by Liam Lawson
She pulled away, straightening upright completely, only to sag against the wall. “No! Oh no.” She held up a hand to ward him off. “You like, broke me just now. No more.”
Trorm grinned.
She grinned back. “Not right now anyway. Later, I’m definitely going to want that again.”
Trorm made to move forward. “Now is later.” She was so sexy, naked against the wall, a sweaty, post-coitus mess. He wanted her again. He felt his member twitching, eager to rise to the challenge of a second round.
Winnie groaned. “Noooo. Tomorrow. I need, like, the rest of the night to recover.”
Trorm frowned. “I start tutoring tomorrow.”
“Good,” Winnie said, gasping for air. “That’ll give me more time to recover. Tomorrow night for sure.”
Trorm started to say absolutely, then hesitated. Now that he’d had sex, his brain was beginning to assert some degree of rational thought and awareness. “I’m meeting with Abigail to study tomorrow.”
“Oh, cool,” Winnie said, not a trace of jealousy in her words. Trorm admitted to himself that he’d been afraid of that. He had the impression that most women in Aflana would not be happy to hear that the male they’d just had sex with was meeting up with another female the next night. “Hey, you guys’ll be like, studying magical stuff, right?”
Trorm shrugged. “Yeah. At the Roaring Stag. We get tea and snacks while we review. Good discussion.”
“You guys study in a bar!” Winie’s ears went up. “That’s got to be like, the best study group ever!”
“You did hear the part about the tea?” Trorm asked.
“Sure, but that makes sense, with you guys doing magical stuff,” she said. “No reason I couldn’t have some wine or beer though.”
Trorm cocked his head. “I suppose not…you actually want to come?”
“Can I?” Winnie asked. She bounced upright, only to sag back against the bathroom wall. “Seriously, I think you like broke my vagina.”
Trorm laughed happily. “I’ll have to double check with Abigail, but I don’t think that would be a problem.”
“Cool,” Winnie said. “Magic’s like, a really big part of your life. I want to know a bit more about it.”
Trorm grinned.
Winnie flushed. “What?”
“You’re so sexy when you talk about magic when you’re naked.”
Winnie let out a little squeal and dove to put her clothes back on before Trorm could start something else.
Chapter Seven
It took Trorm a while to find the tutoring center, longer perhaps than it otherwise would have had he not been mildly hung over. He still managed to arrive presentable and early, which was good because. The room number he’d been given, turned out to be the wrong door, to a room that had two doors and only the sight of a pair of students exiting further down the hall gave way the location of the proper entrance. Someone had forgotten to write down a letter after the room number, apparently.
They were the only sign of life he’d seen since entering. The building itself was nondescript, bordering on sterile. He got the impression that very few actual classes were taught here. The center proper, when he walked inside, was just as sterile as the rest of the building, though it at least bustled with quiet activity. He would not have guessed from the quiet out in the halls that there were this many people in the whole building, let alone one large room.
The tutoring center amounted to a long room that stretched nearly the length of the hallway outside. There was an office in the back, a makeshift computer lab off the left, and an island of back to back carousels stretching down the other side where students were huddled together in pairs, presumably the tutor and the tutee.
At his entry, most of the activity stopped as students gawked. Trorm was keenly aware that his was the only green complexion in the room. In fact, it seemed to him that he was the only non-human in the center. Were the elves too proud or something?
A fussy little woman behind a desk situated in front of the office in the back waved him over. “Do you have an appointment or are you a walk-in?” she asked quietly.
“Appointment, I suppose,” he said. “I’m Trorm Coldstorm.”
She pursed her lips. “I don’t remember seeing your name on my roster. That one would stand out to me.”
“That might be because I’m not here to be tutored,” Trorm said patiently.
He’d expected something like this might happen, though he chose to give the woman the benefit of the doubt. The semester had already started and the center wasn’t technically open to new tutors at this point. An exception had been made because of his arcane focus and their need for students who could tutor in that area.
Trorm glanced down at his notecard, where he’d written both the room number for the center and the name of the woman he was supposed to be meeting with. He didn’t actually need to look, but he’d found that little things like appearing slightly uncertain or flustered could help ease the tension around him. He idly wondered if he shouldn’t take up a drama elective to get better at acting, then thought about the requirement of having to be in front of a large group of people to perform and immediately shut down that train of thought.
“I’m here to see Ms. Tanner? She’s supposed to put me through training today.”
The woman behind the counter blinked at him in a stupor for a moment. “Training?”
Trorm hefted his staff and gave it a gentle shake. “She told me you could use more magically inclined tutors.”
The woman blinked again. “You’re studying magic?”
Trorm tried really hard to mask his emotions and thoughts. He briefly thought about telling the woman that he was just carrying his staff around because it was a nice accessory that also let him hit people he didn’t like but decided against it. “Yes, Ma’am.”
The door to the office opened and a tall woman in spectacles bustled out, accompanied by a much shorter figure with wild pink and green hair.
“Professor Hympress?” Trorm asked. He hadn’t really spent any time around his academic advisor since arriving at the university.
“Hello Trorm,” she said, beaming up at him. She had to look up at just about everyone, as she couldn’t be taller than four feet, about average for a gnome woman. Even without her size, that wild green and pink hair would have been recognizable anywhere. “Glad you found this place okay. I was just bragging about you to Ms. Tanner.”
The tall woman, tall for a human anyway, Trorm still towered over her, extended her hand stiffly to shake. “Nice to meet you Mr. Coldstorm. Fifi speaks very highly of you.”
Professor Hympress gave him a wink. Was it normal, Trorm wondered, for the center to actually call in your references in person? Maybe it was just because they were colleagues at the university together.
“I’m afraid that we’re going to need to put you on an accelerated program,” Ms. Tanner said as Trorm shook her hand. “We only have one arcana tutor in the center and one of our new staff accidentally double booked her for multiple appointments today.”
Trorm nodded in understanding. “I do not foresee this being an obstacle.”
Ms. Tanner’s face split into a relieved grin.
Trorm was treated to a thirty-minute video, given a set of tests that he could have scored perfectly on even if Ms. Tanner hadn’t stood by him, giving him the answers before he could finish reading the questions, and was then brought over to one of the carousels where a tall, dark skinned tutor was waiting. The student eyed Trorm nervously, then extended a hand. They shook and introduced themselves, then Trorm watched as the tutor walked a younger student through their math assignment.
“It’s not so much about teaching,” he said to Trorm as he finished up. “So much as it is about refreshing.”
Trorm thought he understood. He filled out another paper, designed to test what he’d learned by watching, and then was ushered over to another carousel where he repeated the
process, this time with an English tutor who was less comfortable with his presence than the math tutor had been. She kept forgetting what she was saying to her student, dropping things, and giving him nervous glances like she expected him to stand up and beat his chest over her. Another rushed test later and Trorm was ushered over to still another carousel.
This time, the subject was magic. The tutor was a small girl with mousey brown hair and enormous glasses. Her face had something kittenish about it though the expression was intensely serious as she worked with three students simultaneously. All were apparently from the same class, a magically focused elective course that Trorm couldn’t imagine had much relevance to non-arcane related majors.
This tutor ignored Trorm and he didn’t blame her. The three students had her hands full. None of them had a real grasp of the theory they were supposed to be practicing for their individual projects, the result of which would allow them to cast a simple illumination cantrip. Unlike the tutor, they’re attention kept drifting over to him. He sat quietly and did his best not to encourage them. The tutor, whatever her name, was clearly working hard to try and instruct them in something they’d clearly underestimated and he didn’t want to detract from her efforts.
She gave them several exercises to practice on their own when they wrapped up and wished them all good look. Trorm started to introduce himself but she held up a hand to cut him off. “Don’t care. You think you can tutor magic, go right ahead. We’ll see if you last or not, then I’ll learn your name.”
She bustled off to meet with still another group of students who had come in. Trorm began to understand why the center needed arcana tutors so badly. The girl, whatever her name was, was clearly overworked and the demand was higher than they could keep up with. If she’d been able to work with any of the students in her previous group one-on-one she might have even gotten them casting the cantrip by the time allowed.
“Trorm,” Ms. Tanner called, waving him over to the desk in front of her office. She took his filled out tests as soon as he arrived. “Any problems?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Like I said, we’re going to be throwing you into the deep end. Your first appointment is here.”
She gestured to a chubby girl with long hair. Her eyes darted back and forth between Trorm and Ms. Tanner and she let out an actual gasp. Trorm resisted the urge to roll his eyes.
Over the next half hour, the girl sat beside him like a deer caught in the headlights, barely nodding her head as he asked her questions about her assignment. When her session was over, she nearly forgot her things as she fled. Another student was brought to him with similar results, though this one was more vocal. The one after that was almost the complete opposite—he was apparently a huge fan of Trorm’s after the videos that had been released. He was so loud that other tutors had to come over and hush him several times before he left, plunging the center back into silence as Trorm got another terrified student.
When she—there were far more female students coming in, Trorm noted, than male—got up to leave, he had several moments to breath and berate himself for thinking that this had been a good idea before his next appointment arrived. He’d been doing so for several moments when the tutoring center fell completely silent. Not the comparative silence that had followed his loud fanboy, but true silence. Trorm stood up from his carousel to see what the cause was and froze.
A naga had just slithered through the door.
Her human upper half was dark-skinned, like cinnamon coffee, slim, and curvaceous, as evidenced by the bright blue sari she wore, leaving a good swath of her human flesh bare while concealing the point where flesh became scales. Instead of legs, she possessed a colorful serpentine tail, easily between fifteen and twenty feet long. The tail was a mixture of buttermilk and golden markings.
It was so much to take in that he was caught off guard when a dark, vulpine face with enormous ears popped up over her shoulder. He blinked, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. The creature, climbed further up on her shoulder in an ungainly crawl and his mind finally processed that the naga had brought an absolutely enormous bat to the tutoring center with her. It wore a little green collar with a silver bell.
The naga conversed for a moment with the attendant, who then called Trorm over. He resisted the urge to sigh, along with the urge to stare at either the naga’s tail or giant pet bat.
“Mr. Coldstorm,” the attendant said. “This is your next appointment, Israxa Rana.”
The naga turned her cold eyes on Trorm. They were golden with slit pupils. He adjusted his grip on his staff. Nagas were powerful foes, both physically and magically. There was no telling what Israxa might be capable of.
Israxa Rana
Gender: Female
Emotion: TERRIFIED.
Interest Level: 3
Trorm blinked.
Israxa did not. She met his eyes levelly, everything about her cool and controlled. Were his sunglasses malfunctioning? Nothing about her demeanor suggested she was afraid.
“Thank you for working with me, today,” she said, her voice slightly accented.
No, he realized. That cool attitude front was a front. Not unlike the mask of excessive civility he wore in an attempt to get by in this country.
“It is my privilege,” Trorm replied. “I look forward to working with you.” He surprised himself by meaning it. He must have surprised her too because her mask slipped for a moment and her small mouth dropped slightly open.
“My carousel is this way, if you please,” he said.
Chapter Eight
“You are not what I was expecting,” Irsaxa said as they wrapped up what had been a highly productive session. They’d very nearly gotten off on the wrong foot, so to speak, when they’d arrived at Trorm’s carousel and he’d begun to remove the extra seat set aside for students. It made sense to him to remove it for a student with no legs, but that was an assumption. If he was going to do this right, then he was going to do it right.
Instead he’d asked what she would prefer and was surprised to learn that she did, in fact, prefer “sitting” such as it was, resting her human upper half in the chair. It turned out that holding herself aloft was an effort. He suspected that it was, in fact, an affectation done to make non-nagas feel more comfortable. She’d taken up the seat beside him and proved a very dedicated student. They hadn’t really spoken a lot beyond her assignment, but she was a dedicated student and an eager learner.
She was majoring in arcane biology, studying magical creatures. While not a spellcasting major, it required a working understanding of magical theory and she was, in fact, a spell caster. Irsaxa was a druid, practicing nature magic, which was utterly alien to Trorm’s way of thinking. He didn’t know much about it, about as much as he did about nagas actually, which was neither a lot nor pleasant.
“I can honestly say the same about you,” he admitted. “And I am very pleasantly surprised.”
Orc and naga culture were very close to being near inversions of each other. Orcs were patriarchal while nagas were matriarchal. Orcs valued strength of arms and ferocity, nagas valued magic and cunning. Neither had ever particularly gotten along with the other as a result of these two things. Or so it seemed at the surface level. Trorm suspected their differences ran much deeper. At the moment, however, he was far more interested in what he and Irsaxa had in common.
He found himself impressed with her, knowing what he did about her now. The TERRIFIED marker had slowly faded from her status window, which was a relief. Less relieving was that her Interest Level had increased to 4. To be afraid and take action regardless, that was courage. That he admired.
She absently reached up to scratch her bat under the chin. A flying fox it was called, and Trorm could see the resemblance. In fact, when the thing wasn’t crawling around like a drunk rodent it was actually kind of cute.
“I suppose we both misjudged each other at first,” she admitted.
Trorm shrugged. He wasn’t sure
what she’d thought of him. The TERRIFIED marker could have been caused from anything. Truth be told, he found the idea that he could have been the cause of her fear somewhat hard to believe. If she got that powerful tail of hers wrapped around him she could probably pop him like a grape.
“Do you know?” Irsaxa asked. “You are the first tutor who hasn’t gaped at me the whole time or acted like I was about to strangle them?”
Trorm offered a smile and hoped she never found out how close he’d been to doing just that. “I can believe it.”
She extended her hand. “You know, I don’t normally do this, but…” she tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. HOPEFUL. “Would you care to get drinks together, later tonight?”
“I’d be honored,” Trorm said. “But I have a study group tonight.”
She raised an eyebrow. “A male willing to ask for help when he needs it? You, Mr. Coldstorm, are a rarity.”
“I’ll choose to take that as a compliment,” Trorm said.
Her face was cool, displaying no emotion. EMBARASSED. Was that expression her equivalent of blushing? “It was intended to be. I’m sorry, that was specist of me.”
Specist, not sexist. Interesting.
“Until we meet again,” Trorm said.
“I look forward to it.”
~
Hours later Trorm entered the Roaring Stag with Winnie at his side. “I’m surprised you asked to come,” he said, holding open the door for her to go through and then giving a courteous nod to the hostess. Her name was Jill and he’d once seen her fight off an eldritch horror with a barstool. He got a nod in return. RESPECT. That felt good.
“You and Abigail spend a lot of time together,” Winnie said. “I like, want to get to know her better. Also, magic’s totally a huge part of your life, so I kind of want to see what all goes into it.”
Trorm felt his lips quirk into a small smile. “You realize that we won’t be casting any spells at the table.”
