The next morning, you find yourself being glared at all the way to class, made all the more miserable by your sensitivity to gazes. Nearly every guard on or off duty was giving you dirty looks, and rumors were already flying about the school.
"I heard it was a first-year, some idiot who pissed off every patrol..."
"No one could catch them! So there's no proof who it was, but the guards must've seen their face..."
"Wouldn't the guards be looking for them then?"
It didn't take long before the fact that you are being scrutinized by every guard you pass is noticed by the student body. As you enter your classroom for your first class, the whispers quiet for a moment as every eye turns to you, then a flurry of curious comments flies about the room. You trudge to an empty desk and flop down as a smirking Kess slides into the seat next to you.
The next few weeks are a flurry of cookie-cutter classes during the day, with Kess dragging you off every night to different locations to be chased about by nightmarish forms. Your punishments, however, are the true nightmares. Every time you fail, Kess would use your form to prank or otherwise irritate various authority figures within the school, then escape before the identity of the miscreant could be positively linked to you. However, by this point nearly every adult in the school is giving you hard looks It's all you can do to try to get to class while avoiding just about everyone else on campus.
Your classmates, on the other hand, have varied opinions of you, ranging from you being a monumental ass to being a folk hero. As much as you try to deny that you committed any such acts, most of them believe you are simply keeping up plausible deniability, and Kess' knowing sneers only seem to confirm their suspicions.
Nevertheless, your stamina is improving bit by bit, and one or two times you even manage to make it to Kess' designated finish line a step or two ahead of your pursuer. However, those successes are largely a result of luck and desperation, not actual skill.
You flop down on the bank of the lake, dripping wet and panting for air. Against the moon, you see a slender figure rise out of the lake, nude and glistening. You actually managed to get ashore ahead of Kess, who had taken the form of a terrifying mermaid, quite beautiful but for the teeth like an anglerfish and claws on the end of her webbed hands. Now, you watch as she exits the pond in a form akin to the mermaid, but without the scales, claws, and fangs, appearing as a normal, albeit extremely beautiful, human woman.
"You're finally learning to hide your presence," Kess smiles down at you, drops of water running down her naked form. Even though you are a girl, you cannot help but think of her as attractive...or you would, if you didn't know what a terror she actually was. "However, a hole can be just as noticeable. Now you need to work on disguising your presence as something that fits in."
You are too beat to waste breath on answering. Instead, you simply watch as the otherworldly allure shifts and blurs into the nude impish form of Kess, the male rogue student.
"How---do you do that?" you ask between breaths. Thanks to being around Kess nearly constantly for the past month, you confirmed that Kess' form changes were not mere disguises, but actual physical shapeshifting. You had held back from asking until you were sure, but you couldn't control your curiosity any longer.
"Heh, do you really want to know?" Kess grins as he stands there proudly with his hands on his hips.