More Tales of MU

…or, The Prologue’s Last Gleaming

Even with my coaching, Marlot still beat Missy handily, but it was a good game all the same.

Well, I had fun, anyway. It seemed like Missy did, too.

We all went back and forth about whether we wanted to just go to the food court that evening, or give the dining hall another try. In the end, we decided to stick with the plan of seeing how each meal was at least once.

There was a larger group from Harlowe there for dinner. The golem, the loudmouthed dwarfblood, the snake man, and the dark-haired girl were all still there. The nymphs were gone, but now a half-cyclops, a sylph, a girl who had to be at least half ogre, a kobold, and a chubby girl with horns on her head were also there. I couldn’t tell what sex the kobold was. I knew it had something to do with the way they wore their vests, but I could never remember how that went.

I couldn’t help noticing that the sylph and the half-cyclops were giving the dark-haired girl dirty looks when she wasn’t looking. I also couldn’t help noticing that she didn’t seem to have any food. She looked pretty uncomfortable. She’d cleaned herself up a bit, though, which was good.

Well, it wasn’t any of my business, anyway, but it made me feel better for her. She’d apparently just taken a little more time to unwind from the trip. It turned out that she did know how to use makeup, after all.

I think my eye kept catching on her because of the underlying ugliness of the scene I’d witnessed when she first arrived. At the time, I’d just thought the freckly guy was a dick. I still did. But, I was starting to think of the incident itself as the first in a growing list of little warning signs.

I wasn’t naive. I knew that casual racism could be found everywhere. That didn’t mean I had to like it, though. It definitely didn’t mean I was comfortable with it.

“Ooh, look at the pretty sylph,” Marlot said, with no self-consciousness or awareness that other people might be self-conscious, when the sylph went up to get her third set of servings.

She wasn’t wrong by much, though; the sylph was beautiful. Apart from being by far and away the thinnest girl at the table, her blue-tinged skin and double set of arms gave her an exotic touch. Her hair was silvery blue, with darker blue highlights and a jeweled tiara setting the whole thing off.

“Oh, why hello there, exposed cooter,” Missy said. “Could that dress be any shorter? I’ve seen dowsers with less ass-crack showing than that.”

“Maybe she couldn’t afford any more fabric?” Marlot said. “It looks pretty fancy.”

“Hey, guys,” Juliana said, approaching our table. “Mind if I sit here? I don’t recognize anybody else, and I don’t want to eat alone.”

“Sure,” Missy said.

“Thanks,” Juliana said, putting down a tray with a salad and a cup of soup. “You guys talking about the sylph? Her hair is a total glam job. Look at it out of the corner of your eye and you’ll see. I bet it’s not even that long. I saw a dog girl earlier, though, that had really beautiful hair, up in these elaborate braids. I can guarantee you it was all real, too. I saw it up close.”

“Canids don’t really have hair,” I said. “They have fur.”

“Well, this one didn’t have fur,” Juliana said. “She had hair.” She cupped her hands over her head. “Up here. Gorgeous skin everywhere else. I asked her who did her hair, and she said she does it herself. So, I asked her if she was in the glamour and design program, but she’s apparently majoring in applied enchantments. Such a waste of talent.”

“Y’know, when I was here for early orientation, the tour guy told my parents the non-humans had their own eating arrangements,” Missy said.

I hadn’t heard anything about that. Everything I’d gotten had only mentioned the dining hall, the food court, the nexus store, and a sandwich and coffee shop by the towers.

“They were probably talking about the elves and dwarves,” I said. “It doesn’t bother you that they’re eating here, does it?”

“Well, no,” she said. “Not really. It’s just a little weird. I don’t even know what half of those people are.”

“Legs and hips,” Marlot said.

“What?” Missy asked.

“Well, the bottom half of them, anyway,” Marlot said. Missy and Juliana just stared at her. Being used to her weirdness, I hid my smirk. “The top half of them would be torsos, arms, and heads. And boobs, on some of them.”

“Huh?” Juliana asked.

“Forget about it,” I said. “Hey, do any of you know that girl Kira at all?”

“The Pelagian?” Juliana said.

“I’m pretty sure the term they prefer is Argenti,” Missy said. “And is she? I didn’t want to assume.”

I had my own thoughts about her coloration, but I kept them to myself.

“She’s in a single room, I think,” Marlot said. “Did you notice she doesn’t carry a weapon?”

“I didn’t see one at the meeting,” I said. “But a lot of people didn’t bring their weapons downstairs.”

“Didn’t she say she’s Anankan?” Juliana asked. “I thought they couldn’t carry weapons.”

“Well, that’s a bunch of shit,” Missy said. “If they don’t like the rules, they shouldn’t come here.”

“I think anybody can apply for an exemption, but it’s not automatic,” I said.

“I applied for one, before I realized my staff counted,” Marlot said.

I looked at her in surprise.

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“It was no big thing,” she said. “It’s just… I was already taking my staff everywhere. I didn’t see the point to getting a sword or something.”

“Oh,” I said. “Anyway, do you guys really think that Kira’s an Anankhan?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s what she said,” Juliana said.

“I wasn’t really paying attention,” Missy said. “So, are you a glamour major, Jules?”

“Double major,” she said. “G&D and illusion.”

“I never really figured out the difference,” Missy said.

“Nobody does,” Juliana said. “I don’t know why. It’s pretty simple. Illusion is creating unreal or quasi-real constructs, and glamour is just messing with the appearance characteristics of an existing object. They really don’t have much to do with each other, but people always link them together and so most people who are in one or the other are kinda anal about which one’s better.” She shrugged. “The way I see it, knowing both will make me more versatile and give me more options, with anything I want to do. And let’s face it, neither one of them’s exactly high sorcery.”

For the first time, Juliana was impressing me a little bit as a person. Then, I didn’t know her that well, but her first impression hadn’t been great. Anyway, she wouldn’t be the last person to throw an elven dick joke at me.

“So, Bowman,” she said, with a look on her face that just told me I was going to regret my moment of mental charity. “When you see a tree, can you just feel what it is?”

“Shut your racist mouth, you whore,” Marlot said, before I’d formulated an answer. “I can’t believe you just said that. Doesn’t this college have some kind of policy on hate speech?”

Juliana just sat there with her mouth opening and closing like a fish. Missy looked almost as stunned. After about ten seconds, Juliana picked up her tray and moved to another table.

“I thought you said he could,” Missy said to Marlot.

“Oh, he can,” Marlot said. “But that doesn’t mean she isn’t a racist whore for saying it.”

“That’s a bit hypocritical,” Missy said.

“What, just because nobody else is allowed to be a hypocrite, I can’t be one, too?” Marlot asked.

“You kind of have to get to know Marlot,” I told Missy. “Though, on that subject, Mar, it would be nice if you let people get to know you before you pulled that shit on them. Unless your goal all of a sudden isn’t to meet new people and make new friends.”

“Trick people into liking me,” Marlot said. “Check!”

I sighed.

After dinner, we watched TV in my room for a while. I had a pretty sweet set-up: my mom had built a loft for the bed, and I had an old couch underneath it. The rooms in Pelinor all came with cubby shelving in one of the walls, and I’d put the TV in there. It worked out well.

With a warmer box, a fridge, and a sink, I could have holed up there for most of the school year, but that would have defeated the purpose of getting such a great room to begin with.

Because the shelves were freshly stocked with everything my mother had thought I might want or need, we made pop corn and hot chocolate. Marlot being a caffeine junkie, we went down to the corner store twice before they closed so she could get herself another sixty-four ounce pop.

It was a good time. We tried to teach Missy a couple of card games, but you can’t really learn how to play one except by playing it and she was nervous about joining in before she knew how to play.

I didn’t try to raise the subject of Kira again. I had my suspicions about her, but that’s all they were, and I didn’t even know what it would mean if I was right.

There weren’t any laws against drow in the Imperium, as far as I knew, and even if there were, she’d be accorded full rights even with far less human ancestry than she had. The Khersian insistence on a strict interpretation of “human blood, human soul” resulted in a huge outcry any time any type of creature with discernable human ancestry was classed as a monster.

“So, what do you want to do tomorrow?” Missy asked as the evening wore on. I took it as a good sign that she still wanted to hang with us, and possibly that she was a little insecure. She wanted to make sure she was included.

I kind of wished that the dance I’d agreed to go to with her wasn’t a whole week away. That would make things awkward with all the girls I totally expected to throw themselves at me. No, but seriously, even just having a date between friends might complicate things if I did run into another prospect. It would probably be best to focus on her until I was sure where we’d end up.

“Hmm?” Missy said, when neither of us had answered after a while. I’d been thinking; Marlot looked like she was falling asleep.

“I don’t know about either of you, but I am totally sleeping in,” she said. “And actually, I do know about you, Missy, because if you wake me up before eleven I’m going to pelt you with shoes.”

“Yeah, I probably will, too,” Missy said.

“We can see if anybody wants to get in on a card game,” I said. “Or go explore campus some.”

“We could check out the woods,” Marlot said.

“You could teach me trees!” Missy said.

“How about we just take it easy?” I said. “Play some cards. If we attract anybody else, we can move over to the game room and get some darts games going. Or bowling. Whatever.”

As it happened, “whatever” pretty much summed it up. Except for the later start, Sunday was a lot like Saturday. We did hang out in the lounge for a bit, and got enough interest to play a few games of cups. Missy actually joined in for one. Mostly, though, people seemed to be doing their own thing or hanging out in the little groups they’d already formed themselves.

It wasn’t an exciting weekend, but then, it was only the first one. It did have one effect, though: by the end of it, the dorm, union, and grounds around them no longer felt like unfamiliar territory. The room I’d worked so hard to put together with my parents felt like it was mine. I felt like I belonged.

In just a single weekend, I had become a college student.

Just in time for class, too.

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