The Hall of Legends

This story is my entry in the

Literotica April Fools Story Contest 2025

contest, so votes are especially appreciated! It follows a couple of college students who, in their quest to become campus legends, find connection and a reason to break out of their very different shells. Expect graphic first-time m/f vaginal sex, oral, and fingering, all in a public place. All characters are enthusiastically consenting and, of course, over the age of 18.

***

There are just a few weeks left before the first April Fool's Day of my college career, and I'm scared as hell.

It's not a milestone I ever expected to take much notice of, but here at Caverley University, pranks are practically a religion, and April Fool's Day is bigger than Christmas.

Seriously, Caverley is known for two things: epic pranks and a top-notch film department, the latter of which is what prompted my arguably ill-advised decision to apply here in the first place.

Pranks were my least favorite part of high school. As far as I was concerned, they were just mean things people did to each other while claiming they were jokes. Like that made it okay.

Mostly, they involved destroying people's stuff, covering their bodies with various uninvited substances, and picking them up and transporting them places against their will, which would legally constitute kidnapping if we weren't all just expected to be cool about it for some reason.

I'm a small guy. I got carried around a lot.

Sure, sometimes pranks happened between people who genuinely liked each other, but that almost made it worse. It just showed how arbitrary and senseless the whole thing was. Trying to hurt someone you thought had it coming at least made sense. Trying to hurt someone you

liked

, when you could do something nice for them instead, just seemed like a colossal waste of effort.

But that was high school. And if I've learned one thing from my university education so far, it's that my high school's prank culture was fucking

amateur

.

The prank scene at Caverley isn't just more of the same. It's a whole other beast. There's a code of ethics that everyone actually seems to take seriously, and a fierce sense of competition. Everyone wants to create the next big stir, the thing everyone's talking about.

Since I've been here, I've witnessed such achievements as the engineering department swapping out the guts of the bell tower for a set that played "Never Gonna Give You Up."

Or the journalism department putting out a full newspaper announcing the election of dread Cthulu as chairman of the school board, and detailing in perfect journalistic prose the effects of his leadership on every aspect of campus life. There were several pages of memorials at the end for those students and faculty members who had so far plucked their eyes out in madness.

The theater department jumped in on that one too, and immediately organized a robed cult meeting in the quad, which

did

involve a guy seeming to rip out his eyes with some incredibly convincing makeup effects.

Then there was the time someone rigged a teacher's desk to spit out condoms at random intervals all throughout a lecture, each time from a different hidden compartment.

Another person (probably, attribution is sketchy for both incidents) decorated a row of palm trees with Christmas tree lights, which looked perfectly normal and festive by daylight, and unmistakably like a row of ejaculating penises by night.

I'll never look at the shape of palm trees the same again.

And the pranks I've witnessed firsthand are just the tip of an ancient iceberg.

There's an entire hallway of the humanities building, nicknamed the Hall of Legends, that's lined with laminated pictures of people performing various sex acts everywhere you could possibly imagine on campus and throughout Greek Row.

That particular tradition apparently started with two rival fraternities — no one can agree on which two — sneaking into each other's houses with dates and then showing off the evidence to each other. From there, it spiraled into everyone making a show of getting it on in any and every place they weren't technically supposed to.

Most of the pictures are wallet-sized, but the latest contributor to the collage gets to place a poster-sized copy of their image at the end of the hall, until the next contributor replaces it.

Currently, the picture in the place of pride is a panorama of two men and a woman at the top of the redwood tree in the north quad, circle-jerking (circle-fingering, in her case?) with their backs tied to the trunk.

Every time I walk down that hall, I have to guess at how long someone would spend looking at the pictures, if sex was old news to them.

Like, sure, yeah, that's impressive, but I've totally done stuff like that. Who hasn't, am I right, my fellow adults?

I have no idea if I'm pulling it off.

The redwood pic has been here for as long as I have, and I think people are kind of scared to try to top it. God only knows how they got the shot. There must have been a fourth conspirator, piloting a drone or something.

Even the exhibitionism here is staggeringly ambitious.

So, yeah, I admit it, I've been warming up to the idea of pranks in my time here. I've seen pranks bring people a strange amount of joy, and bring them together instead of pushing them apart. And once or twice, yeah, I've watched people high-five and whoop and whisper about the weird, wild, shocking thing that they made happen, and I've wished I were part of the moment.

Being scared on April Fool's is nothing new for me, but this time, it's not about what the pranksters might do to me. It's about whether I can hold my own as one of them.

My hands are shaking when my entire dorm floor gathers together for a strategy session in the hallway, and Claire, one of the women from the unit right across from mine, on the ladies' side of the hall, announces that, together, we're going to win "legendary" status this year.

"Okay," says Landon, my roommate. "Love the confidence. How?"

Claire's roommate Val, steps out from behind her, and as usual, I try not to stare too hard.

Val is a singular presence. She's short and petite, dwarfed by her own glasses and the loud, colorful overshirts she wears open like jackets.

She's one of those short people whose energy alone seems to take up three times as much space as their body. I'm more than a little jealous. I'm almost as short as she is, and I feel like I live in power save mode half the time. More than jealous, though, I'm

compelled

, every time she bursts onto the scene. I want to bathe in her life force.

"Great question!" Val tells Landon, with a flurry of hand-claps. "We're going to—"

"Val, I was going to give you a whole introduction and everything," Claire complains.

"But I can just say it..."

"Well go on, then, say it."

"Fine, I will!"

Claire shoves Val to the center of the aisle. Val stumbles, and I lunge forward on instinct to steady her, before I realize that the two of them are just joking around, and Val is putting on a show.

Great, I'm off to a fantastic start today, understanding the normal people lines between seriousness and humor. I'm sure to be a fantastic asset to a legendary April Fool's Day prank.

Val gently unhooks my hands from her shoulders and pats them, like, "thanks anyway," and begins to pace the hall, making eye contact with everyone gathered around the edges.

"Okay, folks, I'll get right to it!" Val shimmies, so that her outer shirt flutters without a breeze, her curly bobbed hair bounces, and her subtle but present cleavage jiggles under her tight gray tank top. "I'm not gonna lie, going legendary isn't going to be easy. The way will be perilous, the obstacles formidable! And we all know what the biggest obstacle is. Right, Wes?"

She points at me with her whole hand, slapping the underside of it against her other palm for emphasis.

I take a moment to get over the fact that she didn't have to ask my name, and then take my best guess.

"The fact that it's all been done before?"

"Exactly!" says Val, which is even more of a pleasant surprise than the name thing.

It's nice to know I'm not just lacking in imagination for the next big thing.

"Messing with the gym scoreboard? Done," she says. "The vending machines? Done. The faculty lounge? Done. Every inch of this campus is already a storied, cum-spattered monument to laughter and adventure. So how do we not get lost in the noise?"

"By posting a really big picture in a prominent place?" I suggest, thinking of how things are done with the Hall of Legends.

"Nope," says Val. "Anyone else?"

"Call in a celebrity ringer?" Landon jokes.

"Closer, but no!" says Val.

She rubs her palms together, waiting for any more ideas, and generally holding the moment before sharing her own.

"We're going off campus!" she announces. "And I'm not talking about Greek Row. We're going to..."

She waves for a few of our neighbors to step apart, clearing a stretch of blank, white wall. Then she whips out a miniature projector attached to her phone, and backs up to point it at the empty space.

"...City Hall!"

She taps her phone screen, projecting an image of Caverley City Hall, with its palatial white domes and its bronze statue of founder James Caverley.

"This April Fool's Day," says Val, "we're going to take the game to the whole city! We're going to give everyone a great big

legendary

reminder of what Caverley is synonymous with. And it's not another rando rich guy named James from the seventeen hundreds."

She swipes her screen, and the shaky image of the City Hall as it is gets replaced with a clearly photoshopped vision of what City Hall

could

look like.

The words "Caverley City Hall" have been slightly tweaked to read "Caverley Kicks Ass." Which is still a little ambiguous on its own, but for clarity, she's added a costume of our mascot, a wild-eyed possum, fitted over the statue of James Caverley.

"It's

us

," says Val. "We

are

Caverley."

There are a few nervous chuckles along the hall, and a clap from Claire.

"I know, I know," Val raises her hands. "Caverley students have put more elaborate messages on taller buildings. But only right here under our own noses. Or, occasionally, over at Norfitch."

"Suck it, Finches!" Landon adds, referring to the mascot of our designated rival school.

Everyone laughs, but I don't get it. Practically everyone who goes to Caverley also applied to Norfitch, and vice-versa. Rivalry is the ultimate arbitrary meanness. But whatever, that's not what Val's proposing anyway.

"The point is, Caverley pranks happen in a sandbox!" Val exclaims. "And what's the point of it all? What are the pranks even for? Anyone?"

Landon shrugs next to me. "Breaking the tension?" he suggests. "Shaking off stress from school?"

Val teeters on her feet, twisting her shoulders around, shrugging without shrugging.

"Yeeeaaaaah... but no. Actually, no," she says. "I mean, there are so many different ways to de-stress, right? And I'm sure pranks are it for someone, but what are the odds that everyone at Caverley finds it

relaxing

to put almost as much work into making wild shit happen as we do into schoolwork itself?"

No one has a ready response for this.

"No, if it was about stress relief, we'd have spas. We'd have counselors who are actually counselors. We'd have

less fucking homework

!" says Val. "There's something else going on here. There are reasons why we're supposed to do pranks, and they're nothing to do with stress. So, I can think of two possibilities. Firstly, it's awesome publicity for the school. Makes it look like all we do here is have fun and be smart, impressive badasses. Secondly, the same reason we're supposed to do

everything

we do in school. Skills. Confidence. Discovery. Preparation for living in the world. We do pranks to teach ourselves, first hand, that we can do amazing things, hard things, things that have an effect that reaches beyond ourselves. Right?"

There are a few shouts of "Yeah!", part joking, part serious.

"Yeah!" says Val. "And what's the best thing we can do to prepare for the world? To represent our school to the world? We take the game out

into

the world! We take real risks in a real, rails-free space! Who's with me?"

My stomach twinges when she mentions real risks.

At Caverley, campus security is literally forbidden to interfere in pranks without getting special approval from the dean. Pranks are

that

revered here. But out there, in the world, you can do jail time for misuse of spray paint.

I feel a little vindicated when most of our neighbors also pause for at least a second, but after the first few shouts of "Yeah!", the rest spill over like dominoes, and some nervous little flutter in my stomach pulls me over too.

"Yeah!" I agree.

"Yeah!" Val repeats, pumping her fist in the air. "So, I'm going to need

you

," she points at Landon, "to get your hands on a mascot costume. I need

you

," she points at another guy farther down the hall, "to figure out how to mod it for the statue. I need all the hands I can get to help me cut out the plywood additions to the sign."

My tension eases. That's where I'll be, doing the behind-the-scenes bulk busywork. There's no way I can get in trouble for doing just that.

"And you, Wes," Val points squarely at me. "I need you to help me figure out how to rig a lighting setup up there, so that people can actually see what we've done."

"Just figure it out?" I ask.

"And set it up, of course," Val says brightly.

My stomach twists back up, cramming itself all the way up into my ribcage.

"We'll be the perfect team!" says Val. "I'll get us in, set up the broad strokes, you give it a polish-up, and next thing you know, we're riding off into the sunrise of destiny! Legends!"

I know she's joking. But who could say no to an image like that?

#

On the night of the prank, I'm almost late to meet Val in the quad, because I spent twenty minutes trying to figure out what the hell you're supposed to wear to break into City Hall. I resisted the urge to go full ninja, but I did pick out my darkest jeans and gray t-shirt, and I tucked an old COVID mask and a pair of winter gloves into my pocket, just in case.

Val shows up with an only slightly more muted outer shirt than usual, with kittens printed all over it. It might only be a coincidence that it's less colorful than her sea creatures one, or her musical instruments one, or her weed leaves one.

She's still way more prepared than I am. Her backpack is full of precisely, mathematically folded sheets of plywood, rolls of duct tape, and a scary comprehensive set of burglar's tools, which she goes over piece by piece like she thinks it will comfort me somehow.

All I have is a few strings of LEDs in our school colors and a cheap power bank, so I volunteer to carry her second bag, with the modified mascot costume.

"Excited?" she asks, when she notices me restlessly wringing the handles as we walk.

"Sure, excited," I say. "That's... plausible."

Val laughs, and the shaky feeling in my chest grows warmer.

"Hey," she stops on the sidewalk ahead of me, whips around, and holds out her hands.

I place mine in them, and she squeezes.

"Am I totally torturing you with this?" she asks.

"No, I can handle it," I say immediately.

"Do you

want

to handle it?"

"Yeah, I swear."

"Then would you breathe for me for a sec?" she asks.

"Sure, okay."

I close my eyes and try to ignore the warmth seeping its way up to my cheeks. Nothing makes you feel more like an adult than being told to breathe. But she's probably right. The sooner I squash the jitters, the better.

"Calm down," I murmur to myself on a nice, slow exhale. "Calm down calm down calm down."

"Not what I had in mind," says Val.

I open my eyes and raise a brow.

"I mean, if it works for you, great," she says. "Does it? Work for you?"

"I guess, sort of?" I answer. "Why, what do you do to calm down?"

"I don't," says Val. "I've never been able to calm down. I just try to choose what kind of not calm to be. I mean, scared and excited feel almost the same in your body. Way closer than calm. Makes it easier to switch between them."

It sounds ridiculous at first, but less so, the longer I think about it.

I'm not sure I even want to be the kind of excited that feels this intense. I take nighttime cold medicine on Christmas Eve so that I can sleep, because even though I'm nineteen years old, my excitement gets that distracting.

But still, it's better than being scared, so I try.

"I'm excited," I say on another slow exhale, because I'm not sure exactly how else I'm supposed to tell my brain what to feel. "This is awesome, it's amazing, it's so cool, I can't wait."

I keep muttering, and it... kind of works.

Because for fuck's sake, this

is

so cool. This is the kind of night I'm going to be talking about for the rest of my life.

"Better?" Val asks.

"Yeah, actually." I'm still breathing fast and shallow, but I'm almost convinced that it's not a bad thing.

"Good," she says. "Because I need you to keep watch while I pick the lock."

She doesn't, really. It's so late at night, and the street is so deserted, that we can walk right up to the front doors of City Hall, two intimidating slabs of wrought iron and bulletproof glass, and once we're there, it takes Val about ninety seconds to get them open. Twenty of those seconds go to finding the right tools in her kit, and the rest might be her stalling to make sure she can get a few jokes in first.

"Yes, you like that, don't you?" she whispers to the lock when she identifies the perfectly sized pick and slips it inside. "No shame in using the right tool for the job, even if you have to order it from a naughty website. It's better than making do with a hairbrush— I mean hairpin."

She smirks up at me, and turns the handle.

"Step where I step," she directs, charting an arcing course leftward from the door, and squeezing around the side of the metal detectors. "I checked the place out last week."

"You get scarier the more I know about you," I tell her.

"Makes you glad we're on the same side, doesn't it?"

She's laughing, but she's not wrong.

Beckoning me over, she wedges a sturdy metal ruler between the doors of one of the four main elevators.

"It takes keycard access to get them started from here," Val explains. "But there should be maintenance access ladders inside."

"Should be?" I repeat the obvious part of this sentence.

"I couldn't exactly sneak into an elevator shaft during a daytime visit," she says. "How about we have a look before we assume that they've decided to toss the international building code out the window?"

Val has made a gap between the doors wide enough to wedge herself into, and she braces her foot and back against opposite sides to pry it wider.

I help, and soon enough, we're standing together in the silent, unlit box of the elevator.

Val pauses, standing very close in front of me. She opens her mouth, and for a moment I'm expecting something other than words. Then she points upward and says, "Give me a boost."

"Right."

I lace my fingers into a step on top of my knee, like I've seen people do but never done before. It's harder than it looks, even with how petite Val is, but with a lot of fumbling and wobbling, we're eventually able to prop her up high enough to pull herself through the ceiling hatch.

She plants her feet on either side of the hatch from on top, reaches down for my hands, and pulls me upward with a flex of her thighs.