Lyan
They did catch us. The next day the dean called us to her office and told us that since we liked being dishonest we would also like cleaning hippogriff dung from the roof after class every day during the whole week. We tried to argue but the dean had some witnesses that had seen Orus take the plants from the greenhouse, so we had no defense.
We left the dean's office looking defeated and walked to our class dragging out feet.
On the first class of the day the dean entered and said that we were entering an academy competition next week and that the whole week would be used as training. She also said that the ranking was temporarily suspended, which I appreciated. I had walked pass the leaderboard this morning and I was in the middle/bottom of the list and was beginning to get worried. I didn't want to become beast food.
The next classes were combat ones. Apparently the tournament was always a physical one so we were focusing on that.
After changing in the locker room I picked Orus as my sparing partner and spent the rest of the day been thoroughly humiliated. Luckily, everyone was still hung up over what Jack had said yesterday so they were moking Orus and not me.
Mark had appeared this morning, but he was back to his usual self and was avoiding me again, which I appreciated. It made avoiding him that much easier.
Once the classes finished I followed Jack and Orus. Even though Mark was part of our group he had claimed he didn't know about our crimes and had shown the real plants, so he had walked away without a punishment.
We went the same way I had gone with Jack yesterday morning. But once we were at the top we took a different stair and we arrived at a door.
Jack then fished a key from his pocket, dude seemed to have the keys for the whole school, and opened the door.
We were greeted with the sight of the roof, which was made of red tiles and covered in poop.
Orus was the first one to go out carrying some buckets, brooms and mops they had picked up from the janitor closet. Then Jack and lastly I went out. The place reeked so badly that for a moment I thought I was going to puke. Placing my hand over my nose I picked a broom and started working.
" Don't worry. It'll be easy" Orus said, but I wasn't on speaking terms with him. His genius idea had gotten us in this mess in the first place.
If he had just left it alone we would've been better off. We would still have failed, but we wouldn't be out in the roof on an freezing day without a single cloud on the sky trying to get hippogriff dung off of it.
The task was more difficult than it seemed. The dung was either stuck to the tiles so it wouldn't get off no matter how hard you tried or too liquid to clean with a broom. Taking of a single piece of dung took over half an hour and to make matters worse we couldn't use magic because of the barrier that stopped any magic outside the classes and dorms.
" Hey Lyan, come over here" I had told the guys my real name after they had insisted about it for a while and fortunately they had enough common sense to only use it when we were alone.
I came over to where Jack had called me only to end up with a piece of dung on my face. I cleaned the dung from my face as well as I could and looked Jack in the eyes.
" It's on" I picked a little bit of poop from the tiles, ignoring my aversion and deciding getting back at Jack was more important than clean hands, and threw it at Jack's face, but he dodged and the piece of dung hit Orus in the chest.
" This means war" He crouched down and picked some dung too.
The war had begun.
We spent the next few hours throwing dung at each other and when the sun finally set we picked the buckets filled with the dung we had managed to collect before the war had started and left the rooftop.
As we walked through the academy students made faces and gaged as we passed by. I was sure we smelled terrible, but after a while my nose had given up and now I couldn't smell anything at all.
We left the buckets filled with dung near the greenhouse to be used as fertilizer and returned to our dorm.
" I call dibs on the shower" I screamed, but the guys ignored me and raced to the bathroom, so I ran too.
I got there the last one so that meant I had to wait for them to finish until I could shower. I sat on the floor and waited while smiling because Jack, who had usually a very pristine image, now had dung all over his body and clothes.
" You look ridiculous"
" You should look at a mirror" He replied.
We both started laughing. This punishment may not have been so bad after all.
When it was finally my turn I scrubbed my body until my skin turned red and then some. Then I changed the water and took a relaxing bath.
By when I got out it was already bed time and the cafeteria was closed, so that meant no dinner.
Regreating my life choices I went to sleep.
The next day was a repeat of the last one. We trained, well, more like I got humiliated by Orus and Jack and they laughed at me. Then we had lunch, trained some more and went to clean the dung off the roof, which started another war.
After throwing the fourth piece of dung, and hitting Jack on his precious face I stopped to think for a second.
" Do we really need to clean all of this?" I asked the guys in a rare moment of truce.
" Nah, we just need to take down a few buckets with dung and spend the whole afternoon here. They won't come to check what we're doing. I've already had this punishment a few times and they never check."
" That's true" Orus added. " The one time I was punished they didn't even come to check on us"
That was surprising. I could see Jack getting punished. He loved to cause trouble, but I didn't see Orus like that.
" You got punished?"
" Apparently you shouldn't shapeshift and destroy a good chunk of the school" He shrugged.
" It was epic" Jack added." He destroyed half the west wing and they had to contact emergency wizards to fix it. They took two days to solve it and we didn't have classes"
" You just think it was cool because you didn't get punished. I had to clean hippogriff dung off the roof for two whole weeks"
" That much is nothing. I once had to clean it for three weeks straight when we first entered the academy"
" What did you do?" I asked.
" I may or may not have cast a spell on the dean to make her grow a rainbow mustache when she was giving the entrance speech "
" That was pretty cool" Orus conceded.
" I'm beginning to see that their punishments are not very creative"
" Nope, they are all the same, but less talking and more war" Jack threw a ball of poop at Orus and the truce ended and the war resumed.
The whole week was like that. Train, go to war with hippogriff dung, eat and repeat. We even had to clean and train during the weekend because punishments didn't allow for weekends and the tournament was on Monday and the teachers wanted to prepare us a little more.
It was pretty fun to be honest, but before I knew it Monday came and it was finally the tournament day. Good thing was that our punishment was over and hopefully I would never have to smell, touch, or even be near hippogriff dung ever again.
Bad thing was that I'd have to show off my nonexistent combat and magic casting abilities.
I was going to be humiliated. This was going to be fun.