CHAPTER 116 UNDERSTANDING
I was sitting at my desk contemplating my life after the wretched two hours I had spent learning about alchemy.
Adrian entered the room while I sat there and paused for a moment as he looked at me, before entering the rest of the way swinging the door shut behind him.
“Heyo!” He greeted me as he walked by, “Finished with your stuff today as well?”
I nodded absentmindedly.
“You know, I don’t think we ever did talk about it. What courses are you taking here? I’d figure an elf like you would already have a pretty steady grasp on just about everything we could teach.”
I slowly turned in my seat to look at him, searching his face for anything resembling mockery or sarcasm. But he looked fairly genuine in his question. Maybe he was just trying to be friendly.
“Beginners Magical Application, World History, Alchemical Understanding.”
Adrian stopped for a moment as he processed what I said.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Huh…”
“I was never given a formal education of any kind and instead have just been left to my own devices.”
“Is that common?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Huh… So what are you doing now, then?”
“Thinking about what I want to do, overall I’m happy with the first two courses. I am exceedingly disappointed in Alchemical Understanding. I’m wondering if I should talk to someone about pulling out of the course so I can be more productive with my time.”
Adrian just shrugged, and instead started pulling out some books from his own courses along with several sheets of the parchment-like papers.
Parchment on Earth had been made out of animal skins. Sheep, goat, that sort of stuff. These weren’t quite like that, but they didn’t have the flimsy integrity of paper made the way I was used to either.
They felt more like the thicker variants of note cards. It was fairly pleasant to the touch.
“What courses are you in?” I asked him, mainly out of curiosity more than an intention to keep the conversation going.
“Team Tactics, Advanced Mathematics, Survival, and Interpersonal Negotiations.”
I gave a noncommittal hum in response. Leadership classes were essentially what he was taking.
Whatever they saw in him they clearly saw him fit for a team leader role in the future. I didn’t know him well enough at this point to say whether or not he’d be a good pick for something like that.
Well, not like it was really my place to determine whether or not he’d be a good pick anyway.
I just needed to focus on my stuff and do well on the things they wanted me to do well on. Right now that’s all that mattered.
I nodded to myself.
In that case, I should probably go talk to someone, probably Katherine, and bring up my complaints about Alchemical Understanding. The course just didn’t feel right, it also didn’t feel helpful.
Maybe she’d have some insights into what I should do. And she should be in her office right about now anyway, so no time like the present.
I stood up from my chair abruptly and turned towards the door.
“Where are ya headed?” Adrian asked as I started moving.
“To talk to one of the faculty, I have some questions about one of my classes.”
He just nodded and turned back to whatever he was working on at his desk.
I closed the door to the room behind me and set off at a brisk walk toward the nearest set of stairs. Fortunately, I’d been in a kind of first come first serve sort of situation and was positioned in a convenient spot, relatively close to some stairs that put me near an exit to the building.
Unfortunately, at this moment, I was on the side of the building furthest from the direction that I wanted to be heading.
It only took me a few moments to traverse the stairs down to the first floor and from there I made my way to the south end of the building. From there I exited and made my way to one of the main pathways between the four sets of buildings nearby. Two were dorms, one for men and one for women.
The building directly to the south of the men’s dorm was a library. The one south of the women's was a communal bathhouse. I hadn’t actually looked into it yet, mainly because I wasn’t used to the idea of sharing a bathing area with a bunch of other people.
Maybe I was a little embarrassed about being naked in front of a bunch of people I didn’t know, so what?
It didn’t take me long to make it to the obscenely large building that housed the indoor training arenas and the faculty offices. Once inside, I quickly made my way up the nearest set of stairs and took my time navigating the light flow of traffic I found up there. Both teachers and students mingled here, some on their way to talk with an instructor like I was, others leaving after having finished theirs or in the case of an instructor, because their office hours were over.
Katherine should only just be getting into her office, although I wasn’t sure if she was going to be occupied currently. I was hoping she wasn’t, it would be nice to just be in and out quickly without having to wait for a few hours.
Knowing my luck she would have a line out front of her office.
I got several odd looks as I walked through the hallways, eyes lingering on my ears as I passed by. But no one did or said anything to me, so I was fit to ignore them as well.
Soon enough I found myself approaching Katherine’s office, and coincidentally the person that had been in her room was just walking out.
“Alright, I’ll do that. Thanks for the help!” A young woman walked out of her office and didn’t so much as give me a glance as she passed by.
I reciprocated and moved past her, knocking lightly on the open door to Katherine’s office.
She glanced up from her desk, “Alex. Come in and shut the door.”
After giving me her instructions she turned to look back down at whatever she was working on at her desk. As I closed the door and walked over to her desk, she gestured to one of the chairs in front of her wordlessly.
I sat down and waited, taking a moment to look around the office I found myself in.
It was fairly sparsely decorated, a bookshelf occupied the entirety of the right-hand wall. The left side of the office was left blank. There was a rug beneath the large wooden desk and a few chairs situated in front of it, but other than that there was nothing else in the room, save for a single light source that sat on the desk, currently not providing any light since there was still enough light filtering in from the window that was situated behind her desk.
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I waited patiently as Katherine sifted through papers, occasionally writing something before moving on to the next set of papers. She did this a few more times before she set them down and looked up at me, steepling her fingers in front of her.
“So?” She asked, her voice was neutral and her face impassive. I couldn’t tell if she was annoyed by the fact that I was coming to her or not, but I decided that if she were the type to be bothered about this sort of stuff, she wouldn’t have told me to come to her if I needed anything in the first place.
I thought for a moment about how I wanted to phrase this question, because now that I was here it seemed… petty, almost.
All 29 of my minds worked overtime to figure out a polite way to pose the question.
With all of them working in tandem and with how fast I could think, it took less than a second to come up with a preferred sentence.
“I was curious about the direction and intent of the Alchemical Understanding course.”
“In what way?” She queried.
“It seems rather mundane in comparison to my other two courses. From the pages I’ve read and my initial introduction to the lesson structure of the course, it seems primarily focused on speculative analysis of Pre-Collapse Alchemy History…
I paused for a moment in case she wanted to say something, but she waited for me to finish.
“Which in no way, shape, or form that I’ve been able to determine is going to be even remotely useful in my current situation, unless I decide to become interested in historical analysis with a primary focus on alchemy,” I finished bluntly.
“So you’re looking for the reason that you’re taking this course rather than spending your time doing something more useful, in your mind?” She asked, trying to clarify my intent.
I nodded.
“That’s simple. The reason I suggested this course for you is that you know next to nothing about this world.”
I frowned, she wasn’t wrong. I just didn’t see how that was particularly relevant and voiced as much.
“If I were to learn more about the world, wouldn’t it be better for me to take something like another history course, maybe one more specialized in a specific country's history? Or perhaps a social government course that explained, in detail, the political structure of Seltas and Alixia. I feel like there are a number of great options for that.”
She nodded, “You’re correct, if we wanted to strictly make you as knowledgeable about in-field studies as possible, we’d stick to those topics. But that’s not what you’re taking this course for. When I say you know nothing about this world, I mean you quite literally know nothing.”
She sighed before unsteepling her fingers and resting her arms on the desk and continued, “You don’t know our history, therefore you take our history, but you also don’t know our literature, you don’t know our fields of study, you don’t understand our policies or our folklore. You don’t know about our mythologies, you don’t know our proverbs, and you don’t know our entertainment.
“You know nothing.”
I sat there for a moment as I internalized everything she was saying.
She sighed again, “I can tell from the look on your face you still don’t understand what I’m trying to get at. The course you’re taking is not designed to be useful per se. It’s designed to just be something mildly interesting. It’s not going to see a lot of use out in the field, yes, but that’s not what we teach it at all. It’s designed to broaden your understanding of the world at large. Did you even look at any of the students around you in that class? Not a single one of them would’ve been humans.
“They would’ve all been what we consider demi-humans. Cat-folk, Orcs, Kitsune, and a few more. They don’t know anything about human culture, and neither do you. That’s why we’re teaching you. So when you’re communicating with humans, as you’re going to do given that you live in a human-centric country, you’re not at a loss.”
I leaned back in the chair as I thought about that for a moment. 29 minds spinning around in circles as I contemplated what she was saying. This time she waited patiently as I worked towards the conclusions of my thought processes.
I think I understood what she was trying to get at. There was a barrier between this world and me, and the intention was to try and break that barrier down.
The closest analogy I could pull to was the difference in generational communication on Earth. With the advent of the internet, culture changed dramatically. This resulted in many people changing with the culture and adapting as they took in more information and communicated with people the world over.
And the people that didn’t partake stayed the same and struggled to understand as the world changed around them. I remember more than a few conversations with my grandparents where I would have to completely change the way I talked and acted, as opposed to conversations with the few friends that I had, or even just my parents.
My parents, despite being in their thirties when they had me, still adapted fairly well to the changes in the world and could understand at least a portion of how I acted when I let a little bit of internet culture seep through.
But the baby boomers in the world around me were just left confused. Half the time they didn’t even understand sarcasm, which, if that hadn’t been a major disappointment.
But the point was they didn’t understand the world around them. Whether that was because of a stubborn personality or just an inability to comprehend that change wasn’t important.
In this world, I was the baby boomer. I didn’t understand the world around me, or the culture. And now that I thought about it, sometimes I noticed people being a little stiff in the way they talked to me.
I had initially thought it was just me being paranoid, but after Ili’kithari I thought it was because people hated me.
Maybe it was just because people didn’t know how to talk to me because I didn’t know how to talk to them.
“I think… I understand,” I said, slightly hesitantly.
Katherine gave me a soft smile, “Go, take some time to think about this. If you still have problems my door is always open, assuming I’m not with someone or out of office.”
I nodded and stood up from where I was sitting and moved towards the door.
“Alex,” Katherine called after me, causing me to turn around to look at her again.
“It’s okay to be lost. It’s not okay to stay lost. Especially when you have people willing to guide the way forward for you.”
I stared into her eyes. If there was some hidden meaning behind her words or the way she was looking at me, I couldn’t decipher it. So instead I just nodded and opened the door, stepping back out into the hallway.
Glancing back one last time I saw her head turned back down looking at the papers on her desk, silent except for the scratching of her thinnel as she wrote on the papers.
I left the door open as I walked out and slowly started meandering my way back through the hallways toward the staircase. This time I moved at a much slower pace.
I think I was getting more of an idea of what Mortimer had in store for me when he brought me here. I have to wonder if perhaps he saw something in me that other people didn’t, or maybe he had a grand plan that needed someone in an exotic situation, such as myself.
Or maybe, just maybe, he was just a kind person who saw someone in need and was in a position to help them.
As I made my way back outside I stopped for a moment looking around me, truly looking for the first time.
Hardly anyone was paying attention to me, the few people that did look didn’t stare for long and quickly moved on, continuing whatever it was they were doing before.
The idea for me to take Alchemical Understanding wasn’t because it was a useful study or would give me insight and knowledge that could save my life. The idea was to give me a breadth of education and a way to understand the people around me, even if it was just a little bit.
Maybe this course had a bunch of stuff that humans in this world were taught as children, the idea of a famous king from millennia past, getting sick from some dangerous disease and requiring a special potion to heal himself made from exotic and mythical ingredients because the royal healer couldn’t help him, so you better eat your vegetables, child, or that just might be you.
Or maybe not. I guess in the end it really didn’t matter.
Now that it had been brought to my attention, even Adrian didn’t seem fully comfortable in conversation with me. Was that just because I was an introverted person who didn’t care to talk to people, or was that because he didn’t know what to say because I was so different? If I showed that I wasn’t that different from him would that bridge the gap?
How would I even begin to go about doing that?
Was there anyone in this world that I had truly understood? Mortimer? Lillian? Ili’kithari? Fiona? Kaylithe? Marcy? Perhaps, Striga. I could understand not wanting to be around people.
Had I even understood the Earth Raiders?
My minds rapidly went through my memories, turning about the conversations we had, trying to see or notice any possible discrepancies.
The only problem was that, like all things with time, those memories were slowly fading away. I remembered the situations, but not the intricacies.
I could remember a few brief sentences here and there of words that were spoken, and I remembered slightly more clearly some of my more intimate moments with Penny.
But even those were smudged slightly by the passage of time and the fact that I didn’t have a perfect memory skill. Maybe there wasn’t one.
A wave of painful nostalgia washed over me.
I looked down at my feet and realized that I was somewhere else, I had been walking without fully realizing it and noticed I was now at the spot where I usually trained. It was a bit out of the way but the quiet was convenient.
I sat down and laid on my back looking up at the sky, the sun slowly making its way west to eventually set and allow the night sky to paint a beautiful canvas over the world.
I lay there as I took time to slowly reminisce over the past that I had spent with the few people I had met here. The Earth Raiders still comprised my best memories ever since coming to this world, despite the short time I had known them.
I only wished I had gotten a chance to thank them.