Spring Forward, Fall Back (Alucard x Chubby! Reader)

Reader P.O.V.

I wanted to go home ten minutes into class. The professor began his lecture droning on and on about the proper way of using different brushes during editing to make corrections in the background of our work, something most of us had known long before we even came to the class, and the ability to make corrections via transparencies to make the background push the foreground even further forward to achieve a 3-D effect. I had done this multiple times before, a little something you learn when experimenting with Photoshop or GIMP, but some of my other classmates seemed to think that the step by step instructions given out by the professor were a bit too difficult to understand. This meant I would be interrupted in my work countless times by everyone.

"How did you do that one?"

"What brush did you use?"

"How the hell did you make that color?"

"Couldn't I just use the eraser to do that?"

"That looks like you just stole it from Google."

That last comment was just enough to push my very last button. I'd already been in a simmering rage at this point due to some people seemingly incompetent when it came to a class they'd been taking for the longest time already, but to be accused of taking someone else's work when surrounded by people doing the exact same thing to me? Oh, hell naw!

"Excuse me?"

"Well it does. Look." they said again while pulling up the picture to show me.

"Listen," I said as calmly as I could, "you've been sitting here for the better part of the class staring over my shoulder and pretty much copying every single thing I'm doing. You've done that for the whole of this course. There's only one worse and that's because they're constantly asking me to do things they can't seem to do when it comes right down to it. Now you want to sit there, look me in the eye and say that I'M the one taking things from other people?"

"Its just that.."

"Oh no you don't. You don't get to say that when you've been copying my work all through this class. You don't get to sit there and demean the amount of work I've put into every project I do because you think I'm plagiarizing someone else's work, especially since all of you asking me questions, begging me to show you how to do something while you're looking at my work or point blank asking me to do your work for you and are trying to get away with turning in. Talk about plagiarism? There you fucking go. You don't like how my work looks? Fine. Go do your own, don't ask me for another fucking thing and let's have the professor decide if I stole something from someone else or if you guys should be more worried." For a few moments there was complete silence. Then a clap. Another. Another. Half the class that hadn't relied on me for help was now applauding my speech, including the professor. Regardless of the where's and whyfor's, everyone else in that room could understand my ire and the reasons for it.

"And," I began, "upon closer scrutiny, you're actually looking at one of my designs used for the local pizza parlor. It was part of a project we did at the beginning of the term and mine was actually used. If you ask the professor, he'll tell you point blank the five of us who actually had our designs used in local advertisements, three of them being my own."

"She is correct," the professor admitted. "She, Mr. Coleman, Miss Chandler, Miss Jeong and Miss Taro have all had their work used in local ads. Anyone who actually paid attention to what happened in class instead of trying to rip off someone else's ideas would have known that."

"So why don't you do your work instead of scoping around Google for shit to steal," I said.

"For those of you who have tried to get Miss L/N's help through your final project, you will receive a half grade unless you can prove you were the one who did 90% of the work," my now favorite professor said blandly. "If I find even one instance of plagiarism, whether its a brush tip that was downloaded within the last 15 days or a color pallet that didn't exist before that time, you will find your work only getting 50% of the grade. I will also be going through your previous work with a fine toothed comb. Anything I recognize as Miss L/N's design will lower your grade. And judging by the amount of open mouths I see around the room, there's going to be a lot of you losing a lot of points. And just so you know, every one of your programs auto download your schematics because of the graphics program you use, so you can't sit there and delete the changes to your system without the program taking a snapshot of what you used and when it was added to your system." When I looked around the room I saw quite a few people who'd let their jaws drop...except for one.