One

Lisbeth looked up at the imposing grey residence hall in front of her. A large grey concrete square with small windows, of all the halls on campus it was the least aesthetically pleasing. Lisbeth understood why it was built this way, she just didn’t see why they had to make it quite so ugly. The chaos of move-in day was already in full swing, and it was just as bad as she expected it to be. Someone had made a sign above the main entrance; ‘Welcome to Mind Hall’, the cheery colors clashed with the dull grey of the building.

Lisbeth experienced one of the rare moments when she was thankful for her small stature, since it allowed her to slip between a tall tanned guy carrying a mini fridge and a girl with her mother trying to carry a T.V. Eventually she found her way to a desk manned by two very frazzled-looking R.A.’s. Lisbeth approached the R.A. on the left, a boy with red hair who appeared to be lacking sleep. He only gave her a cursory glance before speaking.

“Last name?”

“Sahte.”

“Right, here is your room key and mail key and welcome packet, you have a floor meeting at 6. Try to keep your mind closed, there are far to many idiot telepaths running around.”

With that Lisbeth was dismissed to find her room and move in. After nearly getting crushed by a girl trying to wrestle a mattress into an elevator, Lisbeth decided to take the stairs. Her welcome packet told her that her room was 629, also known as the top floor. Stairs weren’t a problem, all she was carrying was a mostly empty backpack and a poster tube. The top floor consisted of a single hallway with bathrooms on one end and a lounge on the other. There were 30 rooms, even numbers on the same side as the elevator and odd numbers across the hall. This put Lisbeth next to the lounge and across the hall from the R.A. “Shelby”, as was indicated by a pink heart proclaiming it so. Lisbeth’s room was similarly marked with her name on a purple star.

The lock was surprisingly heavy-duty for a college dorm, inside Lisbeth also noticed a dead bolt. Telepaths tended to be more paranoid than the general population on average, something to do with being able to hear peoples’ thoughts did that. The room was a single; Mind hall was the only freshman dorm on campus that offered exclusively single rooms. The cravat was that only people with mental abilities were allowed to reside here, and were actually required to spend their first year in Mind hall. As uncomfortable as telepaths were when they lived with each other, it was worse for almost everyone else. To help the walls were extra thick, and the concrete was made specifically to dampen telepathic powers. The rooms were essentially sound proof and highly resistant to telepaths, making Mind hall rather ironically the dorm that offered the most privacy on campus.

Lisbeth’s room was essentially a white cube with a bed, desk and window. She had a high slanted ceiling thanks to being on the top-floor, that those below her would most likely not be enjoying. The room was otherwise barren except for a few power plugs along the walls. All in all, Lisbeth was glad she didn’t have to spend much time here. Unpacking fortunately took no time at all, all that needed doing was to throw her backpack on the thin mattress of the bed and hang up her pocket. Lisbeth’s pocket had been attached to a sturdy piece of canvas to make a doorway, allowing access to her own private reality. People who could make permanent enchantments were rare, people who could make pockets were even more so. Less than a dozen people alive could make a pocket as large as Lisbeth’s private reality. They were so rare that it no longer mattered how much money you had, just who you knew.

Lisbeth gave a sigh of pleasure as she entered her pocket. The temperature was always perfect, there was no light-source but she could still make out everything perfectly. Inside her pocket she had a massive four-poster bed piled high with pillows, the comforter and sheets were all deep reds and self-cleaning. Lisbeth never bothered to bring in a wardrobe, instead she simply had a series of horizontal poles all her clothes hung from. She had two desks, one for paperwork that was well stocked with stationary, the other for her computer. The computer was a beast of a machine; if the pocket didn’t negate the need for cooling it would have needed a liquid cooling scheme. There were six 70cm edgeless screens mounted above the desk. It was probably within the top 25 most powerful personal computers on the planet, and Lisbeth intended to keep it that way. The only other thing the pocket contained were Lisbeth’s alcohol collection and three bookcases filled with large leather-bound tomes, symbols scrawled on the sides of them in no mortal language.

 

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