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Challenge #04209-K191: In the Other's Shoes by internutter

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Challenge #04209-K191: In the Other's Shoes
![alex-batchelor-6iAxBlkb8N0-unsplash.jpg](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/internutter/EoGxSUP4VqjXp4ibGSYa4hkdtGeSYc5AzZ1KyJZQctBg24SY2C9btMdTpyJTy9ejyo9.jpg)

> The Academy has a Reverse Room. Every year the student handbook is given out, and one of the first warnings is that bullying is NOT tolerated. What happens to a bully? They are forced to sit in the heavily padded Reverse Room. There spells in there force them to see and feel everything they did to their victims, from the victims point of view. -- Anon Guest

Educational facilities have had various methods of dealing with bullies. The usual methods allow the bullies to do whatever they want so long as the victims don't die in the process. Some rare few merely act when violence erupts, thus allowing bullies to use psychological torments until their victim snaps.

The Academy of Better Souls has vastly improved methods. As well as tutors and staff who actually _care_.

Bickle smirked, feeling superior. He'd just verbally devastated the ugliest girl in his year. That'll teach _her_ to tell him she thought his hair looked nice. He had all of fifteen seconds to enjoy the sensation before he encountered the stern robes and disappointed expression of Sibling Cyble.

"Student Bickle," they said. "You must come with me."

He knew damn well what would happen if he tried to run. The Clerics of Justice had their _ways_ of making people co-operate. None of them hurt, because none of them would ever hurt a child, but they were irresistible all the same. So he followed where Sibling Cyble lead him.

Already hating stupid ugly Wit for getting him in trouble.

Sibling Cyble opened a door, and gestured him into a simple, padded chamber. The tantrum room? Why _here_? "Enter," they said. Providing no other explanation.

When he walked in, he was behind someone else's eyes. Waking up in the distant corner of the girl's ward, where all the normal girls had pushed her bed. Everything she did was surrounded by laughter, and accompanied by the sinking feeling in her stomach that everything she did was wrong, somehow.

No matter _what_ the Clerics of Justice said, it still _felt_ that way.

She brushed her teeth with her eyes closed, but had to watch herself in the mirror when she was nearly done combing her hair. All the other girls had friends to help them. Or make sure their parts were straight. Or make sure she didn't miss any strands.

Wit bumbled through as best she could. If she couldn't be pretty, she could at least be neat. Done as best she could, she faced her reflection and whispered, "I am brave. I am strong in my soul. I am doing my best and none can expect more of me than that."

She moved out to her day with the other girls. Isolated on a table alone during breakfast. Relegated to the furthest stall of the toilets. Sent back by three older girls who insisted they watch her wash her filthy Hellkin hands.

_There was a suggestion that those girls were taken for their own lessons in justice, but Wit didn't see it happen. She just knew about scrubbing properly._

The highlight of her morning was Bickle. She'd admired him from afar for some time, but today... _today_ she was going to be brave.

She was going to give him a compliment.

She was so nervous that she wanted to be sick. She held tight to her tail so it wouldn't dive between her legs or tangle her ankles. The last thing Wit wanted was to look stupid in front of her crush.

"What?" he said. Not in a nice way.

Then again, Wit had rarely ever known 'nice'. She swallowed her pounding heart and squeaked, "I think your hair looks nice when you let it grow long."

"Yours look like a Hellkin messed in it," he cooed in return. "Oh wait. It did."

She didn't cry. Didn't make a sound. Just... stood there in the middle of the hall as her world came crashing down around her. A meteor could fall from the sky and rain down onto her head and she'd consider it an improvement.

Bickle stumbled to the padded floor. Back in his own body. Very much out of breath and trembling from head to toe.

Sibling Cyble opened the door. "Do you understand?"

"That was horrible," Bickle managed, and recovered his self-centredness. "Why'd she do that to me? How can you put _me_ into that _thing_ and call it justice? It's not fair!"

"A person is a thing to you?" said Cyble. "Where is the justice in _that_?"

Bickle had no easy answer beyond, "Just _look_ at her."

"Perhaps you should." Cyble gently tapped Bickle in the centre of his forehead. "_Look_ at her. And everyone. With the eyes of truth."

Cyble had a strange glow around them, but Bickle didn't understand what they'd done. Not until he scurried back to classes and truly... _saw_.

They called it Soulsight. To see the innermost nature of a person instead of the flesh that stood in the way. His friends were monstrous and filthy. The people he had been friendly with were various aspects of disgusting.

Wit... was no angel. There were signs that, if Bickle knew how to read them, that Wit could be headed down a dark path if nobody helped her. There was a smouldering flame of vengeance, and a seething mass of self-hatred about her. And thousands of barbs in her back from everyone else.

And every morning, she woke up and chose to try again.

He didn't talk to her for three days, and told his friends to stop down-talking her whenever they started.

On the fourth day, he decided to be brave. "I'm sorry I said that to you," he managed. "They made me see you're really brave. It takes courage to face what you face and... still keep trying."

Wit was sullen and guarded and wary. "Don't make fun," she mumbled.

He decided to be a more active guardian henceforth.

[Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@abatch16?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash">Alex Batchelor</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/dining-hall-interior-6iAxBlkb8N0?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash">Unsplash</a>]

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