Eight

Shelby walked into the RA lounge bright and early on Monday morning. This was supposed to be a breakfast meeting, and it was if coffee counted as breakfast. To Shelby at least it did, she poured herself a rather large cup of black coffee and didn’t acknowledge any one else in the room until savoring a few sips. She hadn’t been allowed to go to sleep until well after midnight, and then suffered some truly embarrassing dreams. When she did look up, Shelby saw that Shane the RD and the five other RA’s of Mind hall were already present, looking just as tired as she felt. Except Shane of course, he always looked well rested and happy, it was like some kind of superpower than made Shelby kind of hate him.

“You could have warned me.” Shelby said in as accusing a tone as she could manage at Shane.

“Warned you about what?”

“Lisbeth.”

“Oh yeah, sorry, policy. Couldn’t tell you.”

Dave, the third floor RA, chose this moment to speak up. “Why would you need warning about one of your residents?”

“Because she is a dream walker.”

“Lucky.” Dave said with a whistle.

Shane cut back in. “Look, I couldn’t have you accidentally outing her before she told anyone. How did that go anyways?”

“Good, I think. It got kind of weird.”

“You’re going to need to elaborate on that.”

“OK, to start with I think she lowered her mental shields at the start of the meeting. I think that earned her a lot of good will, no one else seemed to drop theirs. It also supremely freaked her out, she was nervous as all hell, and everyone in the room could feel it. By the time her turn came around I think she had a panic attack.”

“How can that be classified as good?”

“Because if you see the boogeyman cry it is hard to be scared of him. After the initial shock no one seemed that scared of her. Hell, one girl let Lisbeth cry on her shoulder for a while, most of the others just left to give them privacy. So I think Lisbeth will be OK.”

“Shelby don’t call dream walker boogeymen, also make sure Lisbeth is ok and make sure she is aware of the resources available to her. Anyone else have anything of interest to report?”

The other RA’s talked through their own move-in day experiences. Nothing of note had really happened. Shane reminded them that even if a parent called they weren’t allowed to give out information on the residents. Apparently one of the boys on the first floor had been rather insistent that his parents should never be contacted or given information. Eventually they ran out of things to talk about and just started gossiping about their new residents. Shane shut that down rather quickly, pointing out that the residents wouldn’t like it when they found out.

Less than 45 minutes later the six RA’s were sent on their way with orders to have a real breakfast because they would need it. Shelby made it back to her room by 8:00 am. Apparently early meetings were policy because it was less likely for something to go wrong that early in the morning, any respectable college student would still be asleep. Shelby suspected that they were policy because the administration were sadists. At least there was always a pot of strong coffee in the RA lounge; the six RA’s of Mind Hall learned during training was that they all liked strong coffee.

Shelby got rather lucky upon her return, Lisbeth was in the lounge watching T.V. Lisbeth had clearly only recently showered as was indicated by her still wet short hair. Shelby took a moment to consider the best way to approach her. It was hard to be scared of someone she had watched have a panic attack from admitting what she was. However, Shelby was still forced to remember the last time a dream walker went bad, it had taken six years to find the son of a bitch. He was killed with a drone strike that had been launched from the opposite side of the world. The actual death toll was unknown, but believed to be in the thousands. The one rule of dream walkers was that they all were exactly equal in power, the only thing that differentiated dream walkers’ talents were intelligence and creativity.

Finally Shelby decided to just go up to her and say “hi”. The first thing she noticed upon approaching Lisbeth was that her eyes were red, normally Shelby would assume pot, but in this case crying seemed more likely. She did not want to consider what a stoned dream walker would do to someones head, if the dreamer even noticed. Not that it really mattered, there was no way that Shelby would be busting Lisbeth for anything, ever. The dream walkers, few as they may be, had a massive amount of influence on campus, and their co-ed fraternity was one of the largest donors to the college. Every dream walker that had ever attended was a member, even Lisbeth. She just didn’t know it yet.

 

Previous Chapter

Next Chapter