Alexander knew the campus of Arcadia - at least, the sections he was supposed to access - like the back of his hand. There were plenty of spaces students weren't supposed to venture into - the underground command center, the visitor's hotel, the home of the Revered Mothers, the "embassy" of the Demetrian Order - but anywhere else? How was someone like Alex, someone proud to be on the cutting edge of the sword of the True Church, last bastion of Good in a fallen world, not to explore every nook and cranny of the place where thousands upon thousands of the greatest heroes the world has ever seen were trained? And so, he knew about quite a few places that had fallen to neglect, forgotten in the endless renovations and improvements, where he could talk with a reasonable expectation of privacy. It struck him as morally questionable that he should want to keep anything secret, but Francesca considered this a valid want, and being validated by one of the best of his peers had to count for something.
One of these places was a prayer room three stories up in the Grand Library, a place to contemplate sacred texts, meditate, ponder, and look out on the scenery of the Arcadian crater lake through old, warped glass. Now, if you took the stairs up to the third floor, no matter what turn down whatever hallway you took, you would never find this room. Instead, this room had been constructed when less texts had filled the Grand Library, and it had only been two stories tall - it had been a turret standing out against the sky, as evidenced by a magnificent array of stained glass windows that had been boarded over from the outside. Alex imagine that maybe that was the reason the room hadn't been integrated into the wider structure - no one wanted to risk breaking those windows, even though they were consigned to a fate of never having light shine through them again.
Anyway, to get there, you had to enter an archive room of Dawn Era propaganda pamphlets, issued and distributed when the Church still had to fight for hearts and minds, not territory and souls, and notice a drawstring, tucked behind a bookshelf, dangling from a trap-door in the ceiling, pull that string, and ascend the wooden-frame staircase that descended upon doing so. You'd find yourself in a room just big enough to seat three people without anyone sitting on the trap-door, so long as you were willing to get a little cozy, and it was a nice little place to watch old movies together.
And here, like he'd done several times before, he was currently venting to Francesca, who was sitting cross-legged and bathed in the light of the only remaining functional window.
"I mean, what is any student doing knowing a spell like that? The risks of handing teenagers like ourselves, still emotionally developing, mind you, a spell like that outweigh any potential benefits of getting a head start on perception manipulation Irinaen concepts," Alex breathlessly explained.
Francesca "hmm"ed, which Alex took as agreement. "I'd certainly hope that none of our teachers taught her that."
"Oh, they wouldn't," Francesca said.
"And it's not like any of the books we have access to would teach it," Alex continued, voice raising a little. "We study those books. We're meant to. Learning spells and concepts that are outside of the curriculum is one of the things that can give us the space to put in extra effort, to excel, to go beyond, right?"
"Mmm," Francesca said, impassively.
"Which means that even if there was somehow some Irinaen dictionary I missed, it wouldn't, as a matter of principle, contain Obscuration or the instructions for how to perform it."
Francesca "mmm"ed yet again.
"So," Alex said, eyes widening in frustration, "where in God's green Earth did she learn it??
Francesca smiled just a little too wide. "Wouldn't you like to know?"
"What?"
She just kept smiling at him, and he got the slight sense that with each passing moment, her estimation of his intelligence was lowering more and more. And she was enjoying that. So, he let the gears turn in his head until he reached a conclusion, at which point he gasped.
"You know it too?" he asked.
Francesca giggled - a noise that made him straighten up, objectively one of the more pleasant sounds a person could hear, but if you knew anything about her, one of the most alarming, too. "You're kidding me," he said, hopefully. "Who else knows how to cast it?"
"Well," Francesca said, "I did teach Maxwell once."
"What? When?" Alex said, dumbfounded.
"Oh, I dunno," Francesca teased. "Maybe a year ago?"
Alex felt like his head was going to explode. He was supposed to be on the cutting edge of his class. All the grades and test results said he was, and he thought that by keeping tabs on Francesca, he'd been keeping up with the edgier elements of his compatriots. And Maxwell was getting up to this? He couldn't fault him for taking knowledge where it was to be found, they were all raised to be curious, but he'd still have to talk to him about what he'd been using it for, and why he hadn't told Alexander about it. He - He -
"Okay, who doesn't know it?" he asked, with growing horror.
Francesca shrugged. "Gabriel?"
"Just-"
She laughed. "And Tabbitha, and Rosaline, and most people. Aleste, Teresa, and Kennedy know, I overheard them talking about it once. I think Teresa found out about it on her own - I sure as hell didn't teach them, I wouldn't want to be giving ammunition to my own competition." She gave him a threatening half-smile to him, more like a shark baring their teeth. "Excepting you, of course."
Alex didn't know how to parse this, and therefore blushed. She seemed to like that.
Francesca placed a hand on his shoulder, and he flinched a little bit more than he would have before the Pairing. "You see, Lex, you're a square. You expect everyone to be like you - you've got faith in people, which is nice and all, but - and I mean no offense by this - you're weird. At least, you don't recognize how weird you are. Look at where you are right now. You're in a little hidden annex away from prying eyes with a female friend of yours who isn't your Pair. You know you can be trusted, but do you think anyone with the slightest hint of suspicion in their heart wouldn't see this as..." she trailed off. "You can fill in the blanks."
Alex swallowed. She wasn't wrong, and as usual, that was both the interesting and frustrating part about her. "Okay, Chess, where did you learn it? Did someone break into the forbidden stacks in one of the libraries and start passing it around? Did you overhear some upperclassmen or an Angel workshopping it?" He kept using "it", already feeling strange about saying the term "obscuration".
She shook her head. "Nah. I learned it the same way you found this room."
That didn't clear things up at all. He'd found the room by paying attention, by looking for clues left by those that came before them- Oh.
Francesca smiled as realization dawned over him. "Yeah, some upperclassman from God knows how many years ago left notes in one of the girls' restrooms. You only can see it if you do some sense amplification while sitting in the right toilet stall - I got it when I was trying to overhear a conversation between two other girls at the sinks. I thought they were talking about me - turns out that they were talking about the actual game of chess, and I just had your little nickname for me in my head - and ever-so-slight alterations in the chemical makeup of the wood of the stalls spelled out a couple shimmering paragraphs of explanation. It was put a few layers below the surface, so cleaning chemicals wouldn't abrade it away. The message even said that it was giving the spell away to help," she cleared her throat, ""Sneaky bitches like me"" - Alex was used to Chess dropping terms that they'd only heard uttered under the breaths of the adults, or in books that were purely supplementary reading, so he managed to refrain from wincing - "which I took as a compliment."
Alex nodded. This was interesting information - he'd have to use sense-amplification in innocuous settings, just to see if any other messages were encoded around campus. Of course, there were probably sneakier methods of placing secrets around, but finding the collected lore and knowledge of his predecessors would be well worth the effort. He could narrow his search to places that he knew hadn't been renovated recently, though that would be a hard search. The children's dorms were likely a good place, though he'd now lost access to those - realistically, while they were in the process of being expanded, either the male or female dorm had been made first and was initially split, with a second dorm being created and the two being turned into gender-segregated buildings, rather than being segregated by rooms and floors, that meant that one would carry history far better than the other - he'd have to figure out what males were likely to have investigated along those lines - Caleb and Lucas came to mind - and compare their notes with Francesca's; from there, he might get a better idea of this potential hidden knowledge, and of the developmental history of campus, and-
"Lex?" Francesca asked, sensing that he might, in fact, be lost in his own head, as he tended to be.
He shuddered. "Uh, yeah?"
"Did you want to know Obscuration?"
"I, uh," he stammered, the sudden offer overwhelming him. He ran a quick moral calculus - "I shouldn't. It's forbidden for a reason, right?"
"Seriously, Lex?" Francesca asked. "You aren't going to argue against learning forbidden magic, are you?"
"Rules are important!" Alex protested.
"Are they?" Francesca said. "Then tell me why you can do this."
Suddenly, she leapt on him - not physically, but with her mind, but the pressure was just as real, knocking him over, sweeping over him and enveloping him, and he could feel his mind flowing into hers, to what purpose he did not know - "Chess, please-" he protested. "Why?" she said, in his mind as much as in his ears. The answer, as best as he could formulate it, was that they'd watched documentaries in the dozens about the wars fought by the early True Church against the Union Eternal, and they'd found the fact that uneducated, irreligious heathens had been able to fight against priests of the Demetrian Order and even defeat them in the hundreds and thousands, and they'd wanted to taste that power, to understand it, and they'd tried to recreate the spells they'd seen depicted, and wound up playing with magic that should never end up in the hands of Angels, and -
"Because POweR-" their words started intermingling, coming from both of their mouths, though Alex was still the one talking - "is WHat WE use to -" he slumped to his right, and without even thinking, Francesca caught him - "AFFECT change in the WORLD, so" he gritted his teeth, and she mirrored his words - "POWER IS THE LANGUAGE THROUGH WHICH JUSTICE SPEAKS" - he collapsed into her arms, and neither were entirely sure who had said that last sentence. Though by the way that Francesca was more upright, and was smiling, while Alex was fallen and panting, it seemed like she'd won.
He sucked in air like he hadn't seen it in weeks, and stared, wide-eyed, up at her. "Okay, okay, okay, you-" he coughed, hard, and she stroked his head.
"There, there. Take your time," she said. He couldn't tell if her smile was genuine, or just happy at having gotten a leg up on him yet again.
Eventually, he got the gumption to sit back up. "Chess?"
"Yes?" she said.
"Fair enough. I should not know that."
She nodded. "Good. Now say that learning forbidden magic isn't bad."
"It's understandable that highly-motivated students like ourselves would want to understand magic beyond our curriculum," he said, carefully.
She pouted, and then smiled. "Not what I said, but better than nothing. So, do you want to learn or not?"
Alex nodded.
"Gooooooood," she said, stretching the word like a comfortable yawn. "So," she said, "Given that you've admitted to some forbidden magic, can I assume that you basic perception manipulation concepts?"
"No." He quite honestly didn't. Even when he'd found evidence of forbidden spells in media, poorly obscured in textbooks, or accidentally left uncovered in their lessons, something about perception manipulation seemed distasteful to him. The objective nature of reality was sacrosanct. Even if interfering in perception didn't cause any damage to objective reality itself, it seemed fundamentally wrong to undermine even another's perception of it.
She watched his eyes carefully for any sign of deception, and she knew him well enough to see there was none. "Well, damn. I'm gonna have to teach you from first principles, and then work my way up to Obscuration itself. It's going to be a long road, I hope you're up for it."
He knew she probably phrased it that way just to get him to say yes, but even so, he wasn't one to turn down a challenge. "Of course, Chess."
"Good," she said. Francesca looked deep into his eyes. "Deceive me."
"W-what?" he said, blushing. He really wasn't supposed to hold eye contact with anyone of the opposite sex - he probably shouldn't even do that with Elza yet, but Francesca had a way of being commanding.
"Lie to me," she said, straight-faced.
Alex scrambled for mental traction.
"Uh," he said. A lie. Something objectively wrong. He had this. "Two plus two equals five," he said, wincing.
She rolled her eyes. "That's a terrible lie. You really don't know how to lie, do you?"
"I can lie!" Alex protested.
"Christ, you're so bad at this it's kind of cute," she said, smirking despite herself. "Let me show you a good lie, okay?"
Alex nodded.
She leaned forward, and grabbed his hand, setting it on one of her legs. She looked down, avoiding his gaze. fiddling with his palm with the fingertips of her other hand. "Alex, this is embarrassing, but..."
Alex froze. "But?"
"But," she said, still avoiding his eyes, "I woke up this morning, and-" she sounded uncharacteristically bashful - "it wasn't right, I know, but I saw it, Lex." She was fretting over every word. He wanted to tell her everything was alright, but even through a layer of abstraction, he still just wanted to let her keep speaking.
She didn't.
Alex gripped her hand, stopping some of her fingers from meandering. "What did you see, Chess?"
She looked further away, like his questions and her answers were two opposed magnets, the closer they got, the more they repelled. "It's going to sound really stupid, though," she said. Her tone was almost defeated.
"Chess, I'm listening," Alex said.
She looked up at him - her eyes didn't quite meet his, only coming up to his chin - "Okay... When I looked at the morning sky - and Lex?" She made eye contact, and he held onto that eye contact for dear life. "Yeah?" he said.
"I know this is crazy, but the sky was green. Please, just-" she pleaded.
"I believe you," he said.
Her face twisted almost instantaneously from a plea to a wide smile. "Hold on to that!" she shouted, grabbing both his hands in hers.
"On to what?" he asked, before "Oh-" he said, and tried to hold on to that one moment, that bizarre second in which he believed, truly believed that in Francesca's eyes, from her room, the sky had been green. It was fleeting, and he only held it for a few fractions of a second, but it was enough for him to gain a knowledge of the sensation.
And Francesca could see that in his face. "Damn I'm good at this," she said, smiling.
She wasn't wrong. And he was going to follow this to its natural conclusion. He needed to know how Obscuration worked if he wanted to know what Elza was up to - let alone if some of his other classmates were up to shenanigans.
But beyond all that, there were things that he couldn't learn from his classmates, even one as special as Francesca. They'd all been given a specific, highly-knowledgeable tool to deal with situations beyond their understanding, and it would be foolish for Alex to not take advantage of it, no matter how much his intimidated him.
He really had to ask Julian about all this.