"Good!" Ewan cheered as both Dryth and Sindri demonstrated their pure casting of Produce Light. Two tiny balls of light briefly illuminated the room from the tip of Dryth's finger and Sindri's tail. "Excellently done, the both of you. Now I want you to keep practicing that until you feel like you've got it down perfectly, then we'll move on to other spells once we're all sure you've really got it."

  "What's next? Sindri asked eagerly, "Are we going to explore a dark place with the lights? Are we going to go fight a monster that's weak to light?"

  "Neither of those actually," Ewan replied, "My lessons won't have any exploring or fighting in them, although I'll make sure you're prepared for both! Those kinds of things aren't lessons in my mind, they're tasks to take on outside of lessons, for your own reasons." He pointed with both hands at Sindri and Dryth, "It'll be up to the two of you to determine which adventures you go on, or don't go on, together."

  Sindri gasped quietly and spun himself into a spiral. Dryth could feel bursts of excitement and happiness come from him, along with whispered snippets of the kinds of adventures Sindri wanted to go on. Dryth resigned himself ot going on at least some adventures, his partner was too excited about it to fully shut him down. He definitely didn't want to go fight any dragons or do anything even remotely like the heroes of legend who all should have died very early deaths without their insane powers, luck, or the help of someone equally powerful as what they were killing, none of which Dryth had. But, as much as Dryth wanted a stable life away from his past and family, he would never be able to deny Sindri his fun.

  "What is out next lesson then? If we're not learning to pure cast new spells yet, should we just keep practicing? Or is there something else you're going to teach us?"

  "Hmmm." Ewan scratched at his chin with one hand, then look surprised when he felt the whiskers growing their. "I really need to shave."

  "Aren't you trying to look disheveled and strange so people don't ask you to do things?" Sindri asked earnestly, having prompted Ewan to rant about society, the Association, and being old that morning at breakfast.

  "I am! But if my facial hair grows out too long it goes from disheveled scraggle of hair that's obviously from me not shaving when I wake up each morning to an actual beard. And then I look wise and experienced, which I am, but it prompts more people to come talk to me about their problems." He rolled his eyes. "It's just a different type of nattering when I look like an elder mage of some stripe."

  "You're helping me with my problem," Dryth pointed out, "What's so bad about people asking you about their problems? Wait, no, is it that they're boring?"

  ""They're boring!" Ewan shouted as he threw up his arms. "You have a problem that is interesting in and of itself, isn't your fault in any way, and you're working hard as best you know how to fix, deal with, or surmount it. The fact that you have no idea how to do any of that without my help isn't your fault, since you literally don't have the experience or knowledge to even start dealing with it so you don't lose any points there. All in all, full marks, I'm happy to help you. But everyone else...!" He let out an unnecessarily long theatrical sigh, "Most of them have definitively boring problems, like 'I'm unable to do this thing I think I should be able to' or 'people aren't treating me the way I want them to' or 'I don't understand this piece of information, can you explain it to me?'" He put on various falsettos as he acted out the hand wringing and cringing the people asking him supposedly put on. "This is to me with a beard of course, when I'm clean-shaven it's just Association flunkies asking me to complete tasks on behalf of the Association."

  "Anyway, little to no points for people with boring 'problems'," He made enlarged air quotes around the word, "That they can easily solve or address without involving me. Most of the time I get asked about things that aren't even true problems at all, which brings us to grading point number two, whether it's your own damn fault or not. If it's a matter of changing your expectations, not studying or doing reasearch when you have the ability and opportunity to, or just not trying hard enough, you immediately fail, no points. Finally, has the person who has the problem been pursuing solutions or are they just trying to use me as an easy skip to get where they want to be without hard work? I can't stand people trying to use me as a shortcut. You aren't doing that by the way," He added to Dryth, "Learning from a teacher is different than going up to someone and asking them to just make your problem go away. Learning from a teacher is enviable, being a whiny little dreg is not."

  "Those are good criteria! Those are a lot like how some of the Elders I've talked to back home tell me they determine if they're going to accept petitions or not." Sindri said.

  "Indeed! Anyhoo, what were we talking about?"

  "What our next lesson was!"

  "Ah, yes indeed! Well, my job as your mentor is to prepare you to finishing stepping into the world, and the kingdom, as a new adult, ready to support yourself and contribute to the prosperity of our people!" Ewan drew himself up into a heroic pose and held it for a moment before deflating. "At least, that's what the damn manual that shove onto me every generation says, but who cares what the Association wants? I do need to give the two of you the basic skills necessary to live without me being around, so today we're going to be covering one of the most important lessons I will ever teach you."

  Ewan leaned in close with a heavy air around him. Sindri leaned in too, excitement twinkling in his eyes, and Dryth couldn't help but follow him.

  "I'll be teaching you..." Ewan whispered with a suitable dramatic pause, "How to not lose your shit and obliterate everything around you when dealing with bullshit bureaucracy!" He finished with an exuberant shout.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Dryth groaned at his own expectations that Ewan would actually be giving them some secret or all important knowledge and dropped his head into his arms. "I know how to keep my temper in check." He complained.

  "Do you? That's impressive, it took me decades to master that trick! Well, either way, there's some paperwork that has to be handled at the Association or they'll get more annoying than usual, so we're handling that today. It's a good opportunity to handle some other minor tasks while we're there that will save you time in the future, so I'll be sending you to deal with those while I take care of the bits that need me." He grabbed a sheaf of papers that he'd had behind him and dropped them in front of Dryth. "Dryth, you'll be filling these out, specifically the bits I've marked for you. Sindri, you don't have hands or any form of telekinesis, so you get to watch while Dryth does all the work."

  "Yay!"

  "What are these?" Dryth wondered as he pawed through the pages. "Forms?"

  "Yes, the nightmare of paperwork, forms in triplicate that have to be filled out for the tasks I'll be sending you on. Here." Ewan held out a thin rod with a pointed end. "Magic quill, refills from the inside, doesn't run out."

  Dryth marveled at the simple device while he took it. "Oh an infinite magic pen, nice."

  Ewan stopped and looked at him. "What's a 'pen'?"

  "Uh..." Dryth stared at the thing in his hand, trying desperately to figure out where that word had come from. It'd just slipped out of his mouth without him even thinking about it, just like all the other times he'd been strange around other people, which had all led to him getting ostracized at some point."

  "Wait, no I remember." Ewan snapped his fingers. "Helix has talked about them before, its a word for a quill without a feather, right? Or something like that? Whatever, I think that counts as a pen then. But yes, they are quite nice, it reduces the annoyingness of paperwork by a hair." He grabbed a much larger stack of papers and sat down to start filling them out. "Remember, only do that sections I've marked. The one's I haven't are the ones that I have to do."

  "Ah... right." Dryth slowly started filling out the first line of the first page, which wanted to know his name, while he tried to remember if he'd heard Helix say the word "pen" during the hours the demon had been summoned. He didn't remember it happening clearly, but his memory wasn't perfect, and Ewan had heard the word before, so that must have been it, right? Yeah, that must have been it.

  "Hey, what's wrong?" Sindri 'pathed to him, which came with a feeling of privacy that Dryth knew meant Sindri was talking only to him right then. Ewan was capable of intercepting those messages with whatever psychic eavesdropping card he had, at least Dryth assumed so, but he was polite enough not to. Or at least he said he was, neither Sindri nor Dryth didn't know a way to check.

  Dryth concentrated for a second to make sure he was replying silently. "Nothing."

  "It's obviously not nothing, I could feel that spike of worry, remember?"

  "It's... It's not something I want to talk about right now."

  "Alright." Sindri conceded after a moment. He slithered up Dryth's arm and pressed his head into Dryth's cheek. "I'm here for you, whatever it is."

  Dryth let out a slow, relaxing sigh and basked in the moment of camaraderie. It was a new friendship, based just on time spent together, but his relationship with Sindri was the best he'd ever had. He didn't know if it was knowing each other the way they did from seeing each others memories, even if they didn't actively remember everything they'd seen, or the psychic bonds that connected them, but they just worked together, and Dryth appreciated that so much. "I know you are buddy, thanks. We can talk about it later."

  "Alright." Sindri angled his head so he could look down at the paper. "So what are you doing?"

  Alright, so this is a kind of paper called a 'form' and it's got all of these spaces I need to fill in with the correct information." He stopped for a second when a new thought hit him. "Wait, the contract made it so you could understand when people speak, did it teach you to read?"

  Sindri moved closer and poked his tail at the first set of words. "This says 'Full Name'."

  "Oh good, it did. That saves us a lot of time and energy. Okay, so I fill out the form with the information that it asks for..."

  Dryth was pretty sure he wouldn't have finished his stack of paperwork before Ewan did even if he hadn't been explaining to Sindri how forms worked, why paperwork existed and why it was important, and explained what some of the words that the coatl could read but didn't know meant, and Dryth's stack was less than half the size of Ewan's. It only took Dryth half an hour to fill out all fifteen forms and when he looked over Ewan was sitting with his feet up on the desk looking off into space.

  "Oh, are you done?" Ewan threw his feet down and reached out to take the paperwork from Dryth. "I'll double check what you put just in case, fill in my bits, and then we're off to the Association!" He cheered with fake enthusiasm and a disgusted expression. "Sadly, until I get done with the bits I have to do myself, you're technically assigned to the Stonebreaker Association region as a mage-trainee, so we have to go there first. Once I'm done though you'll be tied directly to me, so you'll be able to use the headquarters from then on."

  "The Association Headquarters!?" Dryth gasped. "We're near the capital!? You own a home in the capital!?"

  "What? No, we're in the middle of nowhere where no one can ever find me and bother me at home. Why would I live in the most busy city in the kingdom that also happens to have the highest populations of busybodies, annoyances, and idiots? That sounds like the recipe for madness." He shook his head like he was disappointed in Dryth's idea. "No, I said you can use the headquarters when you need to because all the paperwork we need to submit to do get anything done involving the bureaucratic nightmare that is the Association has to be processed there before things get finalized and approved. Submitting all your paperwork there saves time and hassle."

  Dryth drooped down in real disappointment. The capital was the city in the kingdom, where the best mages and architects worked to make it the most beautiful place to live, where merchants and shopkeeps sold the best and newest goods and products, and where Dryth would absolutely be able to get a great job. "Won't we lose a bunch of time on travel if we're in the middle of nowhere?" He asked, trying to sound like a mature person who was thinking things through and not like a kid who was sad he didn't get a treat. "The capital's at the center of the kingdom and if no one's ever going to find you we're either somewhere hard to get or near the edges."

  Ewan gave him an actual disappointed look in response to that question. "Dryth. You're right that my house is located somewhere quite difficult to get to, but it'll take us hardly any time at all to get to the capital if we want to go, or to Stonebreak in a few hours. Don't you remember how I brought you here in the first place? I can teleport."