…or, A Scene From Afar
Saturday, Astera 12th 222
On Saturday morning, the dorm was slow to wake up. At least, it seemed that way on the guys’ side. Once I was out of my room, I could hear activity, conversation, and music around the corner where the girls were.
My room was the second from the end, only one door away from girl territory. I headed away from the noise, towards the corner where the guys’ hallways joined. That was where the bathroom door was. The bathrooms took up a lot of the space in the center of the floor, because they had individual showers.
That was the reason I’d put my vote for Pelinor in the first place, despite the Freshmen area being a couple of floors up. Call it two parts shyness, one part self-preservation, but I didn’t really feature myself showering with a bunch of guys I barely knew every day.
The water was running in one of the twelve showers, and a well-tanned guy whose name I thought was Michael was shaving at one of the sinks. There were four of them on each side of a wall that stood in the middle of the room like an island.
Eight sinks for up to forty people to share. I was betting that worked out better on the weekends than during the school week. The rooms in Pelinor came with their own sinks, probably for that reason. I don’t know if I would have liked to share a room with a big hairy guy who shaved five feet away from the beds we slept in, but then, I wasn’t sharing a room with anybody. I could do my shaving and brushing in private and not worry about anyone’s feelings.
Of course, I’d never been able to grow a decent beard, but I still had to scrape the fuzz off of my face every couple of days or else I’d start to get funny looks.
The guy who might have been called Michael gave me a nod when he saw me in the mirror. I returned it, then headed into the shower area. I started without touching the hot water. I liked a cold, bracing shower to wake me up in the morning. I turned up the heat bit by bit until it was just tolerable, then treated myself to a little imagination session featuring the nicer of the two mermaids before I washed up. So, there was another reason I liked a private shower.
I finished the rest of my morning stuff back in my own room, then got dressed and headed over to look up Marlot. I looked for Iolana’s name on the doors I passed, but she must have been further down the far leg of the girls’ side. I did notice that Kira had a single room, right on the corner. We were almost next door neighbors.
Jennifer had gone to a little more effort decorating her half of the floor than Brad had. Garlands of fabric leaves hung over the doors, and there was a tree made of brown cardboard on the wall with the remaining dates in the month written on more construction paper leaves and acorns.
The acorns bugged me, since the leaves were clearly maple leaves.
Marlot’s door was open, and she and Missy were sitting on their beds tossing a pair of balled-up socks back and forth. I knocked on the open door.
“Hey, sugar lump,” Marlot said. Missy laughed, and then Marlot joined in. “Be with you in a minute.”
“What?” I said. Sugar lump?
“Missy asked me if we were dating,” she explained.
“Oh, okay,” I said. I smirked. “That is pretty funny, actually.”
“Hey!” Marlot pouted. She threw the sock ball at me overhand. I backhanded it into her open clothes hamper.
“Breakfast?” I said.
“Sure,” she said. “Just let me get the clean socks you just dumped in my dirty laundry. You want to come along, Missy?”
“Sure.”
I waited in the doorway while Marlot got her shoes and socks on, and then the three of us headed for the stairs. We almost bumped into an olive-skinned girl with brown hair dyed red and orange as she came out of her room.
“Oh!” she said. She smiled at me. It was a cute smile. She had a slight case of buck teeth, but it was cute. I smiled back. “Excuse me… Jamie, right? Jamie Bowman, not-an-archer?”
“Right,” I said.
“Jamie, this is Julia,” Marlot said.
“Juliana,” she corrected. She blinked, her long and obviously glammed-up eyelashes fluttering. From the way her eyes rolled briefly down, I had a pretty good idea what was coming next. “Are you really part elf?”
“Yeah,” I said.
She grinned like a manic beaver.
“Show me your dick,” she said.
“That isn’t the part,” I said, and started walking again before she could respond.
Okay, in all honesty, this was maybe eighty percent of the reason I didn’t make a big deal out of my elven heritage. Like the gay thing, it was a case of a stereotype that was more or less true. Elves were scrawny fuckers compared to humans. There just wasn’t that much substance to them. They were less meaty all over.
That included all under, as well.
That I hadn’t inherited this trait along with my fair skin had made me very interesting to—and somewhat popular with—my distant cousins among the trees.
A lot of people feel insecure around elves. The whole dick size obsession likely had a lot to do with that. I learned early on not to try to compete with elves as an elf, though, and so I never had any issues. I was the human cousin. I didn’t get in foot races or archery contests, but if somebody wanted a jar opened or something off a high shelf, I was there.
If you ever want to feel like the absolute pinnacle of rugged masculinity, a vacation with the elves is the way to go.
Just so long as you’re not picky or uptight about where the attention is coming from. As Marlot had said, things are different there.
“What are you taking this semester, Jamie?” Missy asked me on the way to the union.
“I’m not sure what I’m going for yet, so I tried to get some good general principle classes,” I said. “General thaumatology, lore survey, stuff like that.”
“Neat,” Missy said. “I’m in gen thaum, too. Maybe we’re in the same class? I’ve got Goldman on the Monday schedule.”
“Sorry, I’ve got it with Meinke on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” I said.
I wondered if it had been idle curiosity on Missy’s part when she asked Marlot if we were dating. I hadn’t come to college just to meet girls, but Marlot was right about the increased dating pool. There were possibilities here that I hadn’t had in high school.
I hadn’t been some kind of social outcast. I’d just never really gotten to know any of the girls the way I knew Marlot. I was behind the curve. By the time I started looking at them for dating potential, they’d already been looked at by others, and I was stuck in a box with a lot of nice, flattering labels on it: smart, funny, nice, cute.
Just not the right cute.
Or maybe it had been my imagination. Maybe if I’d been confident enough to press my luck a little more, I’d have memories of an awkward, fumbling night of embarrassment and shame with a huge argument afterwards to keep and treasure just like Marlot did.
Whatever.
The point was, there were a good three dozen girls on my floor alone who didn’t know the first thing about me, and a whole campus beyond them. Odds were pretty good that some of them were looking for smart.
“From what I hear,” Missy said, when we got to the union, “breakfast is the best meal to hit the dining hall. They’ve got real food in the mornings: bacon, ham, eggs, whatever. You can get more meat in a single sausage patty than you’ll find in the whole buffet the rest of the day.”
“How much do you want to bet it’s the meal the most people skip, too?” I asked.
“I’d like to check the other meal times out for myself, but if that’s how it is I’ll probably stick with the food court for lunch and dinner,” Marlot said.
“Yeah, or the convenience store,” Missy said.
“Convenient or not, I’m not using a punch up on a little egg salad sandwich when I could get a burger and fries,” Marlot said.
“Do they take the meal plan at the food court?” Missy asked.
“I think so,” I said.
A gaunt-looking guy with thinning hair wanded our cards at the entrance to the dining hall. One whiff of the air inside told me that Missy had been right about the quality of breakfast at least.
The dining room was a big open space with floor-to-ceiling windows all along the external wall, and a set of doors leading out to a patio with more tables and benches. The color scheme was institutional blue-gray. The floor tiles had little flecks of color to make them look vaguely like marble. Low walls topped with planters broke up the seating area and probably helped cut down on the noise.
The place was predictably deserted on the Saturday before classes started, but I reflected that it probably wouldn’t be hard to find seats on the busiest day.
I remembered in our high school cafeteria, the benches at the long tables had always been half empty because nobody wanted to sit next to anybody but their friends. Once they’d switched to smaller individual tables, it had actually gotten worse because two or three people would sit at a table meant for six people and nobody else would sit there. The tables nearest to where the least popular groups were sitting actually remained empty.
I’d always just shaken my head at the silliness of it, even while—if I’m going to be honest—I played along with it all. College students had better things to think about than who was sitting at the next table over, though.
“Ooh, is that guy making an omelet?” Marlot asked.
He was indeed. The first glass-covered section of the buffet line was full of raw ingredients for omelet filling. The next had tubs of hot selections: bacon, scrambled eggs, hashed browns, pancakes, and sausage patties. There were three other sections, but they were all empty. The dry cereal was in dispensers on a separate counter, and fresh fruit and baked goods were on what looked to be a salad bar.
“Well, I have to say, this is pretty good,” Marlot said when we sat down with our food.
“Told you,” Missy said.
“I believed you,” Marlot said.
“What surprises me,” I said, looking around at the few people in the room, “is how few non-humans there seem to be around.”
“Well, how many people does Harlowe hold?” Marlot asked. “Two hundred? Maybe less? Hardly anybody’s out and about yet, period.”
“Even yesterday, though,” I said. “When I was people-watching in the nexus, I didn’t see anybody showing up for Harlowe. Wait,” I amended. “One girl. But she looked more human than me, to tell the truth.”
“We saw non-humans at the welcome festival,” Marlot pointed out.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You were looking forward to having some company?” Missy asked.
“I was looking forward to not being the token any more,” I said. “Honestly, I just think of myself as a human with an interesting family. The fact that Marlot thinks it’s a big deal just tells you a lot about the town we came from. Ask any elf what I am and they’ll say I’m human. Of course, you’d have to find one first. If there’s a whole hall full of elves attached to the campus, I’d expect to see more of them around.”
“I thought I saw a gnome of some kind at the apple stand, yesterday,” Missy said. “And there was a nymph.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t a mermaid?” I asked.
“No, this was here, on land,” Missy said. “She was having a couple of lesbians lick those prism tattoos onto her body at the gay pride table. Actually, since you mentioned elves, there was one there, too. She was a half-elf, at least.”
“That was a guy, actually,” I said.
“Um, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t,” Missy said.
“There’s no talking to him,” Marlot said, grinning and rolling her eyes dramatically. “He thinks just because he’s got some tiny percentage of elven blood, it makes him some kind of expert.”
“Oh, shut up,” I said, though I didn’t really mind.
“He also doesn’t believe there’s nymphs here,” she added.
“She looked like a nymph,” Missy said. “Naked, kind of straw-colored hair? She looked, um, smarter than I expected for a nymph. I mean, she was enjoying the attention she was getting, but she was kind of focused, otherwise. It’s hard to explain what I mean.”
“Probably wasn’t a nymph,” I said.
The debate continued after we went back to the dorm and then died out unresolved, only to be settled at lunch time. There was a commotion up the path from us right as we we were heading out the back door of the nexus. Marlot punched me in the arm.
“Ow!” I said.
“Look!” she said, grabbing my arm with one hand and pointing with the other. “Nymphs!”
She was pointing at a group of students that had just rounded the corner at the end of Pelinor and were now on the same path as us, heading away from us. It included a pair of very healthy looking young women with amber waves of hair and not a stitch of clothing between them. I was seeing them from behind, but they were turning and looking around enough to give me some idea of their chest size.
“See, that’s the one I was talking about,” Missy said, pointing at the better looking of the two, who had a rainbow on her pert ass and color changing ribbons on her back, arms, and legs. Nobody could have called her unfeminine, but she had a nice, athletic look about her.
The other one was a bit on the softer side. Maybe I was a victim of the elven aesthetic, but an ass that round and jiggly didn’t do anything for me, either.
Bizarrely enough, she seemed to be wearing glasses. They were becoming rare enough on humans, with all the less obvious options for corrective enchantments, but they seemed really out of place for a nymph. Maybe she was a half-nymph? I didn’t honestly know if that was possible, but it could explain physical defects, and why she was here instead of in the middle of a corn field.
The commotion I’d mentioned was from a very loud dwarfblood who was whistling and hollering at the lunch time traffic, drawing even more attention than the nymphs did.
The group also included a skinny bald boy and a pretty blonde human girl, and in the middle of it all was a dark-haired girl who looked like she was about to implode from embarrassment. I was just thinking that she looked familiar when she turned her head towards the bigger of the two nymphs and I realized it was the girl I’d seen in the nexus the day before.
She didn’t look like she’d changed or even showered since the night before. It was a nice, warm day, but she was bundled up in an old jacket like it was armor.
Marlot was still pointing.
“Look, Jamie,” she said, seeking affirmation. “Nymphs. We told you.”
“Yeah okay, put your arm down and pick your jaw up,” I told Marlot. “You aren’t some hick.”
“Everybody’s pointing and staring,” she said. She had a point. Aside from the pretty blonde and the dark-haired girl, the group didn’t seem to mind the attention. “Anyway, there’s your non-human students. I told you that you just needed to wait for the campus to wake up.”
“I guess,” I said.
By mutual unspoken agreement, we let the other group go a little way ahead of us before we headed off. The little reddish-blonde-haired dwarfblood was really being obnoxious, harassing any girl who caught her eye. I wasn’t terribly surprised to see a campus guardsman approaching them. We took a little detour off the path at that point.
Missy insisted we were wasting our time and meal punches going to the dining hall during lunch, but Marlot wanted to at least try it once for each meal and I agreed that was a good plan.
It turned out that Missy’s secondhand estimation wasn’t completely on target. There was a chicken and rice dish without any chicken and a tuna casserole with no discernible tuna, but they also had burgers and ham sandwiches. We figured that we’d probably stick with the food court, but eating in the cafeteria every now and again wouldn’t condemn us to anemia.
The nymphs, the bald guy, the dwarfblood, and the dark-haired girl arrived after we’d gotten our food. There were some murmurs at their appearance, but that could have been for a few different reasons, some fairly benign. Now that I had a better look at him, the bald guy seemed to be some kind of snake person, at least if his eyes were any indication.
The blonde human girl caught up with them a bit later. For some reason, she just stood there until they told her to sit down. She sat on the bench facing outward, and I realized when I got a better look at her face that she was actually a very artfully made flesh golem. Again, maybe my tastes were more elven than I was willing to credit, but she looked really good to me; young, skinny, and blonde.
She also looked like somebody’d driven a wagon over her puppy.
“Now who’s pointing and staring?” Marlot asked me.
“I’m not pointing,” I said.
“So you admit to staring.”
“I admit to nothing,” I said.
“What’s that on the emo girl’s forehead?” Missy asked. “More temporary tattoos?”
“Runes,” I said. “She’s a golem.”
“I didn’t know you could bring a golem here,” Missy said.
“I don’t think you can,” I said. “She must be a free one.”
“I’ve never met a free golem,” Marlot said.
“Neither have I,” I said. “I wonder how free they are?”
“Ooh, are we thinking of asking her out?” Marlot asked.
“Oh, look at her,” Missy said. “There’s no one to ask. There’s nobody home there.”
Was that jealousy? Maybe she was interested in me. Anyway, I hated to admit it, but it looked like she was right. The golem girl was responding to the others, but it looked like rote.
Anyway, Marlot had been right, too. I was staring. I tore my eyes off the group of Harlowe students and we chatted about our classes for a bit. I looked for any more signs of Missy’s interest, but there was nothing I could pick up on.
“Oh, wow, I wonder what’s eating her?” Marlot said suddenly, her head whipping around. I followed her movement to see the black-haired Harlowite darting for the patio doors.
“Dunno,” Missy said. “I wonder what her deal is, in general. I mean, is she even in their dorm?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I saw her going in there yesterday.”
“Maybe they do let humans in?” Marlot said.
“Don’t know,” I said, and that was the end of that conversation.
“Hey, Jamie,” Missy said a bit later. “Jen was putting up a poster for some stupid dance next Saturday. I don’t really know anybody else, so, if you wanted to…?”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
Why not? It wasn’t high school anymore, she seemed nice, and she wasn’t bad looking.
“‘Why not?’, he says,” Marlot said. “And they say romance is dead…”
“No, that’s chivalry,” I said. “So she can pay.”
@Luddite
We don’t know how wide the hallways are. We don’t know how big the stairwell is. The girls’ bathroom could be two or three times as large. Institutions tend to have wider hallways and bigger stairwells. I think they have to, by law, in case of fires.
The only things I find on the bottom level, aside from the large lounge area, are the stairwell, a laundry room, and a front desk. The landry room and the front desk could easily take up much less room then the bathrooms on the top floor.
There might be a room that has the MU equivalent of a fuse box and water heaters, but it doesn’t have to. Also, you didn’t subtract out the hallways when figuring the interior space, or take the stairwell into consideration. Taking your assumed numbers, with 6′ hallways:
100-12=88
882=7744
or how about 10′ hallways:
100-20=80
802=6400
And why would there be fewer toilets/urinals? Do you shower more than you pee? In my first dorm at college there were more toilets. The way you stated your calculations doesn’t take walking space in consideration. How are you going to get anywhere? Teleport? My suggestion is to assume everything in the interior of the top floor is twice as big (if not bigger) than you think it should be.
Also, besides all that, we don’t know how much sitting space (chairs/couches/etc.) there is in the top floor lounge. Maybe people don’t what to sit on the floor.
ARG!
88*88=7744
80*80=6400
@AE: I was wondering… So far, 4 out of the 5 chapters of MToMU have been posted around noon. Is that going to be the regular update schedule with yesterdays chapter being the exception to the rule, or do you not have a regular schedule worked out for this story (yet)?
@Luddite:
I’m not “saving” anything here.
“annoying” is right to point out that institutional buildings have institutionally wide hallways, but there’s more to it than that. From your latest post, it seems as though you’re looking at this as an absolutely simple and straightforward exercise in the most efficient use of space, as though we were playing Tetris or planning a space shuttle launch instead of laying out a dorm room.
Let’s look at two things: the size of the lounge and the size of the bathrooms.
First, the size of the lounge…
Fact: The entire population of the world could fit into Rhode Island.
Fact: It wouldn’t want to.
Leaving aside all considerations of how much space the lounge takes up, the floor lounge was not designed or furnished with the assumption that all eighty of the assumed maximum occupancy would feel like using it at once. Rather than being a Tetris-style pinnacle of the efficiency of space use, it’s laid out like a casual sitting, food preparation, and eating environment. I don’t have a map of it drawn up yet, but you can assume there’s one or more tables, which occupy space in which no one can sit, and at least one countertop area, which, likewise. There’s going to be a TV area, which will have furniture facing the TV and empty space in between… obviously, for purposes of an assembly in which a few people are talking and others are listening, this space could be “reclaimed”, but the people within it would either be standing or seated on the floor.
The lounge downstairs was intended to have many dozens of people comfortably seated and contained within it at once.
Second, the size of the bathrooms.
Fact: The bathrooms on my floor in my first college dorm were hardly Sybaritic, but they still took up more space in total and had far more open space than the lounge did.
Why?
Institutional bathrooms are comprised chiefly of Pure Elemental Hardness and Pure Elementla Slipperiness. From a “How can we maximize the chance that we’ll make it through the school year without somebody cracking open their head and dying?” point of view, you want a lot of wide open spaces.
You want people to have room to walk around in without having walls and other fixtures in head-cracking distance if they take a tumble. You want the showers in their own separate area, where there can be a reasonable expectation of Perpetual Floor Wetness, and you want the sinks in their own separate area so that people aren’t stepping from the one and slipping and hitting the other.
Also, unlike most public restrooms (in a fast food place, for instance), people are going to be brushing their teeth and such on a daily basis, so you don’t want the toilets too close to the sinks, because, ew.
Furthermore, empty space aside, each shower does take up more space than you’re likely assuming. The “plumbing” in the dorms consists of magically refilling and self-regulating cisterns/reservoirs in the walls for each of the water-using appliances. No, this isn’t something I’m pulling out of my ass to “save” or “make myself right.” It’s been established in the other story, through Mackenzie’s narration.
…
All that said, perhaps “could fit at once” wasn’t the best word choice. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable use of language to say “we won’t all fit” when you mean “we won’t all be comfortable”, but if the wording is honestly that much of an issue for you, I’ll rework it just to save future arguments. I’ll change it to say the lounge “would not accommodate” seventy or so people at once. Just like Rhode Island could hold the world, my own apartment here could hold seventy people… but in either case, it wouldn’t be very accommodating.
I already have a stress headache and a bout of insomnia related to people on the other story arguing all the ways in which the statement “if you swing something harder, it will move faster” are apparently wrong. I’m not going to keep arguing about the number of college students that can dance on the head of a pin.
@RdV:
Actually, only one went up around noon. three of the others went up around midnight, and one went up at around five or six in the morning. (The first chapter shows five or six, but was closer to midnight… I just adjusted the time zone setting of the blog after posting it.
So I went back and reread the lunch bit in OF-ToMU (yes I’m stealing that term for now) and I’m a bit confused. Here Jamie mentions that the nymphs group enters and he directly notice that the blond young woman is not a woman but a flesh golem. Although in OF-ToMU Two was sent to pay the fine that Mackenzie had been issued and didn’t arrive until a bit later.
As it reads in here it sounds like Two arrived at the same time as the others though.
Oh and just because it has been mentioned and we all wish to know who the dead fish guy was (so we can make this fictional and awful person burn in a very fictional hell).
If Jame knows anything about it we’ll know soon enough, as it happened on Sunday (and it being Saturday now in MoarToMU) if we’ll get to know more about it we’ll get to know it soon.
Wow.
I wish this story was available in the MUniverse so Mack could find a copy.
Seriously compare the first floor meeting here with the one in Harlow: here they have welcome packs on the table in case anyone missed them, a talk about safety with a sign up sheet for buddies to walk with after dark (obviously Monsters don’t need protection) and, generally speaking, two RAs who actually sound like they know what they’re doing.
Then the whole thing ends with a warning to any guys going over to Harlowe to bring their own rings because “the girls there don’t carry them” (!)
I’ll accept that the last could just be Brad being an Idiot especially as the RA-whose-name-is-not-Janet seemed disgusted (and as he assumed only guys would need to know) but still it shows how much more care goes into the other Dorms and what the people in positions of relative authority think of Harlowe.
For the Harlowe meeting they went round the room in the same way, but where a person was from wasn’t deemed important, just their race (imagine that in RL), there were no welcome packs or similar and their orientation advice consisted of “Read the Handbook” and a very fast summation of some points therein by Kiersta the Queen of Um.
@Clara: Ooooh, good catch! I should have re-read more closely. I’ll need to tweak this.
@Luddite: In order to make sure I’m not talking out of my ass, I’ve used the finest drafting tool I have available to me (MS Paint with zoom turned up all the way and “show grid” turned on) to start a rough layout of the floor, assuming dorm rooms 10 feet wide by sixteen long (not that the length matters, in terms of figuring out the middle bit), and some reasonable assumptions about stair width when you’re expecting streams of people to be going in both directions at once, and what I think are some conservative estimates of the number of bathroom fixtures for up to 40 people apiece… an estimate of bathroom stalls being three feet wide and the shower stalls being four by four… and though my headache’s stopping me before I’m done laying out the bathrooms, I have to say, it’s shaping up about the way I pictured it.
If anything, the bathrooms are turning out more cramped than I pictured. Though still perfectly usable.
Of course that comment would have made more sense if it was back one chapter
@AE:
Yay! As-yet unnoticed typos!
“‘Even yesterday, though,’ I said. ‘When I was people watching in the nexus, I didn’t see anybody showing up for Harlowe.’” Now that I’ve posted this, I realize Jamie’s saying he was watching people, not that he was people, or that he was with people and forgot a word. Granted I am a decent fan of hyphens, but maybe “people-watching” would be a little clearer?
“There was a commotion up the path We’d just headed out the back door of the nexus when Marlot suddenly punched me in the arm.” Missing period or sentence fragment? You be the judge!
Apologies, I actually got a good night’s sleep and got rid of the bags under my eyes. It would appear that sleep satisfaction causes as much giddiness as sleep deprivation…
So, I haven’t read all of the comments so far (more than half, though), but I’m thinking that Jamie is going to end up as a Ranger. Knowing all about trees, picking up on people’s lineage, the undecided major — it all seems very ranger-y.
Just a thought.
Hg
All of this MUness is great and Arf! I found the page pretty early but I had an appointment I needed to get to.
Jamie seems to be a very interesting character and maybe more then the closed minded Mackenzie. He seems to be a near polar opposite of her.
The last line of the story is great though. Normally with great writing comes little sense of humor but it seems AE has a funny bone that can make Rita Rudner look down in shame.
@AE
You said what I was trying to say, but better. It was late (even for me) and Luddite was pissing me off. I should have mentioned tables; we had one in our lounge. I understood what you meant when you said they wouldn’t fit (you can put a lot of people in a VW Bug or a phone booth, but it won’t be comfortable). The majority of my dorm life was in a dorm that was at about half capacity (maybe 2/3, depending on how you figure it), and even then the lounge was crowded during dorm meetings. Dorm lounges simply aren’t designed to have all the students in them at once.
Until next rant.
@annoying:
Thanks. I said probably a lot more than actually needed to be said. The exact layout of the dorm will be fleshed out in the story more as it actually becomes relevant (considering a few people were already saying the amount of description packed in already bordered on the tedious, I think I made the right call not narrating the entire floor plan)… but I had it worked out in my head in enough detail before I started that I know it makes sense, and Luddite’s continued objection and his “nice save” remark struck me as being overly critical.
I probably wouldn’t have posted such a huge chunk of text, but I’d had an extremely bad night the night before, that had already been exacerbating by people nitpicking on the other site.
So, um, does this mean no update for today then?
Whenever someone ‘Arfs’ on MU, I’m always reminded of the RFED phrase used by Delvers (Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies?).
I think it’s safe to assume that all main characters are virgins unless otherwise stated. After all, all main characters are pure and kind and decent huma–errr, people beings!
@Amelia
Well, race probably tells most people where you’re from. After all, pretty much everywhere else in MU, you know that they’re human (or elf, in the elf hall, or dwarf in the dwarf hall, etc.). After all, most races don’t seem to be breeding like rabbits like humans do, and humans seem to be going for racial-superiority-via-breeding by breeding with and out the competition (case in point, more half-ogres now than full bloods).
Also, the Harlowe RA Kiersta is a bitch. She hates being an RA for Harlowe, and, frankly, most of her charges probably don’t even like her, either. It also seems part of the administration’s agenda to keep the Harlowites IN. Doesn’t make much sense to let them know about going out after dark.
Lastly, though, you have to remember. Many of the Harlowe students don’t look human. In fact, some of them are downright scary looking (Belinda, for example). Now, we know how frightening humans (in our world) can look in different lighting–imagine running into something eight foot tall, bristling with muscles, and carrying a big-ass axe.
It probably wouldn’t look good for MU if one student killed another by ‘accident’. Especially if it were a human student killing a non-human.
Lastly, what’s interesting is that Two (and Mackenzie, I believe) bother stated that going out after dark was prohibited. In this scene, however, the RAs even plan for their students going out after night. Heck, the martial students even provide escorts! That points to the fact that it’s school supported, and that sort of hypocrasy is…interesting.
@AE
You’re welcome. I like that you’re trying to describe the campus more. I’d personally like to see an aerial view of the campus with the buildings labeled (like I said before, I’m a visual person), but it’s not necessary. You have a good idea of what the layout is.
I’ve thought about describing buildings I’ve been in; I don’t think it’s as easy as most people seem to think. Giving enough detail so it makes sense, but not so much that it becomes boring is a hard balance. I challenge the complainers to try and describe their own houses with that in mind.
At least you broke your text up into paragraphs; I forget to sometimes.
(Don’t know where to break up the following.) 
And say to the complainers on the other site: “fulcrum”. Seriously, people. Beyond the surprise factor, the enhanced strength, faster=harder (usually), and, yes, the magic, there’s a pivot point not just a straight hit. And, it’s fiction, science doesn’t always work in fiction, even in science fiction sometimes. I don’t personally think that’s a problem here (science and magic work differently (even if they resemble each other), and that’s ok); the story has a set of rules it follows, and where they differ from our own they are explained. I don’t care why she’s faster/stronger; it’s been established that she is. I might idly try to figure out why (and quite possibly be wrong), but that won’t change the fact that she is. ESTABLISHED FACT, MOVE ON! I think some people are only happy when they are complaining. (And I might be one.
)
@AE
Or you could say, “I am the author, I am god!” I don’t see you doing that, though.
@ 22, Jon
I’m hoping we’re gona see mroe of this story’s future from Mackenzies tale lol.
Anyway, i really like this as an expansion on the world of mu and as a story in and of itself.
Keep them both up! hehe
EDIT?:
“Look!” she said, grabbing my arm with one hand and pointing at the other. “Nymphs!”
Should it be “grabbing my arm with one hand and pointing *with* the other?”
Forgive me if it’s already been pointed out.
James sees golem Two.
At first he thinks she’s pretty,
Then sees her blank face.