Why don't I just do a little dance?

The morning’s mail had brought Anders another letter from Karl – one that was chatty and friendly and totally lacking in any sort of critical commentary, the kind of thing that you could slide past Templar censors during a good week but would get pitched straight in the nearest fire if they thought you might be Up to Something.

Some things about it bothered him. Karl hadn’t written about escape at all, for one, even in the most veiled terms. Still, it was word from the world Anders left behind, and he was surprisingly greedy for it – greedy even for the dull bits of gossip about how so-and-so had picked up knitting and was making the world’s ugliest hats for everyone in the dorms, or how such-and-such swore he’d seen a spider the size of a Mabari in the fruit cellar.

And, more than that, he realized he was greedy for Karl’s descriptions of his classwork. The mage was a few years older than Anders, and so his schoolwork had always been advanced by Anders’ lights. Still, Anders used to at least know the fundamental principles of whatever his older friend was learning that week, enough to follow along when they talked it over. But now Karl was enthusing over some advanced entropy spells … and Anders understood what he’d written about them almost as well as a nug would understand the Chant of Light.

Sting to his vanity aside, that made Anders realize how sorely he’d neglected his training over the last six months. He read in the Magic Box when he could find books worth his time, and there’d been what might be called field practice in Rapture and Skyrim, but the rest of the time he’d acted as if magic were his to master simply by wishing it so.

And Isabelle had been right, damn it. Training – or practice, or sparring, or whatever you wanted to call it – would be very helpful if he didn’t want to get killed the next time he went up against real trouble he couldn’t run from.

Which was why he made a grudging visit to the salle today. He’d needed to use his little pocket notebook of spells to set and secure the wards keeping his spellwork confined: The fact he could no longer do it from memory was yet more proof he’d let himself slide, and badly so. Once that was done, he took his place at one end of the room and began a warm-up exercise of casting controlled bolts of each element. Fire, ice, lightning, spirit, fire, ice, lightning, spirit …

It got much more satisfactory once he started to imagine the dummies at the other end of the Salle as Templars, all silly suits of armor and mage-hating sneers.

[OOC: Open post, put in my journal because it might grow up and be a linkdrop someday.]

Once Anders was back at the Circle, he barely had time to change his socks before he was whisked off to stand before Chief Enchanter Irving. Irving wanted an apology and a promise to stop trying to escape; Anders considered it a matter of honor to give neither.

( In which Anders lands in a cell and then goes to Fandom )

[OOC: establishy, NFI, NFB, OOC is love.]