Tales of MU

In Which Mackenzie Has Bigger Things To Worry About

The problem with explaining what had happened was that the further I got from the building, the less clear I was on what had actually been going on… maybe I had been wandering for that long? I hadn’t exactly been counting the minutes, and it seemed like it must have taken a while for me to get as worked up as I did.

I had definitely been afraid of something, but in retrospect I wasn’t sure what.

Or maybe I hadn’t been afraid of anything in particular. Maybe I’d just been freaking out… whether that was the whole truth or not it seemed like the best explanation I could muster.

“Sorry,” I told Nicki. “Something in there just freaked me out, I guess, in a big way. I should probably should talk to Professor Stone before class on Wednesday. Do you happen to know where his office is?”

“Yeah, I’ve been there a couple of times,” Nicki said.

“…it’s in the Emily Center, isn’t it?” I said.

“No, it’s back in the admin building,” she said… the one building I wanted to go into less than the design center. “Kind of out of the way, but he said it was closer to his quarters? Oh, wait… that was his old office.”

“And his new one’s in the design building?”

“No, but I don’t remember where, off hand,” she said. “I just remember that at the end of last year he was happy that he wouldn’t have to be back in the admin building any more… sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I can look him up. It’s not like he’s going to be there right now, anyway. I mean, he’s probably still in the classroom.”

“And you can’t go in and talk to him now,” Nicki said. “I understand. Well, I don’t… but I understand that you can’t? Hey, if you don’t want to go in and find him, we could always wait out here and catch him when he leaves?”

“I… don’t think I want to do that,” I said. “Because then I’d have to explain why I’m not going in, and… yeah. I think I just need some time to get my head clear before I go get my ass kicked in my next class. I’d rather try to explain why I couldn’t find a classroom I’ve been to half a dozen times than explain to Coach Callahan why I don’t have my head screwed on straight enough to fight.”

“Callahan?” Nicki said, her eyes practically bugging out of her skull.

“You’ve had her classes?”

“What? No, I don’t have a death wish!” Nicki said quickly, then just as quickly added, “though I’ve heard you’re one of her special favorites.”

“Yeah, think about what else you’ve heard about her and try to imagine how much easier that makes things,” I said. “Though she hardly ever actually kills students… on purpose… anymore. Anyway, I’ll see you in class on Wednesday, I hope.”

“Yeah..”

“Or sooner,” I added, when I remembered that Nicki had both a very literal and somewhat pessimistic way of determining if she was welcome. “If you want to eat with us or hang out or something. I know everyone had a good time in town on Saturday.”

“Yeah… it seemed like it, didn’t it?” she said.

“Yeah.”

After we drifted apart, I decided that the best thing to do was to find out where Professor Stone’s office was now. It was a little thing and not something that was immediately useful, but it would be a step toward doing something about the problem.

After all, I wasn’t going to figure out what the hell had happened to keep me out of class on my own… I didn’t have enough information, and no new information was going to pop into my head if I kept going back over the same ground. If it had something to do with security precautions or some enchantment on the building or something, the professor would have to know about it, and would probably be able to make sure I didn’t get caught in it next time.

It turned out that Professor Stone’s office was listed in the Archimedes Center, lower level. I didn’t think that was closer to the design building than the admin building was… but then, Nicki had said he liked his office to be close to home. It didn’t make a lot of sense in horizontal terms, but he was at least half dwarven, and there was dwarven real estate under the campus.

I noted that his office hours for Tuesday would make it easy for me to pop down to see him after lunch, which we tended to eat in the Arch anyway. I sent him a quick a-mail apologizing for my absence and saying that I’d like to speak to him about it, then worked on pushing the whole thing aside so I could give Coach Callahan’s class the attention that she demanded.

I wouldn’t have to worry about the stupid building again until Wednesday, I couldn’t do anything more about my absence until tomorrow, and I only had one class left to worry about today. I didn’t exactly feel great but I had my mental feet planted firmly on the conceptual ground and that was something, at least metaphorically.

A weekend had apparently been enough for Coach Callahan to clear up the paperwork problem regarding her mockboxes. She didn’t say one word about the bureaucratic difficulties that had briefly delayed our last class, and so neither did anyone else.

A lot of people were looking at the new addition to our class and looking a little worried. The prospect of fighting anyone more than nine feet tall will do that. I could have told them that they had nothing to worry about… I was the lucky one who would be fighting her.I probably should have expected Pala Asgeirsdottir would factor into her plans plans for my training when she told me I’d be facing some of her gladiators… after all, she’d used the undersized storm giantess as a designated hitter before.

“More mocking, less staring!” Coach Callahan said, making a move-it-along gesture in the direction of the red mockbox. “But since everyone’s being so attentive anyway: Tiny here is my brand new teaching assistant. Unlike me, she has no sense of humor, so if you… particularly any of the aspiring men of the class… feel the need to say anything inappropriate about the size of her… size, you’d better be ready to run when she figures out what you were saying. Which she will do. Eventually.”

That was how I’d originally thought of Pala, though I’d eventually figured out myself that being slow to reach a conclusion didn’t mean it wouldn’t be an insightful one. She had a sharp enough mind to beat up the owl-turtle thing, which was more than I could do without its help.

Though she didn’t do herself any favors by nodding along with everything the coach said, only to whip her head around and glare at her a full five seconds after she said that.

“She’s going to be helping me solve a little problem involving students who, for one reason another, aren’t being properly challenged by fights with their classmates,” the coach continued. “So if I call you, then once you’ve got your weapon mocked go meet up with her over by the far door.”

It seemed like it wasn’t actually my lucky day… I wasn’t the only person being singled out for a more challenging curriculum.

She rattled off a string of seven or eight names, a few of which were actually her endearing little nicknames. In addition to my own slightly upgraded label of “Frybaby”, I also caught “Tiger”, “Twiggy”, and “Sapsucker”.

My surprise must have shown on my face, because the coach came over towards me.

“You didn’t forget our little talk already?” she asked. “It’s early in the week to be disappointing me, Frybaby.”

“I didn’t,” I said. “But you didn’t say anything about anyone else.”

“You don’t think I care about you that much, do you?” she said, giving me a slap on the shoulder. “This is an ongoing problem for me… outside a major university I’m not going to have a big enough pool of talent, but the whole structure of the curriculum doesn’t give me enough room to sort for potential. You put the greatest warriors of a generation with a bunch of schmoes who are learning to defend themselves and expect them to excel and stick with it until they qualify for advanced classes, and you end up with… good fighters. Not great. Just good.”

“I know you don’t think I’m great, though,” I said. She’d made it clear that she thought I could work my way up to the B level, if I tried hard enough. I doubted even most A students would qualify for “greatness” in her book. The grading system wasn’t really designed to measure epic levels of achievement.

“I know you’re not,” she said. “But like I said: not enough sorting. There’s a lot of room between greatness and schmoedom. Your talent deserves better… better than you give it, anyway, and better than you’re going to get, blowing through a bunch of middle-of-the-road mortals with more credit hours than notches on their hilts. Now get on over there!”

It seemed like most of her list was still in line for the mockbox… though one student, a very small kobold that I thought of as a girl more out of habit than for any other reason, seemed to be vaguely drifting towards the corner that Pala had moved herself to.

Could she actually be one of the special students? I should probably be the last person to judge by appearance. When she saw me, she adjusted her course to match mine, letting me lead the way somewhat.

“Hi…” she said. Her voice was quiet and kind of hoarse… like she was straining it by trying to speak up. There was something distantly familiar about it.

“Hey. Twiggy?” I guessed.

She actually looked kind of sturdy for that, but it could have been ironic. I was pretty sure she wasn’t Sapsucker, as that sounded like someone with elven blood… or somebody who had sex with elves.

Or possibly with dryads, but I was fairly sure there weren’t any dryads at MU.

Then I remembered all the mentions of ambulatory plants in the Local Hazards class, and I stopped trying to figure out the meaning of that nickname just in case I succeeded.

“…I’m sort of afraid I’m Tiger, actually,” she said apologetically, and she gave me a shy smile.

Kobolds don’t really have lips, and they have a mouth full of interlocking teeth that… like their bones… is laced with bits of metal that they eat as a sort of nutritional supplement. A shy smile from a kobold is among the scarier facial expressions imaginable.

“Hello,” Pala said as we came up to her. “I am called Pala.” She looked at me. “You I have met. Your friend I have not.”

“I’m Nae,” the kobold said… and of course she was. I’d never had a good look at Shiel’s roommate when she wasn’t covered head-to-toe with fetish gear, but there couldn’t be two adult-ish kobolds in the area who were that small.

I wondered if Pala realized that they had that in common.

“You are… cringe-crawler? Shrinking rat?” Pala said. She mouthed the name again, and then a flash of lightning went off over her head. Literally. “Oh, tiny mouse!” she said. “That is cute.”

“You speak kobol?” Nae said. “Naugul bo.”

“Naugul bo,” Pala said. “We buy metal from kobolds when we are at war with dwarves. My uncle says I am the chief trade envoy because I… fit in better with them?”

“Fit in better how?” Nae asked, clearly baffled by the idea.

I couldn’t blame her. If you didn’t know that Pala was roughly a third the size of most of her relatives, a lot of what she said wouldn’t make sense. But it didn’t seem unusual to her, so she rarely bothered to explain it. I’d taken her for a slightly short half or part-giant rather than an extremely short full blooded one the first several times we’d met.

“Inside their halls,” Pala said. “I have to go on my hands and knees like a dog, but no one else would even fit through the door.”

“There’s nothing wrong with crawling,” Nae said. “I sometimes spend whole days on my hands and knees.”

“Whose caves do you visit?” Pala asked, her eyes almost jumping out of her head.

“No one’s,” Nae said. “I don’t really fit in inside anybody’s caves anymore.”

I understood this to be a reference to her relationship with a dwarf. The clash of values between dwarves and elves was better known to surface dwellers, but since they didn’t often compete for territory or resources it rarely turned violent. Kobolds and dwarves were both largely near-surface mining races. The kobolds generally started out lower and the dwarves started out higher, but the pursuit of ore and living space sent them digging in whatever direction they thought they’d find it.

“I appreciate an amusing juxtaposition of extreme contrasts in height as much as the next person who doesn’t give half a shit about them, but let’s break this up and get down to it,” Coach Callahan said, bringing the rest of the designated group with her. “Tiny, I think you know the drill?”

“I know several drills,” Pala said. She held her spear upright and thrust it out in front of her, then turned her head and looked around her. “But there is not really room in here to perform them.”

“…okay, then take them next door and get them set up instead,” Coach Callahan said.

“Okey dokey,” Pala said. “Please follow me!”

Every step that Pala took looked like she was just barely restraining herself from skipping, something that could have had serious consequences for the ceiling tiles in the hall. She led us to another room just down the hall where she knocked on the door, waited a few seconds, then opened it and looked around.

“Hello?” she said.

“Who were you expecting?” I asked her when nobody answered.

“No one,” Pala said. “But sometimes people run into unused classrooms when they want to be alone and cry.”

The room was another fighting salon, though it was a smaller one and it only had one mocking cabinet in the corner. Pala leaned her stone spear against a wall in the corner, then reached out a hand to steady it as it started to slide to the floor. She repeated this twice before she got it to stay, then her footfall as she turned away jarred it loose and it clattered to the floor. She jumped and looked stricken, but then she evidently decided to leave it where it was and pretend that nothing had happened.

“You have been selected to come into this room by Coach Callahan for fighting,” she said. “We are to be a special class she calls her hydra spawn. Because you all have… qualities? That make you difficult for others to face. So you will face each other instead, and gladiators that I bring in. And me, though I am also a gladiator, so… yes. Today it is just me. Mackenzie Blaise, you are to face me first.”

It seemed it was my lucky day after all…

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Characters: Coach Callahan, Mackenzie, Nae, Nicki, Pala