LdShadowZine

______________________________________

"So… how did I do?" 

The Ocean Queen stares up at the headmaster with eyes shining from boundless anticipation, her tail swishing back and forth with relentless fervour. It bashes against the ground beneath Lizzie, breaking the floor boards into splintered planks and broken timber, carelessly knocking over the papers and amethyst on the desk in front, leaving shattered crystals and messy pages splayed across the tiles.

…Lizzie will clean that up later.

Unfortunately for her, this reckless display only makes the sour expression on Gem's face worsen. Furrowed eyebrows sharp like knives, fingernails clawing deeper into the bark of the desk until it lets out a most horrendous shriek, cheeks puffing until she looks no different than an inflatable balloon just begging to be burst. The echoing of her restless foot makes Lizzie's heart sink even further into her chest.

The clock still ticks on, tick tock tick tock, ever uncaring to the way Lizzie's pulse quickens after each second that passes by.

Thump thump thump thump.

"Well, Ocean Queen… you should be more aware of your surroundings for one." Gem replies with a scowl plastered across her face, and the quiet frustration bubbling in her eyes is certainly not doing the Ocean Queen any favours.

Lizzie bites her tongue and slowly formulates her next words. The weight of a final grade hangs heavy on a student's shoulders, and each wrong syllable that stumbles from her tongue is worth another mark deducted from her score. One red pen stroke is all that stands between the Ocean Queen and failure.

"Okay, okay sure. I– I may have broken a few things here and there…” Lizzie’s voice shudders a bit. She shivers as if she’s being drenched by the icy depths of the arctic waters.

“But what about the classes? I still remember the first one! You wanted three types of crystals and I brought you four! How's that for extra credit?"

"An end crystal. Lizzie, you brought me an end crystal." Gem replies sternly, her breath catching between the clenched teeth of her glare.

"It has a crystal in the name! It counts!” Lizzie flails her arms dramatically up and down in wild panic. Thankfully though, she barely manages to avoid re-knocking the papers Gem just managed to restack on the desk. 

“Do you have any idea how long it took me to get a ghast tear?"

“I saw the death message.”

"Bloody heck I’ll tell you, the nether is not kind to us ocean folk.” Lizzie leans over, putting all her weight onto the backrest of the chair as she places the back of her hand on her forehead as if to mimic fainting.

“Just a few minutes in there is enough to leave your gills as dry as a grilled salmon on a furnace." Lizzie takes her other hand and starts fanning herself dramatically, much to the annoyance of Gem who rather not deal with any of her antics.

Lizzie still remembers the feeling of sparks of lava catching onto her skin, the way they jumped out of the endless smouldering sea like hungry piranhas. She could hardly survive there, her elytra barely grazing by the fires from the blazes and the shooting ghasts. 

She felt so vulnerable. There was no room to breathe or keep her heartbeat steady when every little thing is out to kill her from an ocean she can swim in, to creatures set only on attacking her, to humidity so strong she felt the moisture beneath her scales slowly dry up as though she were a shrivelling prune. 

Lizzie’s skin still stings from the burns she endured while dodging the cascading flames, an itching sensation lingering beneath her flesh from how unnaturally dry her body became.

But still, the Ocean Queen’s woes do nothing to sway the ever stubborn headmaster. 

"You nearly placed an end crystal in the middle of the entire classroom! You could have seriously hurt someone or— or even exploded the building!” Gem’s words barely stay intact, her voice splitting apart like ripples that splutter along an uneven water’s surface.

“One touch from it and it's game over. Next time, could you please think for a moment before casually bringing a dangerous explosive into my classroom?!”

“It’s just one teensy-tiny mistake in my first class.” Lizzie quints her eyes, keeping her thumb and index finger only an inch apart as she playfully emphasises the words ‘teensy-tiny’. 

She forces on a light-hearted smile hoping to try and pacify the irritated headmaster. “I was able to slay the beast you wanted in the second class. I did it without dying that time!”

Gem slums down on her desk with a sigh as she continues to flick through the papers in her hand. “I will admit, you did excel in the second class, but you have three more classes that need to be assessed.”

She keeps flipping through the pages until she abruptly stops a third of the way through the stack with a faint click of her tongue. The headmaster lifts her head to lock her gaze onto the Ocean Queen with the piercing hue of her emerald eyes engulfing Lizzie’s entire vision.

“So, the familiar?”

Lizzie lights up, the gills along her ears rapidly flapping up and down in excitement.

“Oh Todd! Isn't he wonderful? He’s a rare little guy, a pain to catch, but it was worth it to have a familiar as cool as him, right?”

“Of all the creatures in your ocean you just HAD to pick pufferfish.” Her voice drops down to a familiar scowl that the Ocean Queen is slowly realising she’s going to grow rather acquainted with by the time this meeting is over.

“Why couldn’t you just pick an axolotl?”

“Now now, the axolotls are my royal guard but that's a completely different role to a familiar! And what kind of Ocean Queen would I be if I only gave preference to some of my subjects.” As usual, Lizzie tries to reply with one of her usual witty remarks, but she finds her once unshakable confidence seems to falter the longer the meeting goes on, her words barely escaping her lips without a small twinge of uncertainty seeping through each syllable.

“But a pufferfish?! Lizzie, why did you let a pufferfish out of its bucket! It poisoned me! It poisoned both of us! We could have died! Your familiar could have died!” 

Any words Lizzie could try to weave together wouldn’t do the look of abject horror plastered across the headmaster’s face any justice. Just faintly she could hear the sound of crinkling paper from each wrinkle Gem adds from clutching onto her pages. 

“Why didn’t you think for a second before letting out a poisonous pufferfish inside a closed space?!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry geez!” 

Lizzie closes her eyes in hopes of avoiding the headmaster’s scorn for another second, but the image has already burned its way into her retinas. The air is thick with disappointment, and every breath she takes feels stifled in her throat. 

She slouches into her chair in defeat.

“Can we just move on to the potions already...”

“Yes. Yes we can.” As Gem spoke, Lizzie’s eyes couldn’t help but fixate on the small flicks of the red pen in her hand, a deduction in her mark no doubt about it. Lizzie’s heart plummets even deeper into her stomach.

“Your fourth assignment was to make a potion for each potion effect and you did manage to complete the task—”

“So I passed?!” Lizzie jumps out of her chair, her eyes practically sparkling. Finally, an assignment she completed without any hiccups!

“I– um, yes but….” Gem twiddles her two thumbs together as she gives the Ocean Queen a nervous side glance. “Lizzie, why was there suddenly an infestation of turtle eggs in front of the school’s pond shortly after I left the classroom?”

“Ah that um…”

“No…”

“I might have maybe sort of… bred the turtles in the academy pond.”

“Lizzie!”

“I’m sorry, I'm sorry! I just–” 

Her gills droop down as she begins to hide her face behind her long locks of flowing pink hair. Lizzie doesn’t have the strength to look Gem in the eye, not now after she realises how badly she’s flunked her classes. Lizzie’s cheeks burn in embarrassment, a deep scarlet hue so bright that it puts the coral reefs that blossom in the seabeds of the Ocean Kingdom to shame. 

“Haaaaa…. I failed the flying test too, didn’t I?”

Shame rests heavy on the Ocean Queen’s heart. No matter what Lizzie does, there always seems to be some small detail that she misses. In every class she’s kept making mistakes, little errors, slight lapses in judgement. Even now when she should have passed the potion assignment, she still screwed up somewhere and made a fool of herself.

It makes Lizzie squirm. She feels like throwing herself into the river banks outside the academy. Like an aimless pebble that failed to skip along the water’s edge, plummeting down to become forgotten at the bottom of the seabed, she lets herself drown in this sea of humiliation. 

“Come on now Lizzie, you completed the course—” 

Lizzie watches how the headmaster’s eyes soften, her voice dropping to a hushed tone as if to coo the Ocean Queen. 

“I crashed through so many rings. My stupid tail kept hitting the obstacles.”

“Hey calm down, you weren’t that bad—”

“I was! I know I was! You’re going to tell me how I got everything wrong just like all the other classes!”

“Lizzie.”

“Everything has gone terribly wrong! All my dreams of becoming a great wizard from the Crystal Cliffs Academy, SHATTERED!”

“I—”

“Just give me my final grade already.”

The headmaster stares at her, the room filling with a silence that cuts through each of Lizzie’s senses like a diamond sword. The seconds that pass feel like hours, lacing the air with the weight of every mistake Lizzie has foolishly made.

“Well… if you insist.” For the final time, Gem flicks through the pages in her hand and adds one last pen stroke onto the ending line.

Lizzie’s grade.

Her heart crushes under the pressure of each pen stroke and furrowed brow, its restless beating orchestrates itself along to the sounds of scribbled ink staining the bemoaned parchment that nestles in the headmaster’s hands.

“Ocean Queen, during your time at the Crystal Cliffs Academy you have nearly blown up the school, poisoned and almost killed the both of us, got actually killed yourself and created a turtle infestation in front of the academy.”

Each word that falls from the headmaster’s lips makes Lizzie wince, but the Ocean Queen has long since let go of her hopes of graduating, and so she merely slams her head onto the desk in front of her.

“So I failed?”

“Let me finish.” Gem cuts Lizzie off before she could get another word in. Her gaze is piercing, as usual, razor-sharp with focus on her target, but this time it feels different. 

It doesn’t cut at Lizzie’s heart, it doesn’t make her shudder, it doesn’t feel as though Gem is about to dissect her every move to break apart her mistakes piece by piece. 

It’s still determined, but there’s something almost kind behind her eyes, gentle even.

“Ocean Queen, you are reckless and impulsive and honestly the most insane person I’ve ever met… but throughout your time at academy you’ve proven yourself to be someone hardworking and determined, always willing to go above and beyond to excel in each class and you have the persistence to keep going no matter what obstacles stand in your way.”

Lizzie freezes, her train of thought completely halting as Gem finishes her sentence. 

The headmaster is… praising Lizzie?

The headmaster is praising Lizzie even after how badly she screwed up, even after all the times she almost blew up the school and put Gem in danger, even after everything she did the headmaster still hasn’t given her a failing grade.

It’s as though Lizzie’s been brought up to open air after years of drowning in the abyss of the ocean, feeling the warmth from the rays of the sun for the first time on her skin after scumming to an endless winter, tasting the cold hit of water against her throat despite spending all her life wasting away in an arid desert. 

Lizzie thinks about looking up, but then suddenly Gem slams something onto Lizzie’s head, making her squint her eyes from the impact. When she opens them, she sees a small strip of purple covering a part of her vision.

It’s the brim of a hat.

A wizard’s hat.

“I’d say that makes you more than qualified enough to be a professor.” 

Lizzie looks up and sees nothing but an overwhelming swell of pride glistening in Gem’s eyes. Every harsh word, every bitter scowl, every jab and screech that knotted themselves around Lizzie’s heart have all seemed to melt at the sight of Gem’s brilliant smile. 

There isn’t a spec of disappointment lingering in her gaze, there’s no lie muttered from her lips. Gem truly meant every word that left her lips.

The Ocean Queen silently stares at Gem in awe and maybe even disbelief at what she’s seeing. She blinks a few times as if to check if she’s dreaming things, as if the words that left Gem’s mouth weren’t some trick of the ear or if the admiration that resides on the headmaster’s face is some sort of daydream that Lizzie hallucinated hide the true grimace that should be stitched along her lips.

But sight never changes, Gem’s smile remains the same.

“You mean?” Lizzie's voice perks up ever so slightly, quietly hopeful but still resigned.

Lizzie doesn’t want to get her hopes up so soon, to fall for a dream that had been doomed from the beginning.

But Gem never gives Lizzie’s the chance to be let down, she never dares to strip Lizzie away from the hope that has been slowly bubbling up inside of her. 

Instead her grin grows even wider.

“Mhm-hmm. Lizzie, you passed!”

A faint sparkle returns to Lizzie’s eyes.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Oh thank you, thank you, thank you!!!”

Lizzie jumps up from her desk and tackles Gem into a big bear hug until both her and Gem fall to the floor beneath them. The newly appointed professor wraps her arms around the headmaster’s waist, squeezing her tightly like she's a teddy bear. 

The Ocean Queen is practically smothering Gem, nuzzling the headmaster’s cheek with her own face. Perhaps Lizzie should be worried about seeming unprofessional with how quickly she demolished any definition of personal space between the pair, but her heart is far too elated to pay attention to the pestering voices in her head that scramble to find any way to dampen the girl’s mood.

Honestly Lizzie would have been continuing to smother Gem for another ten minutes without a care in the world, but she then heard a nervous voice perk up from beneath her.

“Um… Lizzie?”

“Yes?” She freezes, blinking a few times before she responds.

“The desk.” 

The Ocean Queen’s grasp loosens on instinct. She attempts to shift her hands to the floor, but then she feels a sharp prick hit her palms. Lizzie’s eyes slowly begin to drift away from Gem’s face towards the floor—

And then she sees it.

Beneath her and Gem lies a once sturdy desk completely shattered on the floor, crushed from the weight of Lizzie’s entire body. The legs have fully snapped off from the main body, the tabletop has been split into two with wood shavings littered across both of their figures, there's broken timber shards prodding at each bit of their bare skin and remaining oak wafts the entire room in a deep musty scent.

“I’ll fix it later.”

They both stare at each other in silence before they burst out laughing, their echoing giggles overpowering any pain that jabs at their limbs and the oaky smell that tries to invade their senses. 

Stumbling and foolish, with mistakes made and desks broken, despite it all, Lizzie passed. 

She made it.