Bureaucracy: Wake up. It is 5:45 am. Your morning schedule is Shower, Breakfast, Meditation, GMS:103, and Visit the Administration Office. Check your calendar for complete details. You should contact Lewis Straus, Mayra Bellsolà-Bayn and Damon Miles from your class for your group work.
Bureaucracy: Wake up. It is 5:50. You are running 5 minutes late for your shower. Based on your current morning ablutions, this will require you to get moving now.
Bureaucracy: Wake up. You are late….
OMG. Dismiss alerts.
Solace: I will work through the notifications and settings for the Bureaucracy skill to make it more user-friendly for you. It seems quite bossy. I would, however, recommend that you get going. I know that shower and bathroom activities are primarily habits. Still, you seem to relish the morning shower when available.
OK, mum, I'm up. I can skip the shower today and have an extra-long soak in the bath tonight. It's not like I even really need breakfast, either, but coffee is a necessity.
I decided to skip the shower and breakfast, glad I had some time-saving skills.
I didn't skip my meditation, though; it was one of the few things I did that seemed to calm some of the turmoil I was feeling from the pressures building with the conflict between my title of Augury and my meeting with the Eldest. I hoped that meditation would help.
Leaf of the Broken Season: Sporty
I relaxed in meditation on my Wanderers of Alubusm's Novice Prayer Mat with the Turtle of Godaago Garden set out. It was unnecessary, but I wanted to keep my bonuses up. Meditation seemed to make me a bit more centred.
The Bureaucracy skill had put me on edge.
I had been cultivating a bit of an identity in classes here, one that didn't stand out too much and one that did not really encourage people to want to get to know me more. Partly because I had not planned to stay here for long as I planned to get the trainer and go. I had started with no fundamental concept that the rest of the universe didn't get skills and titles handed to them like a newly minted member of the Empire on a new integration planet. I often found myself lacking some context, and it just added to what people thought of as my awkward personality. There was a massive difference between my experiences and those of the average Mage here.
I got dressed before heading to the seminar.
Leaf of the Broken Season: GSM Active
The Mages Guild ran their classes in an open forum, with attendance compulsory for provisional students for three years. Each block of studies involved studying from three of the twenty schools plus a general studies course.
Each school ran their lessons differently, and it was hard to reconcile some of the differences. Some were theory, some practical and some a combination. Each was supposed to be run by a Master Mage in that particular school, but most first-year classes were run by low-level Journeymen Mages who were sucking up to the Master Mage in an effort to secure Guild advancement.
My first block of studies included Enchantment, Illusion and Destruction. Today's course was General Mage Studies 103: Practical Theory of Mana. This was the class I needed for Minor Mana Manipulation (Tier 1).
If I 'passed' this, I would be officially allowed to use the skill privately and commercially. I needed to pass the second-year course to be rated for Mana Manipulation (Tier 2). It was also the class that my Bureaucracy reminded me to contact three classmates for a group assessment task.
One of the big issues was that I had not really cultivated friendships or was even on speaking terms with anyone, and I was in the unusual position of being the last selected for a group. This was so at odds with my previous schooling, where I was socially active and popular with all the students. Here, though, I was not here to socialise or make friends.
It didn't help that the Academy reeked of a mixture of Brakebills, Hogwarts, and Beverly Hills 90210 in sheer pretentiousness. Add in the students' sheer entitlement, creating a melting pot of one-upmanship and paranoia.
In another life, I would have loved it here. I wish I had time to relax and enjoy my time here. If this had been six months prior, I would have been at home amongst all the social groups and all over the drama, maybe even causing quite a bit of it. Instead, I was lying low and trying to gain knowledge without people and beings finding out the huge gaps in what I knew. It was both frustrating and challenging for me to fight against my nature.
As my skill had indicated, the last three people I could form my group with were Lewis, Mayra and Damon.
Even here, they were odd. None of them came from wealthy families like the majority of other Junior Mages. They were residents of the shared dorm complex, and even by the odd standards of the Mages Guild, they were very odd. Usually, that would have put them into the group of people I'd like to get to know, but I found them to be more than very odd. Weird in a difficult-to-get-along-with way. Despite my history of befriending strays and being friendly with most people, I still struggled to find common ground.
Lewis was close to seven feet tall and skinny as a bean pole. Not grotesque, he was quite the opposite. Rather than gaunt, he looked wiry and fit. Lewis spoke with a high, squeaky voice, wore absurd outfits, and had that mad professor hair that he changed the colour of almost daily. He was a prime example of why you did not dump all your points into one stat at the expense of others. At a guess, his Charisma would be in single digits. His Intelligence would have been his highest stat, but all his other stats would have been at their minimum. His only saving grace was that he liked my sense of humour and was a prodigy in runeworking. Once you got talking about that, you needed a packed lunch. He had asked me out on a date, and to his credit, he was not offended when I turned him down; it was almost like he was expected to ask a female out on a date like he was reading a script or something. I found out later that he had asked every female at the Academy on a date with similar results. He was cute in a way but just too weird and single-focused. Even if I were interested, my love life was more than complex.
Mayra was one of the few people who scared me. Not physically or even mentally, it was more a sense of watching an unexploded bomb in the hands of a toddler. When it went off, the potential destruction would be spectacular, as long as you were not in the blast radius. We all knew she would go off; it was just a matter of when or what. She exuded an aura of menace and near-uncontrolled rage as she stalked around. She was physically attractive and dressed to show off her figure, but it did little to curb her blunt and abrasive manner. Everything was a challenge to her and a challenge to her dominance, and she had a way of looking through you, making you seem insignificant and meaningless before her. I got the sense that she came from a very wealthy family but had been disowned, giving her a significant chip on her shoulders. Despite her abrupt and demeaning personality, I had some positive experiences with her, especially when discussing her magical obsession with Chronomancy.
She was lucky. Chronomancy was a rare and challenging school of magic to learn. You didn't learn it so much, but you gained access to it through experience and talent. Maybe she was not so lucky, though. According to Academy gossip, skilled Chronomancers were batshit crazy. The students would use the local equivalent name of bat-like Horrorbugs or Stinkhoods.
Despite that, she was one student who I'd like to have my back when the crap hit the fan. Or maybe not, if she went psychotic. It was hard to tell with her, and if you got it wrong, you would never hear the end of it. Her obsession with time was close to addiction levels of obsession.
Damon was the third potential group member. No, not a potential but a future group member. I needed them in my group to pass and had no choice. He was quiet and unassuming, and he was the person I voted for as most likely to be a psychotic Necromancer. Given Mayra's company, that was pretty impressive. The biggest issue was a really nice guy. Everyone took advantage of his good nature, and I am sure everyone would pay for it one day. I'd put money on him having a kill list a mile long.
He was so hard to read for such a nice person. I felt sorry for him and had even had a cup of genuine Earth coffee, which was bloody expensive in the store – with him. I was pretty sure I was not on his list after that, and I was doing my best to keep on his good side. No one knew his magic specialty, so he was assumed to be a generalist, another reason everyone looked down on him. People without a specialty or something to make them stand out were seen as mundane. We had that in common, as I was also enrolled as a generalist. In the unofficial hierarchy list of schools, those who started as generalists were not even on the list.
I entered the seminar hall two minutes early. I could feel the BureauBureaucracy'sproval of not being at least 5 minutes early. This class was based in the Hall of Mysticism, which should have been called a tower, not a hall, but for some reason, classes were taught in Halls until you graduated to be taught in the Tower, regardless of where the class was actually taught. The room was tall and round, with eight levels of tiered seating around the room, rising from a circular pit in the middle. The entire room made up the Tower's third floor and was airy, draughty, and cold. The Master Mage, or in our case, Journeyman Mage Instructor First Class, would talk and lecture from the pit, which was large enough for a small herd of elephants. The auditorium would feel cramped with three hundred students and packed with four hundred. Magic was obviously involved in the acoustics, as the slightest noise made by the Mage in the middle would be broadcast to all clearly, sometimes to hilarious effect, if they forgot to mute themselves.
This session's class for GSM103 had just over one hundred fifty students. I sat opposite where I would have sat at school or uni—the back row near an exit. I could not quite sneak in, but leaving first was important. It was also near where the other misfits sat, next to where Lewis, Mayra, and Damon always sat, always with the same empty few chairs between them.
A class ran for between one and three hours, seemingly at random and on the whims of the presenter. This was one reason only one session was scheduled for the morning or afternoon.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
I had attended one lesson on Illusion, where the Journeyman Mage, Azriel Diablos, dismissed the class after twenty-five minutes, finishing in mid-sentence. It seemed that Chonomancers were not the only horrorbug-crazy magicians.
Despite the randomness, I found General Mage Studies quite interesting. I was picking up large amounts of information that seemed to bore others. It was more the practical demonstrations that were valuable to me. I had learned the hard way that cheap knowledge without the consequence of learning or wisdom was quite dangerous, and I was trying hard to rectify that.
My main goals at the Academy were to gain knowledge, learn my class skills and formalise some training while flying under the radar and keeping Earth, Rach and Min Min out of the spotlight. I'd let whatever plan Claudia had for me play out as if I worried about it or tried to force it. The skill would bite me in the arse or not work. Neither of which was really an option. I didn't want to disappoint Claudia, not just because of her position but because she seemed nice as well.
Today, during one of the brief breaks in the lesson flow, I had organised for my future group mates to meet at the Black Boulder Tearoom straight after the lesson. I passed a goddammed written note, which seemed to be the thing here. For an advanced society, there were some awfully backward traditions. Mages appeared to be the worst, almost Luddite, in their attitudes towards tech. Getting an AI to organise a schedule was seen as gauche and too common.
I had to make it through the lecture, have the meeting, and then return to the Administration Hall in the afternoon for another waste. In my dreams, that would be a quick visit. I could feel the rumblings of bureauBureaucracyas quite worried that flying under the radar would be more challenging afterwards, as I could feel the skill-building of some strategic-level defences and counters based on my previous visits.
Despite finishing on time and leaving simultaneously, I was at the Black Boulder waiting for nearly twenty minutes before the others arrived. You would think that Mayra, of all people, would be on time. Joking about Chonomancers and punctuality was not worth the social awkwardness. I'd save it for later when I knew she could take a joke without trying to kill me.
Organising Lewis, Mayra and Damon was akin to raking leaves in a cyclone with no rake. All we had to do was get together and practice some of the magic manipulations – stuff we had learned in classes and document our learning using a recording stone. This was practice for our final practical exam, where we had to demonstrate the same techniques under pressure. You would think that finding one hour a week for a few weeks to get together would be easy.
An hour later, I was on my third coffee, and we were still trying to sort a time.
"Nope, I am busy then, too", Mayra said after I had proposed a very early start.
"Sleeping in doesn't count as busy", Lewis grumbled.
"Not sleeping, busy.", was the curt reply.
"Doing what?" Damon asked, and even the most unflustered of us seemed to be getting frustrated.
"OK." I was more than annoyed, "How about we meet at 5 am, and if you can't make it, you can't. Everyone else will be there, and it is up to you if you miss out unless you can nominate a time when you are not. I quote, "Busy, In a meeting, running your business times three, family dinner, family lunch, family breakfast, a highly improbable date, study practice for Chronomancy, looking after your pet and my favourite, a hair appointment, then we are set. Even I don't need three hair appointments in a week."
Solace: You left out fitness training, meditation and study.
I kept quiet. Solace was not wrong.
Mayra glared at me. "Fine, I'll be there."
Solace, can you book the training hall, please?
Solace: Done.
Thanks.
"OK, I have booked the hall, and we are scheduled for tomorrow and every week for the next month."
They all looked at me.
Solace: I don't think that good AIs are as common here. Most people would have a Tier 2 at the most, even those would be rare in this circle, and they are somewhat clunky to use, from what I gather.
OK, noted.
"Did you use your AI for that?" Damon asked.
"Um, yes."
"Cool. Mine would take ages to sort that out. I am getting it upgraded as soon as I graduate, a present from my, er, sponsors. It would be so cool to be able to do things like that. What else can yours do?"
Mayra glared at Damon and me, "So, Princess, how come you are slumming with us?"
"What?" I asked, genuinely confused. At first, I thought that my cover as consort was blown.
"Living in the posh apartments, high-level AI evidently and more credits than sense in the fashion department, why are you slumming with us?"
"What's wrong with my fashion? What are you going on about?" Again, I was genuinely confused and a bit concerned. My fashion sense was immaculate. My opinion of her dropped even further.
Solace: Don't do anything stupid. Mayra cannot help it if she has no taste. Your clothes are perfect, and that tailor's choices were spot-on.
"Well, most of us here, except Damon, are scraping together to get here through family or corpo connections. You have no affiliation or job and don't hang out with anyone else. Too good for everyone else except when you need us! What is your deal?" She was getting closer to that proverbial bomb going off, and I was sitting at ground zero.
Damon had the good manners to look a bit embarrassed. "Scholarship here. But I have to intern with the corp during breaks."
I sighed. Maybe I had not been doing a good job keeping a low profile. "Does it matter? We don't have to be buddies. We just have to meet for an hour a week and pass the class. I am not sure what stick got to put up your ass but ditch the attitude."
"Fuck you, I'll turn up. Some of us need to pass this. Not everyone is entitled to an inheritance or something. If you muck this up for me, you are dead." She left without paying.
Lewis, who thankfully had been semi-normal, shrugged and left as well.
"Don't worry about it, Damon. I got the bill. You can go, too."
"See you tomorrow morning," he said, standing and leaving.
Well, those will be fun-filled study sessions in the morning, a great way to start the day—maybe the best part of the week.
Solace: You don't do sarcasm well. But I will see what we can learn about her and why she is antagonistic. This is the stuff that Rach would be all over. She would probably have a complete dossier on all the beings you will likely come in contact with and their families.
You are right, but since when did you start with the Rach? I thought you were all Imperial Majesty or Empress.
Solace: With the things I have had to put up with, I think I get to be familiar with her name. It's not like I can totally tune myself out anymore.
I blushed a little.
Anyway, change of topic. Thanks. Talk to Acto if you need to. Also, find out which corporation Damon is affiliated with. While you are at it, you may as well dig into Lewis. At this stage, I'd rather be rude than blindsided by something avoidable. We may need to be more proactive going forward. As you said, Rach would have done it, and she is not a bad role model.
Solace: Done. I'll let you know what Acto finds out.
I paid the lunch bill and then went to the Administration building. As usual, the line was quite long. As I entered and moved to stand at the end of the line, a junior attendant approached me. I tried not to smile a little as I saw my favourite support consultant, Jed, working today at the head of the queue.
"To see a Student Support Consultant, you need to pay the fee before you can line up", the snooty minor bureaucrat said. I found out that the price varied depending on who approached.
Bureaucracy: Ignore him.
I ignored him.
"Excuse me, Miss, you must pay the fee to line up?"
Bureaucracy: Ignore him one more time. Use Dirty Laundry: Clean Skill
I activated the skill.
Clean Dirty Laundry:
Active Effects: Make it obvious for others to see if money, fees or payments being asked for are being funnelled into illegal activity or legitimate business. It can be dangerous to one's health.
"Miss. You cannot see the Student Support Consultant if you do not pay the fee to line up."
Bureaucracy: Ask him what section of the Charter he is authorised to collect the payment for lining up here. Then, ask for a receipt indicating that you are paying to line up and who it is going to.
"Mister …" I paused.
"Samuel, Junior Mage Third Year Samuel Doles", he replied.
"Well, Mister Doles, since you have no identification indicating you are an agent of the Mages Guild or any identification, I would like a receipt to ensure that it is a legitimate expense. Otherwise, I will decline to pay. I am sure the Mages' Guild Charter is quite clear on the appropriate fee for lining up to see a Support Consultant. Could you remind me of the section I need to look under?"
He looked a bit nervous. "Look, I don't want trouble, and if you want to line up, you have to pay. That's how it is—it always has been, too!"
"Samuel, do you mind if I call you Sam? Now Sammy, under Section Seven of the Mages Guild Charter. That's the section that lists fees and services of the Guild; there is no mention of any fee payable by a student for lining up to see a Student Support Consultant." God, I loved BureauBureaucracyskill. Despite hating bureauBureaucracyntinued, the skill supplying the facts, "Section Six Part Eleven, subsection four specifically forbids anyone from collecting fees or payments on behalf of the Mages Guild without clear indication that they represent the Mages Guild, through formal identification, mana signature or signed documentation. Section Six Part Four, do I need to quote the full subsection and paragraph about providing receipts?"
Sam's eyes darted around at the students in front of me, all trying to listen without being seen listening to every word. He paled quite a bit. "Now, I am just doing my job here. No need to cause trouble. I can call security to escort you out."
"Sammy, Sammy, now I am not causing trouble. What grounds would you call for a guard to escort me out? What exactly is your job? So, you admit you are being paid? By the Guild? Then you would have some official identification, and I would happily pay the appropriate fee, which is not for lining up. I would also like a receipt for the said fee, which tells me what I am paying. I would be happy for you to call security, as I have not breached any Guild regulations. Yet, if we looked further into what is happening here…."
Sammy fled. He left the area and moved into the consulting areas. I smiled at all the people in the queue before me and shrugged. "I read the Charter, my fifth time here, and it didn't seem legit". A couple of nods in agreement, and one fellow student clapped politely.
Thanks, Bureaucracy.
Despite feeling proud at kicking back, I knew I was in trouble.
Slowly, I moved forward with the line. About twenty minutes later, Sammy came out. He was pretty pale and looked nervous. He came straight towards me. "Mr. East will see you now."
Solace: Jasper Thomas East. Grand Master of the Destruction School. Called the Blind Igniter after his habit of burning first and asking questions second. An old-school pyromancer. Tier Four. The last recorded level was 88. He has ties to Faye Tallflawes, head of The Flames of the Nebulous Star, a pyromancer mercenary group. He is a dangerous person and not one to cross lightly.
Bureaucracy: Ignore him.
"Miss, um, what is your name? I can't identify you?"
Bureaucracy: Ignore him.
"Miss, Mr. East will see you now. Please?"
Bureaucracy: Ask him loudly who Mr. East is and under whose authority he is operating. Explain that you had not made an appointment to see a 'Mr. East'.
"Sorry, Sammy, who is Mr. East? And why will he see me now after I refused payment and pointed out that your collection of money may not be guild-sanctioned or legitimate?"
I could hear some grumbling in the queue, some in fear and some in anger.
"Please, Miss. You really don't want to keep him waiting."
Bureaucracy: You are safe here. But caution is advised.
Thanks.
Was it weird that I was thanking skills? Did that count as talking to yourself?
"OK. OK. Lead the way." I smirked at Jed as we walked past. It took him a moment to recognise me, but I could tell from his face that he was not happy. He started to scramble to follow me through the door, which was shut in his face.
Solace: I guess you kicked over the hornet's nest. Claudia was right about you.