I went to their mental health counseling center. Why? They told me to. That’s what college is. College is doing what they tell you to do no matter how stupid it sounds. Isn’t that the rest of life too though? That’s how college prepares you for the “real world,” and I admit it does do that. Go here, do this, do that. Don’t think about what you’re doing. Just do it.
“Can we help you?” That’s counselor talk. They teach you to talk like that. It’s always “we” instead of “I” so that you feel like we’re in this together.
“I was told I needed to talk to a mental health professional about my kidnapping,” I told the bland woman behind the desk.
“Our counselors are not actually licensed,” she hedged a little, her bun wobbling as she nodded her head compulsively. “One of our licensed professors oversees the office, but I’m required by law to tell you that most of our counselors are graduate students just learning the ropes.”
“Great,” I replied, draining all intelligence from my eyes as if I could agree with such a stupid process. College does this. They use their students as practice dummies for training students to be psychologists with about the same results as a sword master’s training yard. Dummies get shredded.
No, I mean, think about it. If you are thinking that they need somewhere to train, you are buying into the brainwashing. To say that they need real people to train on is to say that it’s acceptable that classes can’t teach you what you really need to know to do the job. There are two problems with that. One, are the classes necessary if experience is required? Because then shouldn’t we go back to training through apprenticeships? Two, why can’t you teach it in a classroom? Because it takes talent, knowledge, and experience to reach into a person’s very soul and heal them of trauma. Classes can hone talent, but they can’t teach it. They can’t give knowledge that they don’t have, so the knowledge given in classes is very basic, and practicing on students is as unethical as having live test dummies. The worst part is that in the end, they should have to risk the college reputation by endorsing a student who has satisfactorily passed their program in psychology. But the college is above reproach, so it is never called to defend its creations and without that balance, it can teach whatever it wants, and it is not culpable for their alumni failure rate. They post their graduation rate, but the success of an alumni is so rare that they can post all the pictures of successful alumni and not fill a wall in the alumni center.
I hated this machine in my old world. I’d managed to graduate with honors despite them, and the hardest part was holding on to my personal integrity and resisting their brainwashing. Fizzbarren choosing the college as my second nemesis was one spark of genius that I respected about him. Have you ever respected someone you hate? It was like that.
“Do they handle kidnapping?” I asked the girl behind the desk.
Subtlety +1
Exp +10 (1,920/788,209)
“I’m not sure what you mean,” she fussed with papers to avoid my eyes. She too was a student/staff and as staff was a person from my old world. “I can make an appointment for you.”
“Do you take walk-ins?” I smiled, pulling out a cookie and offering it to her.
Charm +1
“No, thank you,” she waved my cookies away. “Why don’t you take a seat and I’ll see who might be available.” This is where she scampered into the back room to gossip about the truly crazy-ass person who had just walked into the office and what to do about it. It wasn’t like I needed their help. I’d be working out my issues with the college system by dismantling it, block by block and cog by cog.
“Okay,” I replied compliantly, eating the cookie with a smile.
I cleaned the lobby while I waited. The office was filled with Stepford people. One girl was nervously chewing her nails sitting next to another that couldn’t sit still. With the nervous secretary out of the lobby, I could focus on my fellow students.
Perception +1
“Anyone want to feel better?” I asked, bringing out a handful of cookies. I’m telling you cookies are the key to everything.
Charm +1
“Um, yeah,” came the reply of the bravest of the bunch. This is what happens to minds compressed into a mold where they don’t fit. Those minds rebel and cause mental illness. While these drones weren’t real students, they were mirrors of real problems in colleges.
“I have a spell for that,” I offered, again asking permission to heal people.
Charm +1
The lobby was empty when the secretary returned. I used Lift Spirits on them, but only sparingly. I also gave them cookies. Ethical? Maybe. This is a grey area and I admit I thought I wouldn’t have done it on real people, even ones brought over from my old world, but these were Stepford people. I was helping them in a way, but I was also helping the college oppress them some more. The more these student drones could withstand the oppression, the more indoctrinated they would be in the system of oppression. Are you following? Good, let’s go into the counselor’s office.
Teaching +2
Exp +20 (1,940/788,209)
“How can we help you today?” the mousy woman asked with a pasted-on smile. That was something college taught you without saying it outright. Everyone knew these smiles and they were, in my opinion, the true secret college handshake.
“I’ve been kidnapped and would like to press charges,” I told her bluntly, pulling out a cookie. I already warned you that I was a compulsive eater when stressed. I am very stressed and in a body that burns off calories so quickly that I could eat myself half to death and not get overweight. If you think I’m not going to take advantage of that to self-soothe, you’re crazy. “Would you like a cookie?”
Charm +1
“No, thank you,” she waved me to her couch with a very concerned frown. “You think you’ve been kidnapped?”
“I don’t think I’ve been kidnapped.” I dutifully walked to the little couch, eating the cookie. I’d run out of snickerdoodles and was working my way into the chocolate chip ones. “I was grabbed by a man and teleported here without my consent and then detained for several hours before a trial that wasn’t a trial determined that I had to attend this college.”
The woman scrunched up her nose and looked at the ceiling. I looked up at it too. Why not? I am not going crazy. I just don’t buy into the game. The most satisfying way to break the game is to shove their idiocy into their faces. This must be as insidious as their brainwashing. It is an application of logic that consistently refutes the brainwashed rhetoric. I must get every staff member and drone student to question the logic of the brainwashing. At this point, it is a silly little ear worm. I just have to survive the idi-fucking-otic system long enough to let it grow, like a plague.
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Subtlety +2
Exp +20 (1,960/788,209)
Would it work? No. I’d had three years to do it last time and it hadn’t fully integrated. It was, however, keeping me sane. Mostly. I was sowing seeds of rebellion against the system of oppression. It would not spark a war in and of itself. It would, however, keep them from burning me at the stake when I took the college over. I hoped. It had last time. Still, this was a tricky game, and I could lose the tide on a misspoken word. I hadn’t come back in time on a whim. I’d weighed the possible cost and made a decision based on my faith in myself; faith that I could do this again, better this time. My mind had dwelled in the things I would do differently and while the chapters of my insane creation of the time loop were saturated with emotional pain, I’d made my final decision with a cool head. It was just that this was the very tricky part.
Intelligence +1
“We mostly deal with the depression of being away from family for the first time,” the mousy woman explained, pushing glasses up on her nose like the registrar had. I cast cure again, getting that pesky eye business cleared up. There was just no need to have left them with these eye problems. Kat had been healed of hers. With the mana it took to take a person from the old world into this one, I wasn’t surprised about the short cuts that had been taken on bringing over hundreds of college staff. Of course, they weren’t all sixteen and healthy again. It wasn’t just the load on the system to bring them all over, but also the concept of who would respect teenagers?
Cure Deformity +1
Exp +10 (1,970/788,209)
“So, you know how to deal with homesickness?” I asked with raised eyebrows. “I’m homesick too, but only because I was kidnapped. I really miss my daughter, but that’s from the first kidnapping, not this latest one.”
“You’ve been kidnapped twice?” she goggled, her clipboard clutched to her chest.
“Yes,” I answered seriously, thinking maybe it was time for brownies.
“How terrible,” she breathed out, eyes wide.
“I know, right?” I shot back.
Subtlety +1
Exp +10 (1,980/788,209)
“Do you want to talk about it?” she leaned forward eagerly.
“Yes!” I nodded, pulling my cabinet of goodies out of my inventory and rummaging through several treats I’d made or bought the day before. Maybe a cinnamon roll? “Are you sure you don’t want something?”
Charm +1
Mousy girl’s eyes skimmed over my butler’s pantry worth of desserts. It might as well have been a pastry counter at the bakery. “Maybe a piece of that cake?” she relented, and I smiled. It was the first victory for me to get one of them to eat what I’d made. In my mind, the goodies were like a very slow worm virus that could slowly pluck their natural distaste for me as an adversary out of their minds and replace it with doubt when they were told to be mad at me. This was another thing that wouldn’t really work except to make me feel better, and without Dom around, I needed every single tiny victory I could get.
Subtlety +1
Exp +10 (1,990/788,209)
I cut a piece of very decadent chocolate fudge cake with whippy, rich milk chocolate frosting for her and handed it over as I went on to explain, “I was picked up for using magic, which I’ve been using since I came into this world. I was then transported against my will to this place where I now have to go to school. I had to leave my husband behind. He was so angry.”
“I’ll bet,” she nodded, not paying any attention to my rant. She put fork to cake and moaned in delight as the chocolate coated her tongue with luscious nummyness.
“That’s nothing compared to how I got kidnapped here to this world,” I went on, just telling the truth. It was really all I had to do so it was easy to say. “I left my daughter behind on that one and it was torturous. And now I have to defeat my nemesis in this grand duel to even see her again. Can you imagine having to leave your daughter?”
Charm +1
“You don’t look old enough to have a daughter,” she tried to listen to me even as the cake distracted her from my ranting. “How old is she?”
“Sixteen,” I answered, licking the frosting off a piece of cake I’d cut for myself. What? I was going to let her eat alone?
“But you’re barely older than that,” she reasoned, fork halfway to her mouth.
“I was fifty-three years old in my old world before I got teleported to this game world,” I told her, watching her eyes grow wide. “You were too. Don’t you wish you could just pick up a phone and call them? Get in the car and go visit your mom or dad? Don’t you have family out there? Back there in the old world?”
Subtlety +1
Exp +10 (2,000/788,209)
I watched her mind stutter against the program as she slowly put the fork in her mouth and chewed. “I do miss my mom,” she admitted, covering her chewing with a hand, but the taste of gooey chocolate let her withstand the brain fart of my truths. That was okay. I was just planting worms.
Perception +2
“So, call her,” I suggested.
“I should,” she answered without thinking.
“On the phone,” I pushed.
“Yeah,” she nodded.
“The phone that’s supposed to be on your desk over there,” I pressed even further. There was a desk and the office looked almost right except the desk was old wood, and nothing was plastic. Which is to say, it didn’t look right at all since everything was cheap plastic at my old college.
Colleges, like all learning institutions, had to skirt the line between appearing opulent enough to garner the best students and being poor enough that they always needed money. They didn’t do either very well, in my opinion, but everyone else seemed to buy into it so what could I do? When money is so tight that you have to stand in line for groceries, you need money. When you are choosing between paying competitive salaries and alumni benefit banquets, you have a budgeting stupidity that I didn’t have patience for.
Perception +1
“My desk,” her eyes glazed over, and it almost worked for a moment. “Doesn’t have a phone.”
“What’s a phone?” I asked, letting the moment go. It was breakable, this spell that Fizzbarren had cast over them. It was breakable. That was all I needed to know from that. I’d spent three years last time doing the job of breaking the college. I was desperate and they always seemed to have the upper hand. This time, I had the experience to slice these dummies to ribbons. Last time, I’d been a brute force held in check by admonishment to be civilized. This time, I knew how to do it civilly with a subtle hand.
“Um,” she stammered, looking from her cake to the desk that didn’t look right.
“That’s okay,” I gave her a big smile. “What’s your mom like? Did she ever bake you a cake?”
Charm +1
“No,” the girl laughed, still eating. “She would always buy one from the store.”
“The grocery store?” I asked, eating cake like I wasn’t fighting her programming.
“Yes, no,” she blinked her eyes; eyes that no longer needed the glasses she hid behind. “The bakery, I guess.”
“Right,” I nodded. “I went to the bakery yesterday. You should go. They have great cinnamon buns.” You can’t break programming with a hammer. I think maybe you can break it with cake. I smiled at myself and let her talk about her mom. As I pointed out discrepancies, she would blink and frown, but then I’d release it.
Charm +5
Subtlety +3
Exp +30 (2,030/788,209)
These people were victims of Fizzbarren too. I might hate the college system, but I didn’t hate the people whose only real fault was that they’d bought into the system and were now as trapped by the college and its brainwashing as they were in Fizzbarren’s world. To save them, I would have to break them down a little bit. There was no saving the actual college system, no matter how abusive it was under all their denials and justifications.
As we neared the end of the session time, I could see that her mind was very tired of fighting the programming, so I cast Lift Spirits on her. I think it might have worsened my cause as her eyes lost that confusion that I’d worked so hard to plant. Maybe it was time to put Lift Spirits away. These people needed to be confused and muddled. I wondered if I could reverse the spell and if it would pull them out of the programming faster.
I’ll admit, I practiced on the mousy counselor and tested out the idea, but I couldn’t get it to work the way I wanted. I might have worked on the spell longer, but this girl wasn’t someone who deserved to be a testing dummy in my practice arena. There were plenty of people who did. I’d go find them and practice.
Mana Manipulation +2
Exp +20 (2,050/788,209)