More Tales of MU

…or, Honey, Honey

“Bingo tonight,” Marlot said at lunch. We were back to the two of us.

“What?”

“In the union,” she said. “Bingo game.”

“Where’d you hear about that?”

“There are posters up everywhere,” she said. “Or there were. They went up Sunday but most of them seem to have been torn down. There’s half of one by the vending cupboards, though.”

“Oh, I must have missed that,” I said.

“Well, you’ve been busy being a deer.”

“Yeah, I think I’m going to give it a pass.”

“You have some important grazing to do?”

“You’re not going to give that a rest, are you?” I asked.

“Think about how you’re going to explain that to your mom,” she said.

“It’s an elven cultural thing,” I said. “Maybe it won’t need explaining. Or her grandpa can explain it to her. And me, for that matter. I’m sure Iason left some parts out.”

“You’re remarkably sanguine about that idea.”

“I just mean he wasn’t thinking in terms of—well, he wasn’t thinking,” I said. “He might know everything there is to know about the bracelet but not think to mention parts of it to me. Or he might not know everything and never think to ask anybody.”

“Again with the remarkable sanguinity,” Marlot said.

I fingered the wooden bracelet.

“It is what it is,” I said. “And Iason is what he is. I like him enough to overlook a bit.”

“If someone welded a wedding ring to my finger, I wouldn’t say, ‘oh, hum, I guess I’ll wait and see if someday I feel like marrying him’ before I did something about it,” Marlot said.

“That isn’t at all what this is.”

“My mind would not change if it turned out the ring also turned me into a giant riding frog.”

“I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one, Mar,” I said. “It isn’t that big a deal to me. It’s hard to explain, but it’s almost cool enough to make up for the way he sprang it on me.”

“Almost.”

“Yeah, just almost,” I said. “But the remainder’s not a big deal.”

“Okay. If you say so. Sure you don’t want to do bingo?”

“I hate bingo,” I said. “There’s no strategy to it.”

“Sure there is,” Marlot said. “You just make sure to pick a card which has the numbers they’re going to call arranged in a line.”

“What if they don’t call those numbers?” I asked. I knew the answer that was coming. We’d never had this conversation before, but it was the set up to a familiar, all-purpose Marlot joke.

“Then you don’t pick that card,” she said.

Any worry that I would be chewed out for skipping my etherscaping class disappeared five minutes after class started. At that point, a third of the seats were empty, including the professor’s. He’d written instructions on the board: “continue work from Monday.” A quick look at some of the other students’ balls—workstations—showed me that the work from Monday had been continuing the work from Friday.

I got the sense that it was even more of a beginner’s class than I had thought. The suite of developer spells it required was the most expensive thing I’d bought for a class, but it almost seemed like I could have skipped it and used the orb’s basic functions. All we’d done so far—and all we seemed to be doing for the foreseeable future—was creating a basic personal-style page and adding the various features to it one at a time.

The instructor came into the classroom halfway through the period. By this point the room was half empty. He looked around like he was surprised anybody was still there, then said, “Don’t mind me,” and went to get something from his desk.

Oh, well. I’d take an easy grade.

Hall, the lore professor, was a bit more conscientious.

“Ah, Mr. Bowman?” he said when he took roll. “I trust you had some particularly pressing reason for not being in class on Monday?”

“Uh, would you settle for trusting that it won’t happen again?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said. “I thrive upon continual disappointment.”

No real consequences for skipping classes. At least, no trumped-up bullshit ones. If I somehow fell behind on my page weaving project or I missed something on a quiz because I didn’t hear Hall say something, that would be on me.

Marlot asked me again if I wanted to join her for bingo, at dinner. I demurred, telling her I had things that needed taking care of. I told myself she would have given me the same knowing smirk even if I hadn’t actually been talking about masturbating. Technically, that meant she didn’t for sure that’s what I meant.

I spent Wednesday night alone in my room, without even the presence of Violet to keep me company. I was keyed up, meaning horny, but my imagination seemed to be failing me.

I’d seen Violet with her shirt off. After letting her peek in my mind, it felt weird to fantasize about her when she wasn’t there. Like that was some kind of violation. None of the other girls on the floor were holding my interest, and having been with two flesh-and-blood women took some of the fun out of my generic ones from central casting. I wasn’t about to get it up for Missy, and I felt conflicted about Barley.

Iason it was, then.

Not a terrible choice. He was the hottest guy I’d ever been with. If Barley had been anybody but a nymph, he’d be the hottest person, period. He might have been anyway. It was hard for Barley’s curves to compete with the tattoos, the compact muscles, and the chiseled marble cock. If she’d only had a cock, that would be—weird. A little hot, but probably too weird to handle.

Iason it was, and it was pretty fucking epic for a solo adventure.

I had a lot of pent-up energy, after the events of Monday-going-into-Tuesday. If he had shown up at my door wanting to ride me, in either or both senses of the word, I would have jumped at it. He had to show up, though. I wasn’t going to go crawling after him.

I had a feeling I’d see him Friday if I saw him at all before the weekend. His pride would make him put it off. I’d said “see you Friday” first, so he could even push the whole thing off on me, if only in his head.

I wore myself out and fell asleep early, then woke up on Thursday morning long before lunch but with nothing to do. I started flipping through my etherscaping textbook, to the parts we almost certainly wouldn’t get to during the semester. You know, the stuff I actually wanted to learn about. As the previous night had shown, I wasn’t above taking matters into my own hands. I took the book and the pouch with my development kit in it and headed for the library to find a crystal ball in a quiet corner somewhere. I could have gone to one of the ball rooms, but I wanted some privacy in case I ended up looking like an idiot.

When people first started putting information on the ethernet, they’d done it with pages. Take a page out of a book, dump it into the near-ethereal, wrap a silver cord around it so you can find it again later. Simple, but not really convenient or dynamic. More complicated but more useful was reshaping the ether into the form of a page, which was what we were doing in class.

If you could shape the ether into a page, of course, you could shape it into other things: shapes, images. With the right kind of knowledge—or tools that provided a reasonable substitute—you could even make little automata. That was what I was interested in. That was the real reason I’d taken the class.

The tavern in Agora had tried bringing in a couple of ball games once, but they’d never caught on with the clientele. Too new, too complicated, and it took more concentration than your average barfly had to control a little guy jumping around in the ether. They’d only been there for one summer, and I’d only caught the first and last week of them, but the idea had stuck with me.

Nothing in the textbook mentioned games, but it did have a section on interactive elements and another one on forming figures. I started with the latter. It seemed like it would be easier. I had a vivid imagination, after all.

I found out pretty fast how far that took me. Being able to make something appear in my head didn’t translate into making it appear in the ball. My goal of making a dragon appear and making her flap her wings turned into making a dragon, and then making a guy, and then making a smiley face.

By the end of two hours, I had a lumpy stick figure that was walking in place, and I was damned proud of it. I couldn’t wait to tell Marlot at lunch. I ended up being distracted, though.

Mack chose that day to bring her human boy to the food court. I guess she was fed up with the no-nookie rules in the cafeteria. She didn’t get it on under the tables or anything, but she practically made love to a dipping bucket of honey while her poor boyfriend watched. He was glowering at her, but he was also smitten. I’d have loved to do something about the growing problem he had in his pants, but he only had eyes for her.

I could imagine a lot of reasons why he might look so resentful. I couldn’t imagine any why he’d put up with her. Her little bits of exhibitionism—including her performance with the honey packet—were impressive but they could hardly be worth it.

“He’s got it bad,” Marlot said.

“Yeah,” I said. “They were all over each other at the dance. Now she’s not even looking at him.”

“They were at bingo,” Marlot said. “They were all over each other there, too. Not that I’m, you know, any kind of an expert or anything, but if lesbian were a class, I’m pretty sure she’d be flunking it. Oh, that golem was there, too. She won a teddy bear. It was actually kind of cute.”

“The teddy bear?”

“The whole thing. She was really into it,” Marlot said. “It’s refreshing to see somebody who’s serious about bingo. Too many people treat it as a casual thing. Also, I’m pretty sure she ate twelve cupcakes all by herself, which is some kind of an accomplishment.”

“You’re talking about the twiggy little thing with the head bands, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t picture that,” I said. “I don’t think she has room for twelve cupcakes. You could stack them up one on top of the other and she could hide behind them.”

“I saw it and I can’t picture it,” Marlot said. “They were practically disappearing. But she covered her cards like a motherfucker. She was like some kind of bingo-playing automaton. In fact, she was exactly like some kind of bingo-playing automaton.”

“Is there a female form of automaton?” I asked. “Automatess? Automatrix? Considering how many female golems there are, it seems like there would be a word for it.”

“Maybe there isn’t because it’s a default assumption,” she said.

“Uh, is it really?” I asked.”Apart from her, most of the golems I’ve seen have been male.”

“Most of the golems we’ve seen have been sexless,” she said. “We just file them away as male because they’re big and muscular. If somebody gets a house golem—which is what she probably was—chances are it’s going to be female.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “It’s kind of gross if you think about it.”

“It’s very gross, and most people don’t,” Marlot said.

“I can’t really blame them,” I said. “I should get going. I’ve got my blah-matology lecture.”

“Fun fun fun,” Marlot said.

“Not really, but after that is Hitting People With Pointy Things 101,” I said. “That should actually be fun.”

“Oh, did you transfer out of Getting Your Limbs Broken For Beginners?”

“No, same one,” I said. “It’s actually a multidisciplinary class.”

“That’s way too technical for me,” she said. “And way too disciplined. I’ll see you after, if you survive.”

“Yeah. See you then.”

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Cross-reference TOMU chapter 108.