come around, I’ll make you explain that to the bursar personally.”

  The merchant nodded happily and shook his head vigorously from side to side.

  “Yes, no, don’t worry, I’ll have it for you!”

  Suddenly there was a sound like something starting to crack and then falling apart in earnest. It was followed by a surprised shout. The janitor looked away from the merchant to see the chancellor falling and pieces of concrete walkway raining down from the side of the academy structure. Even this far, he could see spider web of cracks running all over the walkway and especially the area where the guests from the negative plane were still non-existing. Even considering how hard it was to judge, they still looked confused.

  The merchant had also turned to look, but now turned to the janitor with eyes and mouth wide open.

  “Right, great. Obviously”, the janitor said.

  “The man surely fell to his death!” the merchant said.

  “He's used to it. Don’t worry, I’ll handle it later,” the janitor said and started ploughing the rest of the snow.

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