[EVENT] Theory of Homework [Saryn]

The lounge was pretty empty, as it tended to be at this time of day. The TVs were all off, the computer screens were playing their looping screen savers, and the couches were cold and lonely looking. But this was a common area for all the students, and Morgan said it would be best for them to work on homework somewhere they would be able to talk about it without being scolded by the librarian.

Well, to be honest, the little simian was just happy that she was willing to help him study for Octain's class at all. Neither one of them were the so-called "favorite", but she had a much stronger logical knowledge behind the theories than Wei did.

He was lucky she was nice enough to want to tutor him at all.

He dropped into the chair, pulling out his notebook and pencils. He felt like this would be a long, long, long study session.

He'd been in the middle of flipping through pages and pages of notes with doodles in the margins before finding a fresh page that he labeled with today's date and the basic content of what they were going to be studying together.

Octain's stupid class read the header.

When she arrived he smiled and nodded, tapping out a small rhythm on the table. "Yeah. I don't think there's much for us to review about spirit magic. How about we review his laws of magic first?"

The monkey actually had no idea Morgan was running against him in the elections, and even if he had, he didn't consider her a threat or anything. She was obviously gunning for the Presidential position, which Wei had no interest in.

As far as he was concerned, his only goal was taking enough votes from people who took this whole thing too seriously to snag the Secretary position.

"Okay, so rule one... 'Kill not with Magic'... that's pretty self explanatory isn't it?"

Looking down at book, Wei slid his tongue between his teeth, worrying his bottom lip as Morgan read through the next tenant of Magic, that it wasn't okay to force your will onto anyone other thank yourself. He supposed that made sense, though he couldn't understand why anyone wielding magic would need to magically assert their will on themselves. The only situation he could imagine it ever coming up was in the case that another Magic user was breaking the same tenant, wasn't it?

When Morgan asked how he felt about the rules, he read through them again and sighed. "I think they have their uses, especially for making sure people who have magic don't abuse people that don't have magic. But I question them a bit, you know?" He said. Sensing that he might be misunderstood, he was quick you look to the rules he had written down to support his argument.

"I mean, the rules are pretty straightforward, right? Don't kill with magic, don't steal from other wizards, I get that, but... What about not exerting your will on others? The crux of my magic involves exerting my will on the spirits I summon... and... says not to kill someone with magic, but what if someone is trying to kill you? If you can't use magic on your master, how will you learn spells crafted to work on humans? Are spirits of normal people who we summon, are they bound by the magic rules by virtue of being summoned via magic? The rules are good, but I think they're... not very good as limiters."

At Morgan's statement that there might be exceptions to the rules, Wei gave a small shrug. "That's always a slippery slope though," he said, half to himself and half to the girl sitting across from him. "If they rules don't apply in certain situations to certain kinds of Magi, it's pretty easy to just say 'Oh, this is an exception' and do whatever you want."

He turned to a fresh page in his notebook and started doodling little monkeys juggling bananas in the margins of his book. While he could concede that maybe the rules didn't have Spirit Mages (he considered himself to be more of an Invoker than any brand of Mage, but whatever) in mind, but it seemed odd for something called the rules of magic to just have parts of it that were plain wrong for a whole brand of mages.

"What about you?" he asked, turning the question on her. "How do you feel about the rules?"

He didn't doubt that Octain looked like he might be interested in what they had to say--seemed like he seemed to like it when they talked about magic in interesting ways. But Wei couldn't say he liked being around Octain more than what being in his class required.

Morgan had stimulated his interest on the this issue though, so who knew? Maybe he'd swallow his trepidation and go through with asking Octain.

All of a sudden his pencil seemed to stop just as he was scribbling in his little artistic representation of a monkey's fur. Wait. Change the rules of magic? Well, there was no reason they couldn't--it was obvious that these rules weren't he hard and fast kind that couldn't be changed, they were the guideline type of rules, the kind that just wanted to keep people from being shitty to each other.

"Do you think we could? Or, that Octain would listen if we mentioned that we wanted to propose changes to his rules of magic?

"More importantly, how exactly would we change the rules of magic? Do we just add clauses? Make new rules?"

Wei was kind of excited now. Changing the rules. What an exciting idea.