A crackle, then a pop, and a small flame appears on the hardwood desk, nibbling on the edge of an unrolled scroll.

"Wait, were you trying to summon fire?" Intelligent brown eyes narrow as a tawny finger pokes at the happily burning parchment.

"Yes, that's why I said the summon water spell. It was to summon fire." Maurgeth the Terrible, casually known as Maury because nobody can stop laughing long enough to say her proper name, rolls her eyes, and slaps her hand down on the flame, extinguishing it. A tiny curl of smoke escapes from between her fingers.

"Yeah, I don't think that worked."

"Sidney, you must have gotten perfect scores in your Stating the Obvious elective last year."

"Nah, I almost failed because I would silently point at the obvious stuff. You know I hate speaking up in class."

Maury crosses her arms and looks down at her best friend. Well, her only friend if she is being forced to be honest. The young man is bent over her work area, poking at the small pile of ashes below the hole in the parchment.

"Hmm," Sidney purses his lips as he straightens to his full 5ft 5-inch height and looks up at her 6ft length. "It smells wrong. Like cinnamon rolls. I think your mind wandered while you were speaking the spell. What were you thinking about?"

"I was thinking that I am thirsty and hungry, and I want to go to dinner now," Maury snaps. She grimaces and shrugs an apology for her churlishness. "This is stupid. Why are we still learning this outdated stuff? Why summon fire when we have matches? It's a waste of energy."

Sidney doesn't bother answering. If they aren't having that argument at least once a week, it is because one of them is sick. He understands that Maury knows the importance of elemental summoning. She just doesn't feel like doing it. If laziness were a stat, she would be maxed out.

"Show me your window," he instead orders her, leaning against the table.

Grumbling, Maury summons her stat window, materializing it in the air over the table. She could have done it in the middle of the room, but she is feeling petty and wants Sidney to have to turn around to see it.

Her friend's stubby finger trails down the skills list, looking for Elemental Summoning. "Aww, come on, Maury, can't you minimize some of these category columns? They take up so much space. You are never going to work on heavy weapons mastery or any of this sword stuff. You would get sweaty."

It is impossible to get angry when it is true. Sweat is gross. "I don't feel like it."

"Whoa, when did you get your Arcane Engineering up to 75? That's higher than Professor Tinkersplat."

"Do you think she chose her name as a child knowing she wanted to be an engineer?"

"Why else? Nobody else would choose an intentionally ironic name." A not so subtle dig at Maury's chosen name.

"Hey! My name is great." Maury glares daggers at her friend's back. Since she only has two skill points out of one hundred in light weapon summoning, it doesn't actually do any damage.

"Seriously, though, 75 is amazing. Last time I checked, you were at 42, and that was already twice as high as any other student."

Maury sighs and releases her non-lethal gaze. "I've been working on a bunch of projects with the school to keep from getting failed out of all of my classes. And I got the last 5 from finishing my soul mirror."

A long, high whistle pierces the air. Sidney looks away from the stat window, distracted from finding what he is looking for. "You got 5 from one project? How is that even possible? Soul Mirrors are complicated, but not even they would give 2 points."

With a wave of her hand, Maury dismisses her stat window, glad to be off the topic of elements. She walks over to a curtain against the inner wall and pulls the fabric back. A large oval mirror stretches half of the wall between the floor and ceiling. Instead of her own reflection, it shows dozens of figures sitting at round tables packed in a spacious room. The sound is dull, but they can hear laughter and yelling coming from the figures within, talking to each other, or calling to others walking between the tables laden down with large trays full of food and drink.

"Wow, that IS impressive. But still, I don't see -"

Maury slaps the hand that is reaching to touch the shiny surface. "Stop that. You will smudge it. I linked the summoning portal to another universe. If the magic schools all keep using the human settlements as their primary soul gathering locations, they will deplete the resource. We need to learn to summon souls from other areas or find an alternative energy source. And you know that none of the people in power want alternative energy."

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"Solar power isn't as reliable as good old fashioned soul power," Sidney pitches his voice to exactly match that of the headmaster's. "Yeah, okay, but how does it work? Another universe is really impressive, but does it really pull souls?"

"I programmed in a lure for once a day during the busy dinner rush. It ensnares one person each time and pulls them to the mirror. A repellent at the same time keeps everyone else from looking. Otherwise, nobody would ever eat at this place again."

Seconds tick by, and Maury smirks as her friend does the slow work to figure out how long it will take to summon enough souls to pass Intermediate Energy Gathering in this way. One soul a day until one hundred souls are gathered. 1x=100. It isn't hard, but Sidney has struggled for every one of his three points in mathematics.

"So in one hundred days, you will get all the souls you need for the assignment? That's clever. It only gives you a few days extra before the due date if something goes wrong, though." Sidney rubs his brow, most likely to release the tension brought on by such a difficult (for him) equation.

"I already have five. It works fine. So you just head on back to your room and start getting ready for your trip to the scenic underground. Full of dark, and dank, and slime, and smelly humans."

"Yeah, yeah." Sidney gives one more appraising look to the ornate mirror. "Are you sure this will work? You should really come with us. Everybody in class but you is going, it will be easy to gather with so many people helping each other."

That isn't exactly true, and they both share a smile when they identify the error in his statement. Maury isn't the only one abstaining from the yearly soul gather. Pixiesnort, the Celestim in a Bubble as she is not so affectionately known, is allergic to humans and can't go with the large gathering group unless they stick to other intelligent sentient species. None of the rest of those, like unicorns and minotaurs, gather in large enough numbers to make it worthwhile to hunt them. Goblins do, but they are barely intelligent enough to not poke out their own eyes every time they eat bread. Their souls are worthless. Pixiesnort is allergic to those as well, so it doesn't matter, anyway.

"It will be fine. This will work. And I can spend all the time I save by staying here working on my elemental summoning!"

Sidney looks at her and manages to keep a straight face for a full five seconds before they both burst out laughing. "Sure, that's what you will be doing! I have a gold coin that says you don't speak the first word of a single elemental spell the whole time I am gone."

"I do not take that bet," Maury sniffs delicately as she buries her grin. "Whatever. Do you want to go and get some dinner? The dining hall is doing meatloaf tonight." Her lips smack together audibly as she sucks her drool back into her mouth.

"What kind of meat?" Sidney asks as he leads the way out of the room and out into the dormitory hallway.

"Does it matter?"

Their voices become muffled when the door closes, then fade as the two older students wander away.

Back in the room belonging to Maurgeth the Terrible (not so affectionately known as Maury), the dull roar of voices from the dimensional soul mirror also fades away as the patrons of the pub on the other side wander off and head back to their homes. Wherever those might be. Within the hour, the only figures that can be seen are the old and crusty bartender/owner, who is cleaning the counter with a surprisingly clean rag, and the young man named Neuman, who works most days as a server in the dining area.

"Get those tables cleaned up and you can sit up here with me and have some dinner," the owner calls out to him, finishing his wipe down and throwing his cloth into a bucket under the counter.

Neuman nods but doesn't look back at the older man. His attention is focused on the tables in front of him as he wipes up spilled beer and hard crumbs from that evening's bread hunks served along bowls of stew. Ever so often he looks out of the corner of his eye toward the ugly old mirror hanging on the back wall between the taxidermy heads of two giant stags, but drags his eyes back quickly and stares hard at the surfaces in front of him. When everything is cleaned above the waist, he goes to the back and gets a broom to sweep up everything on the floor before dropping himself onto a bar stool with a groan.

"Hey Old Smith, why do you have that big old mirror back there? It is creepy."

The indicated Old Smith squints his eyes and looks back toward the mentioned mirror. He grunts and goes back to shining the pint glasses to get ready for the next day's breakfast crowd. "I don't know, it's always been there, I reckon. Nothing creepy about it. It's just a mirror."

"Yeah, but we've had five people in town go missing this week, and I swear I saw all five of them walking back toward that wall before they disappeared. There is something weird about that mirror." Neuman stares across the room, more bold now that he is farther away from it.

"It's just a mirror, Neuman. Those boys all wandered off, probably got lost out in the woods as drunk as they were." Old Smith laughs, a raspy noise that cuts off with a body shaking cough.

"Five different people? All in the same week? And I never saw them leave, they just wandered back there and nobody ever saw them again."

"So, what, you think the mirror is evil? It sucked up a bunch of grown men because it was hungry? They wandered off in the woods, kid. That there is just a mirror. Mirrors don't eat people." He shuffles back toward the kitchen to get the dinner for his worker, chuckling and coughing as he goes.

Neuman isn't bothered by the lack of belief from the old man. It sounds weird. He knows. But something about that mirror bothers him. It is creepy, and looking at it too closely makes his skin crawl, like thousands of centipedes moving across his body with their many little legs. He shudders and rubs at the little cold bumps popping up along his arms. In the flickering firelight, it looked just like any other ugly, ornate old mirror, and he can see himself in it as a tiny little reflection in the distance. But still, it makes him uneasy. And sometimes, although he will never admit it to Old Smith, it almost feels like there is somebody on the other side looking back at him.