Or: The Virtues Of Name Circles.

Once upon a time, there lived a Columbia student named Millie. In her junior spring, she enrolled in Chem 2104: Heavy Metals. She did not particularly enjoy the class but her father had all but forced her to take it. The professor was a wicked man, however, and the class was the worst she had ever taken. Every day Millie would go to her room and cry, surrounded by piles of problem sheets taken from impossible-to-read textbooks by Kenneth Straw and Adrian Weaver. There was no way she could understand them!

The lecture was boring and would drag on for hours. Even normal activities such as an introductory name circle slipped by, thankfully taking five minutes of the class while every name slipped off her mind. For Millie, only one part of the class was worthwhile. One classmate was charming, and would always sit on her right. Not only was he entertaining, but he spoke in class. Any attention placed on Millie was deflected by him.

One day, Millie ran into this classmate at Ferris. As they started talking, Millie lamented about how long the readings were and how little she wanted to do them. Her classmate responded, miraculously: “If you want some study guides, I have a few. Just shoot me an email—my name’s pretty rare, if you put it in Lionmail my address should be the only one to pop up.”

She could not possibly ask him for his name. He had said it in the first week (and the second and third and fourth), after all. She could not put her finger on it, but she even remembered that she had seen him before in some club or other, and she was sure he had introduced himself then too. He was as close to a friend as she had in the class and she could not ruin this by telling him that she, halfway through the semester, still did not know his name. Every week, she sat next to him, and talked about how their day had gone, solely saying “you,” and at the end of class, he would offer a study guide, a golden ticket to reduce the Straw and Weaver textbooks to a few short pages. Every week, she would say that she was meaning to, but forgot.

One night, Millie decided to go on a walk around Low to clear her head. As she approached the statue of the Great God Pan, she heard a voice that she had heard before, every week during chemistry. A man was chanting:

“It is good that no one knows, 

Rumpelstiltskin is my name.”

The next day, Millie got her study guide but chose not to talk to Rumpelstiltskin again. His Pan chanting seemed off to her.

The End

The moral: Pay attention in name circles. And if there are any fae beings in your class.

Great God Pan via Bwog Archives