What the Hell? What the Helly? What the Hellianze?

It was another uncomfortable morning at Nocturne Academy, where the air was relatively warm and makes your skin feel sticky enough for you to want to bury yourself alive, but classes said no, so you drag yourself to campus.

The hallways were already buzzing with the usual flavors of undead angst and supernatural apathy. A banshee was sobbing by the lockers (probably over midterms), and a poltergeist had rearranged all the classroom doors into a vertical spiral up the west wing wall. The janitor, a sentient broom named Carl, was sweeping it all under the metaphorical rug. He hates his job.

Rommer was chasing a squirrel again.

“That’s my breakfast!!” he howled, bounding past the front gates on all fours.

Behind him, a floating pile of bones drifted casually through the fog, exuding the kind of skeleton-chic that only a centuries-old corpse could manage. Her skull sat slightly askew, and a wilted flower clung to one of her orbitals. She probably forgot it was there.

“You’re going to detention again,” she called after him. “I can already hear the headmaster sighing in disappointment.”

“Worth it!”

“You said that last time. Then you cried.”

“I was allergic to garlic bread!!”

“What does that even- ugh...” The skeleton shook her head, orbital sockets creaking faintly.

She turned just in time to see a ghost phasing through a lamppost, expression blank as always.

“Morning, Nilo,” she called.

He blinked once, materializing fully with a small nod. “Good morning, Kiki. The lamppost didn’t consent to that. I’m sorry.”

“Who cares about the lamppost? Rommer just tried to eat a squirrel. We’re all having a morning.”

“That wouldn’t be the first time.”

That was when the vampire arrived. Fashionably late, as usual, though to be fair, the sun had finally given up on rising over Nocturne, so technically, he had all day. He appeared with the air of someone owed applause and already bored of it.

Like an unpaid debt or a cursed perfume sample, he lingered.

“Thou art grievously loud,” quoth Ellian, adjusting his immaculate blazer with all the grace of a disapproving archduke. His voice bore the crispness of old money and fouler intentions still.

“You’re allergic to joy,” Kiki replied, floating closer to Nilo. “We’re still waiting on the new girl.”

“New girl?”

“Yeah,” Rommer said, reappearing with leaves in his teeth. “They said something about a transfer student from… uh… the other side?”

“Pray, speak with clarity, knave,” Ellian said, tone as flat as a cursed tombstone.

“Dunno. Probably hell or Detroit.”

“Aren’t those the same thing?” Kiki asked as the three wandered off toward class, leaving Ellian behind.

The classroom was packed with its usual population of horrors and horrors-with-confidence. There was that witch who always sat on tables surrounded by throngs of male creatures eager to be hexed. Then that pile of green ooze who was, for some reason, trying to flatten himself across the north wall. Don’t touch that wall for the rest of the semester. He doesn’t shower.

“Alright, students,” the scarecrow teacher began just as Ellian slouched into class. “We have a new-”

The door opened abruptly, smacking the vampire squarely in the shoulder.

Every head turned. Even Carl the broom paused mid-sweep. What? Come on, Carl. Get back to work.

She walked in like she’d been stitched into the moment, deliberate steps, porcelain skin cracked at the jaw, black liquid oozing softly from her joints. She looked like a burned Victorian doll dragged out of a cursed attic. Or a really broke one, because she looks really simple.

“Ah. Well, you could’ve waited for the-”

“Ira Mavienne,” she flatly introduced herself, then moved to take a seat, scanning the classroom for a place that wasn’t too gross to touch.

The class went silent for approximately 2.3 seconds.

Then someone in the back sneezed glitter.

“Bless you,” Ira said without looking back.

The scarecrow, whose name was probably Mr. Patch (no one dared ask), adjusted the crow on his shoulder.
“Right. Ira Mavienne. Transfer from... unlisted dimensional coordinates. Please give her the standard Nocturne welcome.”

Rommer barked once.
Kiki made finger guns and hit her with a spooky “ooOOooo.”
Nilo phased halfway into his desk like a ghost trying not to look interested but absolutely was.
Ellian sighed—the long-suffering kind that suggested the concept of new people personally offended him.

Ira blinked. She didn’t respond. She just sat, still as porcelain, eyes fixed forward like she was already regretting every decision that led her here.

There was a pause.
Then, from the back corner:
“Slay,” said the ooze kid.

Mr. Patch coughed into his hay-filled elbow. “Well, that’s that. And, uh, avoid the north wall. Kevin’s regenerating.”

A faint groan issued from a puddle of limbs under a biohazard sign.

Ira sat in the third row, beside Nilo. He promptly lifted his hand off the desk and floated half an inch higher. Not out of fear. Just... reflex.

“You are transparent,” she said without looking at him.

“I get that a lot,” he replied.

A pause lingered between them, not quite awkward, more like two frequencies trying to tune into each other.
Nilo hovered just slightly to her side, the way ghosts do when they want to start a conversation but their social skills died with them.
Ira, meanwhile, seemed wholly absorbed in examining the desk. Not out of curiosity. More like suspicion. Like she expected it to rot under her fingers. It might. Nocturne desks weren’t exactly known for OSHA compliance.

Eventually, she said, “There’s something in the wood.”

“Yeah,” Nilo replied. “That desk’s possessed. A student tried to summon a boyfriend out of it two years ago.”

Ira didn’t blink. “Did it work?”

“Sort of. He’s dating the janitor broom now.”

Carl paused mid-sweep at the front of the class, as if remembering his traumatic past, and then kept sweeping.

“You are strange,” she said.

“Thank you,” he replied sincerely.

The rest of the class passed in a blur of screeching, cryptic math, and Mr. Patch briefly bursting into crows to demonstrate “energy transfer.” Ira barely moved the entire time. She only blinked twice. Once when the ooze on the wall made a weird popping sound, and once when Ellian dramatically fainted at the thought of doing partner work.

By the end of the lesson, Kiki had tried to befriend Ira by sliding a bone-shaped sticker onto her desk.

“You seem stable,” Kiki said, unprompted. “I’m Kieri Lune, but Kiki works fine too.”

Ira blinked at the sticker.

“I like you,” Kiki added. “We can braid each other’s ribs sometime.”

Rommer howled from the hallway. The squirrel had fought back.