Lillian flopped down on the bottom bunk and sighed dramatically. "Leslieee! Are you going to help me or not?"
"Coming!" came the voice from the other room.
Lillian propped herself up and dropped her head into her hands. "Where's Daria?" A moment after asking, she knew the answer.
"At the café with Brandon," Leslie explained, walking casually into the room and flicking her hair out of her face irritatedly.
Leslie was one of the strangest-looking people that Lillian had ever seen. Her olive skin, bright green eyes, and short stature only added to the absurdity of her hair, so light blonde it was practically white. She didn't seem to notice- or care about- the stares she collected just walking around in the park. Like Lillian, this was her first year at the university, but at nineteen, she was four years Lillian's elder. Leslie was a thaumaturgy major and had aced every class she'd enrolled in so far. Despite this, she hadn't been any help to Lillian in the field.
Lillian cleared her cobwebs and took a breath before spouting a stream of complaints. "I'm pretty sure I failed the individual report in my thaum lab today. I was working with Brandon and he was doing all the telekinesis and transfiguration, and I was recording the stuff, but then we had to describe how we did it in the individual report and I can't describe doing something I can't do."
Leslie sat down on the bed next to her. "I told you that you shouldn't have signed up for Amandi's section. She's just going to torment you. I thought you were going to see Dr. Hests!"
"I was. I did." Lillian's voice was flat.
"Well then you should see Professor Kern."
"You keep mentioning this Professor Kern person. What's she like?"
"He," Leslie corrected. "He's an assistant professor, but he looks like a student, he's really young."
Lillian raised her eyebrows. "How old is he really?"
"Two hundred and five," Leslie answered matter-of-factly.
"Come on." Lillian rolled her eyes.
"No one really knows, but he looks twenty-one or so. It's weird." Leslie shook her head. "He hasn't been at the university for long, only started teaching at the beginning of last semester, and not a lot of people know him, even in the thaumaturgy department. Anyway, I've heard that he's a really bad group teacher, but he has great office hours. Didn't you ask Dr. Hests to give him your email?"
"Yeah, I did." Lillian slammed her face into the bunk, muffling her voice. "But I don't know if he'll help at all."
"You can at least try." Leslie stroked Lillian's hair gently. "Kern might be really helpful. You never-"
Before she could finish, the door swung open. "Hi guys!" Daria squealed, rushing over to the bed. "Hey, Lil, what's wrong?"
"Nothing," Lillian answered, sitting up. "How was lunch?"
"Oh, fine," Daria replied, waving a hand. "Brandon had his hands full with this millennial and her mother who couldn't decide whether they wanted their checks separate or together, so he was a little bit late. But..." she lowered her voice, leaning in. "There's a new sign in the park."
Lillian yawned and sat up. "Where? What does it say?"
"It's over by the café. It's really weird. It looks like someone put it there. According to the custodian who was trying to get it out it's thaumaturgically stuck. Short and wooden, and it says something like 'Don't read the sign or sit on the letter J'."
"What?" Lillian asked curiously. Leslie, on the other hand, was leaning back against the wall and listening to the news, unimpressed. Lillian had learned through experience that it was impossible to surprise her roommate.
"Yeah," Daria continued, "I can't figure it out."
"What did Brandon say?"
"He didn't see it. He's still at work. I tell you, I would get so frustrated with the tourists..." Daria didn't finish whatever she was going to say. "What other classes do you have today?"
"Quantum," Lillian answered quickly. "You?"
"Developmental," Daria responded. "Want to grab some dinner at the Crave?"
Everyone on campus insisted on calling the Creative Sciences Center by the name of the Crave as a result of the large food court located on the first floor, even students that had classes in the building. Daria's favorite restaurant in the building was the pizza place, so when she mentioned the Crave she was usually referring to pizza.
"Sure," Lillian answered, not mentioning that she had been planning to have dinner there anyway. For a student whose entire meal plan consisted of getting one meal at the Crave and another at the café, she was finally getting used to a fairly regular diet. Leslie nodded along, and Lillian flopped back onto the bed.
☙❧
"We define the convenience C of an elementary thaumaturgical process to be the exponentiation of a constant divided by the difference in energy between the maximum and the input." Dakota wrote an equation on the board as neatly as he could. "Convenience changes based on what the products and reactions of the process are. The constant on top represents proficiency and is incidentally equal to the thaumaturgical efficacy of the thaumaturge in question."
Dakota's students gaped blankly at the board. One girl raised her hand. "Professor... erm, Dakota?"
"Yes, Jennifer?" Dakota turned around and pointed towards her, snapping his fingers like he'd done for Dr. Hests.
"What does this have to do with the application of thaumaturgy?"
Dakota scratched his head through his beanie, wincing. "You're a general thaum major, aren't you, Jennifer?"
"Er, yeah."
"Well, you'll notice that this is Omniscience Theory. It isn't an applications class. Mostly they put the Applications majors in Dr. Hests's Chronothaumaturgical Theory class, because it doesn't have my classes as prerequisites and it's easier, and it's not taught by me. To answer your question, the more everyone learns about thaumaturgy, the better they will be. The human brain is capable of much more thaumaturgy- I mean it's better at thaumaturgy than you ever would have thought before the Thaumatogenesis." He cleared his throat.
"Continuing! There are several problems on convenience on your homework. Please turn in that homework next week on Tuesday. Anyway, it was very nice to meet you all today and I hope to see you again through the rest of the semester!" He picked up an eraser and began attacking the math-coated board in large swipes. Jennifer was the first to take the hint and, flipping shut her notebook, began to walk out of the room. Her classmates quickly followed, filing out the door at a rate which enabled Dakota to correctly infer that they were heading out to get dinner. The last student gave him an unpleasant look, flicking her long, dark hair dismissively in his direction, as he followed his students out the door, headed for the Creative Sciences Center himself.
When he finally arrived, there were long lines for all of the restaurants, except for the grill, which for some reason nobody seemed to like. A trio of girls in the pizza line were chatting away. His eyes were immediately drawn to the face of the white-haired girl, traveling next to the two beside her, a tall dark-skinned girl with glasses and poofy hair and a much younger-looking girl with deep blue eyes and shoulder-cropped red hair. Which one? he thought, habitually adjusting his beanie. His phone buzzed inside his jacket pocket and he fished it out, accepting the call. "Cody?" he asked.
"Cody," answered the caller. "Redhead."
Dakota lowered the phone and hung up. Of course... he recognized the color of those eyes. He couldn't help fixating on the green eyes of the other girl, the white-haired one. She tapped her foot twice, looking impatient. He got a call, and slid to accept.
"Cody?"
"Cody. Look up, dingbat." Cody hung up.
Dakota looked up. He was now at the front of the line. Stepping forward, he paid for his chicken and then left the building, heading back to his office in the Thaumaturgy Building to drop his dinner through the drawers in his file cabinet.
☙❧
"I can't believe you haven't found a job yet."
"Mother!" Galena reproached. "I just graduated last spring! I'm still looking, give me a break!" She was chopping fruit on the counter to make a smoothie. "I'm going to do some looking around. There are lots of emerging fields for people with thaumaturgy degrees."
"Like?"
"Like Thaumatogenesis investigation."
"Who cares about that?"
Galena rounded on her mother. "Who? Everyone cares about that, Mom. It's a big unsolved mystery. Everyone wants to know the answer to it."
"Well, is that something you might be interested in, then?" Her mother leaned back in her chair. "If it's an emerging field, wouldn't that be good for you?"
"Only if I can find a job," Galena sighed. "Those kinds of positions are filling up fast. I don't know what their progress looks like but I'm guessing it hasn't gotten anywhere."
Her mother nodded sympathetically. "Why don't you do something simple like getting a job at one of those restaurants in the park?"
"No!" Galena protested. "I want to do something that will actually help people or provide insight or... or something." Her voice trailed off.
"Thaumatogenesis investigation would be perfect, then," her mother said, cocking her head. "Seeing as you were saying it's not getting anywhere." She rolled her eyes in contempt.
"Mom!" Galena complained. "Don't you think I could help?"
"I think you should do whatever you are interested in as long as you get paid for it."
"Mom!" Galena repeated, but her mother continued. "I don't want to tell you what to do, but-"
Galena cut her off. "Less than a day and that's all you've managed to accomplish." She lifted the knife in her hand threateningly and brought it down on a large chunk of mango.
☙❧
"And you expect me to grant you your promotion and keep you at work?"
"I don't expect anything, sir. I just want to keep my job."
"Tough luck. I'm sorry, but I'll have to fire you."
"What?" Rolf shook his head. "But I've been working for you since I graduated, for four years! You can't fire me now!"
"Listen, Rolf, someone put a sign up in the park that won't make any sense to the tourists. It can't be taken down, and it happened on your watch. I have to relieve you of duties at Jeremiah Raleigh Memorial Park. Your keys?"
Rolf despondently handed over his keys and his vest and slumped his way out of the office. The obelisk was right in front of the custodial office, so he was able to say one last goodbye to his job at the park before he had to go home and start looking for employment. He laid his hands against the cold, smooth stone and looked up; the building stretched vertically into the air, high over his head. He habitually stepped back and read the plaque atop the obelisk, or rather glanced at it; the strange symbols had not yet been decoded, and what they represented was under endless debate.
Time to leave the park, they seemed now to read to Rolf. He sighed and made his way to the path at the edge of the park that advertised a view of the university campus. As he walked slowly past the Thaumaturgy Building and Parkview Hall, his anger against the vandal grew. Who had put the sign in the park? More importantly, why had such a strange sign been put up in the first place?
Rolf lifted his head and looked idly at a familiar swanky green-and-white building home to a phenomenon that he privately thought of as a perpetual Now Hiring sign. He stopped immediately and made a mental note to look into it. Little was known about the building other than that it was government operated and hosted some agency called the DIAO that investigated thaumaturgical stuff, but even the sight of that Now Hiring sign and the bright memory of his thaumaturgy degree urged Rolf on, to try his hand at a new occupation.