No one could enter Building 17 today. While it wasn't exactly because of the overgrown vines wrapping around the entire property, growing denser and knotting at any entrance, especially the door, they certainly helped.
My peers weren't exactly....affected by the blockage. They saw it as an opportunity to mess with their phones and have a break; two couples even decided to have a picnic right then and there.
Meiriam, of course, went to grab her father, Principal Lee Anders, who proceeded to do a particularly....intricate ritual that required dancing around the building, swallowing a stick of butter whole, and stabbing a statue made of some kind of melon with a firepoker.
The vines choking Building 17 blackened, but did not wilt. Apparently, this was not the intended effect, since Principal Lee Anders frowned, crossed his arms, and said "The woods rot serves to the feeding of his growth." Whatever that meant.
No one except me seemed to pay much attention to Principal Lee Anders as he tried to free the building several different ways, which includes: using wichfyre to burn the vines away [it didn't], talking to the vines using the language of flowers [from what I gathered, the flowers grown by the vines in response essentially said "fuck off"], and simply hacking at the vines with the firepoker.
There were ten minutes left in class when Principal Lee Anders decided to call for outside help.
I didn't expect my neighbor Prudence to show up, trying to ride her bike in her vestments; as an Oracle, the priestesses who followed the Goddess Aliurian, her garments were highly impractical. The vestments were designed to show off as much skin as possible, to display the jagged tree like scars that all Oracles had to bear.
Prudence approached the vines and pressed her palm against them, letting her eyes drift close. She stayed like that while my peers began to wander off, some moving on to their next class, while some outright skipped, using Principal Lee Anders attention to the blockage to leave without his notice. My next class still im Building 17, so I had to stay while the next group of students approached and were faced with the same problem as the previous period.
Prudence pulled away from the vines with a worried look, and pulled Principal Lee Anders aside to talk. They would occasionally point at me, which just made me hug myself and try to seem smaller than I already was. If they thought I had something to do with this catastrophe, they would be sorely mistaken; I still wasn't allowed to do the practical labs in any of the thaumaturgy classes.
Principal Lee Anders approached me with his hands behind his back, and Prudence followed, fidgeting with her mossy hair. They pulled me to the side, away from the other students.
"Story," Prudence began, wringing her hands. "We, uhm..."
Principal Lee Anders interjected. "We need your help, son."
"With....the vines?" They nodded. "I don't see how I can help..."
"It's not you, per se..."
"Your blood, Mr. Page. We need your blood."
