Nanashi Mumei pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and shuffled her notes for the day’s lecture. She looked out from her lectern at the small class in front of her… and mentally sighed.
Oh boy, another day with this lot…
Her pessimism was… earned. When she’d signed up to teach this advanced history class, a supplemental gig to her professorship at the local university, she’d assumed she would be getting the top of the line seniors, ready to delve in-depth into topics that the ordinary history course wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. She’d expected scholars, intellectuals who could rival even her university students with their zeal for knowledge.
…That was definitely not what she’d gotten.
In front of her were four girls, each dressed in the school uniform of a white blouse and a pleated, plaid, light blue skirt. In the front row sat IRyS (yes, just ‘IRyS,’ no last name and weird capitalization included) and Ceres Fauna, and behind them, respectively, were Hakos Baelz and Ouro Kronii. And despite their placement in this advanced class, they all kind of just… sucked.
Fauna tried the hardest out of the four. She did, on occasion, engage with the lectures deeper than the most superficial level, and she also tried the hardest on exams, scoring the highest by a decent margin. But she was so accustomed to zoning out and doodling in her notes that she seemed constantly out of focus. Her art, usually of plants and flowers, was lovely, but Mumei didn’t see that as an excuse to not pay attention.
IRyS also put in her best effort… sometimes. She was clever, albeit a bit dimwitted in the social department (leading the girl sat at her rear to bully her mercilessly), so when she could keep her attention on the lectures, she did fine. But, like Fauna, she was prone to losing focus, dozing off with her eyes open. With some investigation, the professor had figured out it was because of late night gaming sessions, and as much as she advised the dorky girl to get more sleep, she was powerless to influence what the students did outside of class, something she’d become familiar with when she’d rescued IRyS from the inside of her own locker.
Behind the nephilim girl, Baelz, the main source of the class’ trouble and the locker-stuffer in question, seemed to have made it her mission to never care about a single thing Mumei brought up. She usually showed that by being crude, rude, and, most frustratingly, wasting her focus on bugging IRyS. The amount of times the brunette professor had dished out a detention for all manner of poking, prodding, pinching, skirt flipping, hair pulling, and whatever other nastiness Baelz wanted to pull that day had probably consumed a whole class period’s worth of lecture time by now.
And, to her right, Kronii just didn’t seem to care about much of anything. Call it senioritis, call it self-obsession, call it whatever you please, Kronii just didn’t give a damn. If refusing to get invested in anything was a sport, Kronii would have a varsity jacket for it by now. The blue-haired girl just didn’t want to engage with anything at any level deeper than making sarcastic comments. It didn’t even seem like she was trying to amuse anyone (except herself, maybe). It felt as if her only goal was to derail so she didn’t have anything vying for her attention.
So, needless to say, Mumei was dreading today’s demanding topic.
She’d tried to boil it down to its bare essentials to retain as much attention as she could from the four, but she couldn’t really do much with it. A topic like this demanded its learners to actively engage with the concepts it presented. If one of the girls missed even a single part of it, she would run the risk of being completely lost by the end. In other words, it was this class’ kryptonite.
Mumei tapped her knuckles on the lectern, calling the girls’ attention up to herself (as much of it as she could, anyway). “All right, class. Continuing on from our discussion about the philosophy of the Medieval period, today we’re going to be covering what might be the most important concept so far: medieval synthesis.”
Fauna glanced down at her doodle of a flower patch and tilted her head. “Synthesis? Like what flowers do? Why would philosophers be absorbing the sun?”
Baelz shrugged and chimed in with her Australian accent. “Same reason you go to the pool and get a suntan, yeh? You wanna get the lads.”
“That’s photosynthesis,” Mumei interjected, with a sigh barely restrained from her words. “Synthesis is the process of absorbing and incorporating anything, not just light.”
“So it’s like… osmoooo…sis…?” IRyS wondered. Her mismatched eyes, fighting zone-out, squinted in thought. “Is that the word?”
Mumei thought about it. “They’re similar? But it’s medieval synthesis, not medieval osmosis.”
Fauna looked satisfied with that. “Okay,” she said, absentmindedly expanding the floral pattern on the margins of her notes.
“So, first question: what is medieval synthesis?” The professor looked around at her class, hoping the question would inspire some kind of visible interest. And, as feared… nothing.. Disappointing, but expected. “Well, during the Medieval period, European philosophers and theologians suddenly found themselves in possession of many sources of unfamiliar ancient knowledge, which had been effectively lost to them for centuries.” She tried for an impromptu quiz, something she’d failed to implement successfully in her lessons so far. “Kronii, can you tell us what might have given them this new source of lost knowledge?”
The blue-haired girl shrugged. “Nope.”
IRyS snorted.
Today was obviously not the day she would implement it. “The Crusades,” she sighed. “Europeans invaded the holy land, and while they were there, they found all kinds of old texts, many of which were from the classical philosophers of Greece and Rome, and they brought them back to Europe for the scholars to study.”
Baelz snorted. “The most devious of licks.”
Mumei shrugged. “Pillaging your enemies was the practice at the time.”
The rat grinned and leaned over to Kronii’s desk to swipe her pencil box. “Yeh, like this!”
Kronii glared at her desk neighbor. “Give it back!”
“Or what?” The redhead held the bag of school supplies high above her head, leaned away from the other girl so she could keep it out of reach. “What are you gonna do, prissy pants? Tell your reflection how mad you are when you’re admirin’ yourself?”
“Ooh, roasted,” IRyS commented, turning around in her seat to give the rat a fanged grin. “Got her! Good one!”
Baelz, instead of taking the compliment, gave the nephilim a disdainful look. “...Thanks,” she sighed, though Mumei could tell from the look in her eyes that she was very clearly considering how she’d go about reinforcing IRyS’ position as the class ‘nerd.’ The troublemaker didn’t like it when her usual victim got so friendly… though that never seemed to discourage IRyS.
The tallest member of the class, though, didn’t pay attention to the subtle politicking. Instead, she rose from her desk, leaned over, and plucked her pencil box out of the redhead’s hand. “Maybe I’ll just report you to the principal’s office and get you double detention,” she threatened as she sat back down, sweeping her skirt beneath her thighs.
“You always say you’re going to do that,” Fauna remarked. The kirin turned her head as far around as she could without twisting her whole body, which meant she got the blue-haired girl in the very corner of her peripheral vision at best. “You never do.”
“‘Cause she’s got too much ego to admit they can do somethin’ she can’t,” Baelz snickered.
Fauna grunted when Kronii thumped her in the back of the head, unable to see the blow coming because of her adherence to proper posture. “Ow…!”
Mumei debated interjecting with some kind of discipline… but honestly, she was just glad none of the girls had ended up getting their skirts pulled down this time. Maybe a day one Mumei would have told them off for the disruption, or even issued a detention, but at this point in the school year she’d learned to save her punishments for when things got really unruly.
Instead, she adjusted her glasses and continued. “However, with these new sources of knowledge, those studying them ran into an issue. Some of what they were reading seemed to directly contradict what they knew to be true from centuries of philosophy and theology. They had a problem on their hands. They couldn’t just throw all the new information presented to them out. For one, it would defeat part of the purpose of the Crusades. And, more importantly, they had an inkling this recovered knowledge had to have some element of truth to it. If it didn’t, then it wouldn’t have been preserved for so long or treated as true by those keeping it around.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” IRyS interjected. “I mean, we have the internet archive, and it keeps all kinds of crazy things around. Have you ever heard of TimeCube?”
Mumei could honestly say she never had, and, given the context, she hoped she never would. “No.”
“Oh, well it’s this thing that a crazy guy came up with to try to explain how like, time works? But it doesn’t make any sense, and the web page just keeps on getting bigger because–”
“IRyS?”
The nephilim blinked. She seemed so alert discussing this… if only she could channel that focus into the class material… “Uh–yeah?”
“I really don’t want to hear about this.”
“...Oh.”
Baelz flicked at the collar of the girl’s blouse. “God, you’re such a nerd.”
IRyS turned and stuck out her tongue. “You’re just a big meanie.”
“Yeh, wait until I show you…” the rat muttered under her breath as she folded her arms and slouched, speaking just loud enough for Mumei to pick up the words. The professor wondered if she ought to step in with some preemptive discipline. She had, of course, dished out dozens of detentions to the redhead over the year. It was hard to avoid it when it seemed like the girl couldn't stop herself from doing everything from spearing erasers on IRyS’ horns to unclasping the poor nephilim’s bra through her shirt. Not even changing the seating arrangement for a week had stopped her; she would just continue to screw around with whoever was closest.
Ultimately, though, she decided it wasn’t worth it. She had enough disruptions to the lesson plan as it was. Like the wearied woman she was, she figured it was better to wait until something actually happened until she reacted. Instead, she continued. “And so they adopted a new intellectual practice, one that came to be called medieval synthesis. The concept is simple enough. They had two sources of information, some of which seemed contradictory, that they believed to both contain elements of an objective truth.”
She traced out three interlocking circles in the air. “You can think of it like a venn diagram. One circle is objective truth. Another circle is the scholars’ contemporary understanding. It overlaps with objective truth, but it might not be perfectly contained within it. And the third circle is the knowledge from the recovered texts. It has overlap with the first and second circles. Both the second and third circles contain elements of the first, and some of those elements are also shared between them.”
“Ugh, math…” Kronii muttered. “Can’t we keep that in Statistics?”
“There are no venn diagrams in Calculus,” Fauna remarked, turning her head again with the faintest hint of a smug smirk snaking across her lips. It wasn’t often the kirin got sassy, but when she did, it was in that subtle way that Mumei knew drove a girl like Kronii insane. “Maybe you should have done better on the placement test last year.”
The blue-haired girl wrinkled her nose and thumped her in the back of the head again. “You’re a nerd. Only nerds like math. I’m not a nerd.”
“I like math,” IRyS chimed in.
Baelz cracked her knuckles and rotated her neck to pop it. “Jeez, you are not doin’ yourself any favors.”
“Can we keep the nerd subjects separate?” Kronii complained.
Mumei shrugged. She didn’t care much for math either, but it was the best example she could think of. “Maybe it’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s close enough. The point is that philosophers and theologians believed both sources of knowledge–the known and the new–got at some element of objective truth, even if on the surface they seemed to contradict each other. Because of this, they weren’t able to throw out information that was different from what they knew, so they had to join it somehow.”
Fauna scribbled in some shading to her sketch and tapped her pen to her bottom lip. Mumei didn’t have the heart to tell her she was accidentally inking her own skin in the process. “Like a tree graft?”
Thinking through her botanical metaphors, Mumei moistened her lips and tilted her head to each side, sending her brunette ponytail bobbing behind her. “I think… It would be more like mixing different types of the same flower in a garden. You want a patch of daisies, and you have two different colors–some are red and some are white. You can mix them in together and you have a patch of daisies that reflects the idea of ‘daisies’ better than one color alone.”
Fauna nodded and lowered her pen. “Okay.”
The professor folded her arms and thought about it some more. Was that accurate? She hadn’t truly thought about the implications of the analogy before making it. Was she leading her students astray by making the comparison?
…Did they even care?
A look across the room answered the question for her. Fauna was drawing again, Kronii was staring at a blank point on the board, Baelz seemed too distracted by doing something to IRyS’ back, and the nephilim wasn’t paying attention at all, instead squirming in her seat with an uncomfortable expression like she needed to pee.
Mumei sighed internally. Best to just continue on. Hopefully if she’d made a misstep, barreling forward with the lecture would correct it. “Faced with this problem, enter medieval synthesis. By thinking cleverly about what they were reading, treating both sources of knowledge as true while not considering either to be the whole truth, scholars adopted a practice of merging existing and recovered information, synthesizing it into a joined knowledge that incorporated both sources and, in their eyes, drew even closer to objective truth by doing so.”
A flash of motion above IRyS’ head caught Mumei’s attention when she looked up from her notes to scan the classroom, her owl-like eyes zeroing in on it. A hand! IRyS was raising her hand! Finally, someone wanted to ask a real question! With a huge, relieved smile, the brunette professor pointed at the nephilim girl. “Yes, IRyS?”
“Teacher, Bae is giving me a wedgie!” IRyS whined, squirming in her seat.
“Nuh uh,” the shorter girl countered, even though, upon closer inspection, she was definitely leaning forward in her seat and stretching IRyS’ underpants up to the poor girl’s neck. She grinned her sharp-toothed grin and stretched the nephilim’s underwear higher, making her squeal and kick her feet. Kronii and Fauna snickered at her distress. “I’m just practicin’ medieval synthesis on your panties with your arsehole!”
Mumei’s smile turned into a frown faster than lightning. Ah, of course. She’d been foolish to think it wasn’t something so depressingly unrelated. Still, in the interest of saving IRyS from getting her panties speared on her horns, the professor had to step in. “Baelz, release her underwear,” she ordered, giving the rat a stern look. “That’s detention.”
Baelz threw her head back and groaned, but she complied nonetheless, though not before giving her victim’s underwear one last pull that made her go cross-eyed.
Mumei gave IRyS a bland look, inspecting the My Little Pony print underwear hiked up to the bespectacled girl’s armpits. “And IRyS… please invest in more grown-up underwear.”
IRyS’ cheeks flushed scarlet. “Nobody’s supposed to see it…” she mumbled as she wiggled around awkwardly in her seat, trying her best to stuff her panties back into her skirt, much to her classmates’ amusement.
Slim chance of that when you wear your skirt so high, Mumei thought in exasperation, but she didn’t dare to voice that out loud. She didn’t want to risk this job quite yet. “Moving on,” she sighed, gesturing back to her lecture notes and picking up where she left off. She was going to get this concept through these kids’ skulls if it killed her. “This practice provided many benefits to scholars at the time. First of all, it allowed them to explore these old texts without constantly having to wonder whether they should throw out their existing knowledge in favor of the new, or reject the new outright because it didn’t align with the old. Furthermore, this lack of fear enabled them to examine philosophy and theology alike from many different perspectives, some of which were, from their contemporary perspective, completely novel.”
Glancing up from her notes once more, the owlish woman practically jumped with astonishment when Fauna timidly raised her hand. Not counting her eggs just yet, Mumei squinted to look for evidence of Kronii giving the green-haired girl a wedgie, or pinching her, or poking her with a ruler, or… well, pretty much anything she’d seen before from this group. It was a pleasant surprise to not find anything of the sort, and it was an even more pleasant surprise when she called on the girl and Fauna asked, unbelievably, an actually salient question! “But wouldn’t there be cases where the recovered knowledge was so different from what they knew at the time that they’d have no choice but to throw it out? Like… what if they knew the sky was blue, but Plato said the sky was green?”
Mumei practically bounced on her toes with excitement at the chance to answer this question. On its face, it was a terribly simple thing to ask, but damn it, the girl was engaging. She was thinking about the information presented deeper than the surface level, and that was better than the usual response!
Of course, before she even had a chance to open her mouth, Kronii had to pipe up. “He’d have to be pretty stupid to say that,” the tall girl snarked, smirking like she’d just made the funniest joke in the comedy club.
The professor felt a vein in her forehead throb, but she kept her composure and forced a pleading smile. “Engage with the hypothetical,” she begged. “Please.”
Kronii rolled her eyes and slouched back in her desk so the front two legs tipped up off the ground, her arms folded across her ample chest. “I’m just saying…”
Mumei bit her tongue again, instead turning her attention back to Fauna. “The truth is, as nice as medieval synthesis was and still is as a concept, in practice sometimes the ideas of recovered works were so diametrically opposed from the contemporary knowledge that scholars had no choice but to discard it. That being said, they would try their hardest to incorporate it, even if they had to employ liberal interpretations. For instance…”
She turned to the blackboard and swept the chalk over its surface, clacking the words ‘the sky is green’ onto the darkness. “This phrase alone seems to be straightforward, and also very apparently wrong.” She gestured to the window with her chalk stick, outside which her students could easily see the clear, blue sky. “However, scholars might have thought about it in different ways, trying to find some element of truth to it, no matter how implausible. For instance, they would consider whether the author meant that the sky possessed some quality of ‘greenness’ rather than being physically green. Or they would ask if ‘green’ was meant as a substitute for another concept, like how we might use ‘green’ to describe sickness in one sense, or environmental consciousness in another.”
“Or money,” IRyS chimed in, still fidgeting in her seat in a desperate attempt to extract her panties from her ass crack without outright digging for them. “I… I think rappers say that sometimes?”
“Yeah, but why would the sky be rich?” Kronii asked.
The nephilim pouted. “I don’t know…”
“Regardless,” Mumei continued, feeling the class’ attention lapse once more. “There are many liberal readings of a phrase like ‘the sky is green,’ so scholars would try their best to incorporate it into their existing knowledge using one that could be simultaneously true with the current–and in this hypothetical case truly objective–view of the world and philosophy. This would get even more interesting when it came to the realm of theological ideas, like interpretations of the concept of a higher power. Interestingly enough, many ideas from classical philosophy reach a similar conclusion to the theology of the Medieval period, though they present themselves in slightly different forms!”
Fauna nodded. “Cool.”
Mumei smiled. That word, as small as it was, felt very gratifying to hear. “It is cool.”
“Teach, I’ve got a question,” Baelz spoke up, leaning back in her desk with her legs spread out wide enough for Mumei to see her underwear below her uniform skirt. Cartoony dice on the crotch, very classy… “Why do we care about this?”
“Beyond it being fascinating historical knowledge and on the test?” the brunette countered wryly.
“I mean tbh–”
“Full words, please.”
“To be honest, I couldn’t care less about the history stuff.” The rat poked her pinky into her ear and twisted it. “I guess I wanna pass the test, but other than that, why do I even want to know what some dusty old dudes thought about other dusty old dudes?”
Mumei held back from making a sharp comment in defense of those ‘dusty old dudes,’ probably reminding the redhead how their ideas were the foundation for the world she lived in, and instead put some thought into the question behind the sass. Why should they care about medieval synthesis? What practical purpose might it serve in their intellectual careers? Obviously they would need to consider it if they entered into the fields of philosophy or theology, but… being real, none of them were going to be going into those fields. Not with this level of intellectualism, at least. They needed some way to relate it back to things they cared about.
Perhaps an example…
“What do you all like?”
“Drawing.”
“Nothing.”
“Bullying IRyS.”
“Not getting bullied!”
Four quick answers, none helpful. Mumei licked her lips and thought again. “Okay… something tangible. Like… how about some kind of entertainment? What do you guys like to watch?”
That got a moment of silence. Mumei looked around at the girls as they considered the question. She was prepared for them to answer something unhelpful again, of course, like ‘paint dry,’ or ‘cat videos,’ or even something as heinous as ‘porn.’ But when IRyS finally spoke up, it was, in a shocker, something she could actually use. “I like to watch anime.”
Fauna’s eyes lit up and she turned to her desk neighbor, eyes brimming with excitement. “Omg, me too! I looooove Naruto!”
Baelz tilted her head. “Naruto, huh? I like that one.” She squinted at the back of the nephilim’s head in front of her, probably wondering if liking something her victim liked made her a loser by proxy.
Kronii gave them a disdainful look. “Naruto? That’s a kid’s show. I prefer grown up anime, like Evangelion.”
“Geez, no reason to be a prick about it,” IRyS muttered.
Before things could escalate any further, though, Mumei interjected. “Anime! You all like anime?” Judging by the various murmurs of assent, some more enthusiastic than others, she took that as a ‘yes.’ “All right then, imagine this scenario: there’s an anime that premiered in Japan, and it got popular there. People got familiar with its established lore. But, when they went to dub it into English for the overseas audience, they thought Americans wouldn’t like the original plot and dialogue. So they effectively rewrote the entire thing from scratch, completely redoing the lore.”
“Like Ghost Stories?” the nephilim girl asked.
Mumei wracked her brain to try to remember which anime that was. It had been years since she’d actively followed Japanese animation. After a moment or two, a flash of a foul-mouthed, wisecracking dubbed version of an innocent anime series came to her, specifically a joke about a black rabbit. “Yes, like Ghost Stories,” she agreed.
IRyS grinned. “Heh. Heh heh… ‘just fill the hole, hole filler!’”
Mumei sincerely hoped that was a quote. It was hard to tell with IRyS sometimes. There was a reason she’d feared someone would answer ‘porn.’ “Anyway, imagine that this hypothetical anime’s rewritten dub also got widely popular in America, and the English-speaking audience became deeply invested in its lore. And all this time, neither population knew the other was seeing a different interpretation of the same show.
“Then, one day…” She brought her hands together, interlocking her fingers in a way she hoped simulated a car crash. “Bang, somehow the Japanese audience finds out about the dubbed version of the show. They translate it into Japanese, and they’re shocked to find out that it seems completely different from the one they know. The characters seem different, the lore seems different… on the surface, there doesn’t seem to be any way to reconcile the two shows! But, despite that, they know this is also an official version of their beloved anime, so it must also be canon, in some way.”
She cast a glance at Kronii, wondering if the deadpan girl was going to interject with another dry comment about how that wouldn’t happen in real life. But instead, to her shock, she found that the tall young woman was leaning forward in her seat, resting her elbows on the desk with a look of rapt interest in the discussion on her face. In fact… they all were. All four girls, usually so difficult to keep focused, were watching her with wonder, like the injection of anime into the topic had put a spell on them.
She blinked, a little bit confused, but felt a surge of pride in her chest like she’d only experienced once before when she’d first gotten a college class successfully through their finals. Spurred on with confidence, she continued. “And so they thought about it, and they came to a solution. Both interpretations must be canon in some way, so in order to determine what they should believe about the show, they began combining their knowledge.”
Fauna tipped her head. “So it’s kind of like if the Japanese audience thought Power Rangers was just as canon as… what was that show dubbing over?”
“Super Sentai,” Baelz answered. When the rest of the class, Mumei included, gave her an incredulous look, her face glowed as red as her hair and she leaned back again, crossing her arms as if she was trying to save her own coolness. “What? I know stuff sometimes.”
“What specific series did they use?” IRyS asked, a coy grin on her lips as she turned to face her usual bully.
The redhead fidgeted for a moment, looking pointedly away, and then muttered, “Lots of them. If we’re going chronologically, it’s Zyuranger, Kakuranger, Carranger, Megaranger, Gingaman, GoGoV, Timeranger…” She trailed off, putting a hand over her face in embarrassment.
IRyS practically cackled in delight. “Ooh~! Who’s the nerd now, Super Sentai girl?!”
Baelz leaned forward to jab an angry finger into her chest, her glaring, blushing face just inches away from the nephilim’s. “Shut it, dweeb! Push your luck anymore, and you’ve got another date with the top of the flagpole!”
The magenta-haired girl, as wary of the threat as her prior experience dictated (that had been a day to remember… Mumei had had to get the janitor to lower the poor girl down), obediently muted herself, but she couldn’t help giggling gleefully as she turned back around to refocus on the lesson.
Mumei blinked. Refocus on the lesson. Those were words she never thought in a million years would apply to anyone from this class. It was such a shock that she didn’t even bother scolding Baelz for threatening her classmate, and instead barreled on ahead with her analogy. “So some things slotted in right away because the details were similar enough that they could easily both be true. Other things were more difficult, like conflicting characterizations or contradictory lore details. But they settled this by deciding that each version showed a different side of the core canon.”
On a whim, she turned to the board and drew a circle, then split it in half with a dotted vertical line. She tapped the left side with her chal. “A character being portrayed as intense in one version of a scene…” She tapped the right side. “...while being sarcastic in the other meant that he hid his true intensity behind a facade of humor, for example.” She added more circles on top of the first to emphasize its wholeness. “And so they combined the two versions of the series into one, as best they could, synthesizing the apparently contradictory knowledge into a single holistic understanding.”
Grinning with excitement at how well she was relating her class’ interests to the topic, she spread her arms wide, palms up. “And that’s what the Medieval scholars did! Philosophy and theology was their anime. The ancient texts and their contemporary understanding were the different versions. And the holistic version of the show’s canon would be, to them, the objective truth that both sources of knowledge were getting at.”
Mumei looked around at the class again, marveling at how invested they were. Baelz was even nodding along! This was amazing! She’d been trying to achieve this every day since the start of this school year. It was almost too good to be true. She had to keep going, ride this wave of engagement as long as she could.
But just as she opened her mouth to go on…
Brrrriiiing!
The bell rang, and the spell was broken. In an instant, all thought of the discussion at hand went out the window and fluttered into the not-green sky, and the students before her returned to their status quo. Kronii slouched and pulled out her phone, Fauna resumed drawing in her notebook, and Baelz hooked her arm around a squeaking IRyS’ neck and said, “All right nerd, how about we go practice medieval synthesis on the toilet with your face?”
Mumei let her arms drop and her shoulders sag. Of course. She’d actually started to get hopeful for once. Silly her. She muttered a halfhearted, “Class dismissed,” as Baelz escorted IRyS out of the room by the neck and Fauna hummed to herself, and then shoved her lecture notes in her briefcase with a sigh.
Maybe tomorrow, she told herself, resolving to study up on her anime before the next lecture. Maybe tomorrow…