The drive from our apartment to our campus library shouldn’t take nearly as long as it regularly does. Traffic is truly a terrible invention of humanity. To be fair, it is at least partially my fault. I wanted an apartment further from the majority of campus. I have some things to take care of over the course of these next few years, and being close to campus means being close to prying eyes. Besides, Nat doesn’t mind too much. Most of the time.
“Come on,” Nat says in the passenger seat of the car. More to the world than to me. She tries her best to will the traffic to move without magic. But traffic remains traffic. Then, as happens occasionally when the drive takes far too long, her attention turns to me. “You know, if we’d taken the apartment on the other side of campus, that townhouse style thing with the nice landlord, we wouldn’t have to deal with this. We’d get to drive against traffic, instead of having to move with it.”
I sigh. “Again, you bring up the apartment that was right next to a literal drive-by just days after we visited.”
She waves it off. “We’d be fine. I checked the stats and the stabbings are way down this year.”
“Way down being?” I muse with a smirk.
She shakes her head. “We’d be fine,” she insists instead of answering the question. That, in and of itself, definitely counts as an answer.
“Exactly,” I reply, “Besides, don’t worry, I’ve started scheduling the traffic in. We’ll still be on time for our office hours.”
“Maybe,” she concedes, “But only if SOME PEOPLE get their ASSES moving.” That last bit is directed at the other cars on the road, not me. Thankfully. I do sometimes forget about Nat’s road rage issues. And solutions. There’s a reason I’m the one who drives, most of the time. Getting somewhere quickly, Nat is great. Entirely intact and unharmed, without making mortal enemies of anyone along the way, she’s less so. I’m betting there’s still a few people in Provence and Italy who still wish us dead from our old vacations. I make sure the windows are all up as we pass through the traffic, so no one can hear the spew of insults Nat has for any she deems to be driving irritatingly. With a smile I think about how this is the future of our Magisterial education. As she manages to string twelve words together in a grammatically correct sentence without a single word that could be played on the radio, I can’t help but nod, still smiling. This is probably going to be one of the better teachers in the American Villae, and certainly the teacher responsible for training the most other pure teachers. I know it’s mostly a good thing. Hopefully as she gets older her creativity remains on point but her irritation mellows. Or she ends up somewhere with either no need for cars or plenty of adequate public transportation.
A few minutes later, we manage to arrive at the campus’s library. I pull the car down into the small garage under the place. Since the Apprentices all live in one of the campus owned buildings in the neighborhood, the parking lot is mostly just for the Magisters who want to save some money. Or have some nefarious reason for living further from the Villa. Not that plotting world conquest is really nefarious, right? Scratch that, I’m working and in regular contact with Therese, it definitely should be considered nefarious. I’m pretty sure that girl could be saving kittens from trees and I’d still really be forced to wonder exactly how it works into her nefarious schemes. Now I’m thinking about the word nefarious too much and it’s losing all its meaning. Pulling into an open parking space in the dimly lit garage, I shift the car into park. “See, told you we’d be on time,” I add to Nat, before realizing she’s already out the door and making her way to the stairwell. In all fairness, while my office hours mostly revolve around doing work on my thesis or grading for classes, she’s actually a strong tutor. I suspect she might get her advisees at the very least coming to her for help with their classes.
I lock the car after I climb out, and calmly walk over to the stairwell. Climbing up two flights of stairs, I walk through into the second floor. Reference books all around me. I make my way through the nearly empty reference section, to the hallway on the opposite end. Six small office slash conference rooms, shared by the Magisters. Pulling out the key to “my” office, I walk in and leave the door open behind me. Because, even though people rarely ever actually show up, they’re free to if they wish.
The office is fairly sparse as far as decorations are concerned. I share it with two other Magisters, so if we want to put anything decorative anywhere, we’ve all got to agree. The shelves, on the other hand, are another matter. Even though there is only one desk in the small office, each of the three walls not including a door supports at least one bookshelf filled with books. My shelves, of which there is one on each wall, have a variety of books. On the one hand, there’s a full shelf dedicated to my old focus: the Enhancements school of Mystic Aid. My other shelves, however, have books on history, politics, and tactics of both the outside world and the mystic world. Every big ass treatise I could find. I’ve read almost all of them at this point. I need to understand them all front to back if I really want my main project to work quickly and efficiently. There are also two shelves for Lauren Ng, granddaughter of Greater Magister Ng, and her books on the theories of High Magic. Then there’s Darren’s three shelves, one of which is devoted entirely to fiction. He’s in reception studies, which is frustrating because he mostly just uses it as an excuse to read and watch whatever media even vaguely related to the mystic that he feels like and claim he’s working on his thesis. I walk over and sit down behind the desk. Pulling out my laptop, I power it on and open up my student notes. I then pull out from my bag the folder of last week’s tests. Time to get to work on what is theoretically my job.
The first person to interrupt my work doesn’t even arrive for my office hours, not really. I’m just hard to track down outside of office hours and my classes. About ten minutes into grading some essays on the underlying principles of Mystic Aid, Great Maestro Stevens-Williams walks through the door then knocks on it. “Alina,” he says, waiting for my acknowledgement, “Earth to Alina.”
With a mental sigh, I look up and smile. “Great Maestro Stevens-Williamson,” I say, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“It’s Devon,” he replies, like I don’t know that. Like he doesn’t say that literally every time. But he holds a position and title above my own, and I really don’t know him well enough to start calling him D or whatever else he claims to like being called. People, especially people who are older but want to seem younger to young people, often say they like things they think people want them to like. Better to remain safe and seem overly professional than slip up and have someone subconsciously feel like you disrespect them every time you speak with them. “And I just figured I’d check in with my favorite two new Magisters. I know you guys went way off campus for your apartment and that’s cool, but again, it’s really not a problem to expand our wards to cover your place. It’ll just be a couple days, we shut the building down for a quote-unquote fumigation, and bam, you guys can use magic at home without worrying about death and hunters and all the other whatnot you’d need to worry about if you did so now.”
Just like with his name, the guy really gets insistent about the things he thinks us younger people want. “What did Nat say?” I ask with a smile. I know what Nat said. She’s not a fan either, for entirely different reasons than me. She doesn’t want to worry about any people from the Villa who come by using magic at the apartment. That, and she thinks Jase cuts back on his smoking when he’s forced to use an actual lighter. Which, in all fairness, is true, because lighters can be a bitch sometimes, and he can get frustrated and give up easily where certain unimportant things are concerned.
“She said she didn’t really want anyone to worry about it, but if you want it she can accept that,” the Great Maestro of this Villa offers in reply, trying his best to emphasize the second half. It’s nice of Nat to include that last bit in her answer, even if she equally knows my desire not to have it done.
“Sorry again, but I’d prefer not. I don’t want to bother our neighbors, and I’m more than happy to just come to a campus area whenever I need to do anything practical,” I reply politely.
He nods and smiles, but there are clear creases of disappointment around his eyes. Like he thinks clearly we just see him too much like an authority figure to admit how we actually feel. As opposed to the truth, that we are saying what we feel. “Well, if you ever change your mind, just stop by the Admin building and we can get it sorted away in the blink of an eye,” he insists before he leaves. He waits a moment for a reply, and when it doesn’t come, he walks out of the office.
I wait a few seconds for the sound of his footsteps to fade away before I let out a deep sigh and head right back into grading. I have to restart the essay I was more than halfway through when Stevens-Williamson walked in. Lost my place having to deal with him in a polite, professional manner. Which puts me back an extra minute, in addition to the time talking took away from my grading. Which, I know, technically isn’t what this time is for, but it’s what I often do during this time and it needs to be done by tomorrow.
I get another solid hour of work in after the Great Maestros interruption before another happens. One of my advisees, Sage Lachance, walks in and knocks on the open door meekly. I nod and, with a gesture towards the chairs in front of the desk and without looking up from my laptop, I tell them, “Come, sit down, relax, and give me a second to finish up this essay.”
They pause for a moment at the door before rushing to the comfiest looking of the three open chairs in the office. Sitting in the chair, I can hear them take a moment to breathe, then start moving papers around. They’re listening to me. Good. I finish grading the mediocre essay on basic principles and turn to look at them. “Sorry for that, Sage, I just wanted to make sure I finished so it wouldn’t be distracting me.”
Sage nods, then shrugs. “It’s no worries, Magister Paredes. It helped, actually. I needed a moment to collect myself and my thoughts anyways. And get ready too.” They hold up the papers they pulled out of their backpack. I smile. Polite and professional, just like I taught my advisees on day one. They likely aren’t telling the whole truth with the whole waiting being helpful thing, so they don’t fully trust me, but I’ll take the little victories when and where I can.
“Alright,” I ask, “So what’s up? What did you want to talk with me about?”
They bite their lip in thought, then spit out, “So I was thinking about next semester, about my classes that I should and could take.” After they start, the words just keep coming. “And I know I don’t have a major or whatever yet, and I know I’m just supposed to take whatever looks interesting or calls to me as well as what I need to take, but I got a bunch of those and I wanted to ask you about them. I mean, not about them, per se, but like about the Magisters and Maestros that will be teaching them. Not that you know all the magisters and Maestros or anything, but you seem to know a lot of things about a lot of people, and you have random yearbooks and stuff on your bookshelves so I figured if anyone might know something about the different professors and how good they are at, well, teaching, it might be you. Or, anyone who has any reason to tell me anything about them in any case. I printed out the descriptions of the courses and the information and everything, I was just hoping you could go through them with me so I can figure out a schedule. You know? Sorry, wait, I think I’m rambling now, did you catch all that?”
I smile and nod. “Yeah, sure, we can go through your interests and work out a schedule. Where do you want to start?”
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