Dear Diary,

Y'know, it was weird enough being treated as, like, some kind of wealthy honors student with a scholarship; being treated like a wealthy adult honors student with a scholarship is just confusing.

Constantly thinking people must be talking to somebody standing beside me, or behind me, or in their head or on the phone, even though we don't actually have those. Confusion making is what it is. I dunno, maybe I need to work harder on my whole 'goof' reputation. I sure as shit aren't going to be able to keep up that façade. God help me if anybody expects me to live up to anything like that.

I shall if I must, but I have faith in you, Tabitha Diaz. Those you cannot blind with your brilliance you will baffle with bullshit.

I couldn't keep the laughter out of my mental voice as I thought, thanks, Boss. You're the best.

I know.

So after catching her and getting her to speak like, y'know, an eight year old instead of a two year old, as impressive as that latter was considering she's only just turned one, Doc Zeccardi looked at her, still smiling, but in a friendly way, not in a dismissive one, and said, "it's good to meet you, Isnomi Aetos-Diaz. How old are you?"

"I am one yeah old!" The Menace somehow managed to enunciate most of that without any baby-talk, although she still apparently had some troubles with her 'R's.

The Doc looked kinda surprised at her response, like he'd expect a number higher than, y'know, one, but he managed to keep his expression limited to 'surprised' rather than 'shocked at her bullshit' or 'upset she didn't know how old she was'. Instead, he just asked, "Are these your parents?"

"Yeth!" She'd been holding on with both hands clinging to his robe, despite the fact that he'd gotten his forearm under her butt for her to sit on, but now she let go and turned to point at us. "Thath Ma," she pointed at Saffron, "Mama," at me, "and Mawee!"

Doc Zeccardi nodded to each of us in turn, then said, "you've certainly raised a polite and precocious little one here, ladies."

I let Saffron do the talking, both because I still hadn't quite gotten my breath back from walking here and because if I had to bet, I'd bet on her making less of an ass of herself than I would. She nodded politely to the Doctor and said, "thank you, Doctor. I'm not quite sure how she managed to be on her best behavior for all of two sentences, but if there's a trick to it I'd certainly like to learn it."

He shrugged. "No offense intended, but it's a simple trick, yet one many parents have difficulty using with their own kids." He leaned toward us and said, "treat them like people."

I got to watch as Saffron went into full on reset mode, her mouth moving without any words coming out as her brain skidded to a stop. I shuffled forward and said, "yeah, I get that. Both the what you're doing and the hard to do with your own kids. Rough mental adjustment to make with somebody you've had to keep from eating their own poop while you cleaned them up."

Doc Zeccardi looked at me, and while his expression never really changed, I saw his eyes dart to take in my hands where I leaned both of them on my cane, then to the side of my face where my newest scar still burned faintly from me talking. "Normally I expect the little ones to be more danger or accident prone." It could have been nasty, but by his smile he wasn't trying to be hurtful, just acknowledging how physically fucked up I was without making a big deal over it.

I shrugged, the scars across my upper back displeased but not enough to stop me. "Yeah, I got into this Hero business for the money and power, maybe even the fame a little bit, but it seems like I'm staying for the danger and injuries I've collected." When he tilted his head, his smile never wavering, but his eyes crinkling a little with confusion, I smiled back and said, "I mean, when you get as many as I have, you kinda want to collect the whole set, right?"

That got him, and he laughed, even as Doctor Glass took a deep breath and let out a quiet sigh. "Looks like this one needs your help more than mine, Steve."

Doctor Glass nodded, but limited his response to, "she seems to be coping, Joseph."

I raised one eyebrow, surprised when that didn't make my face hurt. Then again, I'd instinctively raised the eyebrow opposite my new scar. "You say that like coping is worse than the alternative."

He shrugged, his smile less gregarious than Doc Zeccardi's, but no less real. "It's better than just surviving, but worse than healing."

Now it was my turn to chew the air, trying to come up with a snappy comeback that didn't make me sound like an asshole. Saffron came to my rescue. "Normally we would have left Isnomi with Marie for the day, but I wanted Marie along to ensure Tabitha made it here safely." She held out her hands, and if Isnomi looked a little mulish, she didn't throw a tantrum or cling to Doc Zeccardi at least.

As he handed her back to Saffron, he said, "she's welcome to stay, if you like."

Saffron held Isnomi out far enough that she could look her in the eye. "So, which would you prefer, my girl? A day carting with Marie, or a day here in class with Momma and I?"

The menace looked back and forth between the four instructors and Marie, clearly torn. Finally she looked at Marie and asked, "fye?"

Marie shook her head, replying, "No." for good measure.

Isnomi looked at Saffron and said, "I say."

"Okay then, but if you get disruptive or bother the Doctors or Sister Siobhan, it's back to Grandma you go."

"Oh tay!" She hopped down, then held up a hand to me. I took her hand and she guided me back to a set of three empty desks, maneuvering me into the closest, taking the middle for herself, then pointing Saffron at the third.

As we made our way to our seats, I took a moment to check them out as well; while the numbers were lower than most of our previous regular classes, the population was way more varied. Most of the class were the right age and uniform to be Senior Cadets, but there were a few sky blue robed people in the same age bracket, as well as one young woman in an aqua colored robe, two women in robes that matched Sister Siobhan's, and one older, maybe forty-something guy in an Academy uniform, but with the aura of controlled power that told me he had to be a Hero, the real deal, one that had been doing the job for a while now.

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Doctor DeLeon turned to the rest of the class. "As I was saying before, the curriculum for Advanced Healing Studies varies from year to year. That's both because we can't precisely predict what active cases will be available for the class to work on, as well as the professors changing from season to season. That's before we take into account the fact that every one of you has likely come to this class with the intent to study some particular aspect of Healing. While we will of course attempt to cover all the topics you've come to learn about, if there are no available patients, some of that may be entirely academic rather than our preferred mix of practical and academic."

He stopped for a breath, then met my gaze and smiled, "of course, for those of you focused on the Healing of Traumatic Injuries, especially those which require more to fully recover from than a simple Heal Injury Spell? Not only do we have the City's pre-eminent expert on that here to instruct, our own Tabitha Diaz is obviously presently recovering from injuries sustained this past Spring Equinox, and thus far not a single season has passed without her sustaining more."

What could I even say to that? I just smiled and nodded, trying not to wince as both of those pulled at my scars. "Thanks, Doc," I muttered, but loud enough people could make it out if they wanted to. That got a couple chuckles from the Senior Cadets, and the most intense stare I'd seen in a while from the Hero.

"In addition," Doc DeLeon continued, "Sister Siobhan will graciously share the Divine perspective of a High Priestess of a Healing God. I personally have found conversations with her and Doctor Glass alike extremely enlightening regarding the nature of injuries to the Soul and how they can be treated. We also have the unique opportunity this season to study a brand new Global Spell providing Healing Divination for diagnostics."

At this point I kinda realized that this class? Was definitely, like, post-graduate stuff. Shit that people came to study right before they graduated, or came back to school to study after they'd already graduated. I really hoped me being the ultimate Case Study for Fucking Yourself Up in New and Interesting Ways would balance out the fact that I would absolutely be lost at sea ninety nine percent of the time. Then again, I knew how to keep my fuckin' mouth shut unless I had something useful or amusing to contribute. Which, given the dearth of utility and preponderance of comedy in my previous classroom contributions, really said something about me in general, I guess.

The Hero raised his hand at that point. Impressed me that a dude who was basically a Senator, Chief Justice, and Certified Badass seemed fine with suborning himself to the classroom rules. He waited until Doc DeLeon nodded to him and said, "yes, Hero Mc Rori?"

"Don't get me wrong, the new Spell looks like it's gonna help out a lot when seconds matter, maybe, but how sure are we that it's as accurate as the old one? I tagged some ongoing issues with it and the information came back different. Mostly close to the old values, but a few were way off. Also, I'm a little concerned regarding how reliable the Spell is regarding showing all the relevant information on that first display." He paused, as if realizing that his question had wound up bracketed with a bunch of related concerns, but shrugged and nodded.

Doc DeLeon just smiled. "Reverse engineering a Global Spell can be complex, and the extremely dynamic nature of the new Global Assess Health makes it even more so, to the point that our own Mana Shaping expert has been trying to do so for nearly a month with little success. However, we are in luck regarding your questions, Hero."

"How so?"

"Because the Archmage who created the spell kept meticulous notes about the design of the Spell, and did more extensive testing than any previous Archmage whose work I've studied."

When DeLeon paused, I realized that while he might be a Healer, his core competency had to be courtroom law, because that bait was just perfect. Hero Mc Rori asked, "so, you've still got access to those notes? Will we be allowed to see them?"

Doc DeLeon turned to Saffron, who'd been getting tenser and tenser, and asked, "Well, Cadet Aetos-Diaz? Do you mind reviewing your notes on your new Assess Health, and answering any questions the rest of the class might have regarding it?"

Y'know, Saffron made a hell of a Mom, and she'd parlayed a lot of her Mom skills into being a pretty kickass Imperator, I realized just then that whether she had the tiniest bit of talent or not, what she wanted to do was be a professor. Like, not teaching little kids or even teenagers, but expanding the boundaries of human knowledge and sharing that knowledge with others wanting to map those boundaries. "Yes, Doctor DeLeon. I would be glad to."

What followed, after the weird kind of 'holy shit, she's an archmage' acknowledgement by the rest of the class, was almost ten solid hours of increasingly technical discussions of the nature of Global Spells, Divinations, Mana Shaping, and especially medical shit. Marie and another two Maids rolled in mid-day with lunch; apparently advanced classes had a tendency to blow right through meals, enough that the Maids assumed they had to bring meals or people would drop from dehydration.

Two things really struck me about the day.

First, the menace didn't misbehave at all. Oh, at one point she folded her arms on the desk, rested her chin on it, and kinda snickered as Saffron schooled one of the blue-robed students who'd disagreed with her regarding 'standards', and early in the afternoon she climbed into my lap, put her head on the desk, and fell asleep, but since she'd just finished helping the Maids deliver lunch, then ate her own along with half of mine, I couldn't really call that 'bad behavior.'

Second, while the Mana Shaping parts of the discussion only occasionally dipped down into something I could understand, which I didn't feel bad about since the two Sisters and the Hero also seemed to need simplified explanations for those parts, I understood the Healing parts. Like, I couldn't predict what questions were gonna be asked, or even really answer them, per se, I absolutely understood the answers, even to the degree that I knew, balls to bone, whether the answers were correct, incorrect, or somewhere in between. At least a few times during the class, Saffron totally leaned on that; when she and one of the profs disagreed on something, she'd toss the question over to me. Not like, 'what's the answer', but 'which of us is right'. Somehow? I just knew. I mean, it tickled my lady bits that more often than not Saffron was right, but I knew it wasn't just me agreeing with her. A couple times she'd been wrong. Not, like, stupid wrong, but 'we're out here in uncharted waters, and I made a left when I should have made a right' wrong.

Fuckin' uncanny. A little unnerving that people took me as an authority on shit, but even moreso that I actually knew, even though I had no idea how I knew.

Was absolutely ready to head to bed by the time the Maids arrived with dinner. After we finished eating, Saffron excused herself and I from the rest of the discussion, saying I needed my sleep to recover, and that I'd been instructed to recover by my Deity, so as of sunset Deity overruled Academy and curious classmates.

We woke up late the following day, to Marie rolling breakfast in for us. Turned out she'd rolled in more than just breakfast; the top tray was a solid high-carb breakfast with waffles and pancakes, and when Saffron hopped us all over to Loki's cave, I realized she'd brought food for the rest of the day as well. I mean, if Loki hadn't done his whole loaves-and-fishes gimmick with lunch and dinner he and the menace and I might have wound up underfed, but given an actual sample to work with, his insta-food came out just as good as Marie's cooking. Totally cheating, but, y'know, Trickster God, so it's all good. Tempura shrimp and sushi for lunch, tacos for dinner. Kinda weird having tacos with something other than ground beef as the protein filling. Not bad, and it's way closer to the way good tacos should be, but it's not like I was a food critic back in Camden or anything like that.

Mealtimes and the general nice 'day chilling with the fam' vibe aside? I spent the rest of the day on Loki's table getting my chakras realigned or some shit. What's weirdest to me? Other than a few tidbits I'd picked up yesterday, I didn't have words for most of what he did, but I totally understood what he did and why he did it.

When we hopped home, as Marie was putting the menace to bed, I unloaded about the weirdness to Saffron, words leaking out a few at a time. Finally, when I ran out of steam, she straddled my legs where I'd been sitting on the side of the bed, then pulled the side of my head to her breast. Really made up for the fact that she was laughing when she did it. Not, like hysterical or anything, just amused by my being weirded out. Finally, she stopped laughing, pushed away from me enough to kiss me, then pushed us back so she could look me in the eye and, laughter still hiding in her voice, say, "what did you think would happen when you absorbed all the powers of a God of Healing, Goof?"

Apparently, even when I'm artificially smart, I'm still a fuckin' idiot.