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"Just his entire life before becoming king." Giselle said flatly, closing her own textbook with a snap.

Elke was not a bad girl. She was tolerably intelligent, but not a threat, tolerably obedient, but not completely, and tolerably well-connected, but not superior. In short, she was good enough to be her pupil and an ally, and provided Giselle with a valuable government connection she would not have otherwise. However, Elke also had a tendency to drift, a habit that Giselle had trained herself out of at a very young age and usually couldn't stand in other people. Recently, Elke had been drifting more and more frequently, and it drove nails down the blackboard of Giselle's scholarly soul.

She took a deep breath, if only for the French Ambassador. Elke was a decent sort, but sometimes the Ambassador was the only thing that kept Giselle's patience.

"What did you last hear?" she asked, opening her textbook again. "We can begin from there, and if you cannot remember, we will begin at the beginning."

"Again."

Giselle nodded. "As Henry was emotionally closer to Richard II than his own father, this would later turn out to be a point of contention between the monarch and the prince, one of many..."

She was interrupted and looked up from her textbook with a decisive "No."

And despite the school's many rather questionable practices, Giselle seemed to actually mean it. Maybe it was because she had yet to see a corpse stuffed into the walls, or maybe it was just because her nose was buried too deep in her history books for her to think that 'Black Death' was a name that was anything but historically rich for a student body to rally under. Either way, her tone didn't contain even a hint of sarcasm. "Why would you think that? Is this your first time at a boarding school?"

Before Giselle could respond to this baffling assertation about monsters that turned into kittens (and this really depended on how you felt about kittens in the first place), there came a frantic rapping on the window -- the window that was on, you know, one of the multiple storeys of a many-floored buildilng. The window with no railing or balcony outside whatsoever.

The rapping was frantic, and when Giselle and Elke looked over, they could see a single hand knuckling at the glass and beating their fingers against it. It looked like a normal human hand.

With the reminder: they were many-storeys up.

It was illogical but it was true! Elke was just opening her mouth to protest when ---

"--Giselle," Elke whispered furiously as she slid off the bed, "don't look at it that's when they go evil!" She buried her face in the carpeting, hands over her head in the classic 'tornado survival' pose. Not like she thought covering her head would spare her the terrible fate of whatever was waiting outside with big sharp teeth, glowing red eyes, and a passably human hand, but it made her feel a little more secure.

Frantic, she hissed, "Giselle!"

She was harmless and frightened and definitely in danger, and so Giselle moved her hand to the window, but paused.

Kittens were also harmless. And one thing Giselle had never ignored was historical precedence from a usually reliable source. She could doubt it, yes, but when things like this started happening, she would certainly not ignore it.

Looking at Elke, she nodded to the desk and mouthed grab the chair. Out loud, she said "Hang on!" and grabbed the bedsheets, twisting them into a quick ropeish shape to toss to her. (She refused to let the girl get a solid grip on her arms, just in case.) Whatever was going on here, she was going to sort it out. And if the girl did turn into some so-called 'monster', she was going to have to get through a whack on the head with 500 pages of Arthur B. Westfield's 3000 Short Years Of World History (Unabridged Edition), being threatened with a desk chair, and possibly hit again, depending upon how annoyed Giselle was at the moment. There was no time for any of that now though, now she opened the window and tossed the rope, stepping back to pull.

Giselle tossed down the bedsheet rope to the hanging girl --

And the rope went through her. The rope went through her as though it was a string being flicked through water, and the girl screamed and let go -- dissolving as she went from human into a mass of blood that sprayed out on the walls of the building, splashing like a dropped water bomb on the concrete far below. There was a puddle with what was left of her.

And the end of the bedsheet-rope was covered in blood.

She stuttered a few steps forward, but Giselle's posture warned her off; it was all for the best, really, because the second she saw or smelled blood she would either faint or throw up. Standing near the desk chair, she missed the faint odor of iron, salt and copper; Elke backed up a few more steps, just in case.

"Three times and Lancaster," repeated the bluenette obediently, then with a panicked look she asked, "Hey! Where are you going?!" Giselle was already gone. So, Elke hurried over to the windows, shut them, and flipped the locks; stepped over the sheet, still not looking, and locked the door. Then she returned to her spot on the stripped bed and stayed there, determined not to move or even think about the sheets.

That worked for maybe three seconds.

Instead of leaving the sheets in the careful, blood-concealing disarray as Giselle had instructed, Elke carefully peeled away the white top layers and oh God - she barely made it to the trash can before spectacularly giving up all the contents of her stomach. On the upside, thought Elke (she could smell the blood from the sheet all the way over here) she didn't have to worry about all the calories, and none of it had gotten on Giselle's floor and her own uniform looked fine, too. The downside was her mouth tasted like vomit and there was a bloody sheet not five feet from her.

Ugh. She gingerly tied off the top of the plastic bag in Giselle's trash can. Once Giselle got back, she'd go throw it out. For now, she settled for sitting under the desk, knees hugged tightly to her chest. She just had to stay in the room with the bloody sheet and try not to faint from the mere thought.

"Giselle," she whimpered, "please come back soon..."