asked. T.J. stopped chewing chips and looked from her to me as her logic struck him.
“I thought warlocks were weak?” he asked.
“As a rule, they are. But as with any bell curve, there are exceptions at either end of the population. Huh, Declan?” Ariel asked.
“He is exceptional in many ways, Ariel. Let’s just leave it at that,” Caeco said. “Now, who was that N-eev person?”
Eyes narrowed in a way that told me she wouldn’t be forgetting our discussion anytime soon, Ariel finally turned her attention to Caeco’s strategic question.
“She’s responsible for Ashley’s safety. Probably checking in to see how her first day went.”
“So she’s like a bodyguard? Secret service type?” T.J. asked.
“No, she’s pretty important herself. She’s basically a princess.”
“A princess from where?” he asked, baffled.
“Not from here,” she said, looking uncomfortable.
“How important is Ashley in not here?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I just met her a couple of days ago,” Ariel said, looking down and away.
“Hmmpf,” Caeco said, making her opinion of that statement blatantly obvious.
“Yeah, well, I’ve got homework of my own to get done. See you guys tomorrow,” Ariel said, picking up her tray and heading for the exit.
“Okay, that was strange. Listen, I’m rolling out, too. Catch ya later,” T.J. said, looking like he was going to follow Ariel. From all the glances he’d been giving Ashley the last few days, I was pretty sure he had a crush on Ariel’s mysterious roommate.
“Wytchwar?” Caeco asked.
“It’ll probably amount to nothing,” I said, making one of the most grossly mistaken statements of my life.
I said goodnight to Caeco and went to my room to get a start on my math homework.
Mack looked up from his smartphone as I entered. “Hey what’s this game you’ve got everyone talking about?” he asked.
I explained the last two hours of my life as well as the early years of it, complete with a demonstration. I had his excited attention.
“Dude, that’s better than any video game I ever saw,” he said. “Listen, you oughta write an email to everyone, explaining your personal vision of it.”
“That’s actually my homework for the class. But I also have Calc homework and I need to start looking at this coding assignment for Programming. Man, college seems to be ninety percent homework and ten percent everything else.”
“Yeah, no shit. Gotta read three chapters of Economics and I also have math homework.”
We both got busy, me with my nemesis, calculus, although it seemed to be making sense, and Mack with a thick book on Macro Economics. I knocked off my list of problems and decided to take Mack’s suggestion, spending the next hour organizing my thoughts and writing an email about Wytchwar.
I detailed its early days and described some of the different ways it could be played. Obstacle course, capture the flag, war for territory, two teams, three teams, or maybe even four. One of the rules my mother laid down for me was that I couldn’t just change the course with magic as I wanted. My Craft had to be kept focused on my avatar, but I could build multiple spells into it or carry spelled objects. To keep me honest, she had warded the course with her own runes and I suggested that any course we built at the school should be built the same way. I threw in some ideas of how different abilities or affinities could be employed in the game, put Miss Berg’s name in the address box, and copied it to the class email group. Noting the midnight witching hour had come and gone, I packed up my MacBook and crawled into bed, seeing that my roomie was already sound asleep. The first day of college was officially in the books.
Chapter 11
I slept in till almost nine the next morning, as my first class, Intro to Websites, was scheduled for ten AM. After a quick shower, some fresh clothes, and two breakfast sandwiches from the dining room, I piled into the Beast, shivering as I waited for the engine to start delivering much-needed heat. January in upstate Vermont stays mostly way below freezing and often below zero, and Tuesday was no exception.
Finding parking was an issue, but I made it to class with about two minutes to spare. The professor spent the first quarter of class impressing upon us how seriously we needed to take the material. I think he was trying to set the tone, attempting to kill off any complacency before it could start. From the conversations around me before class,