Cordyceps Twenty-Nine
Cordyceps Twenty-Nine
I really wished I could sleep in. After all, it was Saturday, and the Academy had a two-day-weekend system going on. Unlike a lot of the factories in the city, which operated a Saturday and a Sunday shift so that they could keep going seven-days a week while giving workers a day off, the school worked along the same schedule as the government and banks and other institutions.
Basically, we had time off, and that meant that sleeping in was an option.
For the others, at least. With the [Quick Sleep] skill in full effect, I ended up waking up at something approaching six in the morning. That was a half-hour or so more sleep than usual, which did feel nice, but it was hardly the luxuriant lazy morning I was hoping for.
In any case, I was awake, and unless I wanted to lay down and do nothing all morning, then I might as well get up.
Hitting the showers before anyone else had even exited their rooms, I got through my morning ablutions, then returned to my room.
From what I understood, the students were let loose on weekends. Several clubs and minor electives would use the weekend as a time to push projects ahead or get extra practice in, but just as many students left the Academy and returned home.
In fact, a few had left the night before. I supposed there was no harm in leaving on Friday night to sleep in one’s own bed.
I didn’t care for it, though.
Right now, I had the school to myself, and not much of a clue as to what to do with it.
“What do you think?” I asked Sir Nibbles as I rubbed his ears.
The panbadger laid his head on my lap, eyes half-lidded under the attention. He was enjoying it, at least. I reached over to one of my class books and flipped it open, idly reading through some of the content we’d be covering in Geography in several months without really making much of an effort to memorise any of it.
Eventually though, doing nothing tired me out, and I stood up and stretched while pushing back the last of that laziness.
When I left my room again, a few of the others were up, stumbling around with bleary eyes and many yawns, but they were awake. I found Montgomery just as he came out of his room. “Hey,” I said.
“Oh, hello,” he said. “You look... awake.”
“I got up a little early,” I said. “I wanted to sleep in, but I guess I couldn’t.”
“Already used to waking up early for class?”
“I guess so,” I said. “What are you doing today?”
He thought about it for a moment. “I’m going back home tonight, at least until tomorrow night. But right now... I suppose breakfast is in order.”
I grinned. I could do breakfast. “Sure,” I said. “After that, I was thinking of maybe taking a walk out of the Academy. There’s some stalls nearby, right?”
Montgomery grinned. “There are. My mum gave me a few pounds to spend on whatever. I don’t want to blow my entire allowance in one day, but I wouldn’t mind a few candies.”
I smiled and suppressed that bit of anger in my gut. Pounds as allowance? I was lucky if my little business made more than a pound a day. We were usually dealing in shillings and pence and half-pennies.
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In any case, it was hardly Montgomery’s fault that the world was the way it was. “We should head out with a few more friends. In case we run into some Trolls,” I said.
“I’ll ask Milo,” he said before scampering off towards the boy in question. I followed after him, and within a few minutes, we’d formed a small posse of young boys all eager to get themselves hooked up on sugar and spend their parent’s soft-earned money on things they didn’t need.
After breakfast, of course.
The cafeteria lady was absent this morning, but the food wasn’t. Instead of a lady dumping food onto plates for us, we had a long row of magical containers filled with omelettes and hashbrowns and some warmed up slices of ham. Oh, and beans. Always with the beans.
I didn’t complain, it was free food with lots of protein and in quantities that would please even a lumberjack. The company wasn’t altogether unpleasant either, the boys were hyped up and being a bit silly, but it wasn’t that annoying. I endured it with a bit of patience and eventually got into a decent conversation with Milo about the plants his family grew, of all things.
Once breakfast was done, some of the boys at the table got distracted by the idea of playing football out in one of the fields, but one of the older Dragons told us that they didn’t want ‘twerps’ hogging the field, so that put paid to the idea.
It meant that the group leaving the Academy by the unsupervised front gate was nearly ten strong, a good chunk of our entire year all heading out at once.
We didn’t actually go very far. There was a trolley that climbed up and over some of the rougher hills in the area and which stopped about a block away from the Academy. I must have missed it on the way up last time since I’d come from the east.
It looked like a pretty popular, if dangerous, way to travel around. The trolley itself was suspended in places, and rode on tracks in others, using a fairly simple double-tracked system that I imagined was more complicated than it looked.
The passengers sat on the inside, on benches that faced inwards or by hanging off the side of the trolley from a set of bars. We all elected to ride off the side, which meant that at some points we were clinging to the trolley with a three or so metre gap between us and the ground. It was an insane, rather stupid, way of doing things, but this was a world that didn’t care one whit about personal safety.
The boys all agreed that hanging off the sides was way more of a thrill, and besides, the inner section of the trolley was for women and the elderly.
One of these days I’d have to do some proper investigation into the pervasive sexism of this world. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I would have expected on Earth when the west was going through its own industrial revolution. Then again, back on Earth, most nations which were experiencing heavy industrialization in the west were Christian, and that was a notably sexist religion.
This world was fully polytheistic. Everyone believed in nearly every god and goddess all at once. What separated people was their worship of these gods, as opposed to the belief.
Well, whatever, it was something to wonder at later. “Jump off here!” Montgomery said before putting his own words into action and leaping off the Trolley onto a busy street.
The rest of us followed suit, and then we were cursed out by an angry driver sitting atop the boiler of a smoke-spewing automobile as we all scurried across the road and out of his way.
“Are we going to the market stalls or to the shops?” Montgomery asked.
“The shops are best,” Milo said.
“I want to go to the stalls first,” I said. “Or we could go after. I don’t really mind either way. I don’t have much money with me, though.”
“Ah, don’t worry, I don’t mind sharing my candies,” Montgomery said with a magnanimous nod.
It was a good walk from where we left the trolley to the market, but it passed quickly, with the boys bouncing around and jostling each other and basically acting like clowns and probably making the Academy look bad since we were all still in uniform, but none of us really cared.
The stalls were a collection of well-crafted wooden stalls where merchants were set up to sell all sorts of goods. A lot of these were home-made things, but some were clearly just reselling surplus from different factories. And there was food, of course. Pastries and candies and one enterprising young man had a working cotton candy machine and some experience twirling the sticks he used to make the candy fluff so that it caught the eye.
The prices had me wincing though. Everything was three times as expensive here as back in the slums. The quality might have been better, but I wasn’t sure if it was really worth it.
Then again, I couldn’t install my own stalls here. There were bullies patrolling the area, big fat coppers just walking around and looking quite bored with everything. The stalls were all impeccably clean, and the merchants were no different.
I picked out my mark soon enough, however. A stall off to one side that sold meat on skewers. He had a nametag on his shirt that read Jimothy.
***