Dragon's life in college

ch 43

“I wonder if it will be like this every year,” Nigel thought. “Probably,” he decided.

Having finished packing and understanding that Ember and crew wouldn’t want him around, he instead pulled out a sheet of paper and began working. Ryu had recently sent him a very messy scrawl of numbers, with a request for Nigel’s help to organize his finances. Nigel had taken one look at the extremely haphazard organization system, if one could call it that, that his friend had and had immediately taken it up. Ryu’s accounting skills left a lot to be desired, as in it was not there. It wasn’t a hard task by any means, unless deciphering Ryu’s writing counted, so Nigel found it a pleasant experience, for the most part. There had been a few times when he wanted to claw at his own scales trying to understand how a mess 2G, or at least that was what he thought it was, translated into exactly 1,672 gold coins, and other such instances.

He was almost finished with it now and wanted to present Ryu with a neatly ordered account of his finances, so he set to work finishing up the little work he had left. Mostly just summing up the amount of sapphires and blue topazes Ryu had, which were unhelpfully lumped under blue rocks, and adding those to the respective amounts of valuable and non-valuable gems Ryu had.

Starting College Again

It was strange, arriving at college for the second year. It wasn’t at all like coming home after a long visit, college was never that nice, but it was very much like coming back to something familiar. Not quite homely, but not strange and scary, almost a little comforting in its familiarity. Perhaps it was because he knew what was coming, perhaps it was because it was familiar and somewhat homey, or perhaps it was because he was ready and willing to drop a pile of scrolls onto Ryu’s lap.

“Here is all of your personal finances, neatly counted and organized; unlike that mess you handed to me. How did you ever know how much money you had with that scribble you called a record book?”

“I didn’t,” Ryu answered, picking up the pile, glancing through it, then placing it on his bed. Nigel fought the urge to huff at the disregard for his hard work, but he knew Ryu wasn’t interested.

Personally, it was a little strange to Nigel that people wouldn’t find accounting and organization of money interesting, but he did understand that not everyone enjoyed it. He supposed that it was like how not every Fire Dragon enjoyed incineration, a comparison that his older siblings had always used when he was younger. After having been used for target practice by Ryu, his siblings had gotten suspiciously quiet about any Incineration comments when around him.

“Excited to start a second year?” Ryu asked him.

“Yes,” Nigel answered. He really was this time. “I’m glad I don’t have to worry about getting eaten by my roommate.”

Ryu laughed at that. “Oh, I wouldn’t have eaten you. Cannibalism is frowned upon these days. I might have ended up using you for a target though.”

“That would have been nice to know a year ago.”

“I wasn’t that intimidating, was I?”

“Not intimidating. You were about as unintimidating as a long division problem.”

“Well, that was a year ago. And now, I get to work on making you into the intimidating dragon.”

Nigel held back a groan. He knew that he would have to work on fire-breathing skills, but he was hoping for barely component, rather than intimidating.

“It won’t be that bad, Nigel. I’ve been thinking over the summer. I just need to compare notes with Oceania and we’ll have you breathing fire as easily as you do your beloved math problems in no time.” Ryu reached into a trunk and pulled out a slightly beaten looking sheet of parchment. Judging from the ink stains and slightly burnt edges, Ryu had obviously hurried scribbled down whatever came to his mind at the moment rather than taking his usual careful time writing everything down.

Nigel wasn’t exactly certain what he thought about being a case study, but he was at least grateful that his friends still thought he wasn’t a completely hopeless case.

“Don’t look so sad,” Ryu brushed up against him. “You’ll get it mastered in no time. Oceania’s latest letter indicated that she had an idea which she was certain would work. And with your looks, all you need to do is be able to control your fire and you’ll have every dragon and human running for cover.”

“At least Human Observation isn’t a required class,” Nigel muttered. If there’s one thing more embarrassing than being a scaredy-cat math nerd of a dragon who couldn’t control his fire, it was being a scaredy-cat math nerd of a dragon who couldn’t control his fire and was terrified of humans.

“Come on, let’s get you unpacked and then go wander around. I haven’t been by our spot yet and I want to see if it’s still the same.”

“I didn’t bring that much with me this time,” Nigel said. “The only long part will be dragging everything out of storage.”

“It doesn’t take that long,” Ryu waved at his trunks scattered around his side of the room. “With the two of us, it shouldn’t take that long at all.”

Just as Ryu said, it didn’t take long to retrieve Nigel’s trunks and unpack everything. A few hours later, he and Nigel were relaxing in their spot, chatting about their summer, the part they hadn’t spent together, and discussing plans for the semester. Nigel was slightly worried, having heard that the second year was harder than the first year, but Ryu assured him that it would be fine. College was going to be harder every year, it just meant that they were getting closer to being done.