--- Thomas Shan ---
Thomas was so excited!
Two weeks ago, on his twelfth birthday, he had received a letter from a magical owl, inviting him as a student to a magical school.
He had assumed it was spam, of course. Schools were often pretty aggressive in their advertising. They all wanted nobles like himself to attend them, so that their prestige would rub off on the school.
But then he looked more closely at the letter and noticed that he recognized the name: He was invited to join "Rania's Academy of Adventure".
Rania. Wasn't that the elf that his parents sometimes talked about?
So he showed them the letter, and they both got super excited about it. They wanted to meet their long-lost friend!
So preparations were made, and shamans were called in, and a gate to the feywild was opened. And now he was going to go to a cool new school, while his parents and their old team mates caught up with their lost companion.
---
It was the first day of school, and he was already late for class!
Could this day get any worse?
"I hate applied math class." His friend Rosaline said. "Regular math is already bad enough, but this is the worst."
Thomas had to agree.
Sure, demonstrating how non-euclidean geometry works in practice did sound pretty cool. But making it part of their homework assignment to find the class room was just cruel. Demonstrating abstract geometry in real life did not help with learning it, it just made you go crazy.
He looked up and saw a slightly more exhausted-looking version of himself standing upside down on the ceiling, waving at him. He didn't remember doing that, so that must be a future version of himself, rather than a past one.
His future version's tired smile did not fill him with confidence that the day was going to get better any time soon.
---
"Wait until my father hears about this!" The prince of Azad angrily exclaimed during dinner.
The other students at the table gave each other meaningful glances: "Why? What is he going to do?"
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"He will make them pay for this disrespect! They said I failed the course! Heads will roll, I swear!" The young man vented.
"So you failed the ethics course, and your response to that is to threaten the teachers with execution? Yeah, that tracks." Someone commented.
Then he looked at the prince gravely and added: "Seriously though, are you out of your mind? You want to pick a fight with the ethics department? The gods damned ethics department?
"You do realize that they are the people who give the Wild Hunt their hit list, right? They are basically the world's most powerful assassin's guild at this point."
---
"Don't make eye contact." Rosaline warned him. "Just smile and keep walking, and ignore them."
Thomas was confused. "What? Why? They were really friendly. Their clothes are weird, but that's no reason to shun them. Maybe wearing frilly dresses is just normal for boys where they come from?"
"That's not the issue. Those three were from the elective course on Magical Girls. Their teacher Silent Martha has given them some really weird ideas. I have talked to them before and it has ruined the very concept of friendship for me. Trust me. Just avoid them. You will be better off not knowing."
---
"I wonder if this is really worth it." Thomas said. "We have been trying to find a way to break into this stupid room for four days."
"Of course it's worth it!" Rosaline responded. "Balron said that anyone who can break into the room is allowed to change their own records. We can just give ourselves an A+!"
"I don't know. I feel like if we spent all this time studying for the security exam instead, we would get an A+ anyway. Honestly, planning that break in isn't even all that different from studying for the course."
"..."
"Son of a bitch! He tricked us into doing homework!"
---
"Excuse me, but why is there a dark red smear on the ground?" Thomas asked his teacher on General Adventuring.
"Oh, something happened last Friday and we haven't managed to clean up all the blood yet. Some evil wizard and his cronies tried to invade the school for some reason. He called himself a 'Dark Lord', or something ridiculous like that. Problem is, they had the worst timing. They teleported in during the course on Advanced Murderhoboing."
Advanced Murderhoboing was an elective taught by the Wild Hunt. It taught students how to live their evil fantasies without actually breaking any laws. Do Good Things to Good People and Bad Things to Bad People, was their motto. They focused mostly on the second half of that sentence.
"The students thought it was part of the test." Their teacher continued. "Frankly the violence was excessive and if it had been a test instead of an actual invasion, many of them would have failed."
His neighbor leaned over and whispered in Thomas's ear: "I heard a rumor that one of the fey students, Betsy the pixie, killed somebody so hard that they died to death. They say she was sent to cultural sensitivity training for it, to make her tone down all the murder."
---
"...and one more thing." The prefect said as he addressed the crowd of new students. "Do not go out into the Forbidden Forest. It is strictly forbidden."
"Why? Is it because it's full of monsters?" One of the first-years asked.
"No. That's the Practice Forest, over there. You can go there if you want, but there is a queue, so you need to be there early. Monster hunting is very popular.
"The Forbidden Forest is this other forest over in that direction. You will note that it hurts your head a little if you look directly at it. That forest forms the boundary between Rania's Academy of Adventure and Rania's School for Outsiders, where she teaches Aberrations remedial courses on how physics and biology work. Some of them are really bad at it, and keep twisting space and time into a pretzel. If you go into the Forbidden Forest, you might get lost, or travel through time, or come out different."