the start of a quiet rebellion | Glowfic Constellation

The first class Milan's decided to audit is a half-hour before Odette's first class, but she can get up early and show him the way, if he wants.

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Then he can have a safety lecture. Most of the stuff at the beginning is either fairly intuitive--lab smocks and safety goggles on at all times--or doesn't apply to him--anyone with long hair has to put it up so it doesn't get into anything. They're just starting to get into the salient bits when someone knocks on the door. The professor gets up to open it.

"Hey," says the man on the other side, "I just wanted to drop off the seeds you asked for, from the rainforest expedition."

"Thank you, Michel," the professor sighs, accepting the proffered package.

"Should you really be calling me by my first name in front of a student?" Michel asks, raising an eyebrow in suggestion of a long-running joke or argument. The professor just gives him a flat look in response. Michel laughs, then looks at Milan more closely. "Say, aren't you the guy who just showed up from way the hell farther off--Milan, right?"

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"That's me! 'Way the hell farther off' is an accurate description!" he agrees. "Understatement, if anything!"

"Bit of an idiom," he shrugs. "Matteo," apparently this is the professor's first name, "You seem to be getting along with him so well. Have the rumors that he believes himself going the way of the Zavier girl not reached you?"

The professor goes stiff. "You've made your delivery. Have you further business here?"

"Not as such, no. I assume the rumors are true," Michel adds to Milan.

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"Depends what you mean by that, I suppose. I've been in this universe for three days and there may be implications I'm missing."

"Oh, just the whole Great Mage thing," Michel answers cheerfully, ignoring Matteo's look of venom. "I mean, there's other rumors, but that's the one I meant."

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"...I feel like there's a conflict here that I don't know much about and would really rather not get in the middle of," he says, glancing between the two of them.

"Michel, go," the professor says firmly. Michel finally goes. Matteo puts down the package and rubs his temples. He looks far tireder than the exchange ought to merit.

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"...This may very well be none of my business, but - is something wrong?"

He laughs bitterly.

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"That sounds very much like the sound of something being wrong."

"Not if you ask literally anyone else."

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"And yet, here I am, asking you."

Flatly: "'Great Magi' exist."

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"That seems like... an unlikely opinion to find in this particular city," he says.

"I won't deny that if you're going to give anyone that kind of power Atennesi Cohen is a reasonable choice. That doesn't mean it's a good idea for a person to have that much power."

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"All right, why not?"

"You haven't been here for very long. Do you know what a Great Mage could do if they wanted to?"

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"I've heard some things," he says. "Maybe not the same things you mean."

"It's only reasonable to trust the extant Great Mages not to do anything ostentatiously horrible, since they haven't in all this time. But no one should have to trust anyone else not to, to remodel a reasonable fraction of the planet, or commit spontaneous genocide, or..." he trails off with a vaguely haunted look. That is not the face of a man who has listed the worst options that have occurred to him. "And that trust applies only to Great Mages extant, not those yet to be."

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"...I think I see where you're coming from," he says. "But my perspective is... shaped by different circumstances."

"Oh?"

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"...In my world, we have a genre of fiction called 'science fantasy'," he says. "Science fantasy stories imagine a world where the laws of reality are measurable, quantifiable, and immutable. Where you can study and experiment and develop an understanding of those laws and then apply that understanding to make accurate predictions. We have this genre of fiction because our world does not work like that. There is a patch of desert somewhere that doesn't have a down anymore because someone tried to figure out whether dropped objects of different weights fall at the same speeds. If you are very cautious and careful and draw your conclusions tentatively from experience, you can advance your understanding of the world bit by bit, but if you come up with a theory and try to rigorously test it, you die."

"...Well, that's horrifying."

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"Yes," he agrees. "We don't have Great Magi. But we do have gods, and dragons, and fae, and miscellaneous other powerful people. If you offend any of those, they can kill you or worse. Hubris is a lethally hazardous personal flaw. I grew up knowing that I probably wasn't going to live to see my thirtieth birthday because I am not a naturally humble person and there's no way I could stop myself from trying to do something the very moment I had an opportunity that might not get me killed."