"Women don't make good mages, you know."
Yuna sat before Professor Thrumbolt's desk in a chair that had become more and more uncomfortable as the meeting progressed. Inwardly, she was seething—outwardly now too, probably, despite her best efforts. She knew Professor Thrumbolt had a reputation, and that he had said some things of this sort—though milder—in his Alteration class before, but she didn't think he would be so brazen about it! Look at him. That fat fuck! Sitting there with his big belly pressed against the edge of his desk, with his hair combed over that growing desert on top of his head, with his porky little stub fingers constantly molesting that bowl of peanuts. His mouth was
constantly in motion. He
never stopped chewing this whole time. Ha! Matched those bovine eyes of his.
But the awful part was this: Yuna needed to get her marks up.
Admittedly, she had slacked a bit in Thrumbolt's class. She could easily ace this rudimentary Alteration stuff with her incandescent genius if she wanted, but she had been busy of late. So that's how she ended up here, watching the cow chew his cud, looking for guidance on how to make up those marks. And, damn it, the worst part of all this was unwittingly falling right into Professor Thrumbolt's stupid theories.
On which he was plenty happy to continue elaborating as his fingers fished for more peanuts. "They can be decent mages. Just not good ones," he said, speaking with an air of certainty, even banality, as if what he was saying was a plain and obvious truth. "Too unstable. Volatile, you see. The arcane demands the labors of the head, not the heart."
Chewing, chewing,
chewing. Dull, bored eyes looking at her.
"It's not your fault," he said with a shrug. "It's just the way you are. You've learned a bit of Obanese history by now, haven't you, Yuna? Look what happened to them. Woman mage, lost control, nearly killed everyone."
Every now and then Professor Thrumbolt, while munching on those peanuts, would let out a quiet little
mmm as if the mere act of chewing alone provided him a small dose of ecstasy on occasion. Whatever ecstasy Thrumbolt got from it, Yuna found it revolting in equal measure. It was to her more than just a little gross.
"And that's what I'm saying. Some people mistake my argument as me claiming that women cannot be powerful mages. Oh no no, 'good' doesn't just mean powerful here. It's control, you see. Not merely on a technical level, but on a personal level. Women are emotional. They lash out irrationally. Add magic into that mix?" Professor Thrumbolt whistled, by some miracle, despite having one cheek inflated like a squirrel hauling his hoard. "That's a recipe for disaster."
He swallowed and then puckered his lips and placed his entwined hands on the desk, leaning forward. "Now what does this have to do with you, you might ask. Besides the obvious, of course. Well, harvesting glowvine requires very fine precision. Very fine control. And, Miss Fairweather, it wouldn't be appropriate of me to send you on a field assignment for which you are inherently disadvantaged. Goodness, I almost didn't even allow Sebastian to partake of this assignment. As for you, Miss Fairweather, let's be reasonable. There are easier, more appropriate, ways we can discuss—"
Yuna had enough.
"I CAN DO IT!"
"Please, Miss Fairweather—"
"That's not even my real name!"
"It is your real name."
"The point is! I can do it! I'll get a sample of glowvine and bring it back to you and it'll be sooo~ easy, Professor."
"Your current marks don't lend any validity to your claim."
"If I come back to you with a sample of glowvine, that I plucked myself, no buying it in town or elsewhere, will I get those extra marks, Professor?"
Professor Thrumbolt cleared his throat. "Well. I can't control what you do with your own time, you see. But I would advise you not to do anything rash or—"
"Don't you worry, Professor!" Yuna said, standing up suddenly. She grinned.
"I'm as careful as careful can be."
Then Yuna reached over, grabbed a small handful of peanuts, tossed them all into her mouth, chewed them
aggressively as she looked Professor Thrumbolt intently in the eyes, and then at last turned and left his office. Professor Thrumbolt, stunned for a brief moment, came to let out an exasperated sigh that without words expressed his bias aloud, and then simply went back to looking over the papers which required his attention.
And the peanuts.
* * * * *
THE PORT DISTRICT
"This is bullshit," Yuna said, lamenting her present pickle as she sat on some barrel or whatever, lightly kicking her legs and listening to the
thump of her heels bouncing lightly off the wood.
Okay, did she
say that she was going to pick some glowvine herself? Well yeah, because that's what Professor Thrumbolt wanted to hear—aside from his own teeth gnashing those peanuts to pulp, of course, the swine. But did she actually have any real intention of getting those marks cleanly? You know, actually do the assignment herself? Pah, no! Why would she do that? Glowvine
was dangerous; if Sebastian blew himself up she'd be the first one to laugh (he was a spoiled asshole, so fair game). And besides, why pick some stupid vine herself? That was
soooo beneath the stature of her towering intellect, her incandescent genius.
So go to the Port District, she told herself. Ask some of the sailors, she told herself—because they wouldn't rat her out like the shopkeeps and their ledgers which Thrumbolt could easily check. Shipments of all kinds of rare reagents like glowvine came in all the time! But these stupid sailors and merchants didn't have any! Not one little strand of glowvine. Really? How rare could it be? What, did it cost a fortune or something? Her plan would've worked out
beautifully if it wasn't for these sailors and merchants mucking it up!
"Hey," said some dock worker passing by and noticing her sitting on the barrel. "Get the fuck off of there. Go home."
"You go home."
"It's late. Go home, girl." The dock worker thrust out his finger, pointing away from the docks at large and back into
Elbion proper. "Last chance. Go. Or I'm throwing you out."
"Give me five more minutes to sulk."
"No."
"Too bad, I'm taking 'em."
Yuna should not, in fact, have been so testy with the man. Because as it turned out, he wasn't kidding. The dock worker did just as he said, picking her up cleanly off of the barrel, carrying her by her clothes as if she were unwanted luggage, and tossing her away from his area of work.
As it so happened, said tossing and the subsequent crashing of Yuna to the ground happened but a few paces in front of a certain
drow. The dock worker dusted off his hands and turned to leave, and Yuna groaned there as she lay upon the ground.
Zoskir
