***

  Had movie night with Gestalt. And it was the fucking bomb.

  Gestalt recreated my memory of the time I went to an IMAX theater. We had the whole pce to ourselves which was baller. We watched Airpne! and Die Hard. The two movies that I had seen the most so I had fairly complete memories of them.

  Ten out of Ten would recommend. Best dream night ever.

  ***

  I knew me and Sacriday were tight. Why? Well how did that song go; ‘Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow.’

  Woke up to our standard positions being flipped. I am ying on Sophia. Which well, HOLY SHIT!

  I’m touching a boob!

  WITH MY FACE!

  AHHHGIOASDIHFHANSEFGHLKASDKGJHASEKLG!

  [Never do that again.]

  I’ve never touched a boob before! My own doesn't count. Do I go for the nuzzle? Fuck I probably shouldn’t. I should roll off. That would be the correct thing to do.

  Wait…

  This confusing bitch is pying with my hair again! She’s awake! She's humming! Her arms are around me, did she roll us over? Did she do this on purpose?!

  I shift my head ever so slightly. Fuck, It’s so soft, and perfect, and round, and I think I felt a nipple under my cheek!

  AHHGGLK…

  [Stop.]

  ‘Sorry.’

  [Please have your gay panic quietly.]

  ‘This is my mind you know!’

  [It’s good to be polite to guests.]

  ‘You’re basically a squatter.’

  [You want to try getting on without our services? We don’t have to be here you know.]

  Eek, I can feel that I actually upset them a little. ‘No buddies, we chill. I was just fucking around.’

  [No, it’s okay. That was us. Touchy subject.]

  Okay then. ‘No worries, love you too buddies. But excuse me while I go back to boobs.’

  [Enjoy.]

  I’m gonna do it. I’m going to go for the nuzzle.

  I take a deep breath. I prep my neck. I think of the sound that I’m going to make - so it seems like I’m just waking up. Do I bring my hand up to my face? I could scratch my nose and then just, like, y it down right? If I don’t squeeze it will seem natural. Yeah I could totally get away with that!

  I, of course, do nothing. Because I am a weak, timid bitch, and it would be taking advantage.

  I just listen to her hum gently while she strokes my hair. I feel the pulse of her heart beat from within her chest. God this is so perfect.

  I feel the yearning start to override the horny, and I really don’t fancy having another whole crying session. So I ‘wake up.’

  “Morning.” I said, raising my head from the most beautiful perfect pce in the world. I fsh her a smile that probably hides my angst. “You woke up first?”

  “I’ve not been awake long.” She said matching my smile with the radiance of her own.

  I roll out of bed and start to get changed. Period garrot not looking too bad yet. I still changed it anyway, because I’m not that gross. When people can see me.

  “What lessons do we have today?” I asked.

  “I wrote our schedule on the board - over there, near the door.”

  I am ever so slightly stunned, this girl is so perfect it hurts. She didn’t need to write that for herself, like most people, her memory works. She did that for me, she’s thinking about me.

  I read the schedule.

  Orday - Mana control / rift creation, realm history.Truday - Instants and Sorcery's.Sacriday - Artifacts and Runes.Growday - Enchantments, Asset Handling.Friday - Dueling, Creature handling.

  “Hey, nice, we have artifacts today. Maria said that they will be more my jam. Hopefully it goes better than yesterday.” I said.

  Sophia reaches over and rubs my arm. Her love nguage setting my nethers afme. “It’s okay, you’ll catch up.” She said with the smile that hurts.

  No, stop. No crying today.

  We were about to join everyone for breakfast when I heard a crash and what was possibly muffled, gurgled, swearing from Ria's room.

  I give her door a knock, “You alright? You need a hand at all?” I asked.

  There was a pause, then an eventual “Yes, please.”

  I push the door open, Ria’s room is a trip. There is dry ground for about ten feet, then it just opens up into water, and I don’t mean as in a pool. It’s just a solid block of water in the room, salted. I guess it was held in by some magic force field. There's some sort of shell bed deep in there, looks pretty comfy.

  Ria is floating there near the front, I can see the source of her problems. Her wheelchair has fallen on its side, out of her reach.

  Ria mouths something to me, but I can’t really understand, because she's talking to me from underwater.

  

  

  

  I pick up the chair and hold it firm, near the edge of the force field that is holding all the water in. Ria swims forward and slips out of the water and into the chair. You would think she would be dripping water everywhere. But she doesn’t, she escapes but the water says put. Magic is insane.

  Wait, if they can contain fluids like this, why the fuck am I wearing period rope between my legs? Isn’t there a spell or some bullshit to keep everything contained? Or can I just create a rift in my vagina to dump the discharge into some other realm?

  I think that might of been the most fucked thing I have ever thought of…

  Anyway, Sophia and I wheeled Ria downstairs for breakfast. Not actually down the stairs, there is an elevator. Ria seems thankful for the push, I think she’s struggling a little - adapting to the chair and living on nd.

  Lillian sat on Sophia’s side today. Said “Moring, Sophia.” and pulled her into a big hug. Which Sophia had a cute surprised reaction to.

  I’m really gd that Sophia is around people that are willing to give her what she has been missing her entire life. She needs this, a family of sorts, people to give her contact and safety. People to show her that she's worthy of love. That her curse doesn’t define her.

  …

  There's another part of me that wants to shove Chekhov's barrel down Lillian's throat. How fucking dare she touch what’s mine.

  …Holy shit.

  I stamp down on that thought, shoving deep in the darkest part of my mind. I am not ready to deal with that.

  I pick at my food. I’m not jealous, you’re jealous, fuck off.

  When Lillian got distracted by how many weird fruit things that Shiv was sticking in her mouth - Sophia did immediately reattach herself to me. Which made me feel a whole lot better.

  ***

  Sacriday comes in clutch yet again.

  Artifacts and runes is the best fucking css! First off, the cssroom looks like a mad workshop, which I am fucking down for. Second off, there's my phone! It is in pieces, but professionally in pieces. All id out on a work bench, there is even a diagram underneath it, circles and lines pointing to different parts.

  Our teacher found me hovering over the phone. “Hello.” He said. “I’m assuming this is your piece of technology?”

  “Hi, yeah, I'm Tangerine. That was my phone. I’ve never seen it in pieces before. It looks pretty, have you had any luck with charging the battery?”

  “Hello Tangerine, I’m Cid. And no, not as yet. But I do know a number of methods that fail to charge the battery, so we are making progress!”

  I love him already. “You can only know what to do, when you know all the ways not to do it.” I said, ughing.

  He matched my ugh, deep and booming. “Yes, quite excellent.” He stroked his bushy white beard. “Maria did say you might be a good fit in this css.”

  We all take our seats in the cssroom. I’m pinned between Sophia and Lillian as per normal. But I try to push the three of us closer to Ria. I don’t want her feeling left out.

  So a little bit of backstory about me.

  [We already know everything about you.]

  ‘Shhh you.’

  I love video games. Everyone knows that, they were my thing. I wanted to make games when I grew up. That dream did get a little lost at the end of sixth form, but before that, I had made a few simple games. I would do the art and the programming, James would help me with the sounds. Don’t get me wrong, I was never amazing. Started with Scratch, moved onto Click Team Fusion when I was twelve. By fifteen I was making dumb little games in Gamemaker, then ter at around sixteen to seventeen I started messing around with making stuff in straight C.

  C99 not C++, I might have fallen in with a certain handmade DIY crowd on discord. They looked up their nose at what they viewed as bloat. Which for them included garbage collection. Garbage collection is where your program handles all the ones and zeros on the ram by itself, basically stops memory leaks and stuff. Well at least it’s meant to, plenty of ways to break garbage collection.

  I’m really getting into the weeds here. Sorry.

  Anyway, the point is, I know a little bit about programming.

  Runes are not programs.

  Magic is not a computer.

  But there is a vibe there. A familiarity, Magic wants to do things, it wants to fit and fill and create and destroy and it wants to be everything everywhere all at once. A pure chaotic mess.

  Runes are a way to strip away at that, to confine it down to one result. To limit the everything of magic to one sharp possibility.

  And it’s absolutely my jam.

  Cid had us working on the rune equivalent of the light spell we did yesterday. We are working on weird thin cy tablets, backed with a strangely coloured metal. We are carving the runes into the soft cy with different types of pointy sticks. Apparently which stick you use is important.

  This time I am first to finish, followed closely by Shiv. Although I have a funny feeling if Shiv wasn’t fucking around so much with Lillian, she would of finished a fair bit before me.

  The second great thing about runes. They only take the mana it needs. I don’t need to control my mana output, I can just fire hose and it just works.

  The third thing that works well in my favor, is that runes don’t really care all that much about the type of mana you give it. They tend to neutralize it anyway. But that neutralization isn’t free, my core does a simir process. If I cycle the mana hard enough it seems to lose its colour.

  All that to say, I can charge the runes faster and harder than anyone else in the css. Hell I think even Sid was looking impressed with me. You gotta love that validation!

  Shiv and I finished way, way before the rest. So we got sent to our own table while Sid helped the rest of the css.

  “We could overcharge this.” I said to Shiv. pointing to the light rune.

  “You have my attention.”

  “Check out this part and this part. It holds, filters and spreads the mana, but there is no gate or trigger. Nothing to store the mana or release it. It just flows through.”

  “You want to store the mana?”

  “Yeah and then dump it all at once, as light.”

  Shiv grinned her wicked grin. “Oh now you are talking Goblin.”

  Of course it wasn’t as easy as that, we managed to bug Cid enough so he gave us some rune books to work with. And with a bit of trial and error. Okay a lot of trial and error, the two of us got something that worked.

  “You wanna go first?” I asked Shiv.

  “Nah this was your idea, you go ahead.”

  I shrug my shoulders, cycle up some mana and dump it into the tablet. And it just takes it, so I give it a bit more. I could have kept going for a bit, hell I had a whole sol ring’s worth of mana I could have dumped in there as well. But, well, better to start easy.

  The tablet thrummed.

  I tapped the completion circuit and blinded myself.

  Along with everyone else in the room.

  Shiv is cackling, I’m ughing while rubbing the stars out of my eyes. Everyone else was moaning at us - while they recovered from having a temporary flood light appear in the css room.

  Cid looked impressed and a little unamused. “You two together are going to be a problem I see?”

  “Only if we are left to our own devices sir.” I said.

  ***

  The rest of the day was pretty normal. Had dinner in the hall with the others. I actually did some rune self study, when Sophia and I got back to our room. I can feel a fixation coming on.

  Eventually Sophia bullied me into bed. I had been reading for a while and the candles were getting pretty low.

  I snuggled in close and fell asleep in my girl's arms.

  What an amazing day.

  ***

  Sofatreat