Chapter Text
Angus McDonald makes his first friend at Lucas’s Academy of Arcane Sciences when a short purple tiefling trips on his way down the stairs of the Planar Physics lecture hall and dumps a smoothie on Angus’s shoes.
“Shit,” says the tiefling. “I mean shoot! Shoot, I bullied the professor’s kid. Kid, don’t tell your parent. Are you okay? Are you allergic to eggs? Or, like, sausage?” He pauses, red eyes wide. “Is coffee going to stunt your growth?”
“I’m thirteen,” Angus says, barely restraining himself from adding a reflexive sir. It’s a habit he’s trying to wean himself off of. He shuffles his damp feet, shaking off some of the smoothie. It’s brown-grey and looks like sludge. “What… is this?”
“Oh,” says the tiefling. “I call it drink-fast. ‘Cause it’s a full breakfast in a cup—coffee, toast, eggs, hashbrowns, sausage, and ice.” He pauses. “Also because you need to drink it fast to get it down. It’s a prototype. I’m Jeremy, by the way. Are you, uh… is your parent the prof? I swear I can clean your shoes. It was totally an accident.”
“I’m Angus,” Angus says, and casts Prestidigitation to whisk the disgusting drink off his feet and out of existence. “I’m the TA.”
Jeremy blinks down at Angus, like maybe he wants to call bullshit on the TA thing, and then takes in the stack of syllabi in Angus’s arms. “Fuck,” he says. “I spilled drink-fast on the TA.”
Angus can’t help the laugh that bubbles out of him and Jeremy seems to take the fact that Angus is thirteen and in the Planar Physics graduate program in stride. Angus is used to being dismissed because of his age and maybe a bit of jealous or to awe, when people figure out that he used to work for the Bureau of Balance and that the Bureau of Benevolence is still technically his legal guardian. Jeremy doesn’t connect the dots and Angus—feeling only marginally guilty over the lie of omission—doesn’t help him.
Jeremy, it turns out, has many friends and a study group who’s more than happy to accept Angus-the-young-TA as a member. Syr, a dwarf with a badly dyed pink beard, and Bernie, a half-elf who’s more concerned about maintaining his GPA than Angus’s age.
“Should we watch our language?” Syr asks, the day Angus joins their group. “I swear at planar physics as a concept, like, a lot. Kid, do you… know swear words?”
“I’m a teenager,” says Angus. “You can say fuck.”
He is an instant hit.
Angus hasn’t really had friends like this before. When he was young, he mostly read books in his grandfather’s library, and then he was busy solving mysteries and catching serial killers and saving the world. He and Mavis talk over their stones of farspeech and Angus and Jimmy are still pen pals, but this is different. Angus has school friends for the first time. And they’re kind of adults, sure, but they’re young adults and honestly Angus is more used to hanging out with grown ups than other kids anyway. Jeremy and the rest of the group bridge the gap between the two.
He knows he’s really part of the group when they lead him to the student pub for one of their study sessions and he has to pull them up short outside the doors. “I can’t go in there.”
Bernie frowns down at him. “Is it a religion thing?” he asks, because Bernie’s father is a cleric who takes his work much more seriously than Merle. “The coffee shop closes early on weekends, but we can do that instead. Who’s your god?”
“I’m Jewish,” Angus says. “And Istus, but this is because I’m thirteen.”
“Oh shit,” says Jeremy. “Dude, I forgot.”
Syr tilts their head, looking Angus over. “We could totally pass you off as a halfling,” they say. “This is fine. We can get him in.”
Bernie puts his beanie on Angus’s head and Syr takes off their leather jacket and hands it over. “I could cast Disguise Self,” Angus says, as he pulls on the jacket. “And just make myself look older.”
“You’re gonna get real into a planar physics problem and forget to re-cast,” says Jeremy. “Lucas gave out a tricky one about calculating the resonant properties of sapphire in Syr’s crystal dynamics course.”
Angus’s eyes light up and he turns to Syr, all eager anticipation. “I love crystal dynamics.”
“I know,” says Syr. “It’s really fucking weird because it’s the worst.”
They make it about five steps into the pub before a server stops them in their tracks. “Hey,” she says, pointing at Angus. “You can’t bring a kid in here. Do you want us to lose our license?”
Jeremy clasps a protective hand over Angus’s shoulder. “This is my son,” he says. “You can’t kick us out.”
The server looks Jeremy, in all his purple glory, over, and then glances at Angus and his very incredibly human form. “Uh-huh,” she says. “You and your kid can’t be in here. It’s the law.”
“He’s a grad student,” Bernie says. “Shouldn’t all students be able to frequent the student pub?”
“That sounds even less likely than the son thing,” says the server, and kicks them out of the bar.
Angus takes the rejection in stride because the pub is just obeying the law and his friends really should have let him use Disguise Self instead of putting him in a beanie and a cool jacket, but everyone else takes it more personally.
“I can’t believe they kicked us out,” Syr says. “Bernie’s right, I mean—you’re a student, Angus. Your fees pay for the pub. Shouldn’t you be able to use it?”
Syr would have a point if there weren’t plenty of other places on campus that his student fees paid for that don’t require him to be legal drinking age. “We can just go to the coffee shop for a few hours,” Angus says. “Or order a pizza and study in my dorm. I have a single.”
“Fuck,” says Bernie. “I wish I was a thirteen year old genius. I have two roommates.”
“Then they wouldn’t let you in the pub either,” Jeremy points out. “And we’d really be screwed.”
“Hey,” says Syr. “We should start a petition. Let Angus into the pub.”
“Hell yeah!” says Bernie.
“That’s a great idea,” says Jeremy.
“Or we could put our names down for one of the private study rooms in the library,” says Angus.
Angus is overruled.
Syr starts a petition circulating campus. Most people don’t actually know Angus, but that doesn’t stop them from signing to make Syr, Bernie, and Jeremy stop hounding them. Angus comes along for their signature gathering campaign, mostly to apologize to the harried student they harrass.
They’re at 153 signatures when Lucas calls them up to the Dean’s office.
“Angus,” he says, already looking tired. “Why?”
“Their hearts are in the right place,” Angus says, while Bernie asks Jeremy sotto voce if Jeremy knew Angus knew Lucas Miller. “I tried explaining it was just the law.”
“Angus,” Lucas says. “Please, not this too. Not my own students. I already get weekly calls from Taako. Tell him I know he’s Fantasy Justin so he’ll stop leaving me voicemails. I’m just trying to run a school. I’m trying to do good, like I promised.”
“I don’t know why you think I have any control over what Taako does,” Angus says. “I can’t even control my friends.”
“Wait,” says Jeremy. “Dude, are you talking about Taako? Like… from TV?”
“Yeah,” Angus says. “I’m his apprentice.”
“Holy shit,” says Syr.
“Why are you going here when you could be at Taako’s school?” Bernie asks, incredulous.
“Hey!” says Lucas. “This is a good school.”
Bernie looks Lucas right in the eye. “Be better if you let our friend into the student pub.”
Lucas lifts his glasses so he can pinch the bridge of his nose. There’s a familiar pained expression on his face and Angus realizes that maybe he likes his new friends because they have a lot in common with his old ones. “I can’t—it’s a legal issue,” Lucas says. “You have to understand. It’s not that we’re prejudiced against Angus. We had to increase his pay to keep him here when Taako tried to outbid us.”
Syr and Bernie and Jeremy all exchange glances. “Taako’s Amazing School of Magic doesn’t do planar physics,” Bernie says. “Or I would have gone there.”
“I double-majored in Transmutation,” says Angus, because Taako only threatened to hire him so Lucas would pay him more.
Lucas pulls his hand away from his face and adjusts his glasses. “There’s no point in this petition,” he says. “There’s nothing the school can do, so can we please—”
“Actually, there is,” Angus says, and pulls out his research notes from his satchel. “I reached out to my friends in the Neverwinter militia to ask about liquor licensing. If the pub had a patio, they could serve food on it and not alcohol and then they’d have an area where minors were allowed.” He places the stack of notes on Lucas’s desk. “Or you could apply to switch to a restaurant license, but I have a feeling you’d rather just open a patio. Enchanted, obviously. Magnus could probably build the furniture for you.”
Lucas flips through the notes and then looks up at Angus and his friends. “They’re not going to stop until I do this, are they?”
Angus glances over his shoulder at his friends, who are staring at him in shock, and then looks back at Lucas. “Probably not, sir, no.”
“Okay,” says Lucas. “Okay, I’ll build a patio so minors can eat at the student pub too.”
Syr lets out a triumphant cry. “Victory!” they say. “Not how I thought it would happen, but fuck yeah!”
“I can’t believe Angus knows Taako,” Bernie says. “Wait, is Magnus Magnus Burnsides? Angus, how?”
“Angus, why do you have friends in the militia?” Jeremy asks. “What the fuck, dude? What else should we know?”
“I’m Angus McDonald, the world’s greatest detective, and I once helped stop the apocalypse,” Angus says, turning to lead his friends out of Lucas’s office. “I booked us a private study room in the library and if you promise not to start any more petitions, I’ll tell you all about it.”