GPCiMW Chapter 11

Welp, I forgot how time zones work so this chapter is up three hours late. Sorry about that!

Compared to Professor Highgarden’s lesson, my first class for Essential Principles of Alchemy was both underwhelming and utterly exhausting. After eating lunch with Teveus, Kazuma, and unfortunately Wyll––who snagged the fourth seat at our table before any of us could say anything and by then there were no other open tables left––the four of us headed together to the south tower for our second class of the day. There were only four options for each of the required first-year classes and we’d mostly all ended up in the same sections.

Essential Principles of Alchemy was taught by Professor Harvold Claywright, a young, black-haired wizard with unnaturally iridescent red eyes and a horrible, jagged scar stretching from his forehead all the way down past his jaw. From what I’d heard, he was something of a young prodigy, having achieved his status as an Archmaster at the age of twenty-six purely through his mastery of alchemy. He mostly taught upper-level alchemy electives, but, as the most junior alchemy teacher at Aglakok, he also had to teach an introductory class every year.

The class itself was fine, but Professor Claywright just didn’t have the experience to capture a room the way Professor Highgarden could and the material was, once again, almost identical to what I’d already viewed in my father’s memories. Hopefully in later weeks, once we actually got to the practical parts of the class, things would get more interesting. Until then though, I was stuck listening to a clearly bored Professor explaining reaction tables for three endless hours. Just the way I wanted to spend my afternoon.

In all honesty Alchemy as a subject was pretty damn interesting. The problem was that to get anywhere past the initial stages you learned in school, you needed a massive amount of resources, making it a rather useless subject for someone with no wizarding money, about six-thousand mundane dollars, and a crappy apartment to my name.

There were three parts to alchemy, though this class was only really focusing on the final step. The first two were typically considered witch’s work, one of the many menial tasks that most wizards considered beneath them and passed on to their coven members or occasionally even unbound witches and fuckmeat.

First of all there was ingredient gathering. Most alchemical ingredients were farmed these days, everything from flesh-eating vileblood stranglers to lightning weeds grown in massive fields and greenhouses owned by the various Houses. Most of these plants required only a tiny bit of magic to grow, meaning that even witches and fuckmeat without conscious control of their powers could tend to them with no issues. Aglakok maintained several thousand acres worth of such fields, tended to by meticulously trained and purpose-bred beastkin and lilin, to keep its classrooms stocked, but once I graduated I would no longer have any access to those ingredients.

Secondly you had ingredient preparation. The way a magical plant was sliced, diced, or crushed could have an enormous impact on its usage in a potion or an alchemical ritual. This too was almost always handed off to specially-trained witches since it required little-to-no magical ability, only steady hands and years of practice.

Aglakok actually offered training courses in ingredient preparation for the coven members of second-years and above––once every wizard had at least two coven members––and I fully intended to send Grace or one of my future witches to learn everything they could once that option was available to me. Even with my dad’s memories, I had no idea what the difference between a cubed and diced screaming onion was, but I did know that one was typically used in poison and the other for nerve-healing potions. Having properly trained assistants would be a huge help for when I did inevitably need to use Alchemy for something.

Finally there was the part that most wizards considered ‘real’ alchemy. The process where you used magic to combine a bunch of ingredients into the many miraculous concoctions that helped keep wizarding life ticking along. Just like with spellcasting, in theory alchemy was pretty simple. You took some ingredients, put them in a pot, and then ran mana through the water until everything was properly saturated.

Things became a lot more complicated when you discovered that the exact way you needed to ‘run your mana’ through the ingredients varied wildly, that two seemingly innocuous ingredients could combine into both a lovely hand lotion and a toxic cloud of gas depending on how they were prepared, and that messing up your proportions by so much as a milligram could kill you dead faster than you could blink.

That's why, after painstakingly pounding an hour worth of safety instructions into our heads, our first lesson was about ingredient interactions. Memorizing ingredient interactions. Thousands of ingredient interactions.

There were twenty-seven ingredients listed in the first chapter of our textbook, all readily available to every student at Aglakok. Twenty-four were magical plants grown in the academy’s fields and then the last three were wizard’s blood, witch’s blood, and water. Each ingredient could be prepared in at least a dozen ways, often more. Each ingredient had at least two ways it could be charged with mana. Each ingredient could interact with every single other ingredient, the specific reaction varying based on how they were prepared and charged.

Before we so much as touched an ingredient, we had to know exactly what it could be used for and all the possible risks and pitfalls.

There were so many tables.

I left class at four p.m feeling like a wrung-out dish towel. Tevous and Wyll, who had once again sat with us, both looked similarly exhausted, but Kazuma actually had a bit of a bounce in his step as we went our separate ways. Good for him.

I shambled up to my room to find the bed made, everything in the room freshly dusted and cleaned, and Grace kneeling by the door in the same well-practiced position that I’d found Daphne in on my first day at Aglakok. I smiled despite my weariness and leaned down to peck her on the forehead. “Good job, dear. Now go and fetch your uniforms, no time to waste.”

Daphne and Grace were both uniformed up in short order and I led them together into the training room that was still set up from yesterday. After a few days of practice, both Daphne and Grace could reliably keep their balance, though anything faster than a walk was still beyond them. Thus, I no longer needed to lead them around the room manually and could just input the proper instructions into their treadmills, then leave them to their work while I focused on my own.

Flipping open the book I was using, I quickly rattled off their plan for the next two-and-a-half hours and made a mental note to check on them during their break to give them some water. Then I paused as I remembered another instruction from the book I’d forgotten about the day before. “Oh, and until further notice, neither of you are permitted to orgasm without my express verbal permission. If you do well in practice, maybe I’ll consider giving you a little reward.” I looked back down at the book but it didn’t seem like I’d missed anything else so I snapped it closed. “I think that's everything. Get to it, girls. You’re burning daylight.”

I wasn’t completely sold on the necessity of the order, but the author had written an entire chapter on why he included it in most of his training regimes and I didn’t really have any reasons to doubt him. Ultimately it didn’t really seem like a big deal and I could revisit it in a week or two if there were any issues.

I waited until both witches were situated on their treadmills, then went back to the main room and got started on my alchemy homework. It wasn’t due till next week, but it was best to get that sort of thing out of the way as soon as possible and the assignment looked horribly tedious. Hopefully my other classes this week would be more interesting because I still remembered how much I’d hated all the memorization in my 9th-grade bio class and this seemed poised to be way, way worse.

The next day dawned bright and early. Daphne woke me up as usual and then I finished waking up by fucking a still-uniformed Grace into the bed until her eyes rolled back in her head. I removed her gag and armbinder, then left her to recover as I headed down to breakfast and class with Daphne.

Right off the bat, Introduction to Coven Management and Discipline proved to be a lot more entertaining––if not necessarily more educational––than my alchemy class the day before. My professor for the class was Yevgeny DeGroot. He was a giant of a man, nearly seven feet tall, bald, and built like a brick shithouse. He had a big flower tattoo on his bald head that matched the House crest on his robe; a red tulip with the stem extending down the back of his head.

Compared to him, the naked witch stretched spread-eagled on the blackboard looked positively tiny, and she was clearly trying and failing to hide the fearful look on her face every time he so much as glanced in her general direction.

Our classroom was quite a bit bigger than the ones I’d been in yesterday. It had to be to accommodate the rather comprehensive stations set up at each desk, complete with nearly every tool and appliance I’d seen in the coven room in my dorm.

Daphne looked rather apprehensive as I picked a station and sat down, indicating for her to crawl into the small, lightly-padded cage beside my chair. Still, she didn’t try to say anything and the cage snapped shut behind her, leaving her breasts, buttocks, and cheek pressed against the thin metal bars.

Fortunately for her, it didn’t seem like we were required to use our own witches for the class. After a brief lecture on suitable punishments (the professor believed that anything short of maiming was a perfectly suitable punishment for even the most minor offense), following proper recovery procedures (lock the thoroughly punished witch in a cage and try to remember to feed her at least every once in a while), and maintaining a proper hierarchy among your coven (the wizard is on top, everyone else doesn’t matter. Maybe occasionally have your favorite witch punish the other ones, then punish her to show everyone who really matters), the professor called us up one-by-one to retrieve an Aglakok-owned beastkin that we would be using as our practice dummies for class.

The beastkin we selected today would be the one we used for the entire class. He cautioned us to be a little careful with the fuckmeat because we wouldn’t be getting a replacement if we broke it and then we’d have to substitute one of our own coven members for the rest of the school year. He also said we’d need to return them at the end of the year, so no bonding, but that we would have the option to take them as part of our end-of-year rewards if we did well in all our classes.

Since I was sitting in the front row, I was one of the first to be called. I stepped through the door behind the professor’s desk into a small room lined wall-to-wall with cramped metal cages. Each one housed a feline beastkin much like the ones that Aglakok used to cook, serve food, and take care of the grounds, except younger and without the leg shackles. There must have been more than a hundred of them, all squished together in a space barely fit for ten, but despite that it was eerily silent in the room, their mouths moving but no sound coming out.

I scanned the room, finding each beastkin to be nearly identical to the next. They were all uniformly curvy with smooth, tan skin and long black hair. Despite the cramped conditions, their beastkin features looked well groomed, pointy black cat ears peeking out from their hair and long sleek tails curled around their waists or thighs.

After a moment, I shrugged and walked up to a random cage. “You’ll do,” I told the beastkin inside, tapping my finger against the lock on her cage. I felt a tiny tug on my magic and then the door popped open. Like the professor had told us to do, I wrapped a hand through her collar and tugged her bodily out of the cage and onto the ground. “Follow,” I ordered firmly and left the room without a backward glance, knowing the well-trained beastkin would obey without question.

Once everyone had selected a beastkin, Professor DeGroot launched right back into the lesson. “So today we’re gonna be starting off with one of my favorite ways to welcome a new witch to my coven. This here young thing,” he spanked the witch hanging on the board hard enough to shake her entire body and leave a bright red handprint across both her ass cheeks, “is my newest little princess and today I’ll be using her to demonstrate proper branding technique.”

He loudly cleared his throat and walked over to a station much like the one we each had in front of us, but mirrored so we could clearly see what he was showing us. “Now typically, I like to brand my witches with their names. It makes it so much easier to tell them all apart, you know? This one’s name is Wiggles because, well, just look at her wiggle! You guys however will be keeping your new toys here in my classroom so I’m gonna have you each brand your own names onto them so we can always keep track of which one is which. If you do end up keeping them and want to change anything, a single dose of Brand-Away should be enough to clean up any damage and you can get five of those per semester free from the potion dispensary.

“Now there’s a lot of good spots on a witch for a brand, but we’re just gonna go with a few of the basic ones today. We don’t want to use up too much of our canvas right from the start since we’ve got an entire year to turn these nasty critters into proper works of art. We’ve got about two-and-a-half hours left in class, plenty of time for three spots I think. Feel free to just do your first name or last name, luckily enough we have no repeats in my class this year.

“Now everyone, follow along with what I’m doing. This is discipline, not torture, so I always like to get it done with a single attempt. There’s a few healing potions in the bottom-left drawer of your desks, but I’d rather not need to use any of those today. We’re gonna start with a nice big brand right here above the butt. This one is one of my favorites because it's easy to see in most of my go-to positions and when I’ve got them stored away.” He reached into a drawer and withdrew a long metal rod with a capital W on the end. “Now let’s talk about best practices and how to get these things heating up properly. First of all, it's important to consider what sort of canvas you’re working with. A mermaid’s skin is highly heat resistant and fairies are too small for standard equipment.  What you want to do is…”

He rambled on for another twenty minutes, but we did eventually get to the exercise itself. Professor DeGroot didn’t mind if we talked amongst ourselves while we worked so I had a generally enjoyable few hours chatting quietly with Teveus and Kazuma while we branded our names above our beastkin’s butts, on their inner thighs, and on their left upper arms.

Mine squirmed around a lot, particularly when I was working on her thigh, but it was nothing that some good quality restraints and a proper gag couldn’t deal with. I think my threat to press the cherry-red ‘v’ I was holding right into her exposed pussy also helped––she was much more cooperative after that.

By the end of the class, everyone had managed their task, even Wyll. I was a little upset that some of my letters were a little crooked––I’d started with the arm brand and my two e’s weren’t aligned quite right––but it wasn’t bad enough that I was willing to take the point deduction from needing a potion.

I returned my beastkin to its cage, quietly reassured Daphne that I could remember her name perfectly fine without branding it onto her skin, and wished Kazuma and Teveus a good rest of their day. I’d see them again tomorrow for both of my afternoon classes, but neither of them had decided to take First Year Dueling. My first class of the day had proven to be much less tedious than Alchemy had been, hopefully the trend would continue this afternoon. For now though, I had a five hour break and it was time for Daphne’s next training session. She was already making great progress and I had high hopes for the race at the end of the month.

Thank you to KnowledgeSeeker and Magabeast_pro01 on discord for beta reading.