11Louise Special Squadron
"Yes!" Louise's explosion of joy was certainly infectious. After so many failures, and oh-God-so-many accidents, she had finally done it! She had finally casted a successful spell and her reward was an incredible familiar! "Aren't you cute? I'll kiss you, and love you, and hug you and call you Percival!"
"That's enough, Valliére!" Montmorency complained at her side. "You're being annoying."
"You're just being jealous of my great familiar."
"Bu-but! We both summoned frogs!" The blonde girl exclaimed holding up her own familiar, a red and blue frog named Robin.
"Yes, but mine is bigger." Louise countered showing her tongue.
"That's what he said!" Came a sultry voice at their backs.
"Shut up, Kirche!" Both girls said at the same time, annoyed at the intervention of the Germanian student.
"Come on, girls, you just make it too easy for me!"
As they talked, a petite blue-haired girl approached the group. Followed by her own familiar, a female blue dragon called Sylphid, she started inspecting what Louise had summoned. "Strange." She said.
"What do you mean, Tabi?" Kirche asked her friend.
"Tail." The girl, called Tabitha, started pointing out. "And antennas."
Yes, it was a strange couple of appendages that the creature had. No one had ever heard of a frog with a tail, and with two antennas on top of its head. Besides, the shade of green of its skin was just weird, unlike any other amphibian they had seen before. And its red eyes were downright terrifying.
"I don't care!" Louise affirmed hugging her familiar against her chest. "Dear Percival here is perfect as he is!"
"Miss Valliére?" Came another voice, this time, a masculine and older one, and the girls straightened their backs at the presence of their teacher.
"Ye-yes, Professor Colbert?"
"Would you allow me your familiar for a second?" Unwilling to say no to the older mage, the girl quickly handled Percival to him. "Very curious." The man murmured to himself as he inspected the animal. "I have never seen a species such as this before."
"Is-is there something wrong, Professor?" Louise asked but the man didn't seem to notice her. "Professor?"
"What? Oh, yes, sorry. It seems I spaced out for a second there."
"I wouldn't have guessed." Kirche said under her breath, just loud enough for the other students to hear her.
"In any case, here you have." Colbert said giving Percival back to his master.
"Thank you, professor."
The man answered with a warm smile and turned to address the rest of the crowd. "Alright class, let's return to the classroom!"
One by one, each of the twenty students started raising from the ground thanks to the power of their magic.
Except for one.
"Hey, Louise, are you going to be ok?" A concerned Montmorency, already a couple meter above the ground, asked her friend.
"Yes, sure!" Louise answered with a determined face, but deep down she was shaking. "Now that I have my familiar, everything is going to be fine!" That was the idea, wasn't it? She would summon a familiar and then everything would go better for her, her magic would start working, and her family would be proud of her.
Yes, sure, and maybe she would kiss her familiar and it would end up being a prince.
"Okay, Percival." She told the frog she had safely put under her shirt. "Time to show what we can do!" She pulled out her wand and pronounced the incantations for the spell. "Levitation!" Her feet detached from the ground and her whole body started graciously raising from the ground. "Come on, come on, that's good." And then it abruptly stopped, ending with Louise falling on her rear. "Ouch." She groaned. "No problem! That always happens!" She tried again and, this time, she managed to remain stationary for a couple of seconds without the spell falling on her. "All right, now a bit to the right… no! No! The other right… agh!" She ended up crashing into a tree some twenty meters from her starting position. "That's it!" She told herself. "Enough subtleties!" Getting her wand ready again, she proceeded to cast the spell once more, this time putting as much Willpower she could behind it. "Levitation!"
The class was already halfway through when Colbert noticed that one of his students was missing. "Excuse me, your attention please!" He called the group. "Has anybody seen…"
At that moment, a pink shadow flew right past his eyes. "ahahahahahahahah… AHAHAHAHAHAHA… ahahahahah…!" Then they heard a loud crash and saw a column of smoke rising up from one of the Academy's towers.
"Oh dear God!" Colbert exclaimed and quickly put more power behind his spell to rush to the scene.
"Look! She actually managed to hit her room!" Kirche commented.
"Will… will she be okay, miss Montmorency?" Asked Guiche, a blond-haired boy who had been trying to get on the girl's good side.
"Sure, she has some very strong bones."
Later that night, Louise found herself alone in her room, already on her nightgown and with Percival on her lap. She was barely holding back her tears. "Why does this always happen?" She asked her familiar as she pointed at the planks that were covering the vaguely Louise-shaped hole in the wall. "I'm such a failure." She knew the animal couldn't answer her, but she didn't care. Having someone to talk to was enough. She did have Montmorency, but the girl was physically incapable of keeping secrets. "I can't control my magic. It always fails or destroys everything." She cleaned her watery eyes with the back of her hand. "I thought that with you around everything would go better, but… I don't know." She gently placed her frog on the ground next to her bed. "Goodnight, Percival. Tomorrow will be another day. Another long, long day." She leaned back and in less than a minute she was fast asleep.
Meanwhile, at her side, the frog she had named Percival was still awake. Far from being a simple beast, he was quite intelligent and knew that his master was in pain and in need of his help. He remembered having a great master in his past life, but ever since that morning it was getting progressively more difficult to remember what he had been doing before being summoned to that strange new planet. Oh, well, if he was already forgetting about it, then is surely was because it wasn't worth being remembered. In any case, he had a Master in need of his assistance, and for his honor, he wouldn't leave her waiting! But what could he do? His powerful froggy muscles -far more powerful than those of any common frog- would allow him to jump up to his master's bed, but after that, there was very little he could do to cheer her up. It was so frustrating! That pathetic body was so limited! If only he had his old body, but there was no way of getting it back.
Or was it?
Ever since his arrival, he had been feeling different. His throat had been aching and he felt a pressure that hadn't been there before.
He didn't dare to hope, but if he was right and had recovered his ultimate technique…
This was worth testing out!
Siesta was a cheerful girl who worked at the Academy of Magic. She had many duties, including cleaning, cooking and feeding the animals. But, on that particular night, she got the job of washing the noble's clothes. So, with a basket full of dirty clothes in one hand and an empty bucket on the other, she went to the central fountain to get some water.
"Eh, who are you?" She asked the creature she found there. It was a green frog with a tail and two antennas on top of its head. She immediately recognized it as one the recently summoned familiars. "What are you doing here, little one?" Putting the basket and bucket aside, she picked the animal up and raised it to her eyes. "Shouldn't you be with your Master?" She looked at the frog and felt a chill running down her back. There was something that wasn't right with that animal. His red eyes, staring back at her… there was an intelligence behind them.
Before she could understand what was happening, the frog opened his mouth and shouted: "Change!"
...
A/N: An idea I had while watching the Frieza Saga again. Now, as you probably noticed, in this universe Louise isn't a void mage, she just sucks, and that changed her relationship with other characters. The reason behind this will be revealed in a later snipped, but you can already start guessing.