More Tales of MU

…or, Hints, Allegations, And Things Left Unsaid

Thursday, Astera 17th 222

Thursday morning, I tried to go back to sleep after breakfast without success. Iason was on my mind. As long as he wasn’t being a dick to me or my friends, his personality didn’t stop him from being fun in bed. If he really did want more than that, though, it could be a problem.

The frustrating thing was that I couldn’t even think about how irritating he was without getting rock hard. I didn’t mind spending the morning in my room getting personal with myself, but I wasn’t keen on getting off to somebody I was pissed at.

It wasn’t restful.

Giving up on sleep, I went to the lounge. It wasn’t crowded. Most people were probably either in class or asleep. Brad the R.A. and Kurt the big skirmish player with a sullen attitude were sitting at one of the tables, looking at a chart.

Iason was on the skirmish team. Maybe I could get another opinion on him from somebody who’d known him longer than I had. It could be important. Iason’s behavior to date had been on the border between cocky and creepy, clueless and stalkerish. His straightforward matter-of-factness matched what I expected from horny elf boys. His single-minded focus on me and less-than-honest behavior didn’t, but it could almost be endearing if I knew for a fact it was harmless.

“Hey,” I said, approaching them.

“Hey, what’s up, bud?” Brad said. “You need something?”

“Uh, not really,” I said. “I was just wondering how well you guys know the other skirmish players.”

“Well, last year was my last year on the team,” Brad said. “So, I don’t know all the new ones.”

I looked at Kurt, but he didn’t say anything. Of course, he was as new to the school as I was. It was likely he wouldn’t be any help.

“Okay, but do you know the elf named Iason?” I asked Brad. The way his eyes went wide with recognition wasn’t encouraging.

“Oh, man,” Brad said. “You do not want to mess around with him.”

“Why?” I asked.”

“Because he’s a total ass bandit,” Brad said.

“Oh,” I said.

“I mean, as far as I’m concerned all elves are, but he doesn’t even try to hide it,” Brad said. “Seriously, man. Back to the wall when he’s around.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Is he not part elf?” Kurt asked Brad quietly as I was leaving.

“Him? I don’t know,” Brad said. “Was that him?”

At lunch, I shared my thoughts about Iason with the girls.

“I think you should date him,” Missy said. “He’s cute, and I think the gifts are romantic.”

I raised my arm with the bracelet.

“This is romantic?” I asked.

“It is!” she said. “It’s like you’re bound together for life now.”

“That’s exactly what I was looking for, the first day of class,” I said.

“What do your instincts tell you?” Marlot asked me.

“‘Do whatever this man wants, twice’,” I said. “Instinct doesn’t help when he’s hot.”

“But you’re not afraid of him?” Marlot said.

I thought about it.

“No, I’m really not,” I said. “I’m afraid of what he’s going to do next, but in a ‘oh, hell, what did he do now?’ way.”

At that point, the conversation was interrupted by a crash from around the corner, followed by a woman swearing hoarsely and then yelling, “I’m going already!”

Everybody in the food court and around the balcony had frozen, gone silent. Moments later, the strawberry blonde dwarfblood stormed into view, stomping down the stairs and cursing a blue streak. Before she was halfway down the stairs, a literal blue streak rushed past her.

“What the hell?” I said. The commotion from the dining room was still ongoing, with what sounded like somebody or a couple of somebodies wailing loudly.

“Boy, somebody sure pissed Puddy off,” Missy said.

“Who?” I asked.

“That girl,” Marlot said. “Puddy.”

“Her name is Puddy?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Missy said.

“I don’t know if that’s her name or just what she calls herself, because of all the pudding pops she eats,” Marlot said. I ignored this bit of weirdness.

“Do you guys actually know her?” I asked.

“No,” Missy said. “But, I mean, everybody knows who she is.”

“I don’t,” I said.

“Well, you don’t really talk to anybody but us,” Marlot said.

“And Iason,” Missy added.

“What do you mean?” I said. “I talk to other people. I talked to Brad and Kurt just today.”

“When you’re in the dorm, you’re either shut up in your room or with us,” Marlot said. “Do you even really know your neighbors yet?”

“It’s the first week,” I said. “You can’t tell me you’ve met all the girls in your hall.”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Missy said.

“Pretty much the whole floor, actually,” Marlot said.

“When did you have time to do that?” I asked.

“You run into them in the halls, you see them in the bathroom, you’re walking past and their door’s open,” Marlot said.

“You see them in the lounge when you’re warming up a snack,” Missy said.

“Guys don’t talk to each other in the bathroom,” I said. “And if I’ve got my door closed, it’s usually for a reason.”

“Well, making friends with yourself is fine but it leaves you cut out of the loop for gossip,” Marlot said.

“Like I even care about gossip,” I said. “So, do you know anything about that black-haired girl?”

“What black-haired girl?” Missy asked.

“The one that’s always groping and messing around with Puddy,” I said.

“Oh,” Missy said, wrinkling her nose in disgust. It was kind of a cute look. “Mack. I told you I sit next to her in thaumatology, didn’t I?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “You did mention that.”

“Monday, she came in with her hair all dirty and gross,” Missy said. “Yesterday, she practically slept through the whole class. If she doesn’t flunk out, I’m going to be surprised.”

“Disgusting or not, I don’t think they grade us on shampooing skills,” Marlot said.

“People who don’t care about their appearance usually don’t care about anything else,” Missy said.

“Or they don’t care about their appearance,” Marlot said.

“Anyway, she’s Puddy’s girlfriend,” Missy said to me. “They’ve got a lot of people pissed off because they’ve been bringing Harlowites into the cafeteria.”

“Where else are they supposed to eat?” I asked.

“Like I said before, they have their own place or something,” Missy said. “Anyway, I’m thinking about changing seats in thaumatology. She’s nasty enough even without all the lesbian stuff, and I don’t want her thinking about me when she’s you-know-whatting.”

“Yeah, I know that’s the number one thing I worry about,” Marlot said. “That’s why I’ve taken to stopping random women on the street and demanding to know if they’re masturbating to me. You can never be too sure.”

“Can we back up a bit to the part about Harlowe Hall having its own lunchroom?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Missy said. “How fair is that? I hear their food is catered in.”

“‘Catered’ can just mean delivered,” Marlot pointed out. “It doesn’t mean it’s fancy or good.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Missy said. “A girl in my knife class says that she heard that they have real silver silverware.”

“I wouldn’t mind that,” I said. “I don’t have to worry about it when we eat out here, but the stainless steel crap they’ve got in the dining hall leaves a weird taste in my mouth.”

“Is that why you eat your bacon with your fingers?” Missy asked.

“No, he eats his bacon with his fingers because he’s such a macho manly man,” Marlot said.

My thaumatology class that afternoon was so boring that I couldn’t blame “Mack” for sleeping through hers. Professor Meinke was a lecturer in the worst sense of the word. He was passionate about his subject matter in theory, but he didn’t bring any passion into the classroom.

After an hour and a half that would not die, I headed out for the class that excited me far more. Callahan already had us sorted out how she wanted us, so we got right into the thick of things. She told everybody in the advanced section to get back with whoever they were fighting and start doing whatever they were doing

I mocked up my axe, got a leather hoop off the table, and found the mountain of a woman I was supposed to be paired up with. We resumed the exercise we’d started on Tuesday, with me standing in the hoop and trying to defend against her attacks.

“Good form, but could be better,” Callahan said when she got around to us a few minutes later. “I’ll be back to help you after you’ve got into the swing of things. I want you to keep both your legs in the hoop today. If you step outside the hoop before I dismiss you, she will break your legs.” She turned to my opponent. “I want to see bones sticking out. And by the end of the class, I want you hitting back,” she said to me. “Or she’ll break your legs anyway.”

“She has a longer reach and can move,” I said.

“Suck it up, Princess,” Callahan said. She turned away to address a group of guys who were standing around sparring half-heartedly with each other. “Gentlemen, it’s time to play a game I call ‘last person to kill someone goes to the healing center with his balls in a cup’.”

“You’re not really going to break my legs if I step outside the circle, are you?” I asked after she’d gone through a few rounds of blows.

She grunted.

“You don’t know much about Coach Callahan, do you?” she asked.

“Nothing that’s not obvious,” I said.

“She killed Coach Heinrich,” the skirmisher said. “It was a legal duel, but she tore him apart.”

“Does the university allow the faculty to duel each other?”

She grunted again.

I kept my legs inside the hoop.

“Hey, Princess, where the hell is your little butt buddy?” Callahan asked, storming up to us.

“I thought I was ‘Blingy’,” I said.

“Yeah, well, now you’re ‘Princess’,” she said. “Seriously, though.”

“Who are you talking about?” I asked.

“You know, swishy fuck. Blond hair. Pointy ears. Makes sweet, sweet love to trees.”

“Iason?”

“Johnson,” Callahan said. “Khersis Fuck, I know you fags are easy but just how many elves are you spreading for, Princess?”

“Okay, hold on,” I said. “I know this is an immersive class and this is your style, or whatever, but you’ve got to knock it off with the racial and gay cracks or I’m going to—”

Callahan’s tiny, girlish fist hit me like a bolt from the blue. I hit the ground, and had only just thought to wonder where my leg was when a huge booted foot came down on my calf, shattering bone. I screamed. The sound, the pain, the sensation were all sickening. My head swam and my vision danced.

“You get a silver star for the day, Lucy, but when I say I want jagged edges, I mean it,” Callahan said. Then she bellowed, “Stretcher!”

I was carted by a couple of burly skirmish jocks to the Gygax Memorial Healing Center, a low, modern-looking building with a glass front. A side entrance, labeled the “A. Vanaheim Mental Healing Annex”, was screened from view by hedges.

Once inside, it only took a few moments of prayer and a laying on of hands to fix my leg and my bruised face. I followed the other guys back to the field when it was done. Callahan seemed surprised to see me, but only for a second. She’d already reassigned my partner, so she set me up with a guy with a rapier. I was doing the same exercise but with a completely different style of attacks to fend off.

She didn’t say anything about further leg-breakings, but in all honesty, it didn’t seem like the guy would be up to that.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t a good fighter.

“You’re an elfblood, right?” he asked as his spectral blade slipped past my defense and pierced my belly right above my navel.

“Uh, yeah,” I said, once I’d recovered. “A little bit.”

“I thought so,” he said. “It shows just a little bit, in your ears. Man, I would not want to be an elfblood in this class.”

“Because Callahan hates elfbloods?”

“Worse,” he said. “She loves you.”

“It sounds like she has an interesting idea of love,” I said, turning his next thrust aside with a swipe.

“Supposedly, she’s buried five husbands,” he said. “Three of them were dead at the time.”

“You don’t think there’s a chance that she encourages these rumors because it makes it easier for her to keep up her image?” I asked. This time I hooked his blade on my axe and jerked it to the side. He kept hold of it.

“Good one. I don’t know,” he said. “Even if only half of them are true, she’s still pretty fucking scary. I mean, have you heard about what she did when she was fighting in the Chaos Wars?”

“Hold on,” I said. “There are two things wrong with that sentence.”

“What?”

“First, she can’t be more than thirty,” I said.

“No, she’s totally older than she looks.”

“And second, there weren’t any women soldiers in the Chaos Wars.”

“No, there weren’t any in the Imperial Army at the time,” he said.

“Yeah, that’s what I said.”

“No, you said there weren’t any women soldiers in the Wars,” he said. When I regarded him with confusion, he added, “Wars have more than one side, bro.”

I shook my head.

“Okay, let’s assume for the moment that I believe you when you say that tiny little girl is a sixty or seventy year old enemy of the Imperium,” I said. “What did she supposedly do?”

“Okay, well, her platoon was out in the forest on a patrol and they got lost and cut off, without food or any other supplies.”

“Does this story end with her walking out of the woods alone, surprisingly well-fed?” I asked.

“Uh, yeah,” he said. “You’ve heard it?”

“Not about her,” I said. “That’s like a standard war time horror story. Don’t you see? It’s a front, an act.”

“I don’t know, that broken leg looked pretty convincing,” he said. “But maybe you had a better look from where you were.”

“Technically, she didn’t do the breaking,” I said. “Anyway, giving somebody an easily healed injury that’s covered by a liability waiver doesn’t mean she fought on the other side of the Chaos Wars, or that she’s a cannibal, or that she killed another teacher, or whatever other stories are going around.”

“No, but it doesn’t mean she didn’t,” he said. “Did she give you a nickname?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Uh, Blingy.”

“I’d drop the class if I were you,” he said, shaking his head. “Learning to fight isn’t worth your life.”

“Oh, so now she’s going to kill me,” I said.

“Well, you hear stories.”

“Obviously.”

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