Michael, I hate you! I absolutely hate you! DROP DEAD ALREADY! Gods, why did my parents think sending me to a school of villains as a Jack of All Trades was a good idea?!
Peter, now Petra, grew up dreaming of becoming a genuine Ideal Hero by going to the School of Righteousness and Honor. Unfortunately for him, his parents couldn't afford it, or so they claim. So they unilaterally decided to ship him off to Doom Valley Prep School, a well-known Social Darwinist school for villains, without bothering to consult Peter first.
Despite his best efforts, none of his appeals swayed them, the best reaction he got out of them was "oh it's not so bad. It used to be much worse!". Even the temple of The God of Murder was sympathetic to his plight, but offered nothing more than a tin dagger. With a heavy heart, certain he wouldn't last the week, and having no means of escape, he boarded the Roc-drawn airborne carriage taking him to the school.
On the way there he was offered the hand of friendship by his fellow passenger Michael. Being desperate for allies, he took it only to learn, to his horror, that Michael just wanted a convenient combination "girlfriend" and "test subject" for his alchemical potions. Waking up at the school, Peter finds he's been unwillingly gender-bent from boy to girl and been fed several hypnotic suggestions. It only gets worse from there with murderous bullies, teachers that are apathetic at best and sadistic at worse, monsters that will eat students, and pass or die tests.
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, and Royal Road (here).
Doom Valley Prep School Tropes:
- Academy of Adventure: Both Doom Valley Prep School and The School of Righteousness And Honor put their students through rigorous training to go into battle and deal with existential threats, but with Doom Valley, the students have to worry about their fellow students and walking into class to find their teacher in a bad mood, or that the janitorial staff has forgotten to chase off some eldritch entity from their assigned desk. And when the teachers say that trying to sneak into the dorm of the opposite gender will get you eaten by the beings living under the stairs, they're not joking.
- Academy of Evil: The titular school is a well respected institution and ranked #2 in the world for creating first rate evil overlords, dark wizards, warlords, politicians, assassins, lawyers, and other careers that involve grabbing the world by the throat and taking what you want. It doesn't just teach students to be evil, it teaches them how to be successful at whatever they do. And they'll make sure students learn or die trying.
- Accidental Hero: A student of the School of Righteousness and Honour, was apparently let in free of charge after pick-pocketing a valuable magical relic from an evil wizard who was going to destroy a city with it. Everyone calls him a hero, but he was just a homeless thief that stole the thing hoping he could sell it for a good meal.
- Alchemy Is Magic: As is made evident from chapter 1, alchemical potions can do all sorts of magical things, healing, temporary status buffs, mind-control, and even gender-swapping.
- Black Comedy: Peter, now Petra, spends every day on a mile-long trauma train, and it's all played for laughs.
- Blaming the Victim: On the eve of day 1, Lady Plague holds to task those students who had their room key taken by violence and being unable to defend themselves, shipping them off to a communal dorm like the kind found in army barracks. The bullies didn't go unpunished, but that hardly helps.
- Boarding School of Horrors: Played for laughs. Doom Valley is a well known school for creating villains, and is quite proud of it's reputation as the #2 school in the world. Bullies are allowed to do almost anything they want that doesn't involve murder or causing a fellow student to be sent home due to injuries. Teachers are allowed to murder students, although they usually just give them detention where they could, and sometimes probably will, die. Shadow monsters keep students out of the wrong dormitories by eating intruders. Teachers bet on which students will die, be crippled, or transformed and unable to stay at school. The school is a maze and being late for class will get a detention. Eldritch tentacle monsters are a frequent pest and will attack students. And combat class involves live practice dummies, rabid dogs, and a lava field. And this is just for the freshmen, it gets worse as students advance.
- Body Horror: For a comedy there is quite a lot of body horror. Early on two students, a boy and a girl are shown to be connected by their arm and leg. A month later the pair are basically two nearly identical heads on one body. A girl was turned into a mouse girl that the canteen cat women look at with hungry eyes and sharp knives. The Monster Under The Bed would classify as a body horror with her very inhuman body, but she's so nice people tend to ignore the two sets of eyes, fangs, trunk, multi-jointed arms, and ten bone like fingers on each hand.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: After several comments calling for Petra to end up in sexual situations that went beyond fan service, the author pointedly added this dialogue- “Let's not go there please, I'd like to keep this somewhat PG"- to a suggestion that Petra act as a seductress to deal with one of their enemies.
- Clothing Damage: Happens so often to Petra, that she actually has a minor tantrum when a giant frog eats her dress while trying to swallow her. So far her clothes have been burned, torn, shredded, ripped off, and burst out of.
- Crime of Self-Defense: In Lady Plague's backstory, she legally set up a tower/laboratory in unclaimed land. The king of a nearby kingdom then just summarily declared her tower existed in his domain and demanded she pay insane taxes or serve in his army. When she refused his ridiculous demands, he sent an army at her to take her by force or kill her. She retaliated with a plague known as The Walking Death which not only eliminated the offending country but was so fierce, gods, demons, and all the other nations had to go Scorched Earth to stop it. She now has a massive bounty on her head, but good luck trying to collect...
- Cruel and Unusual Death: A scholar wrote an essay saying that Fate killed the former God of Luck and took over his domain, because he kept altering what was fated to happen. Apparently Fate didn't like that slander, as the scholar was killed soon after by a horde of rabid hamsters.
- Do Wrong, Right: The point of Doom Valley Prep School's "higher education" is not to make villains, any illiterate bum can be one of those. What the school wants to churn out are successful villains, and if the unworthy wind up dying, wishing they were dead, or polymorphed into some non-sapient creature that no longer cares, so be it.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Doom Valley is very strict and harsh, but fair. The teachers frequently set up betting pools to see when, not if, a "weak" student will be killed off by the curriculum, but there are things they absolutely will not tolerate.
- They absolutely, positively, will not tolerate rape and segregate the dorms by gender with monsters to eat any trespassers, and that's no exaggeration.
- Any attempt to murder, maim, or experiment on a fellow student without a teacher's approval is punished in an equal measure of human experimentation, being vivisected for alchemy ingredients, or (gasp) Detention, and if you survive the last, a permanent black mark goes on your permanent record.
- Getting caught doing Stupid Evil is punished at the discretion of the person who catches you, and if you can't buy your way out of it, good luck.
- Attacking a teacher and failing.... Good luck with that.
- Most importantly, try not to die permanently. The teachers don't like to clean up after you.
- Faint in Shock: This happens at least once, when Ella is surprised to see Petra with male genitals. She only passes out for a few seconds and is embarrassed after. When she sees it again a little later she is just turns away while blushing.
- Gender Bender: A massive part of the plot involves male Peter being transformed into the female Petra, and her problems dealing with it. It's done by magic in a few hours, and there are ways to turn her back to a male by safer means, but they cost more money than she can afford, and the school isn't about to pay for it.
- Gods Need Prayer Badly: Ms. Parch, goddess of written history, encourages students in her history class to pray to her if they're having trouble with their homework or tests. Petra also goes and prays to multiple gods and demons, before heading to Doom Valley Prep School, hoping that one of them will answer his prayers. He has a large collection of holy symbols for the various churches, temples, and cults.
- Great Big Library of Everything: The school library has bookcases that are two stories tall, and the aisles disappear off in the distance. It also doesn't follow normal geometry, as four right turns put you in a totally different area, and there is a cliff to climb to get to the second floor. There are five floors just like this. It also has books on every possible subject from curses, to the elemental plane of water, to autobiographies, to basket weaving. It has a small army of angels and demons of knowledge taking care of it.
- Hero Academy: The School of Righteousness And Honor is a sister school to Doom Valley, and the #1 school in the world. it teaches students how to be good wizards, paladins, and presumably benevolent politicians and other things. They frequently pit their students against each other.
- Hot Springs Episode: Doom Valley has a high end spa with hot springs for students. Ella takes them all for an hour long soak to help relax after the first week of class. Petra gets to angst that she has the best figure out of all of her friends, along with other things that come up.
- Lethal Chef: While not shown, Petra claims her grandmother is this.
- Magical Library: The school library is huge, and considering taking four right turns leads to an entirely different part of the library, it's definitely an eldritch location. It also has books on magic, and books that are magical. One section of the library is flooded by a leaking tome on the Elemental Plane of Water. It has an army of demons and angels focused on knowledge caring for the books. There are also monsters wandering around, although some of them may just be there to read the books.
- Magitek: The world seems to have many magical items that are the equivalent of technology. Magic mirrors act like videophones, Petra wishes she could afford a pen that can write down what it hears, a golem caravan is used like a bus inside a city, and more things are mentioned or heavily implied.
- The Many Deaths of You: Just in the first week, Petra has died and been resurrected over 18 times!
- Massively Numbered Siblings: The norm in royal families is to have a lot of children and potential heirs. Ella has over 350 siblings, of both genders. Aghast, Petra offers condolences to Ella's poor mother but then learns that Ella's mother is wife number 259 in a Royal Harem, and is very, very happy being that far down the totem pole.
- Moral Myopia: Michael and Victor do a lot of nastiness to Peter then Petra and her genuine friends yet have the gall to genuinely see themselves as the wounded party when either Petra retaliates or the consequences of their actions come back to bite them.
- Odd Job Gods: There seems to be gods and demons for many roles. Ms. Parch, goddess of written history is the most obvious, since she is also a history teacher. There is also the Demon Lord of Parties, who is apparently quite popular.
- Physical God: Ms. Parch, the history teacher, is the goddess of written history. Listening to lectures from several of her classes, it appears that gods and demons play an active part in the world, from ruling nations to going to the best parties.
- Pass the Popcorn: This is a common reaction by the adults when they realize Petra is Fate's Chew Toy or witness her amazingly improbable luck. The teachers are mostly sitting back and laughing while betting on if Petra will survive the insanity. And later, Blood Wing's Succubus mother actually convinces another demon to come to her kingdom where they watch Petra with 'beer and popcorn'.
- Potty Emergency: Happens to Petra during combat class when she almost falls head first into lava. She's allowed to leave class early to get cleaned up. It almost happens several other times when facing near certain death or detention.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Even the, at best, apathetic teachers, take an extremely disapproving look on rape or attempted rape, which is why the dorms are guarded by monsters that will summarily eat people who try to sneak into opposite gender dorms. Even the worst bullies, aside those already under Victor's mind control, took an extreme dislike to him when he used said mind control to try and have Petra and an unaffiliated boy named Garth go at each other like rabbits in heat in the public mess hall against their will. When Victor suffered the backlash, he first tried to protest he was doing Petra a favor, and when that didn't fly, attempted straight-up murder disguised as an "accident."
- School Bullying Is Harmless: The teachers rarely, if ever, intervene in a bullying incident, aside from obvious detention-worthy rule-breaking, because they are all firmly in the Social Darwinism school of thought, and make a point of Blaming the Victim.
- Social Darwinism: Doom Valley Prep is a fairly firm believer in the Struggler part of social Darwinism. They allow extreme bullying, blame the victim for not being strong or smart enough to stop it, and will give students extremely dangerous tests and detentions that can end in death. But the school also realize that cooperation is a useful tool. The teachers are impressed by Princess Ella because she uses her position and money to gain willing allies and minions. And after a secret test, they told the weakers students who had failed, that they should have allied themselves to stronger students, as friends or useful minions. Then the teachers chastised some of the bullies who didn't use the test to gain willing allies or even unwilling minions. Survival and success is all important, how they achieve it is secondary.
- Stuff Blowing Up: During a safety lecture in Potions class, there is a passing reference explaining why blowing stuff up for fun is a bad thing.We'd spent the first part of the class going over safety procedures. It was all pretty standard stuff. What to do if you got poisoned. Knowing when to grab the extinguisher stone, duck, run away, or bend over and start praying to the deity of your choice. The difference between various types of mercury. And how trying to make a bigger boom nearly drove Gnomes to extinction.
- Suicide Mission: The detentions are frequently this, with students having to collect dangerous items and deal with monsters that will happily eat them. While it's possible for very clever or powerful students to survive, it's not easy. And if they really annoy a teacher, their detention will be made virtually unsurvivable, as Petra discovers.
- Tentacled Terror: Doom Valley Prep School seems to have a problem keeping pesky tentacled eldritch-like horrors off the campus. So far two students have been attacked by tentacled horrors, and the staff treats them like an annoying pest.
- Training from Hell: The curriculum is so harsh, the teachers have a betting pool as to when, not if, Petra is going to be Killed Off for Real.
- World of Technicolor Hair: While most people seem to have fairly normal hair colours, Naomi has pink hair, and the Dwarf Calci, has emerald green hair and beard. This is not seen as out of the ordinary or even worth mentioning.
