A few weeks in, and they already had their group projects. It was… well, Avyr supposed he appreciated the idea of it— it very nicely supported the sort of philosophy of mortal affairs that most of the connected world subscribed to, of unity and collective effort to achieve great things. Still… group projects. He’d already heard grumbling about them from some of the other students, and they weren’t big cats, which meant they at least had a natural advantage when it came to getting along with their peers.

He stared at the form that’d just been handed out to them, glaring at it fiercely enough that he was sure if he possessed a technique of the sort it would have already burst into flames. It was such an inconspicuous thing— a happily colored piece of paper, just sitting there. Menacingly. Five options, chose two, no future revisions.

“So… do you have an idea of which classes you’re going to choose?” Utterly fearless of his currently-murderous glare, Likuan leaned right up next to him and stared at his paper. “Ooh, Agroherbology? I didn’t know that you did that. You really didn’t strike me as the type…”

“Really? He’s told us about it before.” Likuan’s stupidity, as always, was enough to get Mimi to look past her atavistic fear. Some things— like snapping at idiots— were just too powerful to resist. “You just weren’t listening.”

“Oh.” Likuan flushed in embarrassment. “Right, um, I remember that now. I imagine you’re not picking history? How about the sciences? No, you wouldn’t, would you? I get it, I wouldn’t either— ooh! We should do our project together! It’d be fun—”

“Shut up!” Mimi hissed at him, and he shut up. “Sorry about that, Avyr…”

“He wasn’t annoying me.” He had to put up with the constant barrage of questions every time he came to his Aurelian Literature and Culture Studies class, but it honestly wasn’t that much worse than Lily. The biggest difference between them… okay, there were a lot of differences between them, but the biggest one was that he simply… did not get

it. Not like Lily did.

He sighed, shifting a bit and flicking his tail in frustration. It was a horrible choice— anything he had any particular skills in, he didn’t trust the teachers to grade fairly. Anything he trusted the teachers to grade fairly, he’d have to really sink effort into to even try to achieve what he might have been able to otherwise… Then again, when had he ever been afraid of a little effort?

Step by step, one after another— as with everything before, he’d get through it again. One paw after the other. Simple.

He nodded sharply, turning back to Likuan. “I’d be amenable to that.”

Likuan’s eyes widened to an almost absurd amount. “Really? Really really really—” he laughed, loud enough to get some odd looks from the others in their class. “Thank you!” He leapt at him and swept him up into a hug, and Avyr froze, not quite sure how to respond. “It’s going to be so awesome, we’re going to do the coolest most epic project ever known to—” and a bunch of other stuff he didn’t understand because Likuan had buried his face in his fur.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

He sighed, then glanced at the others, choosing to ignore Likuan’s mumbling for the moment. “And you two?”

Mimi snickered at his plight, but nodded in turn. “It’d be interesting, I guess. Tongjing?” The slight girl nodded too, and— well, that was that. One of two projects decided, as simple as that. It was actually somewhat of a relief— to at least have one project where he was working with friendly faces instead of probably-terrified strangers.

For the second project, though…

He glanced down at the list of his options, and grimaced. Now that was going to be annoying…

………

Of all his classes, agroherbology was one of the ones whose instructor he had the least problems with. This was probably because he didn’t have an instructor there— the class was too small, too specific, too geared towards the elite students to earn itself a dedicated teacher. Instead, they had a bunch of guest lectures and the academy’s gardens, which had more or less become their responsibility to take care of.

In theory, the school had a groundskeeper on retainer to take care of the weeds and all sorts of stuff, but in practice after the first time Guandong’s Desert Soulgrass had been tossed out with the weeds, they’d all agreed unanimously to ban him from the garden. A small miracle, given how little they agreed on anything else.

Obviously using the greenhouse for southern continent tropicals would be the best, but Avyr understood using it for other tropical plants, too. That was fine. He understood that entirely. What he didn’t understand was how Tai wanted to use the whole greenhouse for subtropical plants! It was a weird feeling to be in concurrence with Guandong on anything, given how antagonistic their relationship tended to be otherwise, but they both agreed that Tai was an idiot who shouldn’t have been allowed within twenty feet of a plant.

He sighed, staring across the small garden table at Guandong, who glared back. “What? You were the one who wanted to do your group project for this class.” Tactfully, Avyr didn’t point out that she had also wanted to do her project for agroherbology, and that every step of the process of being sorted into his group had been entirely consensual on her part. He’d tried that before, and it’d gone… well, he was glad that he was in Shedding and Guandong, mortal, to say the least.

Instead, he took a more… utilitarian tack. “Have you decided on what you want the project to be?”

“Torch ginger.”

He raised an eyebrow… then, sighed again when the gesture was totally lost on Guandong. How he wished that he could have done a project with Lily… “won’t that be expensive? The school will only pay for a certain amount of our project—”

“I’ll just get Young Master Xinshi to pay for it.”

“—alright, and aren’t they hard to grow this far north? They’re a tropical plant, no?”

“Yeah, but we have the greenhouse, and their spiritual sister— you might not know— is one of the ingredients in several of the Bloody Saffron Sect’s important pill exports.” He knew. Guandong tended to underestimate how studious he could be, often… or, all the time. Annoying… “And when did you ever shy back from a little bit of work?”

That was… fair. Fine. “If you’re paying then…” he nodded, and Guandong flashed him an annoyingly smug smile.

By the time they got through this whole thing, she better be glad he didn’t eat humans…