"Hello." Skyl held out his hand.
His roommate lowered his head and inspected Skyl's palm with a critical eye.
Dry, broad, and clean. His fingers were evenly proportioned, with none of the deformities or calluses that came from years of holding a pen. His skin was smooth and flawless, almost unnaturally perfect.
There was only a faint dusting of white chalk on his fingers, but if anything, it made the hand seem more approachable rather than dirty.
The roommate reached out, touched the tips of Skyl's fingers, then immediately pulled his hand back.
Skyl understood at once.
His germophobia was acting up.
Obsessive-compulsive and a clean freak.
Perfect.
"Don't worry. My hands are very clean. No germs, no dirt. They're probably even cleaner and shinier than your perfectly smooth cerebral cortex."
His roommate froze.
"Excuse me. What did you just say?"
Skyl gave him a friendly smile and asked in surprise, "Did I offend you? I thought glintstone sorcerers aspired to replace their brains with glintstone. If that's the case, wouldn't your cerebral cortex eventually become perfectly smooth?"
"I don't understand... Are you complimenting me or insulting me?"
The roommate's hands shifted awkwardly as though he didn't know where to put them.
"You ordinary people are always using unnecessary descriptive language that makes meaning ambiguous. It greatly reduces the efficiency of communication. An astonishing amount of my valuable time is wasted this way."
"Of course I'm complimenting you," Skyl said with a wink.
By now, he had gotten a pretty good read on his roommate's personality.
A textbook nerd. Self-centered, socially inept, and entirely absorbed in his own interests.
When someone like that was talented, people called him eccentric.
If he had nothing to show for it, they simply called him an idiot.
Any sorcerer qualified to wear a Twinsage Glintstone Crown was a genuine expert. The Twinsage Conspectus studied multiple branches of glintstone sorcery at once, producing broadly accomplished scholars. Naturally, that required far more time and effort than specializing in a single field, and the training period often lasted twenty or thirty academic years.
There was no doubt about it.
Skyl's roommate was an eccentric genius.
Skyl didn't dislike people like that.
Sometimes he hated socializing too.
Back when he was still an apprentice at the College of Winterhold, the other students had privately thought he was a freak as well. At the time, Skyl hadn't wanted to waste even a minute on anything unrelated to studying.
The sensation of becoming stronger every single moment had simply been too intoxicating.
People willing to dedicate themselves completely to scholarship almost always had a few strange habits. Someone who was both extraordinarily brilliant and effortlessly charming was rarer than an endangered species.
It was only after Skyl became powerful that he started paying serious attention to relationships and social interaction again.
His roommate, meanwhile, didn't suspect for even a moment that Skyl might have been sarcastic.
He sounded noticeably happier beneath his Glintstone Crown.
"Excellent judgment. In that case, I can forgive your earlier offense. Now, once I erase all this nonsense you wrote..."
The Twinsage sorcerer turned toward the blackboard and picked up a neatly folded cloth.
He casually glanced over the equations Skyl had written.
His brain immediately began checking them almost unconsciously.
He hesitated.
The cloth had already touched the blackboard, but as his eyes continued moving across Skyl's work, he slapped his own hand away.
"Move. You're covering that part..."
He leaned closer.
"Oh. Yes, that calculation is correct..."
His gaze moved downward.
"What is this supposed to mean? Hmm. He's deriving a constant for magicka conversion efficiency..."
A pause.
"The calculation is correct..."
Another line.
"Aha! This step is complete nonsense!"
He stopped.
"Wait."
Another pause.
"Oh."
His posture stiffened.
"I see."
Without realizing it, the roommate lowered the cloth, crossed his arms, and stared fixedly at the blackboard as though under a spell.
Skyl ignored the man who had become completely absorbed in the equations.
The roommate's research was admittedly sophisticated, but both the topic and the methodology were somewhat outdated.
It was the sort of thing Skyl himself had already worked through years ago.
He went about arranging his bed instead.
There were four single beds in the dormitory. The remaining three had been pushed side by side against one wall, but they were all remarkably clean.
Apparently, his roommate regularly deep-cleaned the entire room.
Even beds that weren't personally his received proper maintenance.
As the man himself would probably put it:
"Since these communal facilities are currently unoccupied, I am the person in closest proximity to them and therefore bear responsibility for maintaining their basic functionality."
Skyl spread out a mattress, conjured himself a velvet blanket, kicked off his shoes and socks, then sat on the bed and sent messages to his friends.
It was almost noon.
He had agreed to meet Melina and the others in the cafeteria, then attend lectures together that afternoon.
"Hey, I'm heading out. Want me to bring you something to eat?"
Skyl greeted his roommate as casually as though they'd known each other for months.
There was no response whatsoever.
"Nerd."
Skyl laughed and shook his head.
"I'm leaving."
The Academy of Raya Lucaria's cafeteria was hidden away in an inconvenient corner, pitifully small, dimly lit, and permeated by a persistent rotten odor.
Someone unfamiliar with the place might have assumed the cooks were boiling corpses in the kitchen.
If that alone could still be tolerated, what truly horrified Skyl was the identity of the cooks.
They were Marionette Soldiers.
Automatons designed for warfare moved their stiff mechanical joints as they dumped unwashed freshwater crabs directly into massive cauldrons.
They brought the water to a violent boil, extinguished the flames, then sprinkled powdered aquatic plants and bitter salt over everything for seasoning.
Skyl held his tray and received his portion.
He stared down at what appeared to be a third-degree-burned Mr. Krabs who still had enough life left to wave its pincers at him.
His emotions became extremely complicated.
At that moment, Skyl completely forgave British cuisine.
He finally understood Gordon Ramsay on a spiritual level.
"This crab is so damn raw, if I threw it back into the ocean right now, it'd still have time to film three seasons of SpongeBob before it died."
Melina waited calmly beside him.
"The residual heat inside the cauldron will finish cooking the crab," she explained. "You simply need to be patient. Once the pot cools down, it will be ready to eat."
Skyl's mouth twitched.
His expression became increasingly horrified.
He looked around and saw one student expertly using tongs to fish a cooked crab from the bottom of a cauldron.
The man cracked open the shell and began eating.
Two bites later, he suddenly spat something out.
Not because the crab tasted terrible.
There was glintstone growing inside the meat.
Raya Lucaria was so saturated with glintstone energy that even the local crabs accumulated enough magic in their bodies to grow crystalline structures.
Tiny pieces of glintstone were scattered throughout the meat like grains of sand.
The student didn't complain.
He spat out the crystal and continued eating.
"You know," Skyl said in a hollow voice, "there was a period when I wandered through Wildspace eating whatever raw wildlife I could get my hands on. Somehow, even that had better food than this school cafeteria."
Millicent was experiencing her own modest cafeteria-related trauma.
She had spent most of her life traveling and sleeping outdoors, eating whatever was available. She had even roasted and eaten tough dragon meat before.
Yet somehow, that iron stomach had finally met its match in a tiny crab.
The swordswoman lowered her voice.
"When I traveled through Liurnia, I once met a man who boiled prawns and crabs. His boiled crab was delicious. I genuinely didn't know it was possible to make crab taste this bad."
"I can't take this anymore. Come on."
Skyl stood up.
"We're finding somewhere else to eat. I refuse to spend another second in a cafeteria that abuses perfectly good ingredients like this."
Melina immediately rose to her feet.
Her expression remained perfectly neutral, but she was very obviously eager to leave.
Millicent let out a long breath of relief and asked Skyl what they were going to eat instead.
"I'm thinking barbecue ribs, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, cornbread, apple pie..."
Skyl rattled off a Thanksgiving-sized menu as he led his two female classmates into an empty classroom for a private lunch.
Before long, the rich aromas of dill, rosemary, tomato, and slow-cooked meat drifted through the room.
Skyl retrieved ingredients from the Tower of Tomes and quickly prepared four dishes and a soup, spreading everything across the classroom desks before they dug in.
There was something strangely exciting about having a full meal inside a classroom.
For a moment, Skyl felt as though his youth had returned.
Of course, back then the most he'd ever done was hide a few bags of Doritos inside his desk and pretend to yawn while sneaking chips into his mouth.
He used to share snacks with the girls sitting nearby too.
The teacher would be talking at the front of the classroom until their mouth went dry, while half the students sat there with their cheeks puffed out like hamsters.
Everyone knew exactly what was happening.
Nobody said a word.
"That smells incredible. What is that?"
The classroom door hadn't been fully closed.
They had barely started eating when a bearded sorcerer poked his head inside.
The moment he saw three people dressed as apprentices enjoying a feast, his expression turned stern.
He marched in and barked, "I am the senior lecturer of the Olivinus Conspectus! How dare you sit beneath the portraits of our honored predecessors and desecrate this sacred hall of scholarship with such..."
He inhaled sharply.
"...such incredibly aromatic and appetizing food!"
His face immediately hardened again.
"I demand that you put down your knives and forks at once!"
Millicent straightened her back in alarm.
She wasn't accustomed to school life, and having only just arrived, she had no desire to offend a professor.
Melina was much calmer.
She silently pulled out her staff, apparently preparing to convince the professor using the traditional academic language of sorcerers.
Violence.
Skyl gently pushed Melina's staff back down.
Then he turned, raised his glass toward the professor, and smiled.
"Professor, have you eaten yet? Want to join us?"
The bearded professor strode over with heavy, dignified steps.
His face was grim as he sat down.
Then he picked up a plate with rigid formality and began devouring food while desperately pretending to maintain proper table manners.
"That smells amazing."
"What's going on in there? Is somebody feeding a pig?"
Voices gradually approached from the hallway.
Two apprentices wandered into the classroom.
Professor Nabler turned his head.
Several noodles coated in meat sauce were hanging from his mouth.
He noisily sucked them in and widened his eyes.
"What are you looking at? What are your names? Which conspectus are you from?"
"Professor Nabler!"
"We didn't see anything!"
The two apprentices fled as fast as their legs could carry them.
The bearded professor slowly turned back toward Skyl, Melina, and Millicent.
All three were staring at him strangely.
He cleared his throat.
Then he stood, walked over to the door, and locked it.
"Let's continue eating."
He returned to the table.
"By the way, which conspectus are you three from? What are your names? I'll give you extra credit."
//Check out my P@tre0n for 30 extra chapters on all my fanfics //[email protected]/Razeil0810.