Deciding that waking a sleeping tiger would be a horrendous idea, Aurelius started to edge ever so closer to the door.

  Aurelius shifted his weight on his buttocks, pushing more of his weight onto the soles of his feet in a bid to stand up silently.

  “Squee-”

  Aurelius winced in irritation as the beige, tacky and non-rodent related couch let out a squeak.

  The single sound echoed across the room, amplified by the night air, and by the silent rise and fall of the passed out figure of the bulky sage on the typewriter.

  Aurelius successfully lifted himself out of the confines of the couch, as he started to crawl on all fours on the floor.

  He had realised in the last week that the simple wooden floor had the nasty habit of moaning under any kind of pressure and footsteps.

  It seemed that neither the Academy nor the sage had seen it prudent to lay a carpet over the surface. Meaning that Aurelius would be condemned to perform delicately when threading the accursed, overly lascivious floor.

  While Aurelius suspected that the Academy was flat out broke to afford one for a spare office such as this, he had no idea why an uptight, irritable person like Sage Yeltz would not think to add this simple item to her office.

  She clearly could afford it on her salary!

  With each crawl taking a lifetime, Aurelius made the longest 2 meter journey of his life to the door.

  Aurelius creaked open the door with utmost prudence and expertise, only to be greeted with another peril.

  “Ooooooo”

  The night winds that made their way through the empty corridors unfortunately decided to crash against his delicately held door, and decided to make a ridiculous howling noise through the narrow crack.

  Hurriedly, with alarm, Aurelius glanced back fearfully, and decided to let the winds crash into the door to open it to the maximum.

  Folding a piece of stray paper, Aurelius shoved it against the bottom of the crappy wooden door, and he shuffled on his knees out into the corridor.

  And after another 5 meters of significantly less pathetic crawling, Aurelius got up to his knees to be greeted with something he had taken for granted.

  Freedom!

  ???

  Aurelius did not run into Sage Yeltz until the following afternoon.

  Monday was rather uneventful, yet the dread in Aurelius’s heart had grown over the course of the day and with each passing lesson, anticipating the reception that he would be greeted with from the sage for the events that had transpired last night.

  Aurelius had even considered running away into the nearby forest to run away from such a problem in the first place.

  He would technically die within the next 24 hours if he did that, given the contents of his contract with the Magic Commission, but the death would beat the sort of things Aurelius had in his mind with regards to Sage Yeltz’s ‘irritation’.

  Aurelius felt his dread blow up into a full panic attack, one he had to swallow back to make sure that he didn’t piss off the sage further by showing up late.

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  With a knock, Aurelius entered the familiar room, the terror of which he was getting increasingly sick with.

  Much to Aurelius’s surprise, the sage was back to her usual self, with a neutral, but pissy expression on her face.

  Her Commission uniform was back on, precisely creased at the right places and her muscles bulging out of its clothy confines.

  She was seated on her desk, her feet kicked up on it against a marginally larger stack of papers lying next to them.

  “Mmm.” She greeted then proceeded to completely ignore the sight of Aurelius for the following two minutes.

  Aurelius had no choice but to stand there a little petrified, and consider the options he had for ‘restarting the loop’ in his vicinity in the awkwardness.

  The windows along the corridors were decently far up in the air… right?

  However, when the sage eventually spoke, Aurelius was completely floored by her words.

  “Haaa… I apologise for what happened yesterday.” She… apologised.

  “See, the truth is that the bloody city had a little incident a few days ago in one of the Eastern districts.” She started glumly.

  A flash of darkness flickered across her face as she rubbed her glabella, and lowered her feet from the desk gloomily.

  “There were 5 separate and major bomb threats, completely unrelated to one another in the same night.”

  “And let me level with you. I suspect that it might be the fae.” She said, her face falling into a slight grimace.

  “No idea what their end goal could be, but all perpetrators of the incident were found at the site of the bombs. And guess what?” She asked.

  Aurelius, a frown on his face, shrugged, wondering where this was going. Wasn’t finding the perpetrators a good thing?

  “All of them had killed themselves on the spot. A clean wound on the heart with a nice variety of stabby instruments.”

  “Some in my department suspect a cult, but it feels like the timeline is lining up a little too perfectly with regards to… your little incident.”

  “The culprits had almost zero connections to each other, and were from completely different backgrounds. How is it that a 70 year old businessman and a 25 year old mechanic were involved in the same incident at the same time?”

  “They had only basic anti-divination cast on them, so it was not too difficult to find and disarm the bombs.” She continued, clearly complaining about the case.

  “And as a sage of the water elemental, I had to check each of the places out, along with the corpses as an expert in the magics involving mind-manipulation. It’s a job reserved for archmages and above.”

  “The Commission has to wrap these kinds of incidents up quickly and quietly without overdrawing their resources. If we aren’t efficient and effective about it, people die, and people will lose faith in our institution.” She noted irritably.

  “I had essentially gone without sleep for the past 3 days, with me sorting through documents on the case even during our session on Friday."

  “And when I finally caught up to the work that had to be done, and assigned the work to my department, you dropped that little hint from Quetzalcoatl.” She said sulkily.

  “You can say that I went a little mad temporarily from the stress and sleep deprivation. The research I was doing clearly could have waited for another day, and things would not have gone so… unprofessional last night.” She commented, her hands clasped on top of the desk in a very professional pose that was nowhere to be seen the night before,

  “So, basically. I’m sorry kid. It won’t happen again. Let’s take today a little break from reading. I’ll answer some of your questions and call it a day.” She finished, unclasping her hand and raising her hands up in a pose of surrender and putting the tiniest of smiles on her face in a conciliatory manner.

  Aurelius stared at the hint of the smile on this… ridiculously overworked woman’s face.

  She had Aurelius INCREDIBLY suspicious, on full alert, as some might say…

  Was she… fae?

  “Err… I don’t… have questions… Err… I will be… leaving…” Aurelius stuttered out, inching back towards the door, ready to bolt at any time.

  If the woman made a single suspicious movement, Aurelius would bolt out of the room, and take his chance jumping out of the window! He could either restart the loop or get noticed by the students on the ground with a liquefied pair of legs!

  “Really? Not even about your soul blueprint? Or regarding your contract?” The sage asked, once again kicking her feet up onto the desk and pulling out a stack of different paperwork.

  “I promise you that my name has not been stolen.”

  “It would set off all kinds of alarm bells within the commission if that were the case, and I would have around 3 anti-mage cucksquads investigating me right now. I dare say that they would literally dig up my own shits and trail the scent to find me.”

  “Those dogs are bred for those kinds of things after all.” She said sarcastically, casually flicking the corner of her paper to emphasise her words.

  Aurelius, backed into a corner against an increasingly irritable sage, decided to compile some of his questions as quickly as possible, and leave the office to enjoy his freedom.

  “Err…” Racking his brain, Aurelius came to his first, sensible and useful question for the sage.

  “Can I get records of the honourable Quetzalcoatl?” Aurelius asked the first question.

  “I will compile a few for you to read in your free time. But the sensitive archives are off limits for you at the moment.” The sage replied succinctly.

  As Aurelius searched for another question, the sage interjected, posing a question on his behalf.

  “Haa… Do you not want to know what I meant by you needing five centuries to master that blueprint?” She asked, clearly exasperated with Aurelius.

  This made Aurelius look back at the sage in surprise.

  Yes. He definitely wanted to know that!