The Last Continent [Open]

[Kieron Sharpe]

It had been fully seven years since he had graduated from Hammel and yet the place still felt like a second home to Kieron. He was seeing the different sides of it now, the places that were hidden from young eyes where students dared not tread for fear of getting yelled at by Doctor Neville. Even though he had been employed by the school for coming on a month now it was still slightly surreal to step into the staff lounge. He kept half expecting a teacher or trainer to appear and threaten to give him detention if he didn't get out pronto.

The plate of food the Irishman carried had been brought up from the cafeteria, another place that he was still coming to terms with being in again. He now went down there just before classes broke for lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and brought his up with him to eat in the staff lounge after spending a few minutes chatting to the servers. The morsels on offer at the cafeteria seemed to have seen a vast improvement since his days as a student at the school, and he found himself looking forward to his twice-weekly treats.

Today it was pasta bolognese, fragrant with fresh herbs and with a leafy green salad on the side, and since he was the only one in the lounge at that moment after he had placed the plate on the table he went to the dimmer switch by the door and turned the lights way down. There was still a faint light so anyone coming in wouldn't be met by complete darkness, but it was dim enough that K could take off his sunglasses without wincing at the blinding light. Resting the heavily tinted shades on top of his curly brown hair, K rubbed at the bridge of his nose as he prepared a protein shake by retrieving the tub of strawberry flavoured powder from his half-shelf in one of the cupboards and mixing a scoop of it with some of the milk from the fridge.

After flicking on the coffee machine as he passed so it would be ready for him (and anyone else) after he had finished his lunch, K settled at the table and took a long drink of the shake before turning on his Kindle and devouring the first forkful of pastery-goodness. He didn't get into full books while he was reading at lunch, he was too often interrupted, so he tapped on 'The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld' and it opened at the last section he had been reading – The Last Continent.

With the room light low and the Kindle showing the barest hint of light, Kieron was very comfortable as he began reading through the quotations and working his way through his rather delicious lunch.

Unseen University was much bigger on the inside. Thousands of years as the leading establishment of practical magic in a world where dimensions were largely a matter of chance in any case had left it bulging in places where it shouldn't have places. There were rooms containing rooms which, if you entered them, turned out to contain the room you'd started with, which can be a problem if you are in a conga line.

[Yulia Sokolov]

Lia was gearing up for the proper beginning of year three. She did appreciate how Hammel was a year round school, but at the same time everything felt definitively more settled down when the fall rolled around. Maybe it was because they were all starting to get the hint that summer was wrapping itself up almost as quickly as it had come in. The days were getting shorter and slightly colder, though still not chill enough to wear anything long sleeved even though they were in Vermont. It was just the end of the season, and it was the only season that seemed to be marked with such an end. It was never the beginning of fall, it was always a mournful end of summer. Once they got used to the idea though, then they could enjoy the foliage.

Or at least Lia could. She was more than ready to be in full proper swing and not to try to schedule in all the training sessions while having to worry about the little vacations that the students took. She had her roster and she was happy with the looks of it. At this point she had a good mix of new along with some more long standing students of hers. Development and consistency were both very important and she was glad that she was starting to get her first set of students where she could see the long term effects of her work. It made her re-evaluate things, and she appreciated any opportunity to do so.

Things hadn’t changed all that much for her from last year to this, but some things always did. This year they all seemed to be positive things. The big thing soar on the list was food. With Ferris in the kitchen Lia didn’t hesitate to get her meals from that source for now on, and for the rest of her life if Ferris stayed and outlived her. She was a terrible cook, so the chance to have a good meal in the middle of the day was one that she wasn’t going to give up. Did her dinners still consist of ramen? Yes, but now there was less of it in her life overall.

Lia had picked up her lunch and had headed to the staff room. It tended to be a nice space to get to talk with some of her coworkers, but she’d found something odd of late. It seemed that whenever she went in there she encountered someone new. It wasn’t a bad thing, it just made her wonder if suddenly the coat closet had turned into something like that wardrobe that went to Narnia. She really couldn’t complain though, and that was simply because she hadn’t met a person that she didn’t like there.

She approached the room and balanced her tray in one hand while she opened the door with another. She stepped inside and found the space considerably darker than usual, and didn’t take long enough of a moment to really note the glow that would have issued from the Kindle screen. Without much thought she reached over and turned up the lights.

[Kieron Sharpe]

Selling hot sausages from a tray was by way of being the ground state of Dibbler's existence, from which he constantly sought to extricate himself and back to which he constantly returned when his latest venture went all runny. Which was a shame, because Dibbler was an extremely good hot sausage salesman. He had to be, given the nature of his sausages.

Kieron had always had a deep love for literature and would willingly read pretty much anything put in front of him. He was the child who was two reading levels ahead of his peers, the teenager who would read reference books for pleasure and the adult who would find an abandoned book on a bench and start looking around for the nearest coffee shop. Through all the years of his life, however, he had always carried a deep burning passion for the Discworld and all its many strange, wonderful and fantastical characters.

The Wit and Wisdom was a book he'd owned since he'd bought the first edition in 2007 and was his absolute favourite 'dip into' book. The collection of the best quotes from the Discworld saga had been his companion on countless journeys, first via the hardback copy and then on his Kindle once he had acquired one. He adored real books, but even he couldn't deny that an electronic reader was far simpler than carrying around half a dozen hardbacks all the time.

The pasta and salad was going down delightfully easily as Kieron read has way through the quotes from both Carpe Jugulum and then The Fifth Elephant, and he was so engrossed that he failed to hear the soft squeak as the staff lounge door creaked open. The sudden light rammed into Kieron's eyes with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and his distressed flail to shield his vision caused the chair he was sat on to teeter. Thankfully he caught his balance just in time, and stood up quickly to put his back to the light as he fished around for the shades that -had- been on top of his head.

As he had semi-flailed to shield his eyes he had knocked them off, and when the nurse tried to open his eyes to look for them he winced hard and slammed them shut again. Through his eyelids coloured spots swirled in and out of focus, and Kieron carefully lowered to his hands and knees to try to find the sunglasses that would once more shut him into comfortable darkness.