Others, 48

Well, this sucked.

Ariel had examined the evidence, looked through all the spell circles and all the glyphs and every nook, cranny and other small thing in the tunnels under Three Hills, and she’d come to the conclusion that, without putting too technical a point on the issue, it sucked.

“And that, dear reader, is putting it mildly,” Ariel said, drawing a circle on the floor. It was made mostly from triangles and light. Summoning circles had gone out of fashion sometime around the last major dust-up at Har Megiddo, but angels had never been the most with the times. Some of them were still gloating that they’d been right about cell phones not sticking around as a thing.

Gym Class

Uri’s sister had said that the new school board had split the gym class into one for boys and one for girls because they were all perverts. Geoffrey agreed with her, so Uri guessed that was probably true, though not all the things they’d done to the school were perverted. They’d given lots of new instruments to the music room and replaced all the stairs with ramps and put sign language and Braille in the curriculum, and gotten all the books updated. There was some perverted stuff like the lube and condoms that were in the bathrooms now, and those were just helpful anyway.

Regardless of whether the school board were perverts, though, Uri knew that the gym teacher Mr. Neart was one. He was the sort of weird kind too, one who’d watch them get changed for gym but hardly ever do anything else. Not the cool kind of pervert like Geoffrey who’d actually do something perverted and fun, like have a naked sleepover.

Prince, 98

“So I just take this off when I’m ready to come back?” Franz asked, touching the necklace Ronaldo had given him.

“That’s correct, my prince,” said Ronaldo. “I confess the spellwork is somewhat beyond my ken. As you know, wizards are incapable of teleportation magic. But it has been crafted and vetted by mages I trust, and I have tested it myself. When you put it on, you shall be transported to the room where you shall meet with Lord Geoffrey, and when you take it off, you shall be returned here instantaneously.”

‘Here’ was a room at the mages’ academy, because it had been deemed too much a security risk to teleport directly into or out of the castle, which seemed reasonable to Franz. “Okay. How much time do we have?”