Young Writers Society

Take your ticket and take a seat please.

No, we do not have an estimated wait time, please be patient.

Next!

You glance down at your ticket. It has an obscenely long number on it. You glance up at the screen announcing the next ticket. This is going to take awhile.

You take a seat in the waiting room. It seems to stretch on forever with so many different people in the seats. You begin to wonder if everyone here is waiting on the same thing you are. Probably not, right? There's no way everyone here is waiting for... that.

So, what are you waiting for?

---

Welcome to The Waiting Room~

This is no regular waiting room, this is a waiting room for almost everything and anything. So, someone may be waiting on a doctor, someone may be waiting on a magic appointment, someone may be waiting on a teleporter to another dimension to be free. It's up to you!

However, with a system like this, the wait time is long. So, what better to do than chat with some stranger who's stuck in this waiting room with you?

Railyn grabbed his ticket and stared at it in horror. How long was he going to have to wait?!

He hobbled over to a chair that wasn't occupied (and the adjacent seats weren't occupied thankfully) and plopped down, sighing. He flipped out his Academy Tablet. No service.

Go figures.

This was going to be a looooooooong wait.

As soon as Izabella touched the pearly white ticket, she knew it was going to be a long number. She read it in her head.

874580532658912 she thought. She looked up at the screen at the most recent number. 456. I’m gonna die here. Izabella thought.

She looked around for a seat. There weren’t any seats that had a seat in between another person. So she decided to sit in between two people who didn’t look too shady. She took her book out of her bag.

Mallon taps his feet anxiously, staring up at the screen and trying not to fidget. He was well into the thousands for the line—he wasn’t even sure he could COUNT that high. He didn’t know where his friends had gone either, but he was fairly certain they’d gone off in search of something else.

There were so many people before him waiting to impress the elders and hopefully get a dragon of their own! He had no idea how he’d accomplish that. He fidgets in his seat, glancing around again. Neither of his dads in sight, none of his friends. This was going to take a while.

Someone next to him is messing around with some sort of glowy device, and Mallon stares over his shoulder in interest. “What is that thing?”

Railyn glanced at the boy next to him, peering over an empty seat to glance at Railyn's university tablet.

He tried his absolute hardest not to sigh, but a little bit still trickled out as he pondered how to respond to that question. Do people not know what tablets are?

If they didn't... how could he explain it to them?

He clicked the screen off and it went dark.

He then turned to the man and offered a slight smirk. "Oh, this is something from my school. Allows me to... stay in communication and stuff."

That was a horrible explanation Railyn. His cheeks flared and probably turned as red as his hair.

Mallon nodded like he understood. “Ohhhhhh, uh-huh, yeah.” He swung his legs back and forth, frowning down at his lap as he tried to puzzle THAT one out, but his young brain just didn’t seem to know what to do with that information.

“So what school?” He finally asked, hating the silence.

Izabella couldn't help but overhear the two people on her right talking. It seemed like one of them was using a tablet, trying to explain what it was, but the other didn't really know what it was. Since that clueless boy seemed pretty young and most people knew about electronic devices, Izabella thought it strange that he didn't know what it was.

She thought he must be just weird when she suddenly felt a magical sense that made her see magic in that boy. So that's what it was. He was one of the magical people! And specifically one of those who didn't know much about the non-magical world. What an amateur. At least Izabella was sophisticated enough to know what kind of silly things they used in their world, like tablets.

She looked at her book and pretended to read so that she could continue listening to their conversation.

Railyn smirked when they boy asked what school. It was an instinctive response. He couldn't help but be proud of the school he was attending.

"Lux Academy," Railyn stated, his chest swollen with pride. It took a lot to get into that school, and he had the right to be proud of being a student there. He had fought tooth and nail to get in there.

...Which made his injury a little bit embarrassing, seeing as he had let his aura falter and his leg get smacked by a mace. His aura was trying to heal but of course it was a severe enough injury to have to go to a magical doctor. And of course he was stuck in this waiting room because Glinthaven didn't have any that could deal with a mace injury like that.

Mallon nodded, like that made a lot of sense, despite the fact he had absolutely no clue what it was. “Ohhhhh.” He frowned into space. “What type of school is that? Like, blacksmith, or leatherwork, or…”

Railyn blinked. From where he was, Lux Academy was known basically everywhere. He didn't think there was one person alive who could talk and not know what Lux Academy was.

Then again, this was not where he was from.

"Well, it's a battle academy. A... magic battle academy. We are trained to use our magic to become battle-hardened warriors." He chuckled. "Fun stuff."

Although Railyn wasn't really looking like a battle-hardened warrior right now as he glanced to his casted leg.

Izabella glanced over at them and saw the boy's cast. Izabella had heard only of the name of Lux Academy. This information was new to her. She felt bad fot the boy in the cast. Maybe he got that from his school. Or some shenanigans relating to that school. Whatever it was, he was probably in this waiting room because of that.

The other boy still seemed confused. Even after explanation, she guessed he was in some other burrow of magic.

Mallon nods slowly. “So you do, like…magic?” He asks nervously, looking the boy up and down. He’s tempted to scoot his chair over a little bit but stops himself. “I’m training to get a dragon, but I’ve never done magic or anything.”

"Training to get a dragon, huh?" Railyn tugged up the sleeve of his red leather jacket to reveal his spiraling dragon tattoo that covered his forearm. "It's not an actual dragon, but, uh, pretty neat, huh?"

Mallon looks at it, tilting his head. "Yeah, that's cool. Is it a drawing, or some type of magic, or--" He pauses glances behind him at a girl who, despite seemingly being absorbed in a book, keeps making scoffing noises, like she's laughing at him but trying to hide it.

Railyn blinked. Kids really did have the weirdest way of asking questions. "It's kinda like a drawing, a permanent drawing on my skin. It helps me make my magic more precise."