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.
He snorts. "Fair enough. I don't know. It's hard to explain because I've spent so much of my life building up impenetrable mental habits of not thinking about certain subjects so I can channel all my frustrated arrogant genius into being a really excellent skirmish player and hopefully live past twenty."
"Because hubris is deadly! If you go around thinking too highly of yourself, the universe will endeavour to prove you wrong, and it will win, because it's the universe and you aren't. That's how it works where I'm from, anyway. And I'm not yet ready to believe the rules are different here."
"Well, they are! Bending the universe to your will is how magic works. How the hell do you have mages wherever you are if you can't do that."
"Okay, I admit defeat on that one. Something about what the fuck is wrong with my home plane?"
He laughs. "How long do you think it's going to take the escalated wizard to show up and take charge of me? Soon, not soon?"
"He's in charge of the city, so he has a lot of things on his plate. Could be anywhere from a minute to five hours."
"Soon, not soon," she says, correctly guessing the last two words, and shrugs.
Gosh he's cute. She wonders where he got those scars...
She mentally shakes herself. Irrelevant. She might as well teach him what she can of Genoshan, since she can't think of any way to communicate her actual confusion with the idea of magic that doesn't involve asserting your will over the universe.
She makes an illusionary globe in the air over her hand, which she holds flat, palm up. "Earth," she says.
She points at a chair. "Chair. One chair." She points at another chair, back to the first one, and back to the second one. "Two chairs."
"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten," she counts on her fingers. "Eleven, twelve. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty three..."
He echoes along, and then gets ahead of her, watching to see if he's guessing right - "twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, ...?"
She nods. "Thirty! Thirty-one, thirty-two," she waves a hand. "Forty, forty-one, forty-two," waves her hand again, "Fifty-one, fifty-two..."
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