Hurricane #5: The Campus (Patreon)

As the walk started, Serrano clung even more tightly, trying to keep her breathing from falling into a panicked pant. After the shock of thinking you are looking out between a woman’s fingers, her next thought was that giants didn’t walk the speed she expected. Yet, what exactly should she have expected? It wasn’t as if she’d given it any thought before now. Ms. Webb’s stride was slower from step to step, about two seconds between each footfall, but it wasn’t the ponderous hulking stomp of a movie monster. If she was watching the mouse go by from ground level, she’d think it was just any other mouse woman’s stride.

Well, no, she’d think holy shit it’s a giant fucking mouse woman three lords she could step on me without noticing me or swallow me whole mice shouldn’t be allowed to be fucking terrifying.

“First time around giants?”

Serrano whipped her head around and came face to face with Webb’s chest. Maybe a B cup, proportionately, but those were some hellacious proportions. She jerked her head up. “I, uh. That obvious?” She smiled weakly. Cute face, too. Kind of a sexy librarian vibe. (Oh, fucking hell, coyote, pick either scary or hot, not both.)

“Yes.” Webb didn’t crack a smile, although Serrano wondered if that might be to avoid showing her guillotine-like front teeth this close to her little passenger. “If you were holding my finger any more tightly, I’d be losing circulation.”

“Heh. Uh. Sorry.” Serrano tried to force herself to relax. It…almost worked. “So do you work with Professor, uh, whatever his name is?”

“Snep. Not directly, no. I’m the college’s head librarian.”

Come on, she really was a sexy librarian? Seriously? “Cool. Uh, so do you know magic yourself?”

“Some, yes. Knowing a little about a lot is effectively a job requirement.”

“I guess you don’t get many requests for consultations, huh.” She smiled nervously, looking ahead. They were approaching a building whose size made it impossible to take in all at once. “Three Lords, what is that?”

“I do not. And that is the library.”

“It’s f…it’s enormous!”

Webb walked up a few steps sized for her. Serrano risked another peek over the giant fingers to spot a normal-sized walkway—and a normal-sized road—leading to what was, objectively, a grand entrance plaza. If you ignored the fact that the head librarian could casually level it with a couple of kicks and the grind of a heel.

“As with seemingly all things at this school, Ms. Layotl, that’s complicated. It’s not a terribly large building on my scale, and not as big as the library in the city I grew up in. But the main collection is on your scale.” She opened the front door and headed in. The air inside had the crisp, just-so temperature and humidity feel of a museum, with heady undertones of leather and old paper. “I’m given to understand it’s one of the largest libraries on the west coast of this continent.”

“Wow.” The coyote looked around. It did, in fact, look just like a library, albeit an old one—what she’d expect to see in a building that had been standing a hundred years, not just two or three. “So, wait. The books are my size, but you’re, uh, your size? How does that work?”

“Magic.” The mouse gently set Serrano down on a wooden desktop which looked just as old and stately as the rest of the building, an air belied by the very modern-looking tablet computer off to one side. A tablet the size of a fucking billboard, but still. “Speaking of which.” She took a seat, and propped her elbows up on the desk, looming over the coyote.

“Y…” Serrano looked up, and tried to keep her voice from squeaking. “Yes?” It didn’t work. That was a straight-up squeak.

“If you allow me, I’m going to cast a couple of spells we refer to as ‘metamagic.’ They’re diagnostic tools. They’re harmless, but they won’t be comfortable. Are you all right with that, Ms. Layotl?”

She swallowed and nodded. “Go for it.”

Webb straightened up and traced an intricate symbol in the air over Serrano’s head with a finger, her claw leaving shimmering blue and orange lines in the air. Then she touched the tip of that claw to the wide-eyed coyote woman.

Instantly, Serrano knew won’t be comfortable was a librarian’s gentle euphemism for will feel like superheated popcorn exploding inside all your veins. Everything in her body capable of clenching locked up hard, turning the scream trying to burst out into a long, strangled gasp.

With a quick but complicated hand-wave, a blue sphere of light formed above and in front of Serrano. The mouse studied it, spinning it back and forth with a finger, apparently reading subtle color variations. The pain subsided to an uncomfortable all-over prickling.

“Hmm. I don’t see anything there.” She traced another symbol, and the sphere shimmered red. She spun it around again. “Or there. One last test.”

After she finished tracing the third symbol, the sphere slowly clouded over from its core, then swirled solid black. Serrano could feel it now, the deep cold of dry ice.

Webb blinked rapidly, expression growing worried. “I…don’t…” She bit her lip and traced more symbols with both hands.

The sphere began to spin, grey clouds forming across its surface. It spun faster, faster, faster, distorting, distending into a cone. The force began to pull at Serrano’s fur, then started to drag the coyote forward. And up.

Webb’s eyes grew wide.

As she began to spin at dizzying speed, Serrano tried to move, or scream, or do anything, but could only manage to choke out, “Tor—tornado—”

Webb blinked rapidly again, then abruptly clapped her hands together around the miniature cyclone, just over Serrano. She let out a startlingly thunderous squeak at the feel, her whole body jerking forward. The coyote didn’t fall to the desk as much as get thrown from the miniature funnel cloud, sliding and tumbling across the desk toward the far edge, far too fast. Her scream became a desperate howl as she tried to stop herself from going over—

A hand came down in front of her, and she hit it, hard, like slamming into a padded wall. She hadn’t recovered her breath before it closed around her. It wasn’t Ms. Webb’s hand, so who had just grabbed her?

She placed the ice blue eyes staring down at her a moment before their owner spoke. “This is unexpected, Miss Layotl.”

Serrano wheezed, not even trying to move from her sprawl across the snow leopard’s palm pad. “Pretty weird morning for me, too, professor.”

“I have no doubt.”

Webb cleared her throat. “Professor Snep. How much of that did you see?”

“Enough for…concern, Mrs. Webb.”

Serrano ran her hand through her hair. “What does it mean when your test thing turns into a tornado?”

The mouse shook her head. “I have no idea.”

“It did not turn into a tornado. It turned into a portal, through which a tornado was drawn.”

“Drawn through? By what?” Serrano looked between both giants.

Snep fixed his gaze on her. “It would seem by you, Miss Layotl.” Webb’s gaze was worried, not stern, but it stayed locked on the coyote, too.

“Hey, wait. I told you, I don’t know anything about magic, and as far as I know, you two are the only wizards I’ve…” She trailed off.

“The bartender you mentioned?” Webb prompted. Snep lifted his brows expectantly.

“Uh, there was this vixen working at my usual bar, and I told her about the dreams I’d mentioned to Mrs. Librarian here, about drowning in storms. She made a drink for me called a hurricane and said I could drink it as a kind of, what’d she call it, sympathetic magic.”

Snep remained expressionless. “And did your next dream change?”

“Sort of. I mean, I recognized I was dreaming in it, so I thought maybe I could control it. But it just got worse. I dreamed about waking up, but it was still the nightmare. I was dreaming about…draining away. When I woke up for real, there was water draining out of nowhere in the shower. Not the first time that’s happened, either.” She swallowed. “Do you think she did something to me?”

“One can’t rule that out, but neither can one say it with certainty. We can only diagnose based on what little we’ve seen.” He frowned. “You could analogize the spell that Mrs. Webb cast upon you to a scope. A magnifier, after a fashion.”

“I don’t…what, I have some kind of magic hole to the fucking storm dimension in me?”

“You have a connection to a portal. The nature of that connection, and why storms figure so prominently, remains mysterious.”

“You can’t tell me anything more than that?”

Snep lifted his brows fractionally. “I can only tell you I have…a certain unease, Miss Layotl. Not only are you in danger, you may be a danger.”

Webb’s already gigantic eyes grew even wider behind her glasses.