Kami returns and breaks up the flow of good posts with her own brain bilge
The bus braked suddenly as a white Toyota corolla pulled out across the lane and EJ’s lunch bag rolled off her knees before she could catch it, clunking to the floor and no doubt instantly bruising the pear inside. She quickly bent down to retrieve it, the imagined jeering of the other passengers ringing in her mind’s ear.
She held her bus card up to the scanner at the next stop and it tagged her off with a satisfied bleeb-beep. The doors hissed shut and the bus accelerated away as she slipped into the slow-moving current of students as they all travelled North toward campus.
The group gradually thinned as beanied and beareded heads, steaming in the crisp cold, tore off into cafés, lecture buildings and libraries. EJ had the longest walk: across two major intersections and past the human sciences building, fine arts, music, law. Following that, a long lawn of struggling grass where graduation functions were held every semester. The university would put up a marquee for the entire week, thoroughly smothering all life beneath it and spending the next five months attempting to revitalise the lawn only to throttle it again come spring graduation.
This was naturally of substantial interest to the biological thaumaturgists who were constantly offering new lines of artificially selected magic grasses. The gardeners eventually gave in one fateful afternoon and agreed to sow a new variety in one corner of the lawn. The growing speed and vitality of grass was undeniable as was the natural bounce and shape of the ringlets and the tendency for the grass to go frizzy in high humidity.
Naturally, the gardeners, from that point on, opted to do things, well, naturally.
EJ briskly crossed the empty road and stepped under the arch leading to the clocktower, one arm holding her satchel in place and clutching her lunch bag, the other driven deep into her coat pocket. She tried to draw her nose back from the fabric of her scarf which was steadily getting damper with her breath. She passed the hazchem sign which read “No electronic devices beyond this point” and pulled her phone from her pocket briefly to check that it was turned off.
Magic, as the university and the scientific community at large were begrudgingly calling it, tended to “mess” with electronic devices. Just as leaving a credit card in a jacket pocket next to a cellphone generally resulted in a phone call to the bank, trying to text within the critical thaumatic radius resulted in a wiped contact list or all contact names being changed to those of ancient deities.
Obviously it hadn’t taken very long for someone to point out that life depends on electrical currents and charge gradients etc. and that magic seemed highly compatible with living organisms. To this the response was a wringing of hands to the sky and a desperate “well you explain it then”.
After a brief search, EJ’s fingers eventually found the mundane silver house key to open the tall wooden double doors. She let herself in and closed the doors behind her with a deep clack. The chamber was dimly lit by a mixture of natural light filtering through translucent windows and a warm yellow glow of flames in brackets which lined the walls. She took a torch from a rack by the door and lit it at a fireplace at the opposite end of the round room. Holding the torch as close as she dared to her running nose and chilled cheeks she walked down the northern corridor, her footfalls echoing through the stone building and intermingling with the distant shuffles of other pairs of feet.
The sound of her walking was muffled as she crossed the threshold to the carpeted part of the building. The tower was the oldest building at the university but had been repurposed as an administrative centre in the decades prior. Now, due to its distance from the centre of campus, it had been stripped down and re-fashioned for the study of magic. Computers, airconditioning and heaters had all been removed and the old furnaces rebuilt. Power points hung unused in the corner of rooms and the hands of the odd remaining clock spun back and forth, dancing to some tune of their own (or someone else’s) devising.
She pushed open the swinging door into the biological thaumaturgy lab. The office space that EJ worked in was in the Northernmost room which thankfully had large windows along one wall. This meant that it was bright and would eventually warm throughout the day. She extinguished her torch in a bucket of water, laid it out on a rack to dry, went to the coat rack, pulled down a large robe with her name written in masking tape along the edge and wrapped it gratefully around her.
Roz (“Rosalind”) was in the lab adjacent to the office space doing observations on her mite colony when EJ rapped on the glass and waved. Roz turned and waved back while her colony combined on the benchtop to form a rude gesture and redispersed as the student turned back to her work.
EJ went through the final door to the hushed workspace, sat down at her desk and decided to reward herself for getting into work so early by heading out to get a coffee.
