[INDENT][COLOR=SLATEGRAY][CENTER][sup][h1][center][img]https://static.dc.com/2025-02/2025_02_24_Zatanna_Marquee_3x1.jpg?w=1200[/img][/center][b][center][color=black] Z A T A N N A   Z A T A R A[/color]
[color=#1E90FF]Z A T A N N A   Z A T A R A[/color][/center]
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[color=#1E90FF][sup][i]"Misadventures Of The Magical Variety"[/i][/sup][/color][/CENTER]

[h3][b]|| Strange Academy — New Orleans, Louisiana[/b][/h3]

The senior student common room had that particular quality of quiet that only existed between eleven at night and whenever Magik decided to blow something up.

Zatanna had learned to appreciate it.

She was cross-legged on the wide windowsill at the far end of the room, one knee drawn up to her chest, a book balanced against her thigh. Not one of the assigned texts, those lived in a neat stack on her desk, spines uncracked, radiating the low-level guilt she'd gotten very good at ignoring.

This was older. A slim volume with no title on the cover and a faint smell of woodsmoke that had nothing to do with the fireplace across the room. She'd found it slipped between two reference texts in the east wing archive three weeks ago, which meant either someone had hidden it there deliberately or the archive was doing what archives in places like this occasionally did, deciding for itself what needed to be found.

She was choosing to believe the former. It prompted a fair number of questions but ones with slightly less terrifying answers.

[color=#1E90FF][i]"Trats morf eht gninnigeb."[/i][/color]

The words came out barely above a whisper, her lips hardly moving. On the windowsill beside her knee, a small origami bird she'd folded from the corner of a torn envelope slowly unfolded its wings and took a single, tentative step. Then another. Then it walked directly off the edge of the sill and she caught it without looking up from the page.

She'd been working on the animation for as long as she'd had the unmarked text, following along with its incantations of seeking. It had been the easiest part of the text to translate, although she was starting to believe that was due to the rest of it being rather heavier on the secrets.

Meanwhile her creation still hadn't adjusted to the concept of gravity.

[color=#6DB48A]"Zatara."[/color]

[color=#1E90FF]"Isn't it past your bedtime?"[/color] Zatanna asked pleasantly, turning a page.

[color=#6DB48A]"That's from the restricted archive."[/color] He wasn't asking. Julian was very good at recognising things that were out of their usual place and very bad at recognising when that wasn't actually his business. He might very well have been correct, she wasn't sure [i]where[/i] the text originated from, just that it certainly wasn't supposed to be where she found it.

[color=#1E90FF]"Is it?"[/color] She turned another page. The paper bird sat very still in her palm, as if it too was waiting to see how this played out.

[color=#6DB48A]"You aren't supposed to remove those without supervision, [i]even you.[/i]"[/color] There was a particular flavour of satisfaction in his voice. [color=#6DB48A]"Strange's going to hear about this."[/color]

Zatanna finally looked up. She regarded him for a moment with a measured patience she didn't truly feel. [color=#1E90FF]"Julian,"[/color] she said, [color=#1E90FF]"You've been standing there waiting for me to look nervous."[/color] She closed the book. [color=#1E90FF]"You can go."[/color]

Something moved behind his eyes, the particular frustration of a person who'd rehearsed a scene and found the other party had different lines. He held her gaze a beat longer than was comfortable, then let out a short breath through his nose.

[color=#6DB48A]"Enjoy the book,"[/color] he said, with just enough edge to imply he hadn't decided what to do with the information yet. Then he left, his 'followers' trailing after him.

Zatanna waited until the sound of footsteps had faded down the corridor before she looked down at the book in her hands.

The thing was, he was right. She wasn't supposed to have it. Even if she could claim innocence in how she had acquired it, that didn't entirely absolve her continued studying of the clearly unmarked text.

She'd known that before she took it off the shelf. She'd known it the whole three weeks she'd spent with it tucked under her mattress, reading it in the margins of nights like this one. The question she was still working out, the one she turned over quietly while the Academy creaked around her in the dark, was whether [i]supposed to[/i] and [i]allowed to[/i] were the same thing here.

She wasn't sure they were, anymore.

The paper bird made a small, determined movement in her palm, lifted off her hand, and flew directly into the fireplace.

Zatanna watched it go.

[i]Three weeks,[/i] she thought, [i]and it still hasn't figured out what to fly toward.[/i]

There was probably a lesson in that she didn't care to consider. Her eyes settled to the view out the window. It was often said that New York never slept, and many cities could of course lay claim to vibrant night lives. New Orleans was different, it wasn't so much that it never slept, it seemed to come alive at night. Even as the last hours of the day trickled away, the city began to hum with an increasing activity that echoed the crescendo of a jazz track.

Those who looked for Strange Academy with ill intent, or without the gift of magic, would see only a humble but well maintained courtyard among the antebellum buildings of the French Quarter. Those permitted to find the Academy could see its true form inhabiting the Courtyard, a space impossibly large for its physical moorings.

For now, that meant that as Zatanna gazed out at the city, she did so under the anonymity of ancient spells.

She needed to be somewhere else for the night, and much as she was sure the glamour of Vegas had once beckoned her father, the siren song of New Orleans reached out for her.

In years gone by the act of leaving the grounds this late had been something far more challenging. The third window on the east corridor had a gap in its seal that Facilities had been meaning to fix since, she was sure, time immemorial. The ivy on the outer wall had been old enough and thick enough to hold her weight without too much complaint, and the ward on the south garden gate had a four-second delay on reset that she'd mapped out the first month she was old enough to care about what existed on the other side of it. These days, as one of the older students who didn't come with a risk of spontaneous combustion, she could simply walk out and deal with any sense of disapproval the next day.

New Orleans at midnight was not a city that noticed one more person moving through it without purpose. The French Quarter was warm and loud around her, all spilled light from open bar doors and competing conversations of brass bands bleeding into each other.

She stuck to Frenchman Street, there were plenty of bars with histories at least as long, if not longer, than the country. They tended to attract types from both the mortal and magical world. She ordered a drink and let the music do what it always did here, which was fill up the parts of her head that the Academy tended to leave occupied with ambition and anxiety.

She was halfway through it when she spotted Khalid.

He was across the street, which was strange enough on its own. But it was the way he was standing that caught her attention, very still in the way that had nothing to do with patience, facing a narrow alley between two buildings with his hands at his sides. Around him people moved in the ordinary way. He simply stood, as if he hadn't noticed any of it at all.

She crossed the street.

[color=#1E90FF]"Khalid."[/color]

He turned, and for just a moment, a fraction of a second she might have imagined, there was something behind his eyes that she didn't recognise. Then it was gone, and it was just Khalid, blinking at her.

[color=#C2B067]"Zatanna."[/color] He glanced back at the alley, then at her, then made the very deliberate choice not to look at the alley again. [color=#C2B067]"You're out late."[/color]

[color=#1E90FF]"So are you."[/color] She kept her voice easy. [color=#1E90FF]"What are you looking at?"[/color]

A pause.

[color=#C2B067]"Nothing,"[/color] he said. [color=#C2B067]"I thought I saw something. I must have been mistaken."[/color]

She looked past him at the alley. It was empty. Brick walls, a rusted drainpipe, a stack of pallets. There was nothing there. Nothing that she could see, anyway.

[color=#1E90FF]"Come on,"[/color] she said, after a moment. [color=#1E90FF]"I'll buy you a Coke."[/color]

Khalid smiled, and it was the right smile, warm and slightly relieved, and she matched it. They began to cross back across the street together.

[color=#C2B067]"Remember when we used to go out into the city and people would still recognize you? Must be a relief that's stopped."[/color] Khalid spoke without a hint of the almost robotic nature of his stare, the calm and friendly voice she was used to.

[color=#1E90FF]"I'm sure when people think of Zatanna Zatara they still think of a scared little girl, quite forgetting it's been over fifteen years. Like Madeline, I suppose."[/color] Zatanna looped her arm into Khalid's as they walked. He was tall enough, even if his build was more on the slender side of athletic, for her to rest her head on his shoulder as they did. [color=#1E90FF]"That, and people notice less when there's drink and music, I don't think we were roaming Frenchman Street at midnight when we were six."[/color]

[color=#C2B067]"Time flies when you're trying to make sure it remains flowing the right way, I suppose."[/color] He laughed, she followed a moment later, before he spoke again. [color=#C2B067]"I heard they offered you the family residency, thinking of heading back to Vegas?"[/color] His voice remained even, but she could sense the anxiety of the question.

[color=#1E90FF]"I'm sure my Dad would have liked that, I'm not sure I can go from helping Strange save the world to pulling rabbits out of hats, seems a bit of a downgrade."[/color] Zatanna sighed, pushing a strand of black hair back behind her ear. [color=#1E90FF]"But, I don't think that's fair of me. My dad's life wasn't a waste."[/color]

[color=#C2B067]"Of course not, Z."[/color] Khalid's hand gave her own a squeeze, before they untangled themselves, just before arriving back in her original bar. [color=#C2B067]"But that doesn't mean you haven't found something greater."[/color]

Zatanna gave him a smile, not voicing the sudden flash of a thought that she wasn't sure if that was true.

[color=#1E90FF]"Come on, there's one very fabulous cocktail and one very boring coke waiting with our names on them."[/color]

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