As soon as when it was done, Scott slid the finished documents across the table. "All clean. You're officially boring civilians now."
Damon picked up his ID card, twirling it between his fingers with mock admiration. "Well, look at that. I even smile well."
Lira smirked faintly. "Try not to break this identity before lunch."
Scott's boys gathered around the opposite end of the table, beer bottles half-empty, their eyes never leaving the two. Their laughter had faded, what remained was wary silence and vigilance.
One of them Cray leaned forward slightly, his knuckles drumming against the wood. "You two really planning to play student out there?"
Lira's gaze flicked to him not sharp, not hostile, but heavy enough to still the air. "If that's what's needed."
The man looked away first.
Julius sighed, rubbing his temple. "Alright. Enough staring contests. They'll leave with me in the morning." He met Damon's eyes, his voice low but edged. "Until Elias says otherwise, you're partially under my watch. Try not to burn the state down."
Damon grinned, teeth flashing faintly white. "No promises."
Scott cracked open another beer, muttering under his breath. "I hate this already."
Outside, dawn was still hours away but something in the air had shifted.
And Julius knew, even before the first light broke, that Ohio would never stay quiet again.
The campus of Ohio State University stretched like a carefully painted canvas wide lawns dotted with old oak trees, red-bricked lecture halls lined in crisp symmetry, and glass buildings that gleamed like polished mirrors under the morning sun. Students swarmed through the grounds in a steady current backpacks slung low, coffee cups in hand, some laughing, some fighting against deadlines with half-baked essays and caffeine in their veins.
The central quad hummed with the easy noise of university life. Laughter. Running feet. The flutter of papers and the sharp clack of skateboard wheels against pavement.
Down one of the longest hallways in the Engineering and Humanities block, the calm rhythm of the morning fractured into the sound of pounding sneakers.
Ryan tore through the corridor first tall, broad shouldered, curls plastered to his forehead from the sprint. His gray hoodie was half unzipped, bag bouncing wildly against his side.
Right behind him, Holly dashed past a startled group of freshmen, clutching a script binder to her chest, her red scarf trailing behind like a flare.
And bringing up the rear, of course, was Damon perfectly composed despite the chase, though his shirt was untucked, and the usual sleekness of his hair had surrendered to a stubborn strand sticking out of place.
"Ryan," Damon drawled, dodging a trash bin with casual grace, "one of these days, you could wake up on time."
Ryan huffed, throwing him a look over his shoulder. "And give you the satisfaction? Never happening."
Holly laughed breathlessly. "You two are idiots would never wake up early."
They burst through the junction of intersecting hallways, each veering in different directions at the last moment Ryan shouldering through a door marked Sports & Humanity Studies, Damon sliding toward the Engineering Lab, and Holly skidding into the Performing Arts Studio just opposite.
It had become a kind of morning choreography over the years, a collision of schedules and shared chaos.
Three years earlier, when the portal shuffle list the university's digital system for room allocations had thrown Damon into Ryan's dorm, neither of them had cared much. Damon, ever the composed observer, had found the arrangement convenient. If one had to share a living space, better it be with someone whose secrets you already understood. Ryan, for his part, had simply shrugged it wasn't like he'd had a choice.
But convenience had turned to ease surprisingly fast. Ryan was a sports and humanities major, always with a ball under his arm, a book tucked somewhere in his bag, and too many opinions about ancient epics. Damon, with his mind wired for equations and machines, spent nights sketching sleek designs on graph paper or tinkering with blueprints mainly on explosives.
Somehow, they'd found a shared rhythm. A balance. Ryan's messy half of the room didn't clash with Damon's precise side it filled it.
And then there was Holly, her acting class was always scheduled across the hallway from Ryan's lecture hall and Damon's lab. She'd been a blur at first the girl in bright scarves and louder laughter but soon she became a daily constant. Morning sprints through the hallway. Accidental meetings at the vending machine. Long, lazy lunches on the steps of the theater building.
None of it was planned. But like roots under old stone, the pattern had settled deep.
As the bell rang and the hallway emptied, their laughter faded into three different doors.
On the other hand, Rein's world at Ohio State University was a quiet constellation orbiting just outside the orbits of Ryan, Holly, and Damon.
While the others tore through shared hallways and bump into each other routines, she lived in a different rhythm altogether tucked into a residential block at the edge of the Arts & Design sector. Her roommates were a collection of wildly different personalities a soft spoken architecture prodigy who never spoke above a whisper, a transfer student from Barcelona who hummed opera while making tea, and a senior who treated every morning like a runway.
It suited her. Rein had always been better at fitting in silently.
She spent most of her time split between the School of Architecture and the Fashion Design Annex, buildings that breathed creativity in two very different dialects. One smelled of paper, ink, and chalk; the other of dye, fabric, and heat from iron presses. Her schedule was brutal, as a five hour design studios, portfolio critiques that stretched into dusk, and architecture seminars where entire models lived and died on the strength of a single idea.
But the one saving grace of her insane timetable was its pattern a week's sprint of chaos followed by two, sometimes three, full days of quiet. This helped her maintain focus and increased her mental stamina during these rare days and these days were breaks she cherished. Breaks where she sometimes just sometimes crossed paths with the others.
Then there is Lira's story which was different.
She roomed with Claire, which in itself felt like the universe deliberately tossing together fire and rain. Claire's side of the room was a nest of music sheets, violin cases, and small potted plants perched on the windowsill. Lira's half was stacked with alchemical diagrams, notebooks scribbled with equations, glass vials neatly arranged in padded cases, and the faint but constant scent of herbs and iron.
Lira's major Alchemy with an extra course in Metaphysics kept her buried in specialized labs deep under the science wing, places where the lighting never felt quite like day or night.
She often returned at hours that didn't belong to the living, her hands faintly stained with powdered elements and inks sometimes it made even her roommates think she's up to no good in which in all honesty couldn't be said to be a lie.
Claire, on the other hand, lived in rhythm. Her Music Conservatory sat on the far side of campus opposite the general academic buildings. Her world was concerts, chamber rooms, long rehearsals, and the delicate strain of strings echoing through vaulted halls. Quite something to help train in assimilation of frequency and rhythm along with its flow in relation to the human state.
Their paths barely crossed, but when they did a quiet "hey" before bed, a soft smile in the hallway it was enough. A thread still existed between them, stretched but not broken.
Between Rein, Lira, and Claire, the dynamic was fragmented but deliberate. They'd met once or twice since arriving, brushing fingers against old familiarity. Not enough to draw eyes, but enough to remind themselves who they were beneath the names printed on their forged IDs.
Their cover was flawless.
No raised eyebrows.
No trailing shadows.
Just students with different majors, scattered across a vast campus invisible by design.
And that invisibility… was precisely the point.