The harsh buzz of your alarm clock jerks you awake. You blink sleep from your eyes. You've got an hour before your interview with Dr. Whipple. Plenty of time.
But present-you knows you're not going to make it.
You struggle through a shower. Your head feels like its insides were scrubbed with a wire brush. You pull yourself together and dress as neatly as you can. One last glance at yourself in the mirror and you're ready to leave your dorm room.
Your hand passes through the doorknob as if it's made of mist.
Your pattern binder is missing. You don't have access to any useful magic.
You try the door again, with the same result as before.
You know what's going on. It's a pattern that traps someone in a room. It showed up in a lot of last year's Ditch Day stacks because it's self-sustaining. Self-sustaining patterns require a practitioner to channel energy at first, but then the magical energy keeps the channel open and the magic continuing with minimal risk to the practitioner. This pattern lasts for around three hours and then fades.
If you could get access to the pattern you could disrupt it by altering it. But it's on the outside of your door, as likely as not.
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