[Durelin]

“You haven't even signed up for your classes yet?”

The glasses were creeping down the woman's small nose, and Valde’s lip twitched, wanting very much to curl into a sneer as his eyes were constantly drawn to those spectacles. It irked him that she peered at him over them, just as it irked him that she had the nerve to speak to him with anger in her voice, even raising it a bit. The shuffling paper and the whirring and clanking of a paper cloning device that he had always thought to belong only as a cardboard cut out next to Spockú.

“You should have been informed of my arrival.”

“So? That doesn't mean I have to like the idea of it. What is the point of a Registrar's office if anyone can just walk in here and expect to take a class? Are you even enrolled here?”

Valde deftly avoided the questions. “Well, what is the point of wearing glasses if you do not even look through them?”

With a huff, the woman forced her glasses back up the bridge of her nose, and with a wave of her hand informed him that he was assigned to the class ‘Interpretive Drama: Shakespeardil on Mordway.’ He raised an inquisitive eyebrow at her, but it was clear that she was shooing him vehemently, and there was quite the line behind him. So when he had been told which room in which building his class was (For never could a university be located in just one building. That would take all the fun out of it, and diminish the effectiveness of the name ‘university.’ Rather than ‘The University’ being one select building, it was a fertile orchard containing a variety of trees and bushes from which innumerable fruits were ripe for the picking. The use of this rather graphic metaphor as an extended one is of course the only reason why there are so many different buildings. Why these buildings are all named after different people is due to entirely different metaphor which may not be cited here, due to the animosity it might cause).

As soon as Valde set foot in the classroom, he spared a half a moment to gape, and then turned on his heel to leave.

“Oh fool, I shall go mad!” was belted out in a quavering male soprano to music led by a somber but soulful bopping of a trumpet, complimented by the whine of overdone but thankfully under-toned strings. All music and song stopped soon after his entrance, though, and his retreating back of course did not go unnoticed. “Ah, Mr. Delego!” The stout troll rumbled in a voice that Valde had expected to squeak much in the same way that it had when the creature sang. Valde Delego whirled around, and saw that the troll professor wore a suit with a be-spotted bow tie that made the Lead Tragic Actor gag. Over this, he dared to wear some kind of cape, with a floppy forest green hat topped with a large feather that overhung it to the right. “Please do come in!”

“Please, do stay in. I’d rather not.”

A moment later, and he felt a hand clamp down on his shoulder, and he was, at least by his own description, forcibly dragged into the room, and placed in the middle desk in the front row. He glanced around him, and found only four other students in the class. Each held a quill pen at the ready, and eyed him surprisingly casually from beneath plumed hats.

“Welcome, Mr. Delego, it is so good to have thee. It has been rumoured that you are indeed experienced in the art of…playing?” He chuckled to himself, finding himself funny, as any well-respected man instructing in a well-respected university would, what with all the confidence they had that was surely befitting them.

“Oh yeah, he’s a playa’ and he know it!” exclaimed the only student that sat in the back row. He then slunk down in his chair with a hand over his mouth as the professor’s eyes turned to stare at him, flaring up with anger. The troll stared at the young man in the back as if he were a cat had just expelled from either end of it, or perhaps both.

“Get thee to the guilloti—” He coughed. “Grammar and Diction in Modern English. Now.” He pointed to the door, and the man scurried out, leaving his hat and pen behind. After the troll professor had collected the abandoned things, he returned to look at Valde with a smile. “Now, what were you saying, Mr. Delego?”

Any sensible person would simply go ahead and begin saying what they had been going to say in response to what their professor had been interrupted in saying, and even if they had not had a response ready at that time, they would come up with one as quick as they could. But this was Valde Delego.

“Well, that’s a rather moot point, isn’t it professor?”

“No, my dear cos, I am afraid it is rather debatable as to what you were going to say.”

“Then we concur.”

“I assure thee: assuredly not.”

“But you agreed that it was debatable.”

“No, I said that ‘twas debatable, while you did speaketh of it being moot.”

“My point exactly. They are synonymous statements.”

“No they’re not.”

“Yes they are.”

“He’s right,” a voice squeaked from somewhere behind Valde, and he whirled around to look at who had spoken. It was a young mouse-like lady with honey hair that reddened severely in the face when the Lead Tragic Actor did gaze upon her. He thought that she looked rather constipated, but he thanked her nonetheless.

“What did you say?” the professor asked, an angry edge to his voice. The young woman squeaked again, and Valde was waiting for small gray and pink ears to pop out of her head, or at least largely disproportionate black ones. But she managed to hold up a dictionary, opened to the page containing the entry on ‘moot.’

“Why do you think it is called an Entmoot?” Valde asked, turning back to the professor after flashing one last smile at the young maiden, who was now clearly in distress.

“Ah,” the professor said simply. “Well, I believe it safe to say that Mr. Shakespeardil did not initiate use of that word, nor alter the meaning, so of course it would slip my mind so easily as it did thusly.”

“On the contrary. I doubt that you have traced back to the origin of the word ‘moot,’ sir, if you were not even aware of its meaning. In other and more obnoxious terms: how do you know?”

“Well, sir, I believe that is a moot point.”

“There, now you’ve got it.”

The troll professor rolled his large black eyes so much that Valde was certain they would get stuck in the back of his head, and with a sigh, he turned back to the blackboard behind him, where notes were scrawled in a lithe hand. “That’s quite enough, Mr. Delego. Now, wherefore art we here today, class?”

“I was forced to be here by some crackpot wizard and his dweomer nonsense,” Valde blurted out, obviously bemoaning his fate.

“To remaster the masterpieces of one Wilhelmër Shakespeardil so that they may be still worthy of his name, but may bring in loads of cash in today’s entertainment world,” the rest of the class drawled. The enthusiasm was bewildering, over two people muttering words that they obviously could care less about.

“In other words,” the troll professor cried out with a grin, flourishing his cape and brandishing a pointer stick that Valde was sure had been sharpened into a full-fledged poking stick, “we’re making a musical.”

“A musical?!” Valde cried out as if an arrow had just pierced his heart, and not one from the elfin quiver of Cupidrembor. “O untimely modernization!”