A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [45]
My “student” laptop—a battered first generation iBook—is always charged. Whenever I’m out in public, I carry that thing.
My business laptop stays in my silly little graduate student suite, under lock and key. The laptop is unlike anything anyone around here has seen, except maybe in some of the secret R&D labs around campus. Maybe not even there.
Because this thing is high-powered—not just with tech, but with the occasional magical connection. And how to explain magic to the nonbelievers in my audience? It’s simple, really.
Magic slips into the real world. Or the real world slips into the magical world, depending on your point of view. Mine is the point of view of a person who uncomfortably straddles both worlds. I can see the magical, even though I have little magic myself.
I have little magic, but I have access to magic. Thanks to engineers with magic who also happen to design computers, I have at my fingertips the simplest of spells. I also have commonsense nonmagical remedies to magical potions, and other such things that occasionally come in handy when dealing with the other side of reality.
In truth, I’ve only used those things with said empath’s friends. In my work, I’ve used the standard gun/ knife/whatever’s handy to complete the job.
Which is looming.
That’s what I’m thinking as I approach my usual chair. It’s a wingback with high arms that sits directly across the room from the instructor’s chair.
I staked out this chair on day one of the workshop, and although one of my less observant compatriots tried to take it from me on day two, no one will ever try that again.
They say I’m touchy.
I’m just a little protective.
The problem is that I don’t look touchy. If you were to walk into our little critique session on this Friday morning, I’m the one you’d ignore. I’m older than most of the class for one thing. I also have cultivated the don’t-pay-attention-to-me vibe so essential in my job.
Maybe it’s one of my little magics.
If you glanced at me, you’d see a once- pretty woman who allowed time and lack of attention to make her seem faded. But if you looked, really looked, you’d notice a few anomalies. I wear baggy clothes to give the impression of flab, when in truth I have none. I also have a hard time hiding the intelligence in my eyes, so I look through my eyelashes a lot like an unrepentant Southern belle.
My fellow students have yet to notice these things about me, but the instructor week two, Discord, noticed right away. He never picked on me, even though I was the one who had two (rather mediocre) stories in for critique that week. Instead, he avoided me as much as possible, making him rank just a bit higher in my mind than he normally would have.
Apparently, he became a bestselling thriller writer through observation, not through all that tough-talk he imparted to the other students.
But I digress.
I also arrive at my seat before everyone else, so I can watch them enter. I ignore most of them. They’re the background for my two missions. But a handful of people are impossible to miss.
Like our teaching assistant, Raj O’Driscoll. He’s a glorified gofer, and not bright enough to realize that should anything go wrong with this workshop, he will get the blame.
Then there is the faculty advisor, Lawrence B. Hallerhaven. Hallerhaven has taken on the job to schmooze with the famous writers. He’s terrible at planning and even worse at following through. He leaves all of that to poor Raj, who is spending this morning preparing for