Efficiency classes: boring, and way more useful for people who aren't her. Odette would probably just pull out a novel, but if she got terrible grades in every class that didn't matter to her, it would reflect badly on her professor father.
If only something interesting would happen.
"I would be really, really surprised if it made it to a tenth of the amount of pain I'm in at this moment," says Milan.
"I'm under a fairy curse. The fae are a type of person at home; they have powerful magic and tend to be easily offended, and when my father was a teenager, he offended one, and was cursed to the effect that his pain will never fade. If he'd known he was hereditary, he would never have had children. I was born with half a lifetime of accumulated bumps and scrapes - not the injuries themselves, but their echoes. This scar is inherited." He taps his cheek. "By all accounts I was a deeply unhappy baby. So my mother went on a campaign to be exquisitely polite and helpful to fairies until one agreed to bless her kid - not to undo the curse, they don't do that, but to mitigate it somehow so I would have any hope of ever leading a normal life. It's hard to put into words exactly what my blessing is, but it gives me an effectively unlimited pain tolerance."
"I'm fine! My world is horrifying in a way that exceeds my Genoshan vocabulary to describe."
"He is currently in a great deal of pain and has a supernatural method of coping," Atennesi elaborates. "And you think pain from magic won't count because it's not an injury?"
He shrugs. "If it counts for the curse it'll count for the blessing, of that I am very sure."
"I see." He does not sound very happy about this. "If any mage tried to do this to a person--which we couldn't, persistent effects are possible but they must be maintained, if every mage in this city dropped over dead it would fall out of the sky--they would die. Immediately, once any other mage discovered it."
"How nice for your world. As fairy curses go, Father's was on the nasty side, but it probably wouldn't make a list of the worst hundred."
"Are fairies immortal? If not, I feel that it might plausibly be inaccurate to say that the ones alive today will regret where you landed. Otherwise I would be highly inclined to say it."
"It's going to be a long, long time before I'm comfortable returning to my world or recommending that anyone else do so, but when that day comes, I expect there will be at least a few of the current population of fairies still around for us to gently chastise."
He repeats the conversation of the past few minutes verbatim except for being in a different language.
"Well. We have all the time in the world to get powerful enough to rip the unpleasant parts of your reality to shreds without disturbing the parts that are just doing things like having people in them."
"I like to think so!" He looks at Atennesi. "So, now what do you think of the telepathy option?"
He smiles. "It seems perfectly adequate. It seems impolite to startle you; say when."
It hurts very abruptly. Underneath is the very obvious sensation, one idea, three actions, a way of bringing your will to bear on the world directly.
"Huh, that's a jump," Milan comments. "You weren't kidding. I'd win my bet about it being less than a tenth of my former total, though."
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