Liverpool Institute

  First day of classes – Office hours

  A knock at the door of the professor’s office startled him to wakefulness, nearly sloshing the drink from his canteen over his modest suit. Just barely avoiding getting more than a few drops on the corner, he hurriedly stoppered the flask and tossed it back into the lowest cabinet on his desk, just on top of the folder that held the paperwork he’d need to sort through later tonight.

  Paid to keep the tools you needed to do your job close to where it was needed most, he always said.

  Sniffling a bit as he rubbed the crust out of his eyes, he adjusted the collar of his shirt that had gotten bent out of shape as he had taken a power nap in his admittedly luxurious armchair. On paper, it had been a gift from the provost, but while neither of them would admit it it was plain as day what it had been from the start.

  A kickback to stay with the program. To not rock the boat too much, and risk losing out on the university’s record breaking profits. Of which he’d inadvertently started as a crucial piece to, but over time intentionally solidified his position as.

  He had a sour taste in his mouth, but he wasn’t sure if it was from the thought of the web of office politics he’d entangled himself in, or the dehydration from falling asleep after all the gin. Regardless, his voice came back gravelly and hoarse as he responded to the person on the other side of the intricately carved wood.

  “The door is open,” he answered crossly.

  A moment’s pause, before the squeak of the hinges announced the arrival of today’s first – and likely only – student visitor.

  What was her name again… let’s see, 9:25am class, second row from the front and 53rd seat from the left…

  Ah, yes. Lucy. Lucy Wright, he remembered now.

  “Y-you wanted to see me, professor?”, the bookish girl asked nervously.

  He nodded seriously, clasping his hands in front of him as he rested his elbows on the desk. He didn’t answer her question.

  “Have a seat,” he commanded plainly.

  Truth be told, she looked about ready to melt into a puddle from embarrassment, but that didn’t mean he was about to go easy on her. He needed to be exactly certain that any student who proved worth his time was, well, actually worth his time, after all.

  At the very least, this one could listen well enough. It was a good start.

  “Do you know why you’re here?” His voice came even and disapproving, and the student’s breath hitched a bit as she was caught off guard by his sudden inquiry.

  “U-um…”, she stammered, gulping audibly before calming herself enough to reply. “No, not really. I thought it was to do with today’s class at first, but…”

  She trailed off near the end, but he’d gotten the answer he wanted. Honest, and perceptive. Things were looking better by the second for this little interview.

  He let her stew in silence for a few moments longer as he mulled over his offer. On the one hand, she’d consistently shown a track record for critical thinking and had at least some basic knowledge about the field, even before going into the institute. That, in and of itself was something that was getting harder and harder to come by. Moreover, despite her general hesitant demeanor, she was still able to work up the nerve to face him consistently…

  …

  … Lucy fidgeted nervously, and he realized that his mind had wandered off a bit, leaving her high and dry.

  He sighed resignedly at himself, though that turned out to be open to misinterpretation by his visitor. The girl looked extremely worried at the reaction, but at the same time he still didn’t correct her assumption. Instead, he just moved on to the course of action he figured he’d be doing from the start.

  “Young miss,” he finally said. “How would you feel about signing on as a junior lab assistant under me?”

  That little reveal made her eyes go wide with shock. “W-what? L-l-lab assistant? I thought you thought I was-”

  “Inadequate?” a flinch on her face confirmed his suspicions, and he pressed further. “Maybe a little misguided, even?”

  She froze up, unsure of how to process the turn of events. On the one hand, she looked like she was drowning in a wave of relief, but at the same time she also looked about ready to cry.

  Perhaps it was time to lay off the pressure for a moment. Wouldn’t do to squander the chance at getting some fresh blood on the team before there was even a chance to make introductions, after all. As someone who’d worked with Domain magic since it’s very inception into the wider world, playing things by ear was close to second nature to him by now. Despite the scientific trappings that the field had taken on in recent years.

  “Relax. You’ve already passed the hard part of the test, and that was being one of the few students who actually bothered to work outside the boundaries of the entrance exam.

  “You’re… you’re not mad at me?”

  “Mad? I’m practically ecstatic,” he said with a completely deadpan expression. “Do you know, out of the several hundred of your peers that I’ve had the displeasure of meeting today, just how many of them showed more interest in the field as a whole than cashing in on their own Domain talent training?”

  “Um… I’d guess not a lot, sir…”

  “Twenty-three. And of those, almost half of them are liable to chicken out before they even get the chance to fail. More still decide they’re not up to the task partway through, and leave of their own accord. At the end of the day, I’m lucky if I cover the attrition rate for my department by the end of the year. That’s how demanding pushing the limits of our understanding of magic is. Do you understand?”

  “I-”

  “If you think you do, you don’t. That’s rule number one. But then again, starting out, that won’t exactly be your job, anyways.”

  “B-but I haven’t agreed to-”

  “Oh, you will. Everyone I give this opportunity to always does. Who wouldn’t want to work in a lab on the bleeding edge of progress? Makes for a great resume builder, after all. Gets you fast-tracked out of general education credits, has a clear path to one of those cushy corporate jobs everyone wants these days, the stipend…”

  He slid an envelope across the top of the table over to Lucy, who picked it up gingerly with both hands, trembling like it might crumble to ash any second.

  “Inside is the list of specifics and the directions on where to show up the day of, but that can wait until later. For now, I’ll just give the brief rundown on what we do around here.”

  She’d already unsealed the letter and had begun skimming through the text on the missive inside. “There’s a… practical exam listed here?”

  He waved away the concern. “A formality for someone operating at your level, I’m sure. But, never mind that for now. Those results won’t matter unless you know what you’re getting them for. In which case…” he cleared his throat, at long last delivering the ultimatum he’d been building up to.

  “How much do you know about the Central London Exclusion Zone?”

  < -|- -|- >

  When Lucy returned to her dorm that night, she felt like her heart was going to explode. Never in her life would she have believed that she’d be offered to work under the Professor Edison Smith. Not to mention, to hear implicitly that he approved of her research ethic!

  Sure, he was… more than a little rough around the edges, but… still, to learn under one of the Founding Five mages! This was a once in a lifetime – no, once in a hundred lifetimes opportunity for her!

  Now, all she needed to do… was… not… blow it…

  She stared down at the practical exam assignment listed in the offer in abject fear. All her worries that had plagued her up to the moment she’d entered that door to begin with came back not only in full force, but redoubled as well.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  The wording was deceptively simple. But under no circumstances would this be easy. Especially when she still didn’t have any Domain talent of her own to speak of.

  By the date listed below, construct a prototype spell or enchantment that can perform a sufficiently novel application of a Domain’s rules.

  Saying the wording was vague was like saying the sun was awfully bright out today. She didn’t even have a clue where to begin, and there was only a two-week time frame for her to make this happen in the first place. She groaned, flopping down dejectedly into the beanbag chair she’d brought from home.

  “How am I supposed to make this work now…?”

  It was an absurd ask, by any metric. Entire think-tanks were formed in the hopes of accomplishing this sort of thing successfully. How was she supposed to do this by herself?

  To even make the attempt to start tackling the problem just made her brain hurt. Massaging her temples, she began fishing around in her bag for some painkillers to fix the issue, only to be interrupted by a knock on her door and a familiar – infuriatingly cheery – voice.

  “Hey, could you let me in? I left my keys inside again…”

  A silent sigh escaped Lucy’s nose. Evidently, time to process what she’d just received wouldn’t be coming anytime soon. Getting back to her feet, she flipped the deadbolt on the dormitory entrance and immediately found herself ensnared in a bear hug that threatened to sweep her off her feet.

  “Ohmygod hiiiiii~!”, Lucy’s roommate squealed as she practically bowled her over in excitement. Thin and wispy, but nearly a head taller than her own admittedly short stature, the platinum blonde elf seemed blissfully unaware of her now rather precarious balance.

  “You won’t believe the first day of classes I had!”, she exclaimed, with light hints of a Welsh accent peeking through the corners of her diction. “I got to learn my first official cantrip today! Can you believe it? Well, can you?”

  “Agh- put out the lights first, will you, Ffion? I’m going to go blind at this rate!”

  Lucy wasn’t a fan of how this was becoming a common occurrence. At first, the idea of rooming with a second-generation mage had sounded exciting! But, little did she know, there was much more that came with that package than was let on by the counselor originally.

  Born to an elvish family, Ffion inherited much of her parent’s raw talent, with very little of the control that decades of practice brought with it. Objectively, once she got a handle on things it was very obvious that she’d be quite the prodigy in the Day Domain, but until then…

  She was literally glowing with excitement. More miraculously still, was the fact that she never seemed to be aware when she turned on the light show.

  “Oh! Sorry…” she replied sheepishly, taking a deep breath until the light dissipated entirely. “Better?”

  “Much,” Lucy agreed, finally wresting herself free from her iron grip. “Anyways, glad that you had a good time in, ah, what class was it you had today?”

  “Applied Spellcasting 100!”, she beamed, causing Lucy to wince slightly as the light manifested for a bare moment again. “The professor said I was a natural!”

  “Well, you were born with Domain talent, after all…” she sighed wearily. When life decided to play favorites, it really played favorites. By stint of being born to two elf parents, Ffion had been practically guaranteed a slot at the Institute. Meanwhile, she herself had fought tooth and nail with revision after revision of essays to not only pass the rigorous demands of the placement test, but acquire the scholarships needed for her to cover tuition for the year.

  That Ffion’s family was also filthy stinking rich was just icing at that point. Lucy wondered what it would be like to have a free ride fall in her lap.

  “Hey, are you okay? You kinda spaced out there for a bit, Luce.”

  “Hmm? Oh, nothing just… a lot happened for me today, is all.”

  “...You want to talk about it?”

  “It’s fine, really. Tell me about this cantrip you learned.”

  “Oh… okay!”

  It didn’t take much to get the elf started. A natural extrovert, in direct contrast to herself, really. As she dove into the explanation of what she learned, Ffion flicked on the television they shared to a random channel, a brief flash of lime green darting between the remote and the screen before it came to life.

  “So, since I’ve got Day magic, the professor split me off with this tutor of his and he’s, like, this handsome looking guy from St. Petersburg, yeah? Said his father was a mage for the Kremlin, before the Reds dissolved and whatnot, or something, but… wow! Like, you can tell he works out, but doesn’t like to show it off because he wears this-”

  “Ffion, you’re getting sidetracked again.”

  “Oh, right! Anyways, I get paired up with him because we both share a Domain, and he goes on this interesting tangent about how there’s more than just light involved with Day magic! Can you believe it?”

  “Mm-hm.” Lucy nodded along passively. The scope of each of the Ten Domains was well known to her already, but apparently this was news to Ffion, so she humored her. Though, in her defense, Day was one of the more esoteric options.

  All the Domains in the Aspect category were like that, to an extent. With the other seven in the Elemental and Life subcategories, things were typically pretty cut and dry. Fire, naturally, gave control over fire, but also to an extent heat, due to being downstream of the base concept. Similarly, Water controlled water and the processes that it was involved in, like erosion, and so on. As such, the lower complexity Domains sometimes mixed and mingled in the extent of their capabilities, but that assumed that the mage had the talent to use the entire breadth of their Domain to begin with.

  Law, Day, and Night, on the other hand… were a bit of a different beast. Started to dive a bit into the spiritual side of things, if recently declassified research papers could be believed. It really was a blessing for the global scientific community that the USSR dissolved, and gave NATO reason to feel less cagey about what magical findings they’d hoarded during the Cold War.

  Law for instance, had some… interesting effects on chemistry in controlled environments. Accidentally creating a Philosopher’s Stone in the early 90s in a lab out of Helsinki had been such a bombshell, that the news hadn’t leaked until just last year. Add to it that some members of the team responsible had allegedly checked into mental hospitals soon after for hearing voices that weren’t there, and the tabloids had gone rampant for nearly a month straight.

  Night was apparently deeply connected to death and dreams, as well as just plain darkness. And Day, besides just plain light, was in a similar boat, just in the polar opposite direction.

  “It’s crazy to think about!”, Ffion replied to the conversation. “And you know what’s crazier? The cantrip he had me learn was one of the precursors for divination spells? Can you believe it, Luce? Divination! Granted, what we started with was just for enhanced perception, but when I mentioned that the colors on his jacket seemed a lot more vibrant all of a sudden, he seemed surprised! I think I picked up on it quicker than expected. He called the spell tetrochro… tetracora…”

  “Tetrachromacy,” Lucy finished.

  “Yeah, that! It was amazing!”

  “I imagine it was, wasn’t it…”

  As grumpy as she was being, the idle conversation was cheering her up a bit. Taking her mind off the possibility of working for Edison Smith on his project to unravel the secrets of-

  “The Central London exclusion zone now enters its second week since its appearance, with no signs of dissipating anytime soon. For the sake of public safety, the military cordon continues to remain in place, and at this time organizations such as FEMA are looking into the possibility of provided material support through indirect airdrops. It still remains unknown whether or not…”

  The TV newscaster interrupted her train of thought, causing a frown to form on her face. Part of her hoped that the people inside the apparently hazardous dome of fog were okay, but at the same time she was starting to grow sick of hearing about it. If only there was some way to get some real information as to what was actually going on in there. So far, all they knew was that nobody had come out, and that nothing that went in could come out either. They’d almost need a way to remotely observe-

  Lucy’s eyes widened in shock. It was a lightbulb moment that potentially held the way out of her current predicament. She fished out the letter from the professor, reading the wording of the practical exam to make absolutely sure there wasn’t something that would disqualify this idea.

  If I can even just get a prototype that works halfway…!

  “...Luce? Is everything alright?”

  “You said you were learning enhanced perception spells?”

  “Uh, yeah, why?”

  “Well, Ffion…”, she floated casually. “Would you be interested in helping out on a project with me?”

  < -|- -|- >

  Two weeks later

  “Next.”

  The professor sat at one end of the lab with a bored expression. Perhaps he’d been too hopeful with this year’s batch. Most of the students he’d headhunted were washing out at record numbers. It was putting him in a bit of a bind, honestly. He couldn’t afford to lower his standards, but at the same time more than nine tenths of those he’d found were running away with their tails between there legs. Literally, in the case of the one dragonborn kid that’d travelled here all the way from his family den in the Himalayas.

  A disappointing surprise in and of itself. Back in his prime, dragons had been a species that was feared as much as it had been respected. Back then, magecraft had been mostly underground, too. Now that it was taking center stage in the limelight, though…

  Times changed. No longer were they proud and majestic warriors. Now… they were campus donors.

  If they expected him to change his standards on behalf of a single whelp, they were sorely mistaken.

  Though, all that’s left now to examine is…

  “Coming!”, said the voice out in the hall. Shaky and short on breath, Lucy entered with what appeared to be a hermetically sealed jar of… some sort of gas… and a telescope with… were those Day inscriptions?

  “What is this?”, he asked grouchily as she set the two items on the table in front of him.

  “Just pick up the telescope and point it at the jar. Here’s the crystal you’ll need to power the enchantment.”

  She set a small, thumb-sized yellow gem on the table, glowing slightly that felt like sunshine in the center of his palm. Grumbling, he slotted the crystal into the receptacle and did as he was told. The enchantments came to life, and he held up the telescope to his eye, noting that the jar appeared clear when he looked through.

  “So, you made an X-Ray vision lens that can see through heavy smoke. Congratulations. Now, if that’s all-”

  “It’s not!”, Lucy countered. “That’s not smoke in there professor!”

  “Really? Then, what the hell is it supposed to be?”

  “That, right there, is a sample of the fog encircling the Central London Exclusion Zone. The item you hold in your hands is capable of cutting through the interference of the mist’s chaotic mana pattern! At least, at this density…”

  He took a look at the jar again with his naked eye. Certainly looked dense enough to him. He glanced back at the student in front of him, who seemed a lot more confident than she’d been when they’d first met.

  I need her on this team. No other way about it. She’ll be wasted with anyone else.

  “I’m going to need to see all of the notes you used to design this,” he demanded politely.

  “Gladly,” she replied unwavering. “But I have a condition of my own.”

  “Oh? By all means, name it, then.”

  “I didn’t do this alone. Without my research partner, none of this would have been possible to begin with. If she isn’t given the same deal, then I’m out. End of story.”

  Well, color him impressed. Looks like in just two short weeks this girl actually had the barest sense of how things worked at the highest levels.

  It was, almost a bit nostalgic, actually.

  “Deal,” he agreed. “I have office hours tomorrow. Bring your schematics and your associate with you then. And,” he interrupted before she turned away to share the good news on him.

  “Welcome to the team.”