Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 54848 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54848 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
“That’s really nice. Thank you, Professor.”
“You can call me Charlie,” I offered.
“Charlie,” she repeated. “I’m At… Atty,” she said, fumbling over her own name. Which I maybe would have found unusual if I didn’t hear a kid, stone-cold-sober, refer to himself as ‘The Blobinator’ just a few days before. And she hardly looked any older than my typical student.
“Nice to meet you, Atty. Can I give you a word of advice about Professor Stan?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Don’t stand too close to him on Wednesdays.”
“Why not?”
“Professor Stan is… regimented in his eating schedule,” I said, putting it nicely. The man was compulsive about it and had a lot of rituals that went along with eating as well. Including bringing his own plastic utensils to work for lunch. “Tuesday nights, he eats something that is so loaded with garlic and onions that it seeps out of his pores the whole following day. I sat next to him in a meeting once and, yeah, I won’t make that mistake again.”
“That is really good to know,” she said, looking a little grossed out. “Thanks again, Charlie,” she said, waving the paper at me, then moving out into the hall.
“God, what is wrong with me today?” I grumbled when I turned back toward my desk, only to whack my hip into my little side table, sending two days’ worth of empty coffee cups toppling to the floor.
As I stooped to pick them up and finally toss them, I could swear I heard that strange little laugh again.
Maybe I had a brain tumor or something.
I didn’t have any family history of that, though. We were healthy, if a bit neurotic, stock.
“You know what it could be,” I mumbled to myself.
The lack of proper sleep, too much caffeine, stress, and the never-ending, ever-expanding to-do list I had going on for my life that was constantly getting pushed aside for my career.
And now, it seemed, to help some random, incredibly handsome, stranger with his app.
His app that he could, potentially, make hundreds of thousands of dollars from, but hadn’t offered me anything for my time.
I mean, I didn’t need the money, though.
See, the thing was, really gifted and talented kids who get into college as a young teenager often get a lot of scholarships. On top of that, progeny of former, beloved professors also got quite a discount as well.
Which meant I walked away from my university days with almost zero student loan debt, and with a job that offered a starting pay that was something like three times the national average.
On top of that, I was a woman of simple needs.
I had an apartment that was big enough for me and my books, but didn’t cost all that much. I wasn’t home often, so I didn’t have cable or a lot of subscription streaming services.
I ate out a lot because it was easier and, ultimately, cheaper than buying a bunch of groceries that were likely going to go bad in my refrigerator.
I didn’t typically enjoy shopping for clothes or shoes or makeup. My only real indulgences were office supplies and reading glasses.
I mean, when the stores rolled out the school supplies, I was a happy, happy camper. And then when school started, and those same supplies were suddenly on clearance? It was like Christmas.
On top of all of that, I didn’t have a social life to speak of. Aside from Imka, I didn’t really have any friends. And even Imka was just a “work friend.” So I didn’t need a going-out budget.
So, it didn’t bother me that, yeah, this man might be making a small fortune off of his app. What mattered to me was that he was trying to bring something that I was so passionate about to the masses.
It would just be nice if he maybe gave me a little credit somewhere. If I had that, I could possibly get my students to download the app, fall in love with playing it, and get hungry for more information from me.
That was always the goal.
To get the next generation as interested in history in general, but the myths in particular, as I was. Or even half as interested as I was.
“History and culture and the beliefs those cultures held are internal parts of the human collective; they explain wars and the reasons civilizations leaned into or away from certain things that may have inevitably helped or hurt them.”
That was something I remembered my father telling me when I was a little girl grumbling about learning about the real-life wars waged in ancient worlds.
I always preferred the stories when I was little, my brain not wanting to wrap itself around the atrocities that human beings were capable of.
I could excuse genocide and mass rape from fictional god characters, but not from people who were out there hurting other people.