LUMM 1: Die a Horrid Death, Arlo Crowhaven

3 | love & beauty

The midday bell's ring followed in my wake as I tore away from the one-minded trickle of students heading for the dining hall. It was lunch, but I wasn't hungry. My brief talk with Andy siphoned every bit of my appetite. When I left the room this morning, the slob excuse of a sophomore was still curled up in bed, a mop of dark hair sticking out from the folds of his blanket. Sometimes, it amazed me how far he got being an elite with an attitude like that. Maybe it was because of his status that he could afford to act as such.

Nevertheless, Andy told me something of value. From the start, I operated based on what Mr. Proleau revealed, not on what I knew. The first step in finding the solution was to start from the beginning. Look at what one was given. Often, the answers were glaring and simple.

Horace Prescott—a son of the Prescott family prominent in the legal gambling scene. At least, his father and grandfather were. His mother had a more...sensible hobby, which was staying home and hosting nigh-daily parties. Mrs. Prescott was a rumor mill, having cultivated a network of informants who wouldn't do anything other than nose into people's privacy. I might have tapped into said network more often than I'd like to admit, and doing so had always yielded favorable results. Mrs. Prescott was a hell of a woman.

Which was part of the reason I opted to cave in to Horace's request. Not because he slid me a full-round through appropriate channels, but because I intend to get his mother's network to work for me. But one wrong choice led to another, and now I was headed to where his murder took place.

I stepped out of the Food Science hall, coming to the lip of the wide courtyard leading to the expansive stairs. The descent connected to the rest of the grounds. Towering halls dedicated to connected Credences called Departments, landscaped gardens filling the choreographed cobbled paths winding through and around the campus, and embellishments like statues of forgotten Hylsas and vain politicians and commissioned fountains and sculptures from Creative Credence graduates littered the immediate surroundings. Lyllan University wasn't the most prestigious institution around for nothing.

My lips curled in on themselves. See...dorms were to my left, along with the Conservatory and the Creature Studies Hall. Theater Annex should be...well, somewhere. I was a New Slate—someone who hasn't even spent a full term. Lochrame be damned if I knew where the drama kids frolicked around.

Students of various coats and uniforms representing their current level at university milled around, flitting in and out of the domed lobby while talking among themselves or lugging stacks of grimoires enough to fill a trunk. Most of them took one lecture whose site happened to be at FSH. I'd bet my nonexistent inheritance that it was Biology A1, which was a required lecture especially for those in the Innovation Credence.

My lectures as a direct Food Science Credence with a major in Potions and Medicine and a minor in Herbology involved more complex ideas, enabling me to create the Idea Vial in my free time. A mere drop would open one's neural pathways, leading to the generation of ideas. Wild, out-of-the-trunk ideas, but ones nonetheless. It would be a hit once I start marketing it to the inventors and scholars, to any professional in need of ideas on a regular basis. The fact that it might be a tad addictive was inconsequential.