Ritadrija Shian was a lot of things, but she was not a morning person. Rito blinked blearily at the cup of piping hot coffee the canteen lady set in front of her. Then, she wrapped her fingers around it and took a grateful sip.
“Like liquid energy,” her father always said. She could see his point. Liquid energy was exactly what one needed when prepping for class at 9:30 in the morning.
What was the point of 10 am lectures anyway? It’s not like anybody attended them. She certainly never had, and she’d always been relatively studious.
But Sinya Haval had asked her to take the morning lecture with the second years. And Rito would rather bite off her own tongue than disappoint Mrs. Haval. She had never been inclined to hero-worship, but if she had been, Mrs. Haval would’ve been pretty high on her list of potential heroes.
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She reached into her handbag to retrieve the sheaf of test papers she would be returning to the students during class. She wasn’t looking forward to explaining to Priya Parekh for the hundredth time why the hermeneutic circle could be thought of as an ontological issue as well as an interpretative one. Sinya thought she did it for the grades, but Rito had a sneaking suspicion that the girl just got a kick out of riling up the professors. She sighed. Morning classes were bad enough without drama.
Her fingers bumped against her phone as she laboriously pulled the test papers out of the embroidered cloth bag Nikita had given her for her last birthday. She’d thought of throwing it out; but it really was a very pretty bag...
The phone was vibrating. Rito frowned. Who on earth would be calling her this early in the morning? She swiped the green icon and pressed the device to her ear.
“Rito? Rito! Oh, thank God you picked up!” Falguni’s panicked voice rang in her ears. She was sobbing. Before Rito could say anything, Falguni wailed into the phone, “Rito, please, you’ve got to do something. Afreen’s gone!”