Just a Super Normal Monday

It takes a serious effort to **** yourself to sleep that night. You keep checking your grimoire all through the evening, hoping that you'll find another page, maybe with another spell to read. And yet, no matter how many times you pour over the tome, the aged sheets of parchment remain resolutely blank. Eventually, you resign yourself to a reasonable bedtime, in the hopes that perhaps something magical would await you in the morning before Monday classes.

You are disappointed to find that is not the case. You check the grimoire first before you brush your teeth; then before your morning shower; then before your breakfast; and of course, once more before you drive off to school. Every time, you get page after page of blank parchment, excepting the first page that details your Sight. You try not to feel frustrated, but what's the point of having access to magic if you can't actually do anything with it?

As you walk into the school, grimoire tucked under your arm, you're momentarily struck by the sight of all the people on the school grounds. Or rather, the new additions to the airspace over the crowd. Over each person's head is another one of those red HP bars, much like you saw over your Grampa. As you gaze out on the crowd of students, chatting and waiting for the morning bell, four things become apparent to you. First, while everyone has an HP bar, none of them seem to be full. In fact, nobody you can see has even a tenth of their bar filled. You'd imagine if these bars are in fact supposed to represent "hit points", then someone with a tenth of a bar would be pretty badly injured, but that's doesn't seem to be the case here; it's not like you're seeing people limping around with blood soaked clothes after all. It looks like a normal Monday in the school quad. A mystery for you to explore when you get the chance, you suppose.

The second thing you notice is that the text that accompanies the bars doesn't seem to resize itself for readability when you're a distance away from the person you're looking at; within a few paces, it's readable enough, but any further than that and you start to have to strain to read the distant words. It occurs to you to focus your Sight on a distant target, much like you did for your Grampa, and while that does generate more text, it does nothing for the actual size of the text. Despite being a goddamn Wizard, this Sight stuff doesn't seem very user friendly.

Third, every bar has some sort of descriptive class; given that your Grampa was some sort of Wizard/Grandpa multiclass, this makes sense. The most common ones you see are "Student", unsurprisingly. The occasional exception, however, does surprise you. You can see that classes such as "Athlete", "Performer", and even "Politician", can be found among the throng, which sort of begs the question as to how someone's class is actually determined. If a Student joined a sports team, would they become an Athlete? If an Athlete was cast as the lead in a school play, would they gain a level of Performer?

And finally, you note that no-one is a higher level than three. Most of them are level one, a handful are level two, and maybe one in fifty are level three. Pretty much all of the younger teens, freshmen you'd assume, are level one, and the only level threes you see look about the same age as you. While that does lead you to hypothesize that age and experience may be tied to level, you've really got no idea at all what these descriptors are supposed to actually mean.

Guess there's more to your Sight than meets the eye, huh?

And then you realize you've been just standing there in the middle of the quad staring at people for a few minutes now. You're already seen as kind of a weird kid, so you really ought not to stand around like a creeper. It wouldn't help to give people any fuel to the dumpster fire that is your general reputation. When you first got to high school, you tried to fit in, you really did. Unfortunately, you went about it in entirely the wrong way. Instead of finding a group of friends and sticking with them, you drifted from group to group, never really finding a place for yourself in any of the cliques. You were too much of a nerd to fit in with the cool kids. You were too put together to fit in with the outcasts. Your Grampa had once called you an "old soul", which you know was intended to be a compliment, but you couldn't help but think just made you feel weirder, as though you couldn't even connect with your own generation. By the time you were a sophomore, you had resigned yourself to being more or less alone, and in fact if it wasn't for the timely arrival of a particular transfer student, you could have easily seen yourself giving up on having a social life altogether.

Never mind all that shit, you've gotta get to homeroom. A brisk walk later, you're taking your seat in your first class of the day, and it finally occurs to you that you probably shouldn't be carrying your grimoire so openly. You did, after all, swear a (somewhat informal) pact of secrecy with your Grampa. The only problem is, now that you're here in the classroom, you realize you've got almost nowhere to put it. The thing is massive, after all. Thinking quickly, you pull out two of your textbooks and leave them under your chair to make room in your backpack for the grimoire. It's obvious that your backpack is stuffed full, and you're going to have to carry these damn texbooks in your arms for the rest of the day, but it'll do for now. Maybe tomorrow you should just leave this thing at home, or at the very least in your car.

...Nah, that ain't happening. You already know you're gonna be checking the grimoire every break you get.

With no small effort, you finish zipping up your backpack just as your buddy Aster takes his seat at the desk next to yours. Aster is, of course, the aforementioned transfer student who you met sophmore year. Both being outsiders in the social order of the school, it took little time for the two of you to become best friends. You're always around each other, to the point where most people consider you a package deal. Every group project, every major event, even most of your electives, the two of you are side by side; a sight that probably looks pretty comical, all things considered. After all, you are just over six feet tall, and stand a head above most of the teachers, let alone your classmates. Aster, much to his chagrin, is a full foot shorter than you, shorter even than most of the freshmen girls. You've got pale skin and bright blond hair; Aster has a dusky complexion with curly dark brown locks.

Speaking of locks, lately he's been growing his hair out, and with how curly it is, it has a tendency to poof out a good way from his head. Part of you suspects his new style may be an attempt to add a few inches to his stature, but you'd never say that to his face of course. In any case, it isn't a bad look for him at all, and you're happy to see him have a bit more confidence in his appearance. His first week of school in the states, he straight up wore a business suit to school, and one that looked comically oversized on his small frame. Luckily, he's left that awkward phase in the past, and is comfortable wearing a T-shirt and jeans, though they also tend to hang pretty loose.

"'Sup Aster," you greet him as he digs his own textbook from his luggage-style rolling backpack.

"Morning Ken!" he responds with a smile. While you were never much of a morning person, you were always jealous of how much energy Aster had at the start of the day. "Welcome to the 18 and over club, dude! Sorry I didn't get you anything." After three years in America, his accent has entirely faded, not that he had much of one to begin with.

"No worries, man," you say with a smile, "I'm covered on gifts anyway." You think back to yesterday's event, and can't help but let out a small laugh. "Actually, I might have gotten more than I can handle..."

He quirks an eyebrow. "Interesting! Better or worse than the car?"

"Hmm," you reply, faking consideration. Probably best to deflect his attention away from that subject, though part of you desperately wanted to brag about being a goddamn Wizard. "Definitely not better than the car."

"I imagine most things wouldn't be better than a decent car," he replies bitterly.

"Hey, you've got a car too."

"Yeah," he says wryly, "a shitty Geo Metro my brother couldn't find a buyer for." You know that, like many younger brothers, a lot of Aster's stuff was hand-me-downs from his older brother, including his car, most of his clothes, and all of his gaming paraphernalia.

The two of you are interrupted by a digitized chime, signaling that the morning announcements were about to commence. Your teacher is quick to quiet the class, though Aster and you (and half the class, to be fair) simply carry on your conversation in hushed tones. Well, it's mostly a one sided conversation, to be fair. He's telling you all about a particularly exciting round he won of some shooter game you don't personally play, but he seems to be pretty hyped about it. You do your best to split your attention between him and the morning announcements (apparently the school will finally be getting lockers next year, not that it matters for a senior like you), but something distracts you and catches your eye.

Above Aster's head, much like everyone else, there is one of those red HP bars; unlike just about everyone you saw out on the quad this morning, though, his bar is fully filled, much like your Grampa's was. But what's even more surprising than that is the text that accompanies the bar.

"Aster Stefanakis, Demihuman: Level 2 Student"

Which is... interesting, to say the least. You know what the "demi" prefix means, but you've never heard of a demi-human before. You focus your Sight on the bar to see more, and what appears before your eyes is:

Aster Stefanakis, Demihuman: Level 2 Student. Friendly, peppy, and extremely loyal. Aster sees you as not only his best friend, but also his closest connection to the World of Humanity. If you had to fight him, you could trounce him, but it would probably emotionally devastate both of you. 100/100 HP.

Which, understandably, only raises further questions.