After that night out on the common in front of Schumann Hall things settled into a rhythm. Classes were still a scramble to keep up with, but it became a familiar, almost comfortable scramble. They started learning how to cast each type of magic, learning the basics of mindset and qualitative cues. No specific spells, just raw Production, Consumption, and Decomposition magic. Every idle waking moment Jacob spent practicing engaging his magic until it became as simple as flexing his bicep. Their dorm room went from a space he slept and spent time in, like a hotel room, to his room. The startling amount of freedom they had, whether it was profs not taking attendance in class, or the fact that bedtime was whenever you wanted, gradually became the norm, then became something he knew he would only reluctantly relinquish. At first, the responsibility of making decisions for himself, getting himself to class, to bed, to the cafeteria for food, pushing himself to study, made him feel like he was dangling over a precipice and that at any moment he could just decide to stop doing it all and no one was there to catch him, to make him do these things, and he'd just wither away until he starved to death. For a while it felt like he had to just deal with these crazy stressful and scary responsibilities temporarily until he got back home to Vancouver, but even that weight gradually became normal, easily handled. Living at home seemed like a fever dream, and a bad one at that.

Blake tried out for the Ultimate Split team, and was made captain of the first-year practice squad. The team itself was reserved for second-year and higher students, who could travel to play other teams throughout the year. Every second day he'd disappear into the Tisdale Stadium for several hours to practice. Jacob worked up the courage to check out the Magical World club, which met Tuesdays and Thursdays at 4pm in the Richter Building. Walking in the room on the first day he felt like he was intruding on something exclusive—the club had roughly a dozen consistent members—but he was swiftly and eagerly made to feel at home by the energetic head of the club, an upper year student named Malachi. His simple membership turned into something like notoriety—a thing he was becoming more and more used to since the revelation of his Strength Chart—when he let it spill that he'd not only been to the magical world, but had been there by himself. It turned out only a handful of the upper year members had even been there, and that had been for an elective class. Malachi was the only other one who had gone by himself. He was a fairly strong Decomposition mage with the coveted ability to make his own portals.

In their spare time he went for walks with the Bourbon gang—his own, private nickname for their little quintet—around the idyllic little town that split the pocket dimension with the campus, trying to guess which professors lived where and imagining life here year round. Or they crashed in the dorm lounges and shot the shit about anything from who was the hottest professor to what pranks you could pull off with limited magic. Tuesday nights they joined the throng of students at the single screen theatre. The first time it had been so busy Jacob and Blake had been forced to go in the neck-creaking first row, next to a boy with his girlfriend sitting on his lap, and a handful of people sprawled out on the hard theatre floor in front of them. The features were always hokey, oddly self-aware portal fantasy flicks like the Narnia movies that elicited an almost competitive heckling from the rowdier members of the audience and exaggerated screaming at any remotely scary moment. Back home Jacob would have pissed if people talked that loudly at the theatre but here it was more about the collective goofing off than the movies themselves. The scheduled cafeteria hours were more of a nuisance than Jacob had assumed. Sometimes you had no choice but to work through the allotted dinner time, and if you didn't want to starve you had to book it across campus to the town's supermarket before it closed for curfew. He spent an egregious amount of money there, as did Blake. Whoever ran the place must have been making off like a bandit. There was never a night with the weight of that first party, but there was always something going on on campus, whether it was regulated activities or 'broke-student-stakes' poker games in the Harrison Hall lounges.

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Occasionally, the campus weather system glitched, resulting in brief flashes of heat or cold, but never anything as extreme as Claire's 'hail in summer' and oddly they were actually kind of fun. Class would let out into a balmy, shorts-and-shirts summer day, and then suddenly it would drop into Celsius negatives and the herd of students would sprint screaming across campus for the dorms only for the temperature to return to normal by the time they reached the doors. No one knew if these were just part of the program, or if some cynical psycho was sitting in the weather control room, adjusting the spell randomly and laughing at their reactions. No one from the upper years knew, and the faculty all pretended ignorance to the glitches, as if it were some elaborate inside joke. Whether there even was a weather control room was another mystery, though the running theory was that there had to be a master control room or centre for the pocket dimension, the time-dilation machine, the weather, the ecosystem, and all the other magical things that needed regulating. But in a few weeks of playful searching no one found hide nor hair of it. There was an unspoken challenge that finding it and wreaking havoc with it would bring unparalleled notoriety the likes of which no student had ever had. The running theories were that it was deep below the surface, only accessible by a portal if you knew where it was, or that it was in the basement of one of the homes in the town, and that the upper levels were just a masquerading shell like the Shell House.

Jacob had wanted to go and do a catalogue of all the flora and fauna on campus, try and see how they'd constructed their artificial ecosystem, but he never quite found the time to do it. Which was alright, because the Magical World Club discussed the ecosystems and biomes of that other realm, which kept his curiosity sated.

And then, in the jittery blink of a coke-crazed eye, a month had passed. The tournament began in the next week, and the campus was positively abuzz with a fervent, almost ritualistic hype. To some surprise, more relief, the vampire hadn't struck again. The fear of it had already dwindled to background noise, but by the end of the month it had faded to nothing, an unreality.