Magic Under Construction: TOMU V2 #4

[alexandraerin]

Started: 4/12/2011 11:00 a.m.
Status: In progress.
Last Updated: 5:00
Word Count: ~4800
Hours Writing: 4


Note: If you're reading this on my Livejournal, note that at a certain point the cross-post will fail because the post is too large for Livejournal. So if you're following along as I write, it's probably best to watch the Dreamwidth post.



[4 hours in. Pretty well finished, there's some stuff that I'm keeping out of this draft.]

Sunday was the first day that all of us were back on the MU campus, and it was the first day that felt like things were back to normal. It was a weird kind of normalcy, granted, given that instead of waking up underneath Amaranth in a tiny little bed, I woke up underneath her in the middle of a great big one. The new furnishings really did have the effect of making it seem like I was waking up in an entirely new place, not the room I'd spent the last week in.

I didn't mind that little mental reset one bit. The summer housing dorm I'd stayed in for the preceding three months had never felt anything like a home. The room in Gilcrease had felt like that: just somewhere I was staying. Somewhere with a place for me to sleep and room for me to store my stuff. Amaranth's arrival might have been enough to turn it from "some place" into "home", but turning it into a cozy and comfortable home with little resemblance to the crowded and strictly utilitarian place it had been was even better.

It also gave me the sense that it was more her room than mine, which I also didn't mind... while I'd made a lot of strides in dealing with it, feeling out of place was still one of my bigger sources of anxiety. How could I feel out of place in Amaranth's room? It was where she kept her belongings. She even had a place for me.

When we unpacked her books, it occurred to me that she had a practical reason for delegating the shelving to me... it wasn't just a matter of giving me a task for the sake of doing so. She seemed almost inherently incapable of picking up a book and just putting it on the shelf. Each one that she took out of the trunk, she ended up at least flipping through, if not sitting down to read. I like books, and I can't pretend that none of them caught my eye, but a lot of them were things like old natural history or philosophy textbooks from the 60s or 70s... fifty, sixty years out of date and looking like they'd felt every day of it. Amaranth cooed over each and every one of them like they were children, which meant I got a dozen or two books up on the shelves for every one she took out.

"You have your class with Coach Callahan this semester, don't you, baby?" she asked me, while paging idly through a large book about wildflowers. "The additional one you promised you'd take when she gave you a pass/fail grade last year?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said. My replies were more likely to come out "yes, ma'am" than anything more conversational when I was actively working on not sounding snappish.She knew this already. We'd gone over my whole schedule before. "It's my last class of the day, every day."

"A five credit hour class," she said.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. "I'm taking 17 hours this semester, but don't worry... I'm still ahead of where I need to be, credit wise. I'm not going to slack off just because I got extra classes in over the summer."

"Oh, I'm not worried about you slacking off in that regard," Amaranth said. "I'm just thinking about what a bad grade in a five hour class would do to you. What grade do you think you would have earned, if you hadn't been given a pass?"

"Probably a C," I said. "That's what Callahan thought I would end up with when she made the offer."

"Coach Callahan," Amaranth said. "I want you to start practicing proper respect for her."

"I don't think that's going to affect my grade," I said, then added, "ma'am."

"No, but it will affect your attitude, which might affect your performance, which would affect your grade," Amaranth said. "Say it."

"Coach Callahan," I said. "Coach Callahan told me she thought I could end up with a C."

"If you get a C this time, it will be a third of your grade," Amaranth said.

"Not quite a third," I said.

"More than a quarter of it," she said, and I couldn't argue with that. "So we'll have to make sure that doesn't happen. Therefore, one of your tasks will be to get an A from her."

"Yes, ma'... wait, you mean to get my collar, I have to get an A from Ca... Coach Callahan?"

"Whose collar?"

I lowered my eyes.

"Your collar," I said.

"Do you not think you can get an A?"

"I don't know," I said. "Honestly, her grading system is kind of... well... arbitrary."

"Do you think it's unfair?"

"I couldn't say," I said. "She says she assigns the grade she thinks students deserve. Anyway, even if I do get an A, that means it'll be winter break at the earliest that I get to wear your collar."

"I didn't say they would be short tasks," she said. "You've been mine for almost a year. If you don't think you can wait one semester to make it 'official'..."

"I can wait!" I said. "But... what if I don't get the A?"

"Let's just focus on getting the A, shall we?" she said with a broad smile, and that was all the discussion she would allow on the subject.

I sort of understood why she wouldn't discuss alternatives. If she told me that failure would mean she'd give me some other task, that would be the same thing as saying that if I didn't mind waiting longer I didn't have to try to ace Coach Callahan's class. But it felt very much like she was telling me I had to do something impossible and I wouldn't get to wear her collar after the inevitable failure.

Still, even when she was proposing that I should scramble up the dome of the sky and peel the moon off of it for her to use as an umbrella, I loved being in her presence again. Amaranth was warmth incarnate, and I basked in her. It was like the sun had put on flesh and was now sitting on a battered sofa that looked like it was missing at least three inches of height in the form of legs.

Other than getting Amaranth's things in order, it was an utterly routine day. We ate all of our meals in the cafeteria, we went and hung out in the library in the afternoon. It was what had become a typical Sunday in my life.

Steff and Ian went to the library with us, but they didn't stay very long. None of us had any homework or studying to do, obviously, and the others wanted to go check out the newer additions to the campus facilities. Amaranth seemed content to just enjoy being with me in a familiar place for the moment, and of course none of the additions were new to me anymore.

I took an odd kind of comfort in the knowledge that by staying over the summer I had spent more time living on campus than about half of the undergraduate student body, assuming an even distribution of students over the four years. In our little group, Steff had been at MU longer than I had but she'd missed out on the changes over the summer.

"It's kind of a shame we won't be here when the library gets remodeled," Amaranth said, in between flitting between books. "It's part of the five year plan, but there are no funds allocated for it yet, which means it probably won't be done in the next two years."

"I'm kind of glad," I said. "I like the library the way it is."

The multistory school library was one of the biggest and the nicest library I'd ever been in. The municipal library in downtown Enwich was bigger and more impressive looking on the outside, but its inside was kind of dingy and institutional-looking. The MU library was very modern in its design. Its floor plan was very open and well-lit, with skylights on the top floor and a lot of glass in the front that illuminated all three stories. I couldn't imagine a building on campus in less need of renovation.

"Well, I look at it this way," Amaranth said. "If they expand it, it'll have room for more books. Anyway, it's hard to say what will happen in the next four years... Bethany Davies is laying out all these big changes, but she's not staying to see them through."

"You seem really up on this stuff," I said.

"I got the Gazetteer, the alumni newsletter, and the Enwich Times in Paradise Valley so I could keep up on it," Amaranth said. "Last year none of us really came here with our eyes all the way open... I didn't want to make that mistake again. Anyway, it's obvious Chancellor Davies is concerned about the legacy she's leaving now that she's retiring. I just hope she's thinking about more than buildings and landscaping projects."

"Yeah," I said. "Well, it's not like we're not giving her plenty of opportunity to get her name attached to something positive."

My case against the school for the little matter of one of their employees warding me inside a room with a divine seal and another one accidentally dumping me into the ancient magical labyrinth used for delving exercises was still pending, though a settlement offer was on the table that would let them off the hook with minimal financial hardship or much metaphorical egg on their collective and equally metaphorical faces.

They'd have to admit wrongdoing, of course, but since what we were really looking for was improvements in the handling of racial matters there was plenty of room for a moderately skilled P.R. department to spin the whole thing into something good for the school.

"I keep wanting to ask if Lee knows you're back," Amaranth said. Lee Jenkins, of course, was my lawyer, who was handling my arbitration case against the school and who had helped me out in some of the bigger trouble spots of my freshman year. "But of course you didn't leave."

"Yeah, we've been in touch," I said. "He's inviting us to the wedding reception, by the way. It's in the first weekend in Polyantha, so if you want to go you'll probably want to make arrangements to stay past the end of the year next semester."

"I would have thought it would have happened already," Amaranth said. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised they're opting for a longer engagement, with his career and all."

"It's not that," I said. "His wedding's been pushed back by his in-laws-to-be again... something about an insufficient bridal gift. They want time to put together a better offering."

"I can't imagine he cares about that," Amaranth said.

"I've got the idea that it would be insulting for him to tell them that," I said.

Lee didn't talk about himself very much, but when he did he was really talking about his fiancee, K’thindi. She had a half-orc mother who'd raised her orcish, and they were a close-knit family. The stereotypical view of orcs wouldn't lead one to imagine they could approve of someone with a white collar job, but most cultures tend to view someone who makes a good living in high regard. If anything, orcs had a higher regard for lawyers... trial lawyers, especially... than humans typically did.

Orcs didn't practice trial by combat. They viewed trials as combat. Two people standing up in front of an audience of their peers and a respected authority, making contrary claims and trying to show the other up as a liar or trip them up on a point of traditional protocol? That was the kind of thing orcs could understand. It was more or less how they'd settled disputes of honor for ages, during times when a lot of humans were still dueling.

"Anyway... in my mind, it felt like during the summer you went somewhere else," Amaranth said. "I know I was writing to you here, but it was like you left MU and went to some other school and then came back. I'm sure that doesn't make any sense..."

"It kind of does," I said. "The campus feels different during the summer. It's the same buildings, a lot of the same people, and the same place... but somehow it adds up to something different. I can't explain it."

"I think you just did," she said. "As much as I can, anyway... it seems like we both understand what we're talking about, and that's what matters."

"Yeah," I agreed, smiling so wide that my cheeks blushed out of apparent belief that I couldn't possibly be so happy without having something to feel self-concious about.

It was nice in some ways to be put in my place, to fall into the familiar rhythm of yes, ma'am/no, ma'am with my Owner in her room... but it was also nice in other ways to just have a quiet conversation with my girlfriend in one of our favorite places to go together.

The next day we went back to the union for breakfast on the first day of class... myself, Amaranth, Ian, Steff, and Two. Despite how familiar the buffet-style cafeteria was, this felt a good deal less routine, because it was the first day of class. I'd been through this three times before but each time it was different. I was less than an hour away from starting a new class with a new instructor.

"Lot of new faces," Amaranth said as we sat down at a pair of tables in the middle of the room.

"Yeah," Ian agreed.

"Thirty-three that I can see from here," Two said. "No, thirty-two. I've seen the girl with the green earrings before."

I took their word for it... Two's, particularly. I wasn't really good at faces, and I'd never been much of a people-watcher. I tended to keep my head down. When I did look around the room... which I did reflexively since the others were talking about it... my eyes gravitated towards the faces I recognized. They were mostly non-human.

There was Belinda, the half-ogre, who was sitting with some of her human teammates from the Skirmish team. She saw me looking and waved. I returned it, a little awkwardly. We weren't exactly friends, but she'd been friendly enough towards me after the beginning of the previous year.

Celia was sitting with a couple of lizardfolk... one who I thought was Hissy, our floormate from last year... and the gorgon who'd been in the room beneath me in Harlowe.

Twyla, a quiet girl who looked completely human except for a pair of pointy little horns jutting out of her forehead, was sitting by herself at a two-person table, her head down low over a notebook. I didn't know much about Twyla. She'd hung out with the Leighton twins, who seemed to have managed to make it from junior high to higher education without maturing at all... but that was probably more due to bad luck in the roommate lottery than any personal preference.

"I wonder how many people are coming over for meals as opposed to the Archimedes?" Ian said.

"We call it the Arch," I told him.

"That's how you can spot the cool kids," Steff said. "They're up on the newest campus slang."

"I'll bet a lot of the new freshmen in Harlowe are going there instead of here," Amaranth said. "It's so much closer to those dorms. I mean, I don't think I see any obviously non-human students I don't recognize here."

"They must be going there," Steff said. "The school quietly dropped their Food For Freaks program... no more catered meals to keep us from upsetting the normals."

"Huh," I said. "Kind of works out nicely for them that the new student center with the whole racial harmony message is so much more convenient to Harlowe."

"Yeah," Ian said. "A human who's got a big problem sharing eating space with other races wouldn't go to the dining hall that's all in-your-face with the tolerance. So they come here by default, while most of the people they'd object to goes to the new place."

"Well, to be fair," Amaranth said, "the new dining facility is designed to cater to more diverse dietary needs. Considering how many people had problems finding adequate nutrition in the cafeteria options before, putting it close to Harlowe seems like a goodwill gesture, really. It's not a perfect solution, of course, but you have to remember the whole campus is getting overhauled. Presumably when the student union gets its own re-do, this place will offer similar options."

"I'm not saying it's all bad," Ian said. "I mean, I don't think there was some conspiracy by the school to trick Harlowe people into going one place and not the other. But... well..."

"It's complicated," I said. "There's good and there's bad in what they're doing."

"I agree," Amaranth said. "I just don't want the bad to be overlooked."

"I'll tell you one good thing about dining at the 'Argh'," Steff said. "They do take-away boxes. You swipe your card like normal, but instead of all-you-can-eat, it's all-you-can-cram. Not that I don't enjoy a little mealtime social fun, but I'm looking forward to that for those nights I just want to be alone, or alone with Viktor... popping out and bringing back something resembling real food is going to be a lot better than trying to make a meal out of the stuff they carry at the little hallway store in the Nexus."

"That's interesting," I said. "I wonder if this place is going to start doing that? The Arch would be a bit out of our way for food, but that would be nice."

"Oh, Little Ms. Here All Year didn't know about the take-away boxes?" Steff said. "I guess the chosen one hasn't penetrated all of Magisterius University's secrets, after all."

"Chosen what?" Ian said.

"It's really not worth asking," I said. "And no, I didn't realize they let you do takeout. If I had..."

"You would have turned into a hermit the day they opened their doors," Amaranth said. "Something I am not going to permit you to do now."

"Okay, yes, I probably would have taken food back to my room a lot of time," I said. "But when I was here by myself, it's not like I was sitting and talking with people at meals anyway."

"No, but you were getting out for them and sitting somewhere where there were other people around," Amaranth said. "That's something. If it's not a step forward, at least it's not a step back. Now that we know we can do takeout, we'll use it sometimes, but only when we're going to be being sociable back in one of the dorms or for a picnic or something, or when there is an ironclad academic reason you need to be eating alone."

"Yes, ma'am," I said.

"In fairness to Mackenzie," Ian said, "we're acting like the new dining hall is the first time there's been an alternative to eating in the cafeteria. But she could have got food from one of the burger stands and taken it back to her dorm, and she didn't do that. So it's not like the Arch thing would have given her a new and exciting opportunity to withdraw from the world if only she had known about it."

"Oh," Amaranth said, her cheeks coloring slightly. "I completely forgot about that. I'm sorry, baby."

"I actually forgot about it, too," I said. "We went to the food court so rarely that it didn't even cross my mind as an option. Otherwise, I probably would have been eating chicken sandwiches and burgers by myself in my room all summer, and that probably wouldn't have been a good thing."

"Thank you for saying so. In any event," Amaranth said, "how about we go check out the Arch for dinner tonight? I'm kind of curious to see it."

We all agreed, and after that the conversation turned to more academic subjects.

As apprehensive as I was about all the unknowns involved in starting my first class of the year, I was really looking forward to it. ENC 217: Spellcrafting For Enchantment was going to be a major step along the way to my major. Thus far in my education as an enchanter, I'd learned how to manipulate the inherent properties of an object. I could make a sword sharper, a coat warmer, or a door stronger... for a little while. I'd learned how to prolong the effects of such enhancements, though I couldn't yet make them permanent. I could even make a person faster or stronger or more perceptive, though that didn't last nearly as long.

I'd also picked up as a necessary skill in all of my lab classes the basic art of spellcraft, of taking magical techniques that worked for me and shaping them into a formula that could be repeated at need. It was very much an art, and there were a lot of trade-offs involved in taking powerful and useful magic and reducing it to something that could be more or less relied upon.

But that was what my major, Applied Enchantment, really consisted of. Humanity of the other races of the world had been using cooling magic for millennia. When you took that magic and stuck it inside a box in such a way that it was always there, you had a refrigerator, and something like a refrigerator could change the world.

ENC 217 would focus on how to craft spells with an eye towards attaching them to objects. I stil wouldn't close out the semester any closer to being able to make a permanent magical item, but my spells would be a lot tighter and I'd be able to store them as charges in an object. I was really looking forward to that, especially considering how often during the winter months I'd had to repeat the insulation spells I put on my coat.

In fact, that was why I'd decided to take it during the fall semester. By the time the sunny, summer-ish weather left us I'd be able to deal with the cold like a wizard.

Ian was a bit less sanguine about his first day of class.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," he said. "I am not not ready for this."

"Relax, sweetie," Amaranth said. "It's the first day. I'm fairly certain you don't have to be ready for it."

"What's there to be ready for?" Steff asked. "I'm sure your syllabus-receiving skills are still in top form even after a summer without so much as an agenda."

"Okay, maybe you all don't have to do anything for a grade today, but I have to play an audition in front of my professor and the music department head," Ian said.

"Isn't that the sort of thing they should have you do before they let you into the class?" I asked. "If they're going to be picky about it."

"They did," he said. "This is... I got a notice over the summer that I've been 'selected' to give an additional audition."

"Well, that's good, isn't it?" Amaranth said. "I mean, I can't imagine how it would be bad."

"It's bad in that I already made it through the process once without blowing it and now I have to do it again," Ian said.

"It sounds to me like you're under consideration for some honor or advanced class," Amaranth said. "So the worst thing that would happen is you'd be in the class you signed up for and nothing would be different."

"Except my professor, who had thought I was worthy of consideration, would now know he was wrong," Ian said. "Seems like that would be worse than never having caught his attention in the first place."

"Well, if that's how you feel, you could just tell him that you're comfortable where you are and decline," Amaranth said.

"And give up without trying?" Ian said. He sounded borderline offended by the suggestion. "You're kidding."

That seemed to make up his mind, like he'd decided to go in and give it his best shot out of sheer stubbornness. Amaranth had always been the sort of person who would encourage people to excel, but she'd become a little more nuanced in her approach.

"What do you have today, Two?" Amaranth asked.

"My friend Hazel and I are taking Small Business Management together," Two said. "And then I have a pastry class, and then I have The Art of Presentation."

"Does this small business thing have anything to do with your friend Hazel's three or four plans for making money?" I asked. I was long past my initial suspicion of Hazel taking advantage of the easily-disadvantaged Two, but that didn't mean I was thrilled at the thought of her rearranging her curriculum around Hazel's pipe dreams.

"No," Two said. "My friend Hazel says it's planning for the future."

"I think it's a very good idea," Amaranth said. "I mean, college only lasts a few years... if you don't want to live at Hearts of Clay for the rest of your life, you do need to be planning ahead."

"My friend Hazel says she is pretty sure she can get the money to open an inn," Two said. There wasn't a hint of doubt in her voice, but I knew from experience that this didn't mean she believed Hazel's claimed. She had no problem blithely repeating the things the burrow gnome said, because she was confident at least that Hazel had said them.

I knew there were a lot of things that could change between sophomore year and graduation. Two and Hazel could have a falling out, as hard as that was to imagine. They could drift apart, especially given Hazel's growing friendship with Shiel and the fact that they weren't even in the same building anymore when they had used to be just a few doors away from each other. I knew, too, that they didn't have anything like a firm plan for post-college life, but I envied that they had as much figured out as they did.

In theory it was easy to make money with an enchantment degree, but I didn't have anything firmer than that theory. I knew I wanted to stay with Amaranth, but I had no idea how that would work. Making a living as an enchanter would probably require me to live in a city, and she was bound to a plot of land in a farming commune. Her divine nature wasn't much of a hindrance to me at school, but back home she acted as something like a priestess. Then there was the fact that her home was the field of amaranth that was her "other body"... how could we live together there?

"What happened to your excited smile, baby?" Amaranth asked, breaking into my thoughts.

"Just thinking about the future," I said.

"I thought that's what you were excited about."

"I mean the long-term future," I said.

"Isn't there a lot to be excited about there, too?"

"There's a lot to be uncertain of."

"That's another way of saying there are a lot of possibilities," Amaranth said. "I can't think of anything more exciting than that."

"Ah, you all are so cute," Steff said. "It's just a bunch of sophomore jitters, which are like first-year jitters but a year more advanced."

"And I suppose you have junior jitters," I said.

"No such thing," Steff said. "Or at least there won't be until next year, when I'm a senior and you're all juniors, with your junior jitters. Oh, it will be freaking adorable. I can't wait."


[3 hours in. The chapter is pretty substantially finished. In the last hour of work on it, I'm going to be filling in some more details about the cafeteria and possibly the library, and I'm going to be adding a somewhat important event that will probably not be visible in the draft post.]

Sunday was the first day that all of us were back on the MU campus, and it was the first day that felt like things were back to normal. It was a weird kind of normalcy, granted, given that instead of waking up underneath Amaranth in a tiny little bed, I woke up underneath her in the middle of a great big one. The new furnishings really did have the effect of making it seem like I was waking up in an entirely new place, not the room I'd spent the last week in.

I didn't mind that little mental reset one bit. The summer housing dorm I'd stayed in for the preceding three months had never felt anything like a home. The room in Gilcrease had felt like that: just somewhere I was staying. Somewhere with a place for me to sleep and room for me to store my stuff. Amaranth's arrival might have been enough to turn it from "some place" into "home", but turning it into a cozy and comfortable home with little resemblance to the crowded and strictly utilitarian place it had been was even better.

It also gave me the sense that it was more her room than mine, which I also didn't mind... while I'd made a lot of strides in dealing with it, feeling out of place was still one of my bigger sources of anxiety. How could I feel out of place in Amaranth's room? It was where she kept her belongings. She even had a place for me.

When we unpacked her books, it occurred to me that she had a practical reason for delegating the shelving to me... it wasn't just a matter of giving me a task for the sake of doing so. She seemed almost inherently incapable of picking up a book and just putting it on the shelf. Each one that she took out of the trunk, she ended up at least flipping through, if not sitting down to read. I like books, and I can't pretend that none of them caught my eye, but a lot of them were things like old natural history or philosophy textbooks from the 60s or 70s... fifty, sixty years out of date and looking like they'd felt every day of it. Amaranth cooed over each and every one of them like they were children, which meant I got a dozen or two books up on the shelves for every one she took out.

"You have your class with Coach Callahan this semester, don't you, baby?" she asked me, while paging idly through a large book about wildflowers. "The additional one you promised you'd take when she gave you a pass/fail grade last year?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said. My replies were more likely to come out "yes, ma'am" than anything more conversational when I was actively working on not sounding snappish.She knew this already. We'd gone over my whole schedule before. "It's my last class of the day, every day."

"A five credit hour class," she said.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. "I'm taking 17 hours this semester, but don't worry... I'm still ahead of where I need to be, credit wise. I'm not going to slack off just because I got extra classes in over the summer."

"Oh, I'm not worried about you slacking off in that regard," Amaranth said. "I'm just thinking about what a bad grade in a five hour class would do to you. What grade do you think you would have earned, if you hadn't been given a pass?"

"Probably a C," I said. "That's what Callahan thought I would end up with when she made the offer."

"Coach Callahan," Amaranth said. "I want you to start practicing proper respect for her."

"I don't think that's going to affect my grade," I said, then added, "ma'am."

"No, but it will affect your attitude, which might affect your performance, which would affect your grade," Amaranth said. "Say it."

"Coach Callahan," I said. "Coach Callahan told me she thought I could end up with a C."

"If you get a C this time, it will be a third of your grade," Amaranth said.

"Not quite a third," I said.

"More than a quarter of it," she said, and I couldn't argue with that. "So we'll have to make sure that doesn't happen. Therefore, one of your tasks will be to get an A from her."

"Yes, ma'... wait, you mean to get my collar, I have to get an A from Ca... Coach Callahan?"

"Whose collar?"

I lowered my eyes.

"Your collar," I said.

"Do you not think you can get an A?"

"I don't know," I said. "Honestly, her grading system is kind of... well... arbitrary."

"Do you think it's unfair?"

"I couldn't say," I said. "She says she assigns the grade she thinks students deserve. Anyway, even if I do get an A, that means it'll be winter break at the earliest that I get to wear your collar."

"I didn't say they would be short tasks," she said. "You've been mine for almost a year. If you don't think you can wait one semester to make it 'official'..."

"I can wait!" I said. "But... what if I don't get the A?"

"Let's just focus on getting the A, shall we?" she said with a broad smile, and that was all the discussion she would allow on the subject.

I sort of understood why she wouldn't discuss alternatives. If she told me that failure would mean she'd give me some other task, that would be the same thing as saying that if I didn't mind waiting longer I didn't have to try to ace Coach Callahan's class. But it felt very much like she was telling me I had to do something impossible and I wouldn't get to wear her collar after the inevitable failure.

Still, even when she was proposing that I should scramble up the dome of the sky and peel the moon off of it for her to use as an umbrella, I loved being in her presence again. Amaranth was warmth incarnate, and I basked in her. It was like the sun had put on flesh and was now sitting on a battered sofa that looked like it was missing at least three inches of height in the form of legs.

Other than getting Amaranth's things in order, it was an utterly routine day. We ate all of our meals in the cafeteria, we went and hung out in the library in the afternoon. It was what had become a typical Sunday in my life.

Steff and Ian went to the library with us, but they didn't stay very long. None of us had any homework or studying to do, obviously, and the others wanted to go check out the newer additions to the campus facilities. Amaranth seemed content to just enjoy being with me in a familiar place for the moment, and of course none of the additions were new to me anymore.

I took an odd kind of comfort in the knowledge that by staying over the summer I had spent more time living on campus than about half of the undergraduate student body, assuming an even distribution of students over the four years. In our little group, Steff had been at MU longer than I had but she'd missed out on the changes over the summer.

"It's kind of a shame we won't be here when the library gets remodeled," Amaranth said, in between flitting between books. "It's part of the five year plan, but there are no funds allocated for it yet, which means it probably won't be done in the next two years."

"I'm kind of glad," I said. "I like the library the way it is."

The multistory school library was one of the biggest and the nicest library I'd ever been in. The municipal library in downtown Enwich was bigger and more impressive looking on the outside, but its inside was kind of dingy and institutional-looking. The MU library was very modern in its design. Its floor plan was very open and well-lit, with skylights on the top floor and a lot of glass in the front that illuminated all three stories. I couldn't imagine a building on campus in less need of renovation.

"Well, I look at it this way," Amaranth said. "If they expand it, it'll have more books. Anyway, it's hard to say what will happen in the next four years... Bethany Davies is laying out all these big changes, but she's not staying to see them through."

"You seem really up on this stuff," I said.

"I got the Gazetteer, the alumni newsletter, and the Enwich Times in Paradise Valley so I could keep up on it," Amaranth said. "Last year none of us really came here with our eyes all the way open... I didn't want to make that mistake again. Anyway, it's obvious Chancellor Davies is concerned about the legacy she's leaving now that she's retiring. I just hope she's thinking about more than buildings and landscaping projects."

"Yeah," I said. "Well, it's not like we're not giving her plenty of opportunity to get her name attached to something positive."

My case against the school for the little matter of one of their employees warding me inside a room with a divine seal and another one accidentally dumping me into the ancient magical labyrinth used for delving exercises was still pending, though a settlement offer was on the table that would let them off the hook with minimal financial hardship or much metaphorical egg on their collective and equally metaphorical faces.

They'd have to admit wrongdoing, of course, but since what we were really looking for was improvements in the handling of racial matters there was plenty of room for a moderately skilled P.R. department to spin the whole thing into something good for the school.

"I keep wanting to ask if Lee knows you're back," Amaranth said. Lee Jenkins, of course, was my lawyer, who was handling my arbitration case against the school and who had helped me out in some of the bigger trouble spots of my freshman year. "But of course you didn't leave."

"Yeah, we've been in touch," I said. "He's inviting us to the wedding, by the way. It's in the first week of [], so if you want to go you'll probably want to make arrangements to stay past the end of the year next semester."

"I would have thought it would have happened already," Amaranth said. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised they're opting for a longer engagement, with his career and all."

"It's not that," I said. "His wedding's been pushed back by his in-laws-to-be again... something about an insufficient bridal gift. They want time to put together a better offering."

"I can't imagine he cares about that," Amaranth said.

"I've got the idea that it would be insulting for him to tell them that," I said.

Lee didn't talk about himself very much, but when he did he was really talking about his fiancee, K’thindi. She had a half-orc mother who'd raised her orcish, and they were a close-knit family. The stereotypical view of orcs wouldn't lead one to imagine they could approve of someone with a white collar job, but most cultures tend to view someone who makes a good living in high regard. If anything, orcs had a higher regard for lawyers... trial lawyers, especially... than humans typically did.

Orcs didn't practice trial by combat. They viewed trials as combat. Two people standing up in front of an audience of their peers and a respected authority, making contrary claims and trying to show the other up as a liar or trip them up on a point of traditional protocol? That was the kind of thing orcs could understand. It was more or less how they'd settled disputes of honor for ages, during times when a lot of humans were still dueling.

"Anyway... in my mind, it felt like during the summer you went somewhere else," Amaranth said. "I know I was writing to you here, but it was like you left MU and went to some other school and then came back. I'm sure that doesn't make any sense..."

"It kind of does," I said. "The campus feels different during the summer. It's the same buildings, a lot of the same people, and the same place... but somehow it adds up to something different. I can't explain it."

"I think you just did," she said. "As much as I can, anyway... it seems like we both understand what we're talking about, and that's what matters."

The next day we went back to the union for breakfast on the first day of class... myself, Amaranth, Ian, Steff, and Two. That felt less routine, because it was the first day of class. I'd been through this three times before but each time it was different. I was less than an hour away from starting a new class with a new instructor.

As apprehensive at I was, I was really looking forward to it. ENC 217: Spellcrafting For Enchantment was going to be a major step along the way to my major. Thus far in my education as an enchanter, I'd learned how to manipulate the inherent properties of an object. I could make a sword sharper, a coat warmer, or a door stronger... for a little while. I'd learned how to prolong the effects of such enhancements, though I couldn't yet make them permanent. I could even make a person faster or stronger or more perceptive, though that didn't last nearly as long.

I'd also picked up as a necessary skill in all of my lab classes the basic art of spellcraft, of taking magical techniques that worked for me and shaping them into a formula that could be repeated at need. It was very much an art, and there were a lot of trade-offs involved in taking powerful and useful magic and reducing it to something that could be more or less relied upon.

But that was what my major, Applied Enchantment, really consisted of. Humanity of the other races of the world had been using cooling magic for millennia. When you took that magic and stuck it inside a box in such a way that it was always there, you had a refrigerator, and something like a refrigerator could change the world.

Ian was a bit less sanguine about his first day of class.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," he said. "I am not not ready for this."

"Relax, sweetie," Amaranth said. "It's the first day. You don't have to be ready for it."

"What's there to be ready for?" Steff asked. "I'm sure your syllabus-receiving skills are still in top form even after a summer without so much as an agenda."

"Okay, maybe you all don't have to do anything for a grade today, but I have to play an audition in front of my professor and the music department head," Ian said.

"Isn't that the sort of thing they should have you do before they let you into the class?" I asked. "If they're going to be picky about it."

"They did," he said. "This is... I got a notice over the summer that I've been 'selected' to give an additional audition."

"Well, that's good, isn't it?" Amaranth said. "I mean, I can't imagine how it would be bad."

"It's bad in that I already made it through the process once without blowing it and now I have to do it again," Ian said.

"It sounds to me like you're under consideration for some honor or advanced class," Amaranth said. "So the worst thing that would happen is you'd be in the class you signed up for and nothing would be different."

"Except my professor, who had thought I was worthy of consideration, would now know he was wrong," Ian said. "Seems like that would be worse than never having caught his attention in the first place."

"Well, if that's how you feel, you could just tell him that you're comfortable where you are and decline," Amaranth said.

"And give up without trying?" Ian said. He sounded borderline offended by the suggestion. "You're kidding."

That seemed to make up his mind, like he'd decided to go in and give it his best shot out of sheer stubbornness. Amaranth had always been the sort of person who would encourage people to excel, but she'd become a little more nuanced in her approach.

"What do you have today, Two?" Amaranth asked.

"My friend Hazel and I are taking Small Business Management together," Two said. "And then I have a pastry class, and then I have The Art of Presentation."

"Does this small business thing have anything to do with your friend Hazel's three or four plans for making money?" I asked. I was long past my initial suspicion of Hazel taking advantage of the easily-disadvantaged Two, but that didn't mean I was thrilled at the thought of her rearranging her curriculum around Hazel's pipe dreams.

"No," Two said. "My friend Hazel says it's planning for the future."

"I think it's a very good idea," Amaranth said. "I mean, college only lasts a few years... if you don't want to live at Hearts of Clay for the rest of your life, you do need to be planning ahead."

"My friend Hazel says she is pretty sure she can get the money to open an inn," Two said. There wasn't a hint of doubt in her voice, but I knew from experience that this didn't mean she believed Hazel's claimed. She had no problem blithely repeating the things the burrow gnome said, because she was confident at least that Hazel had said them.

I knew there were a lot of things that could change between sophomore year and graduation. Two and Hazel could have a falling out, as hard as that was to imagine. They could drift apart, especially given Hazel's growing friendship with Shiel and the fact that they weren't even in the same building anymore when they had used to be just a few doors away from each other. I knew, too, that they didn't have anything like a firm plan for post-college life, but I envied that they had as much figured out as they did.

In theory it was easy to make money with an enchantment degree, but I didn't have anything firmer than that theory. I knew I wanted to stay with Amaranth, but I had no idea how that would work. Making a living as an enchanter would probably require me to live in a city, and she was bound to a plot of land in a farming commune. Her divine nature wasn't much of a hindrance to me at school, but back home she acted as something like a priestess. Then there was the fact that her home was the field of amaranth that was her "other body"... how could we live together there?

"What happened to your excited smile, baby?" Amaranth asked, breaking into my thoughts.

"Just thinking about the future," I said.

"I thought that's what you were excited about."

"I mean the long-term future," I said.

"Isn't there a lot to be excited about there, too?"

"There's a lot to be uncertain of."

"That's another way of saying there are a lot of possibilities," Amaranth said. "I can't think of anything more exciting than that."

"Ah, you all are so cute," Steff said. "It's just a bunch of sophomore jitters, which are like first-year jitters but a year more advanced."

"And I suppose you have junior jitters," I said.

"No such thing," Steff said. "Or at least there won't be until next year, when I'm a senior and you're all juniors, with your junion jitters. Oh, it will be freaking adorable. I can't wait."


[2.5 hours in. I cut out 500 some words to save for later, so not much growth in size, but there's a clearer progression towards where we're going.]

Sunday was the first day that all of us were back on the MU campus, and it was the first day that felt like things were back to normal. It was a weird kind of normalcy, granted, given that instead of waking up underneath Amaranth in a tiny little bed, I woke up underneath her in the middle of a great big one. The new furnishings really did have the effect of making it seem like I was waking up in an entirely new place, not the room I'd spent the last week in.

I didn't mind that little mental reset one bit. The summer housing dorm I'd stayed in for the preceding three months had never felt anything like a home. The room in Gilcrease had felt like that: just somewhere I was staying. Somewhere with a place for me to sleep and room for me to store my stuff. Amaranth's arrival might have been enough to turn it from "some place" into "home", but turning it into a cozy and comfortable home with little resemblance to the crowded and strictly utilitarian place it had been was even better.

It also gave me the sense that it was more her room than mine, which I also didn't mind... while I'd made a lot of strides in dealing with it, feeling out of place was still one of my bigger sources of anxiety. How could I feel out of place in Amaranth's room? It was where she kept her belongings. She even had a place for me.

When we unpacked her books, it occurred to me that she had a practical reason for delegating the shelving to me... it wasn't just a matter of giving me a task for the sake of doing so. She seemed almost inherently incapable of picking up a book and just putting it on the shelf. Each one that she took out of the trunk, she ended up at least flipping through, if not sitting down to read. I like books, and I can't pretend that none of them caught my eye, but a lot of them were things like old natural history or philosophy textbooks from the 60s or 70s... fifty, sixty years out of date and looking like they'd felt every day of it. Amaranth cooed over each and every one of them like they were children, which meant I got a dozen or two books up on the shelves for every one she took out.

"You have your class with Coach Callahan this semester, don't you, baby?" she asked me, while paging idly through a large book about wildflowers. "The additional one you promised you'd take when she gave you a pass/fail grade last year?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said. My replies were more likely to come out "yes, ma'am" than anything more conversational when I was actively working on not sounding snappish.She knew this already. We'd gone over my whole schedule before. "It's my last class of the day, every day."

"A five credit hour class," she said.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. "I'm taking 17 hours this semester, but don't worry... I'm still ahead of where I need to be, credit wise. I'm not going to slack off just because I got extra classes in over the summer."

"Oh, I'm not worried about you slacking off in that regard," Amaranth said. "I'm just thinking about what a bad grade in a five hour class would do to you. What grade do you think you would have earned, if you hadn't been given a pass?"

"Probably a C," I said. "That's what Callahan thought I would end up with when she made the offer."

"Coach Callahan," Amaranth said. "I want you to start practicing proper respect for her."

"I don't think that's going to affect my grade," I said, then added, "ma'am."

"No, but it will affect your attitude, which might affect your performance, which would affect your grade," Amaranth said. "Say it."

"Coach Callahan," I said. "Coach Callahan told me she thought I could end up with a C."

"If you get a C this time, it will be a third of your grade," Amaranth said.

"Not quite a third," I said.

"More than a quarter of it," she said, and I couldn't argue with that. "So we'll have to make sure that doesn't happen. Therefore, one of your tasks will be to get an A from her."

"Yes, ma'... wait, you mean to get my collar, I have to get an A from Ca... Coach Callahan?"

"Whose collar?"

I lowered my eyes.

"Your collar," I said.

"Do you not think you can get an A?"

"I don't know," I said. "Honestly, her grading system is kind of... well... arbitrary."

"Do you think it's unfair?"

"I couldn't say," I said. "She says she assigns the grade she thinks students deserve. Anyway, even if I do get an A, that means it'll be winter break at the earliest that I get to wear your collar."

"I didn't say they would be short tasks," she said. "You've been mine for almost a year. If you don't think you can wait one semester to make it 'official'..."

"I can wait!" I said. "But... what if I don't get the A?"

"Let's just focus on getting the A, shall we?" she said with a broad smile, and that was all the discussion she would allow on the subject.

I sort of understood why she wouldn't discuss alternatives. If she told me that failure would mean she'd give me some other task, that would be the same thing as saying that if I didn't mind waiting longer I didn't have to try to ace Coach Callahan's class. But it felt very much like she was telling me I had to do something impossible and I wouldn't get to wear her collar after the inevitable failure.

Still, even when she was proposing that I should scramble up the dome of the sky and peel the moon off of it for her to use as an umbrella, I loved being in her presence again. Amaranth was warmth incarnate, and I basked in her. It was like the sun had put on flesh and was now sitting on a battered sofa that looked like it was missing at least three inches of height in the form of legs.

Other than getting Amaranth's things in order, it was an utterly routine day. We ate all of our meals in the cafeteria, we went and hung out in the library in the afternoon. It was what had become a typical Sunday in my life.

Steff and Ian went to the library with us, but they didn't stay very long. None of us had any homework or studying to do, obviously, and the others wanted to go check out the newer additions to the campus facilities. Amaranth seemed content to just enjoy being with me in a familiar place for the moment, and of course none of the additions were new to me anymore.

I took an odd kind of comfort in the knowledge that by staying over the summer I had spent more time living on campus than about half of the undergraduate student body, assuming an even distribution of students over the four years. In our little group, Steff had been at MU longer than I had but she'd missed out on the changes over the summer.

"It's kind of a shame we won't be here when the library gets remodeled," Amaranth said, in between flitting between books. "It's part of the five year plan, but there are no funds allocated for it yet, which means it probably won't be done in the next two years."

"I'm kind of glad," I said. "I like the library the way it is."

The multistory school library was one of the biggest and the nicest library I'd ever been in. The municipal library in downtown Enwich was bigger and more impressive looking on the outside, but its inside was kind of dingy and institutional-looking. The MU library was very modern in its design. Its floor plan was very open and well-lit, with skylights on the top floor and a lot of glass in the front that illuminated all three stories. I couldn't imagine a building on campus in less need of renovation.

"Well, I look at it this way," Amaranth said. "If they expand it, it'll have more books. Anyway, it's hard to say what will happen in the next four years... Bethany Davies is laying out all these big changes, but she's not staying to see them through."

"You seem really up on this stuff," I said.

"I got the Gazetteer, the alumni newsletter, and the Enwich Times in Paradise Valley so I could keep up on it," Amaranth said. "Last year none of us really came here with our eyes all the way open... I didn't want to make that mistake again. Anyway, it's obvious Chancellor Davies is concerned about the legacy she's leaving now that she's retiring. I just hope she's thinking about more than buildings and landscaping projects."

"Yeah," I said. "Well, it's not like we're not giving her plenty of opportunity to get her name attached to something positive."

My case against the school for the little matter of one of their employees warding me inside a room with a divine seal and another one accidentally dumping me into the ancient magical labyrinth used for delving exercises was still pending, though a settlement offer was on the table that would let them off the hook with minimal financial hardship or much metaphorical egg on their collective and equally metaphorical faces.

They'd have to admit wrongdoing, of course, but since what we were really looking for was improvements in the handling of racial matters there was plenty of room for a moderately skilled P.R. department to spin the whole thing into something good for the school.

"I keep wanting to ask if Lee knows you're back," Amaranth said. Lee Jenkins, of course, was my lawyer, who was handling my arbitration case against the school and who had helped me out in some of the bigger trouble spots of my freshman year. "But of course you didn't leave."

"Yeah, we've been in touch," I said. "He's inviting us to the wedding, by the way. It's in the first week of [], so if you want to go you'll probably want to make arrangements to stay past the end of the year next semester."

"I would have thought it would have happened already," Amaranth said. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised they're opting for a longer engagement, with his career and all."

"It's not that," I said. "His wedding's been pushed back by his in-laws-to-be again... something about an insufficient bridal gift. They want time to put together a better offering."

"I can't imagine he cares about that," Amaranth said.

"I've got the idea that it would be insulting for him to tell them that," I said.

Lee didn't talk about himself very much, but when he did he was really talking about his fiancee, K’thindi. She had a half-orc mother who'd raised her orcish, and they were a close-knit family. The stereotypical view of orcs wouldn't lead one to imagine they could approve of someone with a white collar job, but most cultures tend to view someone who makes a good living in high regard. If anything, orcs had a higher regard for lawyers... trial lawyers, especially... than humans typically did.

Orcs didn't practice trial by combat. They viewed trials as combat. Two people standing up in front of an audience of their peers and a respected authority, making contrary claims and trying to show the other up as a liar or trip them up on a point of traditional protocol? That was the kind of thing orcs could understand. It was more or less how they'd settled disputes of honor for ages, during times when a lot of humans were still dueling.

"Anyway... in my mind, it felt like during the summer you went somewhere else," Amaranth said. "I know I was writing to you here, but it was like you left MU and went to some other school and then came back. I'm sure that doesn't make any sense..."

"It kind of does," I said. "The campus feels different during the summer. It's the same buildings, a lot of the same people, and the same place... but somehow it adds up to something different. I can't explain it."

"I think you just did," she said. "As much as I can, anyway... it seems like we both understand what we're talking about, and that's what matters."

The next day we all went back to the union for breakfast on the first day of class... myself, Amaranth, Ian, Two, Dee, and Steff. That felt less routine, because it was the first day of class. I'd been through this three times before but each time it was different. I was less than an hour away from starting a new class with a new instructor.

As apprehensive at I was, I was really looking forward to it. ENC 217: Spellcrafting For Enchantment was going to be a major step along the way to my major. Thus far in my education as an enchanter, I'd learned how to manipulate the inherent properties of an object. I could make a sword sharper, a coat warmer, or a door stronger... for a little while. I'd learned how to prolong the effects of such enhancements, though I couldn't yet make them permanent. I could even make a person faster or stronger or more perceptive, though that didn't last nearly as long.

I'd also picked up as a necessary skill in all of my lab classes the basic art of spellcraft, of taking magical techniques that worked for me and shaping them into a formula that could be repeated at need. It was very much an art, and there were a lot of trade-offs involved in taking powerful and useful magic and reducing it to something that could be more or less relied upon.

But that was what my major, Applied Enchantment, really consisted of. Humanity of the other races of the world had been using cooling magic for millennia. When you took that magic and stuck it inside a box in such a way that it was always there, you had a refrigerator, and something like a refrigerator could change the world.

Ian was a bit less sanguine about his first day of class.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," he said. "I am not not ready for this."

"Relax, sweetie," Amaranth said. "It's the first day. You don't have to be ready for it."

"What's there to be ready for?" Steff asked. "I'm sure your syllabus-receiving skills are still in top form even after a summer without so much as an agenda."

"Okay, maybe you all don't have to do anything for a grade today, but I have to play an audition in front of my professor and the music department head," Ian said.

"Isn't that the sort of thing they should have you do before they let you into the class?" I asked. "If they're going to be picky about it."

"They did," he said. "This is... I got a notice over the summer that I've been 'selected' to give an additional audition."

"Well, that's good, isn't it?" Amaranth said. "I mean, I can't imagine how it would be bad."

"It's bad in that I already made it through the process once without blowing it and now I have to do it again," Ian said.

"It sounds to me like you're under consideration for some honor or advanced class," Amaranth said. "So the worst thing that would happen is you'd be in the class you signed up for and nothing would be different."

"Except my professor, who had thought I was worthy of consideration, would now know he was wrong," Ian said. "Seems like that would be worse than never having caught his attention in the first place."

"Well, if that's how you feel, you could just tell him that you're comfortable where you are and decline," Amaranth said.

"And give up without trying?" Ian said. He sounded borderline offended by the suggestion. "You're kidding."

That seemed to make up his mind, like he'd decided to go in and give it his best shot out of sheer stubbornness. Amaranth had always been the sort of person who would encourage people to excel, but she'd become a little more nuanced in her approach.

"What do you have today, Two?" Amaranth asked.

"My friend Hazel and I are taking Small Business Management together," Two said. "And then I have a pastry class, and then I have The Art of Presentation."

"Does this small business thing have anything to do with Hazel's three or four plans for making money?" I asked.

[2 hours in. Whoops, forgot to submit this 55 minutes ago.]

Sunday was the first day that all of us were back on the MU campus, and it was the first day that felt like things were back to normal. It was a weird kind of normalcy, granted, given that instead of waking up underneath Amaranth in a tiny little bed, I woke up underneath her in the middle of a great big one. The new furnishings really did have the effect of making it seem like I was waking up in an entirely new place, not the room I'd spent the last week in.

I didn't mind that little mental reset one bit. The summer housing dorm I'd stayed in for the preceding three months had never felt anything like a home. The room in Gilcrease had felt like that: just somewhere I was staying. Somewhere with a place for me to sleep and room for me to store my stuff. Amaranth's arrival might have been enough to turn it from "some place" into "home", but turning it into a cozy and comfortable home with little resemblance to the crowded and strictly utilitarian place it had been was even better.

It also gave me the sense that it was more her room than mine, which I also didn't mind... while I'd made a lot of strides in dealing with it, feeling out of place was still one of my bigger sources of anxiety. How could I feel out of place in Amaranth's room? It was where she kept her belongings. She even had a place for me.

When we unpacked her books, it occurred to me that she had a practical reason for delegating the shelving to me... it wasn't just a matter of giving me a task for the sake of doing so. She seemed almost inherently incapable of picking up a book and just putting it on the shelf. Each one that she took out of the trunk, she ended up at least flipping through, if not sitting down to read. I like books, and I can't pretend that none of them caught my eye, but a lot of them were things like old natural history or philosophy textbooks from the 60s or 70s... fifty, sixty years out of date and looking like they'd felt every day of it. Amaranth cooed over each and every one of them like they were children, which meant I got a dozen or two books up on the shelves for every one she took out.

"You have your class with Coach Callahan this semester, don't you, baby?" she asked me, while paging idly through a large book about wildflowers. "The additional one you promised you'd take when she gave you a pass/fail grade last year?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said. My replies were more likely to come out "yes, ma'am" than anything more conversational when I was actively working on not sounding snappish.She knew this already. We'd gone over my whole schedule before. "It's my last class of the day, every day."

"A five credit hour class," she said.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. "I'm taking 17 hours this semester, but don't worry... I'm still ahead of where I need to be, credit wise. I'm not going to slack off just because I got extra classes in over the summer."

"Oh, I'm not worried about you slacking off in that regard," Amaranth said. "I'm just thinking about what a bad grade in a five hour class would do to you. What grade do you think you would have earned, if you hadn't been given a pass?"

"Probably a C," I said. "That's what Callahan thought I would end up with when she made the offer."

"Coach Callahan," Amaranth said. "I want you to start practicing proper respect for her."

"I don't think that's going to affect my grade," I said, then added, "ma'am."

"No, but it will affect your attitude, which might affect your performance, which would affect your grade," Amaranth said. "Say it."

"Coach Callahan," I said. "Coach Callahan told me she thought I could end up with a C."

"If you get a C this time, it will be a third of your grade," Amaranth said.

"Not quite a third," I said.

"More than a quarter of it," she said, and I couldn't argue with that. "So we'll have to make sure that doesn't happen. Therefore, one of your tasks will be to get an A from her."

"Yes, ma'... wait, you mean to get my collar, I have to get an A from Ca... Coach Callahan?"

"Whose collar?"

I lowered my eyes.

"Your collar," I said.

"Do you not think you can get an A?"

"I don't know," I said. "Honestly, her grading system is kind of... well... arbitrary."

"Do you think it's unfair?"

"I couldn't say," I said. "She says she assigns the grade she thinks students deserve. Anyway, even if I do get an A, that means it'll be winter break at the earliest that I get to wear your collar."

"I didn't say they would be short tasks," she said. "You've been mine for almost a year. If you don't think you can wait one semester to make it 'official'..."

"I can wait!" I said. "But... what if I don't get the A?"

"Let's just focus on getting the A, shall we?" she said with a broad smile, and that was all the discussion she would allow on the subject.

I sort of understood why she wouldn't discuss alternatives. If she told me that failure would mean she'd give me some other task, that would be the same thing as saying that if I didn't mind waiting longer I didn't have to try to ace Coach Callahan's class. But it felt very much like she was telling me I had to do something impossible and I wouldn't get to wear her collar after the inevitable failure.

Still, even when she was proposing that I should scramble up the dome of the sky and peel the moon off of it for her to use as an umbrella, I loved being in her presence again. Amaranth was warmth incarnate, and I basked in her. It was like the sun had put on flesh and was now sitting on a battered sofa that looked like it was missing at least three inches of height in the form of legs.

Other than getting Amaranth's things in order, it was an utterly routine day. We ate all of our meals in the cafeteria, we went and hung out in the library in the afternoon. It was what had become a typical Sunday in my life.

Steff and Ian went to the library with us, but they didn't stay very long. None of us had any homework or studying to do, obviously, and the others wanted to go check out the newer additions to the campus facilities. Amaranth seemed content to just enjoy being with me in a familiar place for the moment, and of course none of the additions were new to me anymore.

I took an odd kind of comfort in the knowledge that by staying over the summer I had spent more time living on campus than about half of the undergraduate student body, assuming an even distribution of students over the four years. In our little group, Steff had been at MU longer than I had but she'd missed out on the changes over the summer.

"It's kind of a shame we won't be here when the library gets remodeled," Amaranth said, in between flitting between books. "It's part of the five year plan, but there are no funds allocated for it yet, which means it probably won't be done in the next two years."

"I'm kind of glad," I said. "I like the library the way it is."

The multistory school library was one of the biggest and the nicest library I'd ever been in. The municipal library in downtown Enwich was bigger and more impressive looking on the outside, but its inside was kind of dingy and institutional-looking. The MU library was very modern in its design. Its floor plan was very open and well-lit, with skylights on the top floor and a lot of glass in the front that illuminated all three stories. I couldn't imagine a building on campus in less need of renovation.

"Well, I look at it this way," Amaranth said. "If they expand it, it'll have more books. Anyway, it's hard to say what will happen in the next four years... Bethany Davies is laying out all these big changes, but she's not staying to see them through."

"You seem really up on this stuff," I said.

"I got the Gazetteer, the alumni newsletter, and the Enwich Times in Paradise Valley so I could keep up on it," Amaranth said. "Last year none of us really came here with our eyes all the way open... I didn't want to make that mistake again. Anyway, it's obvious Chancellor Davies is concerned about the legacy she's leaving now that she's retiring. I just hope she's thinking about more than buildings and landscaping projects."

"Yeah," I said. "Well, it's not like we're not giving her plenty of opportunity to get her name attached to something positive."

My case against the school for the little matter of one of their employees warding me inside a room with a divine seal and another one accidentally dumping me into the ancient magical labyrinth used for delving exercises was still pending, though a settlement offer was on the table that would let them off the hook with minimal financial hardship or much metaphorical egg on their collective and equally metaphorical faces.

They'd have to admit wrongdoing, of course, but since what we were really looking for was improvements in the handling of racial matters there was plenty of room for a moderately skilled P.R. department to spin the whole thing into something good for the school.

"I keep wanting to ask if Lee knows you're back," Amaranth said. Lee Jenkins, of course, was my lawyer, who was handling my arbitration case against the school and who had helped me out in some of the bigger trouble spots of my freshman year. "But of course you didn't leave."

"Yeah, we've been in touch," I said. "He's inviting us to the wedding, by the way. It's in the first week of [], so if you want to go you'll probably want to make arrangements to stay past the end of the year next semester."

"I would have thought it would have happened already," Amaranth said. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised they're opting for a longer engagement, with his career and all."

"It's not that," I said. "His wedding's been pushed back by his in-laws-to-be again... something about an insufficient bridal gift. They want time to put together a better offering."

"I can't imagine he cares about that," Amaranth said.

"I've got the idea that it would be insulting for him to tell them that," I said.

Lee didn't talk about himself very much, but when he did he was really talking about his fiancee, K’thindi. She had a half-orc mother who'd raised her orcish, and they were a close-knit family. The stereotypical view of orcs wouldn't lead one to imagine they could approve of someone with a white collar job, but most cultures tend to view someone who makes a good living in high regard. If anything, orcs had a higher regard for lawyers... trial lawyers, especially... than humans typically did.

Orcs didn't practice trial by combat. They viewed trials as combat. Two people standing up in front of an audience of their peers and a respected authority, making contrary claims and trying to show the other up as a liar or trip them up on a point of traditional protocol? That was the kind of thing orcs could understand. It was more or less how they'd settled disputes of honor for ages, during times when a lot of humans were still dueling.

"Anyway... in my mind, it felt like during the summer you went somewhere else," Amaranth said. "I know I was writing to you here, but it was like you left MU and went to some other school and then came back. I'm sure that doesn't make any sense..."

"It kind of does," I said. "The campus feels different during the summer. It's the same buildings, a lot of the same people, and the same place... but somehow it adds up to something different. I can't explain it."

"I think you just did," she said. "As much as I can, anyway... it seems like we both understand what we're talking about, and that's what matters."

The next day we went back to the union for breakfast on the first day of class. That felt less routine, because it was the first day of class. I'd been through this three times before but each time it was different. I was less than an hour away from starting a new class with a new instructor.

It was interesting to contrast it with the year before, where I'd been dragged along by my then-roommate Puddy despite my lack of need for food. Eating had proven to be a pretty good habit for me to cultivate, insofar as it was a social activity.

Puddy's attempt to gather as much of our floor around her as "her" group hadn't gone very far, and neither had her attempt to rally everyone around me in the student senate campaign she'd mounted on my nominal behalf... but in those early days, when people had only just begun making friends and splitting into their own little groups, it had meant that I pretty much ended up eating meals with whoever she could cajole into coming along at the moment



"Hey!" she said. "Do you all mind if I join you?" She sat down without waiting for an answer, but from the way she was talking a mile a minute it seemed like it was more absentminded nerves than presumption. "I'm on my own today, and I saw you all and I thought, you know, it's how last year started... that was a crazy year, wasn't it? We really kind of got off to the wrong foot, I mean on the wrong foot. Or to a bad start."

"Hello, Belinda," Amaranth said. "Sure, feel free. We're all friends here."

"Thanks," she said. "Oh, and it's Bel. I'm going by Bel now. I mean, I think I am. It's something I'm trying."

"Okay, Bel," Amaranth said. She squeezed my hand under the table.

"Hey," I said, hoping I was smiling. I felt like I was smiling, but the half-ogre made me nervous.

She and I weren't exactly friends in the sense that we sought out each other's company... usually... but she was friendly towards me.

She was one of the people I'd shared a table with a few times in the first few days of the previous fall semester and then never again. At the time, she'd landed a position as captain of a squad in the school's Skirmish team on the strength of being a half-ogre, with emphasis on "strength". She'd found the presence of a supernaturally strong half-demon an unacceptable challenge to her position... the fact that I had no interest in recreational or real fighting hadn't mollified her at all. It had only made my existence in proximity to her all the more insulting.

To say it charitably: she hadn't exactly dealt with her insecurity well... but who could say they handled everything with perfect grace in their first year at college? I sure couldn't. She'd managed to get over herself.

She was long over any need to prove herself the biggest and baddest one on the block. She'd toyed with dropping out of Skirmish, but had come tor realize that despite being only the second or third strongest person in the Harlowe girls' freshman floor, she was a better fighter than Puddy or I were... and while there was a limit to what she could do about her strength while staying within Skirmish rules, nothing stopped her from becoming the best fighter she could be.

"How are things on the hex?" Amaranth asked her.

"Pretty good," Belinda... Bel... said. "I think we're going to have a great year, especially with Rocky as co-captain of the squad. We've been working on strategies over the summer. We've also been working with the other squad captains more. You know last year they mostly tried to use as as a sort of secret weapon, but that only really works once. This year we're working more as an actual part of the army."




[1.5 hours in. Shaping up more.]

Sunday was the first day that all of us were back on the MU campus, and it was the first day that felt like things were back to normal. It was a weird kind of normalcy, granted, given that instead of waking up underneath Amaranth in a tiny little bed, I woke up underneath her in the middle of a great big one. The new furnishings really did have the effect of making it seem like I was waking up in an entirely new place, not the room I'd spent the last week in.

I didn't mind that little mental reset one bit. The summer housing dorm I'd stayed in for the preceding three months had never felt anything like a home. The room in Gilcrease had felt like that: just somewhere I was staying. Somewhere with a place for me to sleep and room for me to store my stuff. Amaranth's arrival might have been enough to turn it from "some place" into "home", but turning it into a cozy and comfortable home with little resemblance to the crowded and strictly utilitarian place it had been was even better.

It also gave me the sense that it was more her room than mine, which I also didn't mind... while I'd made a lot of strides in dealing with it, feeling out of place was still one of my bigger sources of anxiety. How could I feel out of place in Amaranth's room? It was where she kept her belongings. She even had a place for me.

When we unpacked her books, it occurred to me that she had a practical reason for delegating the shelving to me... it wasn't just a matter of giving me a task for the sake of doing so. She seemed almost inherently incapable of picking up a book and just putting it on the shelf. Each one that she took out of the trunk, she ended up at least flipping through, if not sitting down to read. I like books, and I can't pretend that none of them caught my eye, but a lot of them were things like old natural history or philosophy textbooks from the 60s or 70s... fifty, sixty years out of date and looking like they'd felt every day of it. Amaranth cooed over each and every one of them like they were children, which meant I got a dozen or two books up on the shelves for every one she took out.

"You have your class with Coach Callahan this semester, don't you, baby?" she asked me, while paging idly through a large book about wildflowers. "The additional one you promised you'd take when she gave you a pass/fail grade last year?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said. My replies were more likely to come out "yes, ma'am" than anything more conversational when I was actively working on not sounding snappish.She knew this already. We'd gone over my whole schedule before. "It's my last class of the day, every day."

"A five credit hour class," she said.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. "I'm taking 17 hours this semester, but don't worry... I'm still ahead of where I need to be, credit wise. I'm not going to slack off just because I got extra classes in over the summer."

"Oh, I'm not worried about you slacking off in that regard," Amaranth said. "I'm just thinking about what a bad grade in a five hour class would do to you. What grade do you think you would have earned, if you hadn't been given a pass?"

"Probably a C," I said. "That's what Callahan thought I would end up with when she made the offer."

"Coach Callahan," Amaranth said. "I want you to start practicing proper respect for her."

"I don't think that's going to affect my grade," I said, then added, "ma'am."

"No, but it will affect your attitude, which might affect your performance, which would affect your grade," Amaranth said. "Say it."

"Coach Callahan," I said. "Coach Callahan told me she thought I could end up with a C."

"If you get a C this time, it will be a third of your grade," Amaranth said.

"Not quite a third," I said.

"More than a quarter of it," she said, and I couldn't argue with that. "So we'll have to make sure that doesn't happen. Therefore, one of your tasks will be to get an A from her."

"Yes, ma'... wait, you mean to get my collar, I have to get an A from Ca... Coach Callahan?"

"Whose collar?"

I lowered my eyes.

"Your collar," I said.

"Do you not think you can get an A?"

"I don't know," I said. "Honestly, her grading system is kind of... well... arbitrary."

"Do you think it's unfair?"

"I couldn't say," I said. "She says she assigns the grade she thinks students deserve. Anyway, even if I do get an A, that means it'll be winter break at the earliest that I get to wear your collar."

"I didn't say they would be short tasks," she said. "You've been mine for almost a year. If you don't think you can wait one semester to make it 'official'..."

"I can wait!" I said. "But... what if I don't get the A?"

[]






We ate all of our meals in the cafeteria, we went and hung out in the library in the afternoon. It was what had become a typical Sunday in my life.

The others went to the library with us, but only Amaranth and I stayed very long. None of us had any homework or studying to do, obviously, and everyone else wanted to go check out the newer additions to the campus facilities. None of those things were new to me, though.

I'd taken an odd kind of comfort in the knowledge that by staying over the summer I had spent more time living on campus than about half of the undergraduate student body, assuming an even distribution of students over the four years. In our little group, Steff had been at MU longer than I had but she'd missed out on the changes over the summer.

"It's kind of a shame we won't be here when the library gets remodeled," Amaranth said, in between flitting between books. "It's part of the five year plan, but there are no funds allocated for it yet, which means it probably won't be done in the next two years."

"I'm kind of glad," I said. "I like the library the way it is."

The multistory school library was one of the biggest and the nicest library I'd ever been in. The municipal library in downtown Enwich was bigger and more impressive looking on the outside, but its inside was kind of dingy and institutional-looking. The MU library was very modern in its design. Its floor plan was very open and well-lit, with skylights on the top floor and a lot of glass in the front that illuminated all three stories. I couldn't imagine a building on campus in less need of renovation.

"Well, I look at it this way," Amaranth said. "If they expand it, it'll have more books. Anyway, it's hard to say what will happen in the next four years... Bethany Davies is laying out all these big changes, but she's not staying to see them through."

"You seem really up on this stuff," I said.

"I got the Gazetteer, the alumni newsletter, and the Enwich Times in Paradise Valley so I could keep up on it," Amaranth said. "Last year none of us really came here with our eyes all the way open... I didn't want to make that mistake again. Anyway, it's obvious Chancellor Davies is concerned about the legacy she's leaving now that she's retiring. I just hope she's thinking about more than buildings and landscaping projects."

"Yeah," I said. "Well, it's not like we're not giving her plenty of opportunity to get her name attached to something positive."

My case against the school for the little matter of one of their employees warding me inside a room with a divine seal and another one accidentally dumping me into the ancient magical labyrinth used for delving exercises was still pending, though a settlement offer was on the table that would let them off the hook with minimal financial hardship or much metaphorical egg on their collective and equally metaphorical faces.

They'd have to admit wrongdoing, of course, but since what we were really looking for was improvements in the handling of racial matters there was plenty of room for a moderately skilled P.R. department to spin the whole thing into something good for the school.

[]

The next day we went back to the union for breakfast on the first day of class. It was interesting to contrast it with the year before, where I'd been dragged along by my then-roommate Puddy despite my lack of need for food. Eating had proved to be a pretty good habit for me to cultivate, insofar as it was a social activity.

Puddy's attempt to gather as much of our floor around her as "her" group hadn't gone very far, and neither had her attempt to rally everyone around me in the student senate campaign she'd mounted on my nominal behalf... but in those early days, when people had only just begun making friends and splitting into their own little groups, it had meant that I pretty much ended up eating meals with whoever she could cajole into coming along at the moment





"Hey!" she said. "Do you all mind if I join you?" She sat down without waiting for an answer, but from the way she was talking a mile a minute it seemed like it was more absentminded nerves than presumption. "I'm on my own today, and I saw you all and I thought, you know, it's how last year started... that was a crazy year, wasn't it? We really kind of got off to the wrong foot, I mean on the wrong foot. Or to a bad start."

"Hello, Belinda," Amaranth said. "Sure, feel free. We're all friends here."

"Thanks," she said. "Oh, and it's Bel. I'm going by Bel now. I mean, I think I am. It's something I'm trying."

"Okay, Bel," Amaranth said. She squeezed my hand under the table.

"Hey," I said, hoping I was smiling. I felt like I was smiling, but the half-ogre made me nervous.

She and I weren't exactly friends in the sense that we sought out each other's company... usually... but she was friendly towards me.

She was one of the people I'd shared a table with a few times in the first few days of the previous fall semester and then never again. At the time, she'd landed a position as captain of a squad in the school's Skirmish team on the strength of being a half-ogre, with emphasis on "strength". She'd found the presence of a supernaturally strong half-demon an unacceptable challenge to her position... the fact that I had no interest in recreational or real fighting hadn't mollified her at all. It had only made my existence in proximity to her all the more insulting.

To say it charitably: she hadn't exactly dealt with her insecurity well... but who could say they handled everything with perfect grace in their first year at college? I sure couldn't. She'd managed to get over herself.

She was long over any need to prove herself the biggest and baddest one on the block. She'd toyed with dropping out of Skirmish, but had come tor realize that despite being only the second or third strongest person in the Harlowe girls' freshman floor, she was a better fighter than Puddy or I were... and while there was a limit to what she could do about her strength while staying within Skirmish rules, nothing stopped her from becoming the best fighter she could be.

"How are things on the hex?" Amaranth asked her.

"Pretty good," Belinda... Bel... said. "I think we're going to have a great year, especially with Rocky as co-captain of the squad. We've been working on strategies over the summer. We've also been working with the other squad captains more. You know last year they mostly tried to use as as a sort of secret weapon, but that only really works once. This year we're working more as an actual part of the army."




[One hour in. Very rough stuff, needs some smoothing out and bridging. Basically gathering material at this point. Mackenzie is very non-active so far, that'll change in subsequent drafts.]

One of the people I'd shared a table with a few times in the first few days of the previous fall semester and then never again was Belinda, a half-ogre who'd landed a position as captain of a squad in the school's Skirmish team on the strength of being a half-ogre, with emphasis on "strength". She'd found the presence of a supernaturally strong half-demon an unacceptable challenge to her position... the fact that I had no interest in recreational or real fighting hadn't mollified her at all. It had only made my existence in proximity to her all the more insulting.

To say it charitably: she hadn't exactly dealt with her insecurity well... but who could say they handled everything with perfect grace in their first year at college? I sure couldn't. She'd managed to get over herself.

[Half hour in. This is pretty much all that's going to be said about Sunday. The rest of the chapter will be Monday, plus whatever's needed to bridge the two parts.]

Sunday was the first day that all of us were back on the MU campus, and it was the first day that felt like things were back to normal. Amaranth and I woke up in bed together, we ate all of our meals in the cafeteria, we went and hung out in the library in the afternoon. It was what had become a typical Sunday in my life.

The others went to the library with us, but only Amaranth and I stayed very long. None of us had any homework or studying to do, obviously, and everyone else wanted to go check out the newer additions to the campus facilities. None of those things were new to me, though.

I'd taken an odd kind of comfort in the knowledge that by staying over the summer I had spent more time living on campus than about half of the undergraduate student body, assuming an even distribution of students over the four years. In our little group, Steff had been at MU longer than I had but she'd missed out on the changes over the summer.

"It's kind of a shame we won't be here when the library gets remodeled," Amaranth said, in between flitting between books. "It's part of the five year plan, but there are no funds allocated for it yet, which means it probably won't be done in the next two years."

"I'm kind of glad," I said. "I like the library the way it is."

The multistory school library was one of the biggest and the nicest library I'd ever been in. The municipal library in downtown Enwich was bigger and more impressive looking on the outside, but its inside was kind of dingy and institutional-looking. The MU library was very modern in its design. Its floor plan was very open and well-lit, with skylights on the top floor and a lot of glass in the front that illuminated all three stories. I couldn't imagine a building on campus in less need of renovation.

"Well, I look at it this way," Amaranth said. "If they expand it, it'll have more books. Anyway, it's hard to say what will happen in the next four years... Bethany Davies is laying out all these big changes, but she's not staying to see them through."

"You seem really up on this stuff," I said.

"I got the Gazetteer, the alumni newsletter, and the Enwich Times in Paradise Valley so I could keep up on it," Amaranth said. "Last year none of us really came here with our eyes all the way open... I didn't want to make that mistake again. Anyway, it's obvious Chancellor Davies is concerned about the legacy she's leaving now that she's retiring. I just hope she's thinking about more than buildings and landscaping projects."

"Yeah," I said. "Well, it's not like we're not giving her plenty of opportunity to get her name attached to something positive."

My case against the school for the little matter of one of their employees warding me inside a room with a divine seal and another one accidentally dumping me into the ancient magical labyrinth used for delving exercises was still pending, though a settlement offer was on the table that would let them off the hook with minimal financial hardship or much metaphorical egg on their collective and equally metaphorical faces.

They'd have to admit wrongdoing, of course, but since what we were really looking for was improvements in the handling of racial matters there was plenty of room for a moderately skilled P.R. department to spin the whole thing into something good for the school.