Chereads / earth orc / Chapter 949 - 62

Chapter 949 - 62

You make polite noises about his suggestions but otherwise ignore them. It's the easiest solution, and you want to cut him some slack given what he's been through.

The third week magnifies every concern you had in the second week. Enrollment is down, with several of the students that Blankenship singled out no longer in class. Blankenship's lecture is worse than previous ones, and he has the distracted air of a man trying to remember if he locked his front door before he left for work. Even your demonstration of the information coded in pattern energy doesn't get a reaction, despite the boss way you capture a visual representation of that information on pattern-sensitive paper.

Blankenship's Wednesday's lecture, though, is the next level of awful. His pacing is more manic than on previous days. He writes on the whiteboard as if he's trying to carve the diagrams into its surface. He grills Inez, who did extremely well in your Beginning Summoning class. Throughout that class, she was lively and engaged, asking insightful questions, and her final project was stellar. Here, though, she presses herself into her chair, chin tucked and shoulders rounded, eyes on her desk while Blankenship quizzes her. "It's a-causal," he says in a fierce, low voice. "I walked through the proof. So what does that mean for information flow? All I'm asking is that you connect dots that I placed so close together that they're practically on top of one another."

Erick, sitting next to Inez, can't hide his contempt for Blankenship. Inez is more diplomatic, saying only, "Sorry, professor, I don't understand what you're asking." Inez is quiet but calm, even as her whole body shows that she wants to flee.

"Dammit!" Blankenship punctuates his shout by hurling a dry erase marker at the wall. It clatters to the floor, the class utterly silent.