>>5777757Meanwhile, you and your one-time rival drifted apart. It wasn’t that you’d ever been close, obviously, and never FRIENDS, but as you spent more time focused on the pursuit of that magical discipline which most captured your passions—a subject where she continued to flounder, and never took any electives in—the whole childish ‘rivalry’ seemed less and less relevant. The more time with Pearce and your other friends, the less any of that MATTERED to you.
Henzler was hardly a SOCIAL rival anymore, that much was certain. That seed of early confidence and extroversion which you’d seen in the young Izirina Henzler seemed to dim and die as she withdrew into herself and away from her peers. While you socialized and fraternized between study sessions, classes, and extracurriculars, you’d sometimes spy her with her face buried in this book or that—textbooks, strange tomes of Dwarven runes or Southeastern scrawl, or old-looking scrolls that she’d go so far as to roll up and stuff hastily back in their tubular cases if she caught you staring. Sometimes it was fiction, or near-fiction—travelogues of distant places, written in olden days, or juvenile ‘portal fantasies’ of fictitious, hypothetical realms. Her every elective and pastime seemed to be obsessed with being anywhere but HERE…
Well, not that it was YOUR problem, right?
Then, one day, she made it such. One day, you returned to your student housing in the Initiates’ Village—that winding and haphazardly-plotted maze of houses, hovels, and tilting over-tall apartments held together with glue and amateur spellcraft, festooned and made bright and gay by the application of iridescent and effervescent magical paints, and lively by all means of street-magic. There, in your own rented residence, you found a note slipped under the door in an unmistakably-official school envelope. You opened it urgently, expecting accolades or—more worryingly—reprimand. You received neither, but the daintily-written but altogether UNOFFICIAL summons of the Archmage’s heir.
‘Come and meet me this weekend at the Mirror Maze. Please.’
That was what it said. The ‘Please’ was hastily appended, you could tell, darker than the rest as if Henzler had let the rest dry and then, realizing how curt and potentially threatening the note was without the interjection, had appended it.
What do you do?
>Tell Logan Pearce about it, and see what he thinks>Attend the mysterious meeting>Ignore the letter, and go about your preexisting plans: shopping!>Confront the little weirdo about this bizarre invitation in class tomorrow>Write-in 