18 Ches

  I have been pulled more into the social circles of the class than I really care to be now, thanks to Alexeia deciding to give us our first research project for the class. We were to clump together in groups of three, and would have until the end of Waukeentide to work on it.

  The assignment itself is fairly simple, though. We were each assigned a key historic archmage to research and give a presentation on, ranging from their impacts on the greater magical community to important historical events that can be tied to them.

  I ended up as one of the last people left, given that the others quickly rushed to group up with those they had been chatting with for the last week and a half. It was… I’m not letting it get to me. I ended up being paired up with Lisbet and Telli since they didn’t have a third person.

  I was at least passingly familiar with them, and they didn’t need to ask for my name or anything. We figured we could probably get together sometime during Fleetswake at least. We were assigned to research someone named Broargar Iringil. It didn’t ring any bells, but Alexeia did at least point us to the country Impultur. It’s nowhere near the Sword Coast anyway, so the presentations next month might actually be interesting to learn about.

  Lisbet also asked me to help spend time with her outside of the project. Given she’s not from around here and is staying with an elderly distant relative, she doesn’t exactly know her way around the city and the upcoming events. Personally, I never found Fleetswake that interesting in the previous years we’ve gone to it, but I imagine that if your context for interesting is a small farming village, the crowds would be both fascinating and intimidating.

  I’ll still go along with her, though, since I can at least respect the courage to come up and ask me for it. I doubt I was her first choice in that regard, so she’s probably already gotten at least a few rejections. Does she assume I’d not be busy as well since I’m the class loner or something?

  It does give me a bit of an excuse to not have to go to everything with Pelsot, at least.

  24 Ches

  I met up with Lisbet today for our arranged get-together. It was kind of nice to get away from my family. Caring as they are, Pelsot and Tulgor are a bit more enthusiastic about sports and racing than I can match.

  Yeena ended up joining me for it, though. She seemed really interested in meeting my “wizard friends”. I do tell her about the lessons, but quite frankly, they don’t actually make for great conversation topics. Yeena isn’t as bad as Pelsot when it comes to reading, but she’d much prefer socializing with people than quietly reading books at the library. That and sewing. I’ve seen the embroidery she does for her own clothes, and it's fairly good. She might become a seamstress in the future.

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  The day went well, though, with introductions made. I think Yeena had far greater expectations of Lisbet before meeting her, which is strange given how often I interact with her. They got along well enough. I think that Lisbet was just happy to deal with people a bit more down to earth with somewhat similar situations to her; the two of us are sort of outsiders compared to most of our classmates.

  She seemed quite enamoured by the races we watched today, mostly smaller teams crossing the harbour area of the city. It’s the sort of thing I wouldn’t expect her to have really had much exposure to, given she came from a minor farming village. The sort of thing she described as “You might find on a map for taxation purposes, but not on any other”. I have to wonder how that works security wise, given how dangerous the stories of wandering monsters tended to be.

  Yeena seemed to enjoy dragging the two of us along the harbour area, sampling the various street food. Mostly festive things themed around the sea. From bread shaped like boats to spiced grilled fish skewers. Lisbet spent an interesting amount of time discussing with Yeena how different the river fish she normally ate were from the ocean catches we ate. Apparently they ate a lot of eels. I was sort of glad to have someone to handle all of Yeena’s questions about our class.

  Bless her heart, but Yeena loved to gossip, but just didn’t have the foundational knowledge for what I told her to really stick.

  1 Tarsakh

  Apparently, the concept of April Fools has somehow carried over today, thanks to Seraphina. Normally, the first day of the week of Waukeentide is supposed to be Caravance, meant to be a gift-giving holiday to celebrate when caravans start arriving after the roads become usable.

  It started off well enough, my family decided to do the gift giving in the morning after we had breakfast. My parents had decided to splurge on purchasing a new book for me. Volo’s Guide to Monsters, which is a sort of mix of encyclopedia, textbook, and collection of fables covering a wide variety of monsters. Apparently, Volo is some sort of famous scholar who’s managed to live well over a century, travelling all over Faerun.

  It was a little after that that I received a sending message from Seraphina. I’d have been more surprised if Orsik hadn’t told me about it. A somewhat advanced spell designed to impart a short message to a known recipient, it was a key spell logistically in the realms capable of delivering news from nearly anywhere. Basically the equivalent of sending a text, but with magic.

  Living up to such banality, but still showing off her magical capabilities, Seraphina was just asking me to visit her shop to pick up a delivery for one of the other instructors at the Tower of the Order.

  It was a short affair, I didn’t even see her. Her secretary simply handed me a well-crafted small wooden box with the instructions to “Hand this off to Mr. Dekarios, a young nobleman who should have a goatee and a more than average insufferable confidence in himself. Don’t open it.”

  As it turned out, this Gale Dekarios was somewhat well known in the order and was apparently also a member of the Blackstaff academy. He was to give an advanced lecture to one of the other classes later in the afternoon about summoning and binding, but I was able to get his attention easily enough.

  Unfortunately, I don’t think Seraphina liked him. That, or the gift was some sort of obtuse attempt at seduction. He asked that I wait a moment while he opened the box so we could both see what it was.

  It was a freshly dead and magically preserved pigeon.

  Still, he laughed it off, said something about “Tara will love this,” and then waved me off. I don’t understand wizards. I don’t think I want to.

  Sorry about missing a week, to anyone who was especially looking forward to it. Not really any great reason for it, just sort of procrastinated and didn't have it done so I wanted till this week. I've been messing around a bit with the spacebattles code stuff, and have discovered some neat things I might use for writing.

  Not this story, probably. I'm actually sort of workshopping ideas for a Worm or Ward X Yugioh fic of some sort to make use of my discoveries, something sort of along the lines of an isekai, rather than a world fusion. Feel free to comment ideas or suggestions for it, since for the moment it's pretty nebulous.

  As far as this chapter though, I'm sort of happy to do stuff with Gale and Seraphina. Gale won't be relevant for a long time (if ever), but timeline wise I figured it would be neat to actually acknowledge he exists. Also important to note, Lisbet is Taylor's first friend since arriving. Yeena was Tayvra's, and the lizardfolk are business partners.