Chapter 242: 242 | For Thirty Seconds, I Forgot I Was the Main Character [GT BONUS]
Her dark eyes held mine for another beat. Then she turned and walked down the 1-B corridor without waiting for a response, her ponytail swinging behind her with the confidence of someone who had delivered her message and considered the delivery complete.
I stood at the junction.
Percy, who had been silent through the entire exchange, looked down at his notebook. He had written two words in the margin.
She’s right.
The Oracle Feed pulsed once in my peripheral vision with a notification I didn’t need to read to understand. Camille Ortega’s Temptation Gauge had ticked up another point. The System registered directness and intellectual engagement as compatible with my psychological profile and recommended continued interaction along challenge-based vectors.
I dismissed the notification and walked toward the 1-B corridor, where the rest of my cohort had already scattered toward their next session. Aspect Theory in Room 218. Different building. Different instructor. Same uncomfortable reality settling deeper into my bones with every class period and every interaction and every woman who looked at me and saw something that didn’t match the file.
My phone buzzed. Sloane.
How was your first class?
I typed back while walking, Percy matching my pace with his notebook tucked against his chest.
Informative. The instructor is good.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Good how? Is she hot?
I stared at the screen. Through the bond, I felt Sloane’s energy shift from focused attention to something warmer and more pointed, the specific flavor of curiosity that preceded her territorial instincts locking onto a target.
She’s a former Rank A Hero who could probably kill me before I finished processing that she’d moved.
That’s not an answer to my question.
The answer to your question is that I took excellent notes.
LUKAS.
She’s my instructor. I am appropriately focused on the academic material.
Your non-answer IS the answer.
I put the phone away and caught up with Percy, who had paused at the entrance to Building D to hold the door open.
"Your typing speed decreased by thirty-one percent during that exchange," Percy observed. "This typically indicates emotional engagement with the conversation partner rather than efficient information transfer."
"Percy."
"Yes?"
"Please never analyze my texting patterns again."
"I can attempt to stop, but the data arrives involuntarily. I can only control whether I verbalize it." He considered this. "I will attempt to verbalize it less."
"Thank you."
We entered Building D and followed the signs toward Room 218. The hallway was quieter here, the architecture older and more traditional than Building C’s modernist glass. Wooden floors. Warm lighting. Display cases along the walls containing Aspect research documents and historical artifacts from Halloran’s sixty-one year history.
Ahead of us, I spotted Rina walking alone, her white hair catching the warm hallway light and her horns curving upward in dark spirals. She carried her sheep mug in one hand and a tablet in the other, and her tail swished behind her at a pace that suggested mild anxiety about finding the right classroom. When she sensed footsteps behind her, she turned with the quick flinch of someone accustomed to checking for threats, and her purple eyes went wide when she saw me.
"Oh." She relaxed a fraction. "Hi."
"Hey. Aspect Theory?"
"Room 218. I think." She glanced at her tablet. "The map says it’s at the end of this hall, but the map also said the cafeteria was in Building A, and I spent twenty minutes yesterday looking for it in the wrong building before someone told me it moved to the Athena Wing three years ago and nobody updated the digital map."
"The map is wrong about the cafeteria," Percy confirmed from beside me. "I submitted a correction request to the IT department on Thursday. They have not responded. I submitted a follow-up on Friday. They also did not respond. I intend to submit a third request today with documentation."
Rina looked at Percy with the careful assessment of someone encountering a new variable in an environment she was still learning to navigate. Percy looked back at her with the same expression.
"You’re the one with the notebook," she said.
"I am the one with several notebooks. This one is for academic scheduling and logistics." He held it up. "I have separate notebooks for campus mapping, student behavioral observations, and personal reflections. The personal reflections notebook is private."
"That’s a lot of notebooks."
"Information requires organization. Disorganized information is noise."
Rina’s tail lifted slightly. "I organize my tea collection by caffeine content and then by flavor profile within each caffeine tier."
Percy’s pen stopped moving. His eyes went to Rina’s face with the specific focus he reserved for information he found genuinely interesting rather than merely catalogable.
"How many tiers?" he asked.
"Four. Decaf, low, medium, and high. Each tier has between six and eleven varieties depending on seasonal availability."
"That is an excellent system."
Rina’s cheeks flushed a soft pink beneath her pale skin, and her tail curled forward to rest against her thigh in the motion I’d learned meant she felt comfortable enough to stop holding it rigid. "Thank you. Most people think it’s excessive."
"Most people do not understand the value of categorization."
They fell into step together as we continued toward Room 218, and for approximately thirty seconds I walked behind two people who had just discovered a shared language that nobody else in their lives had ever bothered to learn. Percy asked about Rina’s preferred suppliers for specialty tea blends. Rina asked about the optimal notebook brand for archival-quality ink retention. Both questions were answered with a seriousness that suggested these topics constituted the most important conversation either of them had participated in all week.
I said nothing. I just walked and let them have their moment and felt something settle in my chest that had nothing to do with the System or the Gacha or the seventeen thousand complications currently orbiting my existence like satellites around a planet that had no business being this popular.
Sometimes people just needed someone who spoke their specific frequency.
