Dear Diary,

Important safety tip: if you are still drunk the day after, hydrate.

Swear I'd straight up kill myself by accident if Saffron wasn't around to mother hen me away from unintentional self destruction. By the end of the day yesterday I had zero notes taken in Basic Mana Shaping, which is gonna bite me in the ass, since just like Doc said, the first couple weeks are all vocabulary. So far the only things I remember are dexter, sinister, doesil, and widdershins. Hopefully by next week I'll even know definitions!

Okay, hopefully by next week if I sleep with my head close to Saffron's some of the vocab is sure to diffuse into my brain. Nature hates a vacuum, right? Gotta happen at some point.

Anyway, she kept handing me pitchers of water yesterday, and I kept drinking whatever she handed me. I must have downed like a dozen gallons of water between lunch and dinner. Enough that I'd have been pissing like a race horse if I didn't have my fuckin' oubliette of a digestive tract. Saffron asked me about that last night. Okay, what she actually said was, "where do you put it all?"

"No idea, really. Nothing's come out the other end since the day I got here."

That got an unexpected reaction. Reactions, really. First she put one finger up, putting me on pause while she flopped onto the World's Least Comfortable Chair. She got that faraway look that means Saffron's brain is churning through more data in a few minutes than I've ever had between the ears. After a little bit, she shook her head. "That's got to be at least a few tons of food by now. I really do wonder where you're putting it all." She made a throwing away gesture, "I mean, it's clear it's related to your unique origin," or your other, more secret secret, beloved Mimic.

Part of me worried that somehow someone else with access to my head might hear her thinking at me. Most of me figured I ought to just leave all the skullduggery to Saffron. After her whole 'why am I holding the baby' trick with you know who, she clearly had more native talent than I did. I mean, yeah, I can blend in real good. Disappear into a crowd? Sure. But actually deliberately just have everybody not look at me? I mean, without pushing my Blend to the point where I'm just a hole in space? Nope. Not my thing.

After refusing to eat one of my Cold Iron coins 'FOR SCIENCE!', Saffron and I snuggled up. I even woke up with a relatively minor headache rather than wanting to crawl into a hole and die. After our normal routine of ogling each other dressing, feeding, changing, and juggling Isnomi while we prepped for class, and delivering the crotch goblin to Grandma Aetos for the day, we hit the Dining Hall for breakfast. Full spread today, and after devastating the food and water supplies even my mild hangover symptoms went away. Amusingly, Saffron made a serious effort to match me nom for nom. She didn't, because even if she had the hollow everything I seemed to be rocking, shorter arms and smaller mouth meant lower food-bandwidth. When I asked as we walked to Geocultures, she just smiled at me and said, "I'm testing something."

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Look, not only do I literally trust her with my life, I'm well aware that my poor monkey brain would short circuit long, long before I even managed to cram half of the knowhow in Saffron's noggin into it. If I tried to understand shit even she had to Do Science to understand? Head would be all explodey, and that would likely gross Saffron out too much for canoodling or shenanigans. Terrible risk, no meaningful reward, I'd wait until she figured shit out before even asking her what she was trying to figure out.

None of that hit the 'weirdest thing today' meter though. That was reserved for the opening of class.

Doc DeLeon, who'd been sitting at his desk reading some kind of scroll, stood up once everyone arrived, looked directly at Saffron, and said, "You'll no doubt be pleased to learn that our topic today will be the City of Athens, home of some of the greatest natural philosophers throughout recorded history."

She shrugged and said, "I suppose. I'm kind of over them though."

Everyone, and I do mean everyone from the ROTCs seated near the two of us to the Barbie Brigade on the far side of the classroom, froze and turned to stare incredulously at my petite paramour. She calmly passed her gaze over her shocked classmates, sniffed, and said, "One cannot stand on the shoulders of giants if one is stuck washing their feet."

Of course Lancaster muttered, "and you need someone's shoulders to stand on, obviously."

Saffron shook her head and said, "I grew up poor and it stunted my growth. What's your excuse?"

Even Rider and Rosen laughed at that one. I felt a little bad for Lancaster, of all people. I mean, yeah, he's a huge douchecanoe, and I will absolutely give him shit about that all day long, but it's not like he asked to be short. Of course, what came out of my mouth was, "Be nice, dear. He didn't ask to be the runt of the litter."

Doc DeLeon just threw his hands up in the air at that point, "really, Cadets? This has to be some kind of elaborate practical joke, right?"

"No, Doctor," said Bill, "Lancaster is actually that short. No practical joke needed."

"You're shorter than I am, Driver!" barked Lancaster.

Bill looked around at everyone before stage whispering, "really? I am? Oh, Gods! I'm shorter than Lancaster? Why didn't anybody tell me?"

"It's okay, Bill," I said, my voice dripping with fake sincerity, "size isn't everything."

"Like you'd know anything about size," Lancaster said, thrusting his hips out suggestively, which made him look stupider than normal, what with him sitting down while doing it.

I just shrugged and said, "I dunno, man. Marie's got some pretty big fingers."

The whole bantering mood slid to a screeching halt as most of the class turned to stare at me in silent disbelief. I managed to hold in my laughter as the Barbie Brigade head-tilted in unison, and then Angel just lost her shit, laughing like somebody'd fed her a whole tray of hash brownies. After about thirty seconds, she wiped at her eyes, looked at me and said, "Trust you to somehow slide a verbal fishing trawler into a wagon accident like that conversation."

I gotta say, finding out that Athens is where most of our Spells originated? Especially finding out all the Spells in Basic and Intermediate Heroic Skills were developed in Athens over two thousand years prior? Complete letdown after that opener.