The events in Andotin were soon pushed aside by schoolwork, and Yaric’s slight, albeit brief, feelings of guilt over killing something sapient quickly faded away. He’d never killed anyone before, and as Lauren reminded him, he still hadn’t. The discovery of a kiln and lumber yard near the area they had searched, and the bodies buried throughout, really hammered that home for Yaric. It was owned by the same rich merchant who had purchased a large estate four years previously and was now missing. As Li Na pointed out, he was the reason bodies were now being exhumed instead of buried.
Sven reminded him that there were people who were just as bad, and he would likely have to kill someone someday, but Yaric was content with studying and the occasional job carrying stone or exterminating pests for now. So long as the pests didn’t hold conversations with him.
The story of what happened with the Draugr was another boost that pushed them to keep their momentum, however, and the four of them dove into their studies. Their practice schedule was still as difficult and involved as they could make it, but motivation tended to very slowly wane over time, and even their rare and seldom-used excuses to skip something and take a break were abandoned in favor of working harder.
Fall slowly fell to the wayside as winter set in, bringing cold brisk mornings and turning evening walks to their rooms after dinner into nighttime strolls under jackets and cloaks. They were all aware that the weather was in the midst of unusual fluctuations that occurred every one hundred and twenty years, but there wasn’t expected to be any snow again, at least not this year.
Still, it was cold, and Yaric and his friends were enjoying their new spell practice.
“Watch this one,” Lauren said, smiling slightly. Her fireball hovered over her hand, burning fiercely. Just like with every practice cast, she held it nearby for a few seconds longer than normal, before firing it toward a pillar with unerring accuracy.
It struck hard and immediately detonated, spraying the targets around it with burning embers of emerald green and bright red flames.
Emil had been watching their increasingly unusual explosions and soon made his way over.
“Modifying your spells already?” he asked, pushing them to explain exactly what they were doing.
“We’re practicing with changing the explosive,” Yaric explained smoothly. It was what they were doing, originally, although now it had also become something of a competition between themselves.
“And your reasons for that?”
“Different compounds can give different yields, and sometimes they have secondary effects that could be useful,” Yaric replied immediately.
“Hmmm… Boron or Thallium, Novice Silver?” the High Wizard asked, his eyes still on the smoking pole.
“Thallium for the green color,” Lauren replied, “and strontium chloride salts for the red flames.”
“I’m aware that thallium is toxic, but it is not so toxic that it would add to the effectiveness of an explosive. How does this modification help?”
“Signals, Instructor,” Yaric answered. The corner of Emil’s lips twitched upward for a moment, but he kept his face impassive. “We’re both training as scouts.”
“And that is what you four are practicing now, signals?” their instructor asked, looking between the four of them.
“No,” Sven acknowledged. “We’re practicing the change of chemicals, and we’re using as many different compounds as we can think of so we can hopefully use any other combination in the future.”
“Good,” Emil said, before surprising them even further. “Show me.”
Lauren smiled and repeated her performance, creating an explosion of green and red. Sven followed up with an explosion that left dense white smoke, his addition of white phosphorus both hiding the target and setting fires far from the detonation point.
Li Na had a big grin on her face when she launched hers, and with good reason. It was the first time she was using this particular spell, and the flames from her explosion morphed into purple and blue flames. It was deceptively easy, since she only added copper chloride, but turning the purple flames blue required the addition of pockets of butane, and the spread of that butane determined the spread of blue amongst the purple.
It was taking some time, but Li Na was slowly growing more confident with her knowledge of their various subjects and their application. She frequently applied her own ideas with little to no confirmation from Lauren.
Yaric’s was more traditional. And he was certain that making an explosive fireball detonate with even more force was a tradition. What else would you do?
He crammed aluminum powder in with the explosive, just as he had learned had been done with his arrow. The additional pressure also seemed to help, because the resulting explosion was significantly more powerful than the others, despite being the same size.
Lauren summoned another fireball, this time based on the incendiary version, with her carbon shell well perforated and the inside filled with propane gas. She continually channeled the spell, replacing the propane as quickly as it escaped and giving everyone a consistent source of heat, even if it was very small.
This time Emil wasn’t successful, and a very obvious smile sat on his face.
“Excellent! The next examples of those two spells both involve changes to the chemical composition, so you’re effectively learning them already. Just ensure that you simulate these spells safely before casting them for the first time.”
They had. Unlike the others, Yaric and his friends booked the Tech Duinn in the evenings, after all their classes were over. That allowed them to get in whatever amount of practice time they felt they needed, without the length of the lesson constraining them, and then they had the full lesson with an instructor available during the day. They never used the lesson to practice in the Tech Duinn.
Learning to switch out spell components that created the chemicals was also something with a wide range of applications, as once they learned to substitute two or three alternatives, they could usually substitute any other chemical as well, even combinations. While they were having fun and competing with each other, they were also genuinely practicing their combinations and substitutions.
Yaric in particular was very relieved to have an explosive option under his belt. It added to his repertoire of penetrating spells, whether they were shards of ice or stone, or assisted with his archery in some way. He wouldn’t always have explosive arrows at hand, and Lloyd had already reclaimed the remainder before they’d stepped on the transporter.
More than that, however, their range of non-offensive spells was increasing dramatically as well. From improved shield spells and variations of their physical augmentation spells to spells that provided heat, created smoke, or purified water.
The only spell that Yaric was still having issues with was the transportation spell that could teleport his arrow to a new location. Every part of that spell was firmly down, all except for targeting the location the arrow should shift to. It was incredibly difficult to specify an exact spot far from his location, and at some point he would even need to shift that spot off the flight path of the arrow. Instead of simply shifting it in space to go past an obstruction of right in front of the target, he’d need to be able to shift targets and even effectively change the direction the arrow was traveling in. Right now he couldn’t get the destination component to work at all, and every arrow he tried it on would disintegrate when the spell backfired.
Ivan was not pleased.
“I’m aware that your bow has an exponential draw weight increase at the end of the draw. With your new spells, you can start making use of that. It’s going to change your trajectories even at short range, so today you will start with five fifties like Novice Silver has been doing, but you will work your way up to one hundred meters instead of seventy.”
“Yes, Instructor.”
“Use these arrows,” Ivan added, pushing two quivers toward him. “The usual arrows won’t be accurate under that much power.” Then he turned to Lauren, with similar instructions tailored to her regular bow. “You are also capable of a more powerful draw now. Stay at your five fifty, but today you will work your way up to Novice Miller’s familiar seven seventy. I want to see seven-centimeter groupings at seventy meters by the end of the day.
“Oh,” he added, almost as an afterthought, though the way he started turning before stopping seemed suspect to Yaric. “I almost forgot. Novice Miller is still struggling with his spell, so we’re going to add some motivation. We’ll stick to the same deal as before. I will count the deviations, and whoever has the most deviations will buy the other lunch. But just to make it interesting…”
Ivan let the unfinished sentence hang in the air for a moment, smirking as he did. Lauren didn’t seem at all nervous, on the contrary, she seemed excited to hear what he would say next.
“… our next lesson will be the same, and the following after it, until Novice Miller stops destroying my arrows. But that alone isn’t interesting. So we’re going to start dropping the requirements to minus one, minus two, and so on. To be clear, you’re going to shoot ten one hundred, then nine one hundred, then eight one hundred, continuing for as far as necessary. Novice Silver will be required to have six-centimeter groupings at seventy meters, then five-centimeter groupings. Hers will stop dropping earlier as there is only so much we can drop a seven-centimeter grouping. Ten centimeters is already laughable for someone with a focus on spatial magic, so we can go further there.”
And Ivan’s challenge was oddly effective. Yaric would have been devastated if Emil had called out how Yaric was struggling with a spell and given him a challenge that seemed almost like a punishment. Somehow, standing on a range with Lauren and competing over something as trivial as lunch, which neither of them technically paid for, really did push Yaric to figure out his spell, and in a positive way. Lauren stood to benefit from the competition as the most likely winner, but she helped him anyway. The last time she had won the same competition she had spoken about their river cruise lunch for a full week before and the week after.
Of course, Yaric wasn’t falling behind in any way. Ivan was setting extremely high goals to match the unusually high expectations he had for Yaric. He also knew that Yaric effectively had the spell, he was just suffering from a block that prevented him from completing that final part. It was an unfortunately common event within specialties like spatial magic.
Lauren got used to the change very quickly, as she only had two steps in range. Yaric had to drop the same distance back, get used to the new arrows, and then take another five steps forward, all while keeping a tight grouping.
She crushed him.
In typical Lauren fashion, she spent the majority of their walk back jumping between planning the lunch she wanted and trying to help Yaric figure out the problem with his spell. They hadn’t made much headway when they arrived back at their rooms to pick up the other two for dinner, but she had realized that she’d probably need to start learning that spell earlier than she’d planned if she wanted to help with more than motivation.
Li Na and Sven were still working together on a new spell, in this case a variation of an earlier earth-related spell that now added heat. A lot of heat. There was even a metal component at the core of the earth spike now, with a very obvious future progression being to make the entire structure metal.
Sven had the spell in his lesson plan for him to take advantage of his magma affinity, which genuinely was considered a specialized affinity that combined two others. It was close enough to some earlier spells that Li Na was studying the spell with him.
They didn’t have a lot left in their lesson plans, even when adding in the additional spells if everything was pooled together. At the same time though, there were less than three months left in the year, closer to two, and they all wanted to be finished before the year ended.
Lauren had Yaric’s lesson plan so she could study his newest spatial spell, initially leaving Yaric to continue practicing spells he already knew well. Li Na and Sven’s conversation about combining an earth spell with heat gave him an idea, however, and Yaric started trying to practice something else. It wasn’t a new spell, not by any means, but he hoped it could be useful practice and practical at the same time.
He continued trying to work out the intricacies when Emil arrived from his chaperoning of the students who headed to the Tech Duinn, and he made a lot of progress between then and when High Wizard Spyros moved on to the range as part of his usual rounds.
Sven and Li Na both wanted to try a partial change to the spell, where they simply added heat, and Yaric had his own idea to try, so they all four of them followed Emil down to the range for some actual spell casting.
Yaric chose to use the same earth spike spell that the other two were using. It was simply the most practical, though he could have used ice instead. In hindsight, ice may have been even better, as it tended to be less eye-catching when flying down the range when compared to the dark stone, but it didn’t really matter when he was really just trying to prove the concept.
Both Sven and Li Na were already hitting barrels with their new spells. The long-term damage they did was shocking. Each earth spike penetrated deeply, splintering wood and creating large holes, but the resultant smoke was very quickly followed by large flames that soon consumed the entire barrel above the point of impact. Then the superheated rock would drop to the bottom and ignite everything else. The rear end was so hot it was almost soft, causing it to deform around the still hard front end and smear widely over anything it struck.
It was vastly different from the effect Yaric was going for. Yaric had to cast the spell for the earth spike first, though he only manifested a single, gleaming shard of stone. His second spell was now almost second nature, and it easily anchored to the dart. Then it shot forward, aiming for a pole near the far end of the range.
It was only partway there when it shimmered and disappeared, striking the pole less than a second later.
‘Maybe the darker color wasn’t so bad,’ Yaric mused, watching the effect his first spatial spell had when cast over another. It worked exactly as it usually did, shrinking the distance the projectile had to travel to reach the target. If he could get faster at adding that spell he would be able to make every spell quicker to target and harder to dodge. Many spells would also carry more force as they would have lost less energy when traveling over a shorter distance.
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Yaric tried it with ice as well, and it was actually easier to track the glittering shard than the stone had been, contrary to his initial expectations. That had its own benefits, which Yaric made full use of while trying to see how quickly he could start casting the spatial spell after manifesting a projectile. In the end he decided to use the Tech Duinn for any further work on overlapping the spells, as he found he could start casting the spatial spell before the projectile manifested, so long as it was already there when it came time to anchor the spell.
His fireball spells had even more interesting effects. The flames originated from the combustible fuel on the surface, which in the most basic form was simply a component creating the flames and fueled by a finite amount of arcana that was no longer replenished after it was launched at a target. The spatial spell had the interesting effect of appearing to dissipate the flames while in effect, as the flames themselves were not covered by the spell.
This resulted in the fireball traveling through contracted space while the heat dissipated into regular space around it, preventing enough ionized gas from accumulating in the far longer space outside the spell. The red fireball transformed into a much smaller, almost solid-looking sphere of blue, before suddenly bursting into red and yellow flames at the end of the spatial spell. That even had possibilities for hiding a spell, or at least disguising it.
Both the incendiary and explosive fireballs had similar effects, and all three looked fairly spectacular if they hit the target while still under the effects of the spatial spell. Lauren even paused her study of Yaric’s lesson plan to try the same thing.
Both Sven and Li Na simply added it to the new spell they were testing. The apparent increase in speed, relative to their perception outside the spell, made the stones seem to disappear much like Yaric’s had done. They flew downrange for a moment, disappeared, then struck their targets far earlier than expected. Cutting less than two seconds into half a second didn’t seem like much, but it caught them by surprise several times before they got used to it.
High Wizard Spyros was very pleased.
“Excellent work! I may have to revise your lesson plans before the start of the new year. Are you all working on spells you’ve traded?”
“Not exactly,” Sven acknowledged. “We’ve been mixing and matching slightly earlier than planned, so we’re about ninety percent there with spells from other lesson plans.”
“And your own spells?” Emil asked, raising the most pertinent question.
“Probably around ninety-five percent complete,” Sven guessed.
“Ah, so you haven’t finished your own yet. Still some way to go too. Well, I’m glad to see you’re not simply learning each spell but looking at ways to layer them or use them together. You’re already touching on some more advanced concepts, so let me ask the four of you this, what would happen if you combined a wind spell with those darts? I would estimate you could achieve wind speeds of over two hundred kilometers an hour if you narrow your spell appropriately. And what if you fired the darts too soon, so they had the tailwind most of the way but suddenly slammed into what would effectively be a two-hundred-kilometer-an-hour headwind, at least in effect? What would happen to the heated rear end then, and how would that affect your target?
“And what if you didn’t use water in the ice version? What if you used a different frozen liquid, perhaps something highly flammable? Maybe something that sublimates and quickly fills an area with flammable gas, or something that ignites spontaneously in gas form? What about a liquid that’s only stable when frozen, or shaping it so it heats unevenly and breaks apart quickly?
“I’m sure you two have noticed that the spell components for the core of that magma spell is not simply iron,” Emil continued, turning to Sven and Li Na. “Instead of using metals that remain solid under those temperatures, at least for long enough, what would happen if you left out the heat and made the core with the white phosphorous Novice McDavids already demonstrated the effectiveness of? The stone will be hard enough when not superheated, but it will quickly become so if the shape causes it to crack on impact. And an uneven crack will cause uneven heating, speeding the process.”
Yaric was trying to memorize some of the suggestions Emil had just made, and from the looks on the faces of Li Na and Sven, so were they. Lauren was actually taking notes.
“Continue with your training, but don’t forget to let me know when you finish your lesson plans. We won’t leave you languishing until the new year.” With that Emil turned and walked away, having given them a lot to think about.
He’d also given them enough ideas that they possibly wouldn’t need any additions to their lesson plans, as there was simply so much they could do with the things he had just told them. Yaric’s mind was spinning with options, many of them not even mentioned by Emil but triggered by his other suggestions. And these were just off the top of his head.
They spent the evening using the only spatial spell they could cast consistently to try all sorts of tricks with existing spells, though Li Na was the only one who managed to properly apply it to a wind blade. She’d received the occasional minute or two of private instruction on conceptual applications of spells, and it certainly seemed to help. That or she could have just done it even without the instruction.
Yaric also managed to find the sweet spot for multicasting, and he started to get a good feel for when to start casting his spatial spell. Even better, it wasn’t a serious problem if he messed it up. The spell simply didn’t have an anchor and he either had to add a lot more difficulty by trying to hold it together until the projectile manifested, or release it uselessly and start again, which did nothing worse than waste time. While that was frustrating, his real fear was causing some kind of catastrophic failure, which didn’t seem to be a possibility in this case.
Recently Yaric and the others had also found that they had started to outgrow Lauren’s games. They were currently on the final difficulty, and it wasn’t nearly as hard as the games usually were when they moved up a tier. Everyone still made time to practice with it, but they had a lot more free time for other practice.
And in this case, teacher Li Na was in the house.
“You’re trying to make it more complicated than it needs to be,” Li Na explained, surprisingly patiently as well. “Augmenting this stick is not any harder than augmenting your own body. There really isn’t any difference. You’re casting the spell on the object instead and you’re doing it to make the stick stronger. Try it again.”
All three of them groaned and picked up another dried stick. They were lucky it was winter, as they were going through the thin, dead pieces of wood at an alarming rate. This didn’t seem to phase Li Na at all, and she kept them going through pile after pile as they tried to master augmenting other objects.
The weirdest part was how their progression wasn’t linear. Most of the time the augmentation spell simply wouldn’t anchor to something other than themselves, but even when it did, it didn’t work nearly as effectively as it should have, and the next time they tried it would fail to anchor again.
The small pile of large sticks rapidly became a large pile of small sticks, as one after another was broken against the table.
“Try this,” Li Na suggested, and taking up a stick she began moving through one of her forms, treating the stick like a mace. It looked very comical to see a three-millimeter-thick piece of dead wood swung around as if it were her imposing mace.
“Try practicing our forms?” Lauren asked, echoing the confusion felt by the other two.
“Just try and get into the mindset… this is your weapon, and it’s an extension of you. Use whatever movements give you the strongest feeling using the weapon like it’s a part of you. Then try and cast the spell and your arm, and recast it wider and wider until it covers your weapon as well.”
Yaric felt very self-conscious, as they were sitting in the warmth of their dorm building, and they had already been breaking sticks against a table and making a mess. New Sven was chopping and thrusting with a thin piece of wood, Lauren was twisting and shifting hers as if it were a spear, and Yaric was holding his horizontally in a two-handed grip while his lowermost hand shifted the bottom end to maneuver the tip.
Sven almost seemed to be meditating as he shifted from form to form. He often seemed to be in a trance during single practice, but he somehow managed to achieve the same thing even when seated and swinging a stick, a stick he swung down at the table to break even after the service it had just given.
Thud!
The stick rebounded, vibrating slightly and highly unexpectedly.
“You got it!” Li Na exclaimed.
Yaric and Lauren glanced at each other in shock. Li Na’s method had actually worked, at least for Sven. And unlike their other methods, this wasn’t something she herself used. Understanding how the spell applied to other objects was just second nature to her, these lessons were built with her insights into something she could already do. No one had had any idea if they would actually help them figure out the concept.
Sven didn’t pause to celebrate, instead he simply went back to doing the same forms and trying again in an attempt to capture the feeling and method. They all wanted to be able to cast the spell properly without requiring several forms to be performed first.
“You’re still thinking of it as an object,” Li Na admonished, holding out another replacement for Yaric. He was on his fifth one since Sven had successfully cast the spell, and Sven hadn’t broken another since. “It’s no different to augmenting yourself. That’s the big difference I hear everyone talking about all the time; how hard it is to augment something else or how it takes a different way of thinking. But that’s the problem, they see other objects as different in the first place. It isn’t. It’s just in your head.”
‘Oh good. I’ve never been told I have problems getting out of my head before. This will be easy,’ Yaric thought sarcastically.
Lauren was having the same problems he was, though she was being far more stubborn about it. She couldn’t understand why she didn’t just get it right so she could move on, and she didn’t feel like it was something she should need to work on over days. It was just a perception shift. There shouldn’t be any practice needed for something as uncomplicated as that.
They practiced until late. Li Na was yawning frequently by then, though she never complained. Sven moved to sit beside her in support, while Lauren and Yaric continued to make attempt after attempt. They’d even replenished their pile for a second time before it simply became too late.
Lauren and Yaric both apologized for keeping the others up so late, but no one seemed to care. They went to bed tired from a long day, but also determined to get it right the next night.
‘Li Na’s lessons might not have helped yet, but she did do a great job on the other project,’ Yaric thought, looking out his bedroom window. The owl box had been completed and hung up while he was being stalked by a Draugr, and it had even been improved upon. Sven had obviously helped with the fittings, but there was an additional perch on the outside, and Li Na had told him she’d added another thinner wall around the inside to create a space for sawdust as insulation. Probably also Sven’s idea, as neither of them had thought of it before Yaric left, but Li Na had implemented it.
Apparently the owl had ignored it the first day, and everyone had been afraid they’d scared it off when it disappeared on the second day. But then its head had popped out of the hole, revealing that it had simply moved in and had been inside the whole time.
‘Burning those flame motifs into the side was unnecessary though. And the name was completely unnecessary as well,” Yaric grumbled, particularly since it didn’t even say ‘Yaric’.
Property of the Dragon Puppy.
He still hadn’t decided if the fact that she’d run out of space and been forced to inscribe ‘Puppy’ in tiny letters was a good thing or not. At least there was no image of him breathing fire…
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The next night was worse in many ways. Most of their lessons were the same, but they’d had riding lessons at the end of the day, and the wind chill had been insane. No one had expected it to be so cold, so they were all sitting inside and shivering while trying to get their augmentation spells to work.
Li Na had them trying extensions to the exercise that had helped Sven figure it out, so now Yaric and Lauren were mock-fighting while trying to use the spell to win. If they could shatter their opponent’s weapon, then the outcome would become obvious. There was no outcome otherwise, as they were using fifteen-centimeter-long sticks while sitting on the same couch. Unfortunately they were breaking randomly based on the stick, and not the spell.
“Okay, try this. I know I keep telling you that the object is no different to you, but that obviously isn’t working. So if A is equal to B, then B is also equal to A,” she said, sounding proud of herself. “Instead of trying to remember that the object is no different to you, keep in mind that you are an object as well. You’re no different to it. Your body is an object in this room just like those sticks are, so if you can augment that object, why can’t you augment the stick?”
That did seem different to Yaric, but he was used to it by now. Still, Li Na was putting a lot of effort into helping them figure this out, so the least he could do was go through with her suggestion.
Yaric started with a couple of basic forms, trying to feel out the piece of dead wood in his hands. It was certainly no sword. Then he cast the spell on that object just as he would on an object like his arm, legs, or entire body. Turning to Lauren, they began their stick war, but just like little kids, they were simply smacking their ‘weapons’ into each other.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
Both weapons rebounded off the other repeatedly, pushing their arms back and stopping the strikes dead.
“You got it! Both of you!” Li Na exclaimed. “Together…”
Yaric was shocked.
‘That was it? It was because I saw myself as different?’ Yaric almost groaned when he realized that that was exactly what Li Na had been saying the whole time. Lauren was already hugging Li Na, and Yaric stood up as well.
‘So just seeing it from my perspective instead of the perspective of the room caused the problem? It doesn’t matter how I see it; it just is.’
Yaric had just thanked Li Na when the thought struck him like a lightning bolt.
‘Dammit! It doesn’t matter where a location is relative to me, or the arrow. The location is the location no matter where anything else is! The destination is the destination, it isn’t relative to anything!’
And just like that Yaric realized what his latest spatial spell was missing, after losing only four lunches that had nothing to do with how he worked out the solution, and instead figuring it out due to Li Na’s help with an augmentation spell.
‘It’s a good thing we have the day off tomorrow. And the first lunch.’
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Lauren had chosen a location on campus despite having the day off. It wasn’t reserved for faculty, but it was located near the residences and miniature town that helped support the Academy. It also wasn’t one of the higher-end places, but a small eatery with a similar location to where they had met their sponsors after winning the Competition.
There was a large park with wide open lawns between the trees, and a surprisingly large lake. Waterbirds that Yaric had thought to be migratory were still waddling around the lake, though he did note that few seemed to actually go into the water. The actual place they would be eating at looked like a very long, extended wagon, with a counter that ran almost the entire length.
Small benches and tables were assembled in front, and from what Yaric could see of the food currently in front of people, it mostly served things that were quick and convenient. Definitely not what he had expected Lauren to choose, just as he hadn’t expected her to insist that Sven and Li Na join them.
They walked up to the counter and the young girl who was waiting for them, but when Yaric looked up at the simple menu written on a board near the ceiling, Lauren surprised him yet again.
She placed her hand on his shoulder and leaned on him to duck down, pointing further under the awning to reveal a second, much smaller ‘menu’.
Picnic basket for two. Contents vary.
Yaric smiled. Lauren was keeping a promise they’d made a while ago, while still having lunch and a proper break from their training. A small squeak behind them after he placed their order told him she’d made a good choice.
The baskets also came with blankets, and since it was on campus grounds and catered to staff, there was also the option of stones that could be heated magically, which Sven added to their order.
They were soon spread out in front of the lake, enjoying a surprisingly good spread of cheeses and biscuits to start, with a hot stone on either side. Ducks waddled nearby, hoping for the snacks that Li Na was soon tossing their way.
For the first time in a long while they simply spoke about whatever came to mind, instead of focusing on school subjects or ideas for training. The air was crisp and cool, but the sky was bright and clear, and the lake glittered under the midday sun.
Li Na called for them to wait when they started pulling out the main course and took off for the counter before she’d even finished speaking. She came back twirling a large serving platter on one finger with a massive grin on her face.
“What’s that for?” Yaric asked.
“It’s not a picnic without one of these,” she replied, turning it upside down and tossing it toward him. Yaric leaned to his side and caught it, then tossed it back. Lauren put the food back and stood up, moving out to the side. Li Na immediately threw the platter her way.
Soon all four were diving all over the place to catch the spinning wooden platter.
Sven broke off from the game to run over to the counter as well, and he came back with eight more. He sat down without a word and started working on one, only for it to break. Shockingly he managed to get it right with only his second try, using heat, steam, and who knows what else to reform it slightly into a proper domed disc. The surprised expression on his face counted for shock on his part as well.
This one flew even better, and they quickly forgot about lunch. Li Na almost dropped into Sven’s lap when they finally sat down to eat, still out of breath from running around. She hastily shifted to the side with a slightly redder face than the one she already had, and then they all ate so much that they ended up lying on the blanket and watching the clouds drift by for the next hour, barely even turning their heads to talk.
Their last game wandered around the lawn and between groups of waiting birds, who all seemed to think they somehow had food on them. Dodging and weaving between waddling ducks became a part of the game, which didn’t stop until it became too dark to play.
It was cold, and the extra blankets came in handy, because the picnic soon became dinner under the stars. Thousands of stars were scattered across the sky, reflected in the lake and reminding Yaric of the double appeal they had completed.
Lauren and Sven took one of the hot stones each and pulled it under their blanket before opening their blankets to Yaric and Li Na, where they sat huddled while waiting for their order to arrive.
No one cared how long the food took, and when it arrived it did so with a couple of bottles of wine that they certainly hadn't been expecting. They stayed under the blankets even after they'd eaten, this time lying back staring up at the stars in the night sky.
They hadn’t even left the campus grounds, but it was the best day off they’d had in a very long time.