After waking up and magicking your way through the morning you check your schedule. Whoever decided that world history should be taught at 8:30 in the morning was an idiot. It's bad enough trying to be interested in learning history when it's so very general and fast-paced but to have it early enough in the morning that everyone's bleary-eyed makes it that much worse.
Offsetting that is the neat fact that you're one apparition and a five minute walk from class. Honestly it takes you more time to attempt (and finally succeed) in transfiguring a teacup into a thermos for your tea that actually getting to class on time. You're still not sure it's a true thermos because you don't think you can transfigure a vacuum, but you're cheating by using a warming charm anyhow.
You stroll in to class a full five minutes before the start and find only a couple of girls who you've never made the acquaintance of sitting towards one side and a long-haired Latino-looking guy front and center. You exchange nods with the guy and sit down near the front and start pulling out your notebook. The rest of the class trickles in with Derek giving you a wave in passing before finding a seat.
The class itself isn't anything to write home about. There's very little discussion and little detail given that the class is supposed to cover more than two thousand years of history. Your note-taking is simple and concise and honestly you could probably regurgitate the basic gist of the lecture even if you might differ in some of the word choices.
Your next class isn't for almost an hour, so once everyone stampedes for the exits you take your time packing up and sip at your tea instead. A soft groan from your left draws your attention and you look over to see a bloodshot brown eye staring at your thermos. The girl had drug herself in at the last minute and laid slumped on the tiny armrest-sized desk the entire time. You figured she was asleep, but even if she had been, the noise of everyone leaving apparently awakened her.
"It's tea, not coffee." You comment mildly. You murmur legilimens under your breath and push a bit to try and establish a connection. You don't quite get a full connection, but a few feelings pass from her eye to yours and you get empathetic twinges of the hangover she's feeling right now. Passing the container to her, she pulls her straight dark hair out of her face, shakes a couple of painkillers out of a bottle and chugs most of your remaining drink. At least she has the good sense to look sheepish as she passes you your drink back.
"Sorry," she rasps. Her skin is pale and she squints when light reflects off of the whiteboard at the front of the class. "I guess trying to run to class made the hangover worse." She blinks a couple of times and meets your eyes, freezing for a moment before offering a pained smile. "I'm Sarah."
"James," you give her an amused smile back and stand. "I've always found that if I'm gonna drink that I block out most of the next morning for recovery. Running was probably a bad idea, yeah."
Sarah looks disgruntled at the comment but perks up a bit when you pick her backpack up and offer it to her. She's a little shaky standing up and you fear she would have tipped over if she had to do it herself.
"Have you eaten anything yet?"
"No?"
You sigh and gesture her towards the door. "Did you at least drink a bunch of water before you went to bed?" At her very soft head shake and wince you don't bother to hold back the sigh. "It's like you've never had a hangover before."
"I haven't?"
Oh, she's one of those up-talkers? That could be really annoying?
"You should get some food and a lot of water in you and then go back to sleep if you don't have any tests today." You have the time to get her to the cafeteria and maybe even cast a pain-relief spell on her surreptitiously, but do you really want to take the time?
[X][Sarah] Walk her to the cafeteria, make sure she eats, try using healing magic on her.
You pluck Sarah's backpack from her since she hadn't done anything with it since you handed it to her a few minutes ago. "Alright, I have like an hour before my next class, so how about we get you something greasy for breakfast and all the water you can drink."
Sarah pulls an oversized pair of sunglasses from the smaller pocket of her bag before sliding them on and sighing in relief. "That'd be great."
With the glasses on she stops flinching every time the light level increases the slightest amount but she still stays pretty quiet as you walk. The cafeteria is pretty empty so it's not difficult to assemble eggs and bacon, but you also throw a banana and oatmeal on her tray. There's no sports drinks so you grab a glass of 'vitamin water' and some hot tea while she's getting settled at a table. You use the time to flip your wand around in the holster so it's pointing out and push it so that it makes contact with your skin. You're not completely sure it'll work but it's easier than trying to surreptitiously wave a wand around.
"Here," you say, handing her the flavored water, "drink this first, worry about caffeine later."
You can't actually see her eyes but you get the sense of her blinking slowly at you. "M'kay. I don't remember you really talking to anyone in class before."
You manage to keep your laugh down enough so she doesn't flinch. "I'm not really a huge people person most of the time. Still, when a friggin' zombie looks over at me I can take pity on them."
She tilts her head enough that you can see her attempt at a bloodshot glare as she continues chewing. "M'not a zombie."
"Suuuuuuure." You manage to control your skeptical look as best you can. "So, you gonna drink a little less now?"
While she chews the banana you move your hand under the table and murmur the diagnostic spell as softly as you can. To your relief you feel the information trickle in to your mind and take the time to scan her. You can't see how much she had drunk but damned if it doesn't seem like she's still half-drunk and hungover. Short of a hangover potion (which you don't have, and would bring up some uncomfortable questions) all she really needs is water and time. And half a day of sleep, probably. Who knows how she made it to class—it must have been on adrenaline and a prayer. You try to come up with some easy way to cast a painkiller spell on her that wouldn't have her just magically feel better and don't really come up with anything smooth.
"Yeah, like I was keeping up with my big when she was drinking and we got in to doing shots-"
"Your big what?"
"Like, my big. I'm in a sorority and she's my big sister?"
"Ah. Yeah, the amount I know about that kind of stuff could be written on these tiny napkins with space to spare."
Sarah starts to regale you about 'bigs' and 'littles' but gets a bit too animated and winces again.
You manage to sneak in a casting of the painkiller by making it seem like you were offering a head massage for the headache she still had. Getting her back to her dorm was also a chore because after helping her hangover the slight drunkenness came to the fore and she was pretty giggly.
Luckily her roommate Susan—a tiny brunette—manhandled her in to their room and thanked you for bringing her back before she had to go track her down herself. You do get a look like you are some kind of freak when Sarah calls you 'Mr. Magic Hands', but an explanation and another casting of the spell when doing a head massage stops the skeptical look, but does make you cringe when Susan calls you that as you walk down the hall to leave.
Your next class isn't so much a class as a study session for Macro where there's a TA to take your work and answer questions. You walk in early to find that Derek is sitting and talking with a couple of students. He waves you over and immediately asks if you've heard what the Merchants were up to last night. When you say you haven't, he shows you a PHO post of multiple security cameras merged together.
"All eight locations were hit at the same time—that's crazy for the Merchants, they generally couldn't hit one thing correctly."
You hand his phone back. "And the stealth fields? I know she's a Tinker and all, but…"
"She's a vehicle tinker, or something like it," one of the guys, Vijay points out, "and she's made cloaked things before, but only one at a time. This is unprecedented."
"I think Skidmark was holding her back," Derek says bluntly. "He was arrested what, four days ago? And now instead of some crazy tinker-tank that'll end up blowing itself up there's at least ten stealthed truck things that worked perfectly. If that's what she's capable of, the Merchants are going to be pretty dangerous."
"I had gone to Lord's Market on Sunday and was walking back when I heard what sounded like a big diesel truck pass near me, but I didn't see anything," you say. "There wasn't any traffic on any of the streets I could see. Wonder if it was one of those stealth things."
Both Vijay and Derek look interested, but Miss Najjar the TA calls everyone to attention. You turn in your report at the end of class and chat a bit more with both guys before finding a quiet spot to pop back to your apartment for lunch and a bit of magical study.
While you eat you hold your wand in your palm and use the Four-Point spell to point north. Using your wand as a compass isn't hugely useful at the moment but the idea behind making a simple spell to tell you information is something that you might be able to hack in the future. You switch over to practicing the Super-sensory Charm instead, using your Occlumency and increased cognition from the mind arts to slowly get used to the sheer amount of information bombarding you. It's not something you'd want to leave up for any major amount of time—you can smell the pigeon shit from the roof of the building next door and the open dumpster in the alleyway—but the enhanced vision and hearing may end up being useful.
Cleaning up and finishing the few questions you had for history, you get back in 'costume' then apparate over to the three-story warehouse that you finally decided on for a main base.
Instead of setting up wards immediately, you wander the area casting Homenum Revelio to make sure there aren't any hidden people that you didn't detect with your mind sense. Once you're sure it's clear you dig through the rubble piles nearby until you stumble upon a huge chunk of pink granite. It was probably an old surface plate from a machine shop, but it'll work excellently when divided into smaller chunks for wardstones. Maybe too well, really, you'll save this for permanent wards once you have a bit more experience. You levitate that back to your lair and come back to the same pile for some stone that looks like it was the facade of a building.
Back at the warehouse, you get some decent experience with Reparo to get the broken front door fixed. The large rolling metal doors on the back also need a shot of repair in order to roll smoothly. You close both sets and lock them with a Colloportus.
Taking your stone up to the second floor where there are some rooms, you pull out your reference materials and work on making some simple wardstones to get started. You don't know quite enough to put up Hogwarts-worthly wards quite yet, so simple will have to do. The combined rune schema for muggle-repelling, notice-me-not, and intruder-detection is laid out in the book, so it's easy enough to copy on to the stone, if a bit time consuming. With the notice-me-not included a vertical boundary needs to be established, so you end up carving eight copies and breaking open the roof access in order to place the top stones. The spellcasting and tying it to the wardstones is the first time that magic has actually felt like work to you, leaving you hungry and somewhat tired. The wards feel strong, though and you feel them in the back of your mind, just like you feel the wards on your apartment telling you that everything is undisturbed.
Wednesday's classes don't start until almost 10, so you sleep in a bit and check the news. No major gang violence, although a couple of postings on PHO mention some weird noises coming from the western parts of the Trainyard. Skidmark is supposedly still on the Rig and arraignment has been pushed back for some reason. Speculation is that he's in the middle of meth withdrawal and probably unresponsive.
After your morning math class you spend some time in your lair cleaning out old debris and practicing detection spells. You don't know if you could call them charms, it seemed to be more like divination, but some searching through the trunk had come up with some spells that could be tailored into searching for things—like 'guns' or 'cars' or 'marijuana'. Well, actually you ended up having to refer to a primer dealing with spell modification and hacking the Four-Point spell to point to the nearest concentration of a previously-cast spell. It wasn't great, but otherwise casting a spell to find 'a gun' went absolutely apeshit and returned way too many pings.
After that bit of magic practice you head back to campus for afternoon classes. You're pretty early to Parahuman Sociology (or 'cape 101' as everyone seems to call it) and have your pick of seats. You sit and cast the wide-band legilimency spell and watch people trickle in. Crystal—Laserdream—wanders in talking to a couple of people before noticing you and flashing embarrassment for a moment. She ends up taking a seat next to you and meticulously arranging her notebook and pen before turning to you.
"Uh, hey. I want to apologize for the other day, my cousin is…" she trails off with a twist of her cupid's bow lips.
You shrug. "It was just annoying really. Is she like that all the time?"
Crystal's shoulders relax a bit. "Yes."
"Get that a lot?" you ask.
"Yeah, sometimes it feels like I'm her moth-" she breaks off as her cousin floats into the room, her aura high enough to pull the attention of almost everyone. As soon as Victoria looks her way she makes a couple of hand gestures while blaring embarrassment and anger. Glory Girl reins in her aura and settles to the floor, looking away and flushing a bit. Crystal turns away from you and busies herself by taking her headband off and fixing her hair. When she turns back she looks mortified and starts to say something when Victoria arrives.
"Hey, sorry Crissy, I got distracted." Victoria says, pausing as she puts her stuff down and looks between the two of you. She shoots her cousin a raised eyebrow and a little smirk before turning to you. Her aura ratchets up a few notches and she float-hops forward almost putting herself between your desks. "Victoria Dallon, you can call me Vicky."
Crystal is broadcasting a fiery death in her cousin's direction. Class is going to start in a moment, so if you have anything to say, best say it now.
[X][GG] "The name's James. Crystal and I were already talking" (Slightly less polite)
You incline your head ever-so-slightly to look her directly in the eye. "James. Crystal and I were already talking, Victoria." You turn back to Crystal and offer what pity you can with your eyes. "I see what you were getting at. Less like a mother and more like a pet owner whose puppy just pees all over the place when they're happy. Or sad. Or pretty much anything, really."
Crystal throws a hand up in front of her face and turns away but not before you hear a snort escape and see her shoulders jerk a bit. Her cousin reacts like you expect, hands on hips and floating higher while her aura begins to increase. Maybe your Occlumency skills have just increased that much, but you're unmoved in the face of Glory Girl's aura for ten or fifteen seconds until Crystal chastises her and points to her desk. You wait until her attention is partially back to you before wiping at your brow like it was actually difficult to withstand it.
"You handled that better than most people would," she murmurs to you after making sure Vicky isn't looking.
"I learned how to control myself when I lost my parents last year," you return mildly, "it will take more than a tantrum to bother me." You pause a moment as if in thought. "I can see how dealing with it all the time could be a problem though. Regular shrink visits would probably keep things from being an issue, I assume you have one on retainer?"
She makes a noncommittal noise as the professor starts their lecture, pulling out her phone and texting madly.
Crystal exchanges phone numbers with you later in the week in Programming, ostensibly about help with the class. You're unsurprised that on Friday that Vicky comes in closely following her cousin, who shoots you an apologetic look and is pulled away as soon as class ends.
Crystal literally drags Vicky off after class, the younger girl floating as her cousin pulls her along. You'd offer a jaunty wave but neither girl looks back so you shrug and find a nice sheltered spot to apparate to your warehouse. You've decided that's the safer option, since it has the muggle-repelling charm on it. You'll need to test and see if capes qualify as muggles or not at some point.
By Friday you've cleared the warehouse out and gotten to be a dab hand at cleaning and repairing. A number of the windows have been repaired outright, and you've gotten practice on summoning glass shards and transfiguring them into fixed panes. All of the second and third floor windows are fixed, with the first-floor fanlights over the doors being transfigured into matching stone. You're actually getting a bit better at Transfiguration in general, having taken some time while you were fixing things to practice small inanimate-to-inanimate transfigurations.
Derek has also invited you to a party just off campus later in the evening, apparently some frat or frat adjacent thing.
[X][Party] Attend the party.