Chapter 8: Chapter 7: Moons

As I walk through the door to the science classroom, I literally get blindsided. It turns out my feathery best friend does not, in fact, know how to take it easy.

“Lily~, I missed you so much! How come we have to be in different classes?” Ava whined.

“You know why, Ava. I can’t exactly take flight class with you, and there’s about one out of every fifty harpies that’s talented enough to do magic. So even if we had every class possible together, there’d still be two classes we wouldn’t have together. Come on, let’s sit down.”

The mention of seats caused Ava’s face to immediately change from crestfallen to shining. “Oo, oo, perfect! I actually came here as fast as I could so I could get us the best seats!” She then proceeded to drag me by the claw toward the front. 

I groaned internally when I realized where she was pulling me. Of course Ava would be the type to sit up front. Still, I couldn’t help but ask.

“Ava, why are we sitting at the front?” I whined.

“Huh? Well, I figured it would be the best spot for you, considering everyone else’s mana would get in the way of seeing the board if you sat in the back,” my friend explained. That surprised me. Was my best friend actually really smart and thoughtful?

“Anyway, come on come on, let’s sit down!” she squealed, regaining her energy that had been toned down a moment earlier.

I allowed my impetuous friend to drag me up to the rightmost seats in the row of six, and coiled my tail below the chair before leaning into it. Technically, my tail makes a fine chair by itself, but between having a chair back and common courtesy, using an actual chair was fine by me.

The rest of the students filtered in over the course of the next few minutes, and the very real bell rang just as the last girl, a dalmatian-patterned kobold, made her way to the empty seat in the second row.

The teacher, a hakutaku, stood up from her desk and clapped twice. “Alright class, time to begin. Of course, that means roll call.” She began listing off names, to which the students responded with the standard “here.” After she finished, she wrote her name on the board: Mrs. Min Niu. Underneath, she wrote Cycles of the Moons. Then she just stood there with her arms folded beneath her rather generous bust, waiting for the class to quiet. Once we did, she began her lesson. 

“Alright, first, who can tell me the names of the three moons and how long their cycles are?” Mrs. Niu asked. A few hands shot up, and others joined more slowly, but I was one of the few that didn’t, since I didn’t know. She called on the almost-late dalmatian girl whose hand had been one of the first ones reaching eagerly into the air.

“The largest moon, which is red, is called Luna, and it has a full moon every thirty-six days,” the spotted girl began in a rush, “the second largest, which is pale yellow, is called Selene and is full every four hundred thirty-two days, and the smallest, green moon is named Ceres and takes six days to reach full again.” She then sat back down after her excitement from being called on had caused her to stand up.

From what I could smell, our teacher was a bit surprised at the canine’s energy, but to her credit, she seemed to regain her train of thought very quickly. “Excellently put, Miss Kirby. One important thing to note is that each of the shorter cycles fits neatly into the ones longer than it. In fact, this is why we base our calendar on it. There are four hundred thirty-two days in a year, beginning every full moon of Selene; thirty-six days in a month, corresponding with Luna; and six days a week, matching Ceres’s cycle. Because of this, the new moons never line up, but the full moons line up every year on New Year’s Day.”

After that, she began explaining the waxing and waning phases, and I tuned out a bit. They all orbited Eos, the planet I was now living on, in the opposite direction the moon orbited Earth, so the phases filled, then waned, from left to right instead of right to left. Not that I really paid much attention to it before.

I was startled out of my quiet musings by the still very real bell, signaling that I had been lost in my head for nearly the entire class period, and that it was time for the most hectic class of the day: lunch.