Dear Diary,

Okay, maybe I overreacted yesterday. Just because I have a skill named after a monster that makes incarnate Gods freak out doesn't mean I'm a monster, let alone one that makes incarnate Gods freak out.

Yeah, that sounds kinda weaksauce to me, too. I think I'm gonna ask someone about it, but not right now. In person would be better.

Your girl can learn, see?

Anyhow, I stayed awake late last night, reading 'Principles of Heroic Magick'. It turns out I hadn't been far wrong with my thought about pushing Mana into my finger and tracing the pattern duBois showed us in class. The bit he didn't emphasize, which meant I completely missed it, because my head is made out of solid rock that bullets bounce off of, is that I have to push my Mana just beyond my finger, not just to the tip of it. When I tried that, a few weird things happened.

First and foremost, I felt a kind of pressure holding the Mana in, almost like somebody had put a glove on my hand, but one that wrapped around my entire body the moment I tried to push something through it.

Second, whatever it was fell apart like a sock that had been bleached too many times less than a second later.

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Third and finally, my finger left a glowing line in the air, almost like an afterimage of my finger. I whipped my finger around in the triple circle duBois showed us, but nothing happened. The glow faded the way afterimages do. All I'd done was make a pretty lightshow.

Still, I'd made a pretty lightshow with nothing but my finger. It was somehow both cool and stupid at the same time.

Staying up late was a mistake though. I'd have been late to class if it wasn't for Marie knocking on my door with a late breakfast. For the two days prior, one of the ROTC kids had stopped by my room on the way to breakfast, but today I had my other class without them. 'Remedial Standardized Celtic' is what it said on my schedule. 'Time served in Hell' is more accurate.

Seriously, imagine taking a remedial class in a language you already spoke, but couldn't actually hear when people spoke it to you? Like, anything I heard I heard in English or maybe Spanish. Anything I said I said in whatever language the person listening to me understood. If they understood more than one language, I have no idea how my translation ability dealt with that. The only thing I needed to learn? How to write in 'Standardized Celtic'. Which is a bitch if you can't even hear how the words are pronounced.

At least I got Friday afternoon off. I thought about going out and getting my party on, but after shorting my sleep the night before and spending the morning in Hell, I wanted nothing quite so much as a nap, so I binged at lunch while the other three carried the conversation, what little of it there was, then slept through the afternoon.

Honestly, I had no idea where to get my party on in Philly anyway, and wandering the streets at night just didn't seem like a great idea.

Yet another thing to add to my list of questions to be answered.