Bricks, Bridges, and Bonds

Nita unpacked her belongings in the remarkably unremarkable room. Dorm rooms are the same even here, she thought. Her name was affixed to the top bunk, a small chest of drawers, and the empty half of the closet.

With the strict weight limits on how much she could take with her, unpacking took almost no time. Nine hangers took care of her shirts and trousers, while her undergarments, socks, short trousers and tee shirts barely filled the top drawer. She decided to leave the middle drawer empty for the time being, and she could put the bag in the bottom drawer.

As she turned the bag over to roll it up, the sound of something hitting the floor got her attention. She looked down to see an interlocking plastic brick. Not of any use by itself except as a caltrop for bare feet, she picked it up and examined it. A common two-by-four brick, the blue plastic still looked new.

Nita remembered her first set. She’d never been one to play with the other children in the neighborhood. Building things with her interlocking bricks even when shooed into the front garden to play, had caught the attention of some of the other children. Too shy to say “no” when they asked if they could join in, the other children began to hang out with her, building things in the garden. Over the course of that summer, she’d made friends with half the neighborhood, and soon all of them had multiple sets as well.

How that brick wound up in her bag she didn’t know, but she’d ended up a gram overweight at check-in for the gate and had to discard a pair of socks. One would’ve brought her to weight, but a single sock was of little use, so the pair was left behind.

She’d been assured that the campus gift store would be able to order in things she might need…like socks. As she placed the blue brick on top of the dresser, she wondered if the store would be able to get a set — or sets — of the bricks that had made her locally popular and ignited her interest in engineering.

The door creaked open. Her roommate, a tall taurid woman with polished black horns and hooves, came in by timid, slow measures. Given her bulk, Nita found the contrast hilarious, but did her best not to laugh, trying to keep her expression neutral and non-threatening. If she’s that shy, she thought, I should do my best to make her comfortable.

“Hello, my name is Zuna. You must be Nita. I will do my best not to frighten you.”

That was the breaking point. Nita broke down laughing. “Damn, girl. You may be big, but you don’t scare me. I thought you were just super shy. I was trying to be cool to let you get comfortable.”

“Oh, cool.” Zuna stepped into the room, her hooves clacking on the hardwood floor, which creaked in some spots as she walked toward the bunks. “Well, still, if I come crashing in here sometimes, it’s not your fault. I just get like that sometimes.”

“Don’t we all?”

“It’s mostly elves around here, so I wouldn’t know. Everyone seems scared of me, so I try to stay quiet and out of their way,” she said, stopping to look at the plastic brick. “What is this?”

“It’s a plastic brick that ended up in my bag somehow. Just don’t let it end up on the floor. They really hurt to step on.”

Zuna picked it up and examined it. “I thought it might be a magical totem or something, since you spent the weight to bring it here, although it is light.” She put it gingerly back down on the dresser and flopped onto the bottom bunk with a thud that Nita felt through the floor.

“Would you have time to show me around campus?” Nita asked. “I’ve been through the VR walkthrough, but it’s not the same.”

“Sure. What’s your major?”

“Engineering.”

“Then you’ll be spending a lot of time in the sciences building. We’ll start from there and finish up at the cafeteria. Dinner starts in an hour.”

Nita picked up the brick and put it in her pocket as she followed Zuna out of the room. As they walked through the campus, Nita saw what Zuna meant. Most of the students were elves, though a few dwarves, a halfling or two, a group of gnomes that stayed clumped together, and even a goblin passed them. Still, Zuna was the only taurid she'd seen, and Nita was sure she was the only human on campus.

It was obvious to Nita that the other students gave Zuna a wide berth. Well, she won’t have to stick out on her own, Nita thought, I’ll stick out with her.

“Over there is the library,” Zuna said, pointing. “Behind us is the campus store. Bookstore on one side, gift store on the other. And now the important stop, the cafeteria.”

“Wait a minute,” Nita said. “I need to check on something in the store.”

“You already know which books you need?”

“No, something else.”

Nita left Zuna waiting outside the store while she went in and spoke with the gnome behind the counter. It took several minutes, and the exchange of a larger amount of cash than she’d expected before she returned to the waiting taurid.

They sat eating, others in the cafeteria avoiding their table and suddenly looking away whenever Nita turned their direction. “What’s up with—”

“Ignore them; I do.” Zuna put down her fork after having cleared her third plate. “Why did you come here for engineering, when you could’ve studied that at home for a lot less?”

“Ever since the gates opened, and magic started seeping into my world, I’ve wanted to know how it could be used in materials for engineering. Here, I can get that information, and get my hands on magical materials.” Nita shook her fork, made of a magical alloy that would hold food when desired, but cleaned and sterilized itself when placed down.

“What’s your major?” Nita asked. “I know there’s lots of elf, dwarf, human, and halfling mages and even some goblin, but I didn’t know there were taurid mages too.”

“There are,” Zuna said, “mostly raw shamanistic types, but I’m not one. I’m here because I switched from theoretical physics to theoretical magics. Very similar, but the maths are lot more complicated.”

They walked back to their room, without detours, and Zuna asked, “What were you ordering from the store?”

“A surprise,” she said. “Something that helped me make friends when I was a shy kid. I think you might enjoy it, and I suspect I already got at least one other group of students interested.”

“I’m not one to stress over surprises,” Zuna said, bending down to bring her eye-to-eye with Nita, “but it better not be a surprise party. I hate those.”

“It’s not. I promise.” Nita began to snicker. “But…now I know what to do for your birthday!”

Zuna snorted and began to laugh as well. “You really aren’t the least scared of me, are you?”

“Why should I be? You can’t even keep a straight face when you’re trying to be intimidating. Your little smirk gave you away.”

Over the following week, classes started and Nita and Zuna found themselves busy, but always made time to meet for dinner in the cafeteria. It was there that the gnome Nita had spoken to in the store came rushing in with a large box on a pushcart. Behind him followed the group of gnomes she’d seen traveling together her first day on campus.

The gnome pushing the cart was out of breath. “Your box just came, and your neighbors in the dorm said you were here.”

“You could’ve left it there,” Nita said with a wink. She noticed that the group of gnomes still hung back, but all eyes in the cafeteria were on her and Zuna.

“Yeah, but I…we wanted to see it.”

Nita cleared a space on the table and began removing the contents of the large box. Two sets of standard bricks, a set of motors, actuators, gears, belts, axles, wheels, hinges, and assorted parts for building working machines, and beneath that an architectural set of blocks.

“Come on, Zuna. Let’s build something.”

At first, Zuna just watched as Nita began putting together a working drawbridge spanning the table.

Zuna began fiddling with the pieces, opening the architectural set after Nita gave her the go-ahead, and started adding design elements to the structure. The gnomes gathered in closer and with a nod from Nita began chiming in and helping.

“If you use an actuator to move this section like that…” “We could increase clearance by putting the swing-arm…” “If we cantilever this section of the span, we can…”

During the build, Arrold, the gnome from the shop, wrote down orders for dozens of kits — including two for himself — as they all played with the bricks. When the lights dimmed, letting them know the cafeteria was closing, a collective groan went around the table.

Everyone who had been playing with the bricks, and even a few of the elves and others that had stood around watching, began to put all of them back into their respective boxes. Nita stood and raised a hand to stop everyone.

“I know people who like to keep their kits in the original box and separate, but I’m not one of those.” With that, she swept all the bricks on the table into the large shipping box. She noticed winces from some of those watching and thought, Yep, those are the ones that’ll keep them in the original boxes.

As she picked up the large box and Zuna picked up and smashed the kit boxes for recycling, Nita smiled and watched Zuna saying her goodbyes to the same students who had been too scared of her to even walk on the same side of the hallway.

“Bye, Arrold, Rin, Leelee, Violet, Tansy—”

“All the rest!” Tansy interrupted. “Can we do this again?”

“Oh, these are Nita’s blocks, you’d have to ask—”

“I already did. I just meant, will you be there too?”

“Yeah, I think I’d like that.”

The little gnome leaned forward and grabbed Zuna’s leg in a hug, her face barely reaching the taurid’s hip. Zuna gave Tansy an awkward pat on the head.

Tansy let go and stepped back. “I’m sorry we were afraid of you. You’re a lot of fun!”

Zuna smiled. “Thank you, Tansy. See you around.”

Nita winked. “See you later, Short Stuff. Let’s go, Zuna. We’ve got to figure out what you’re going to wear when we go clubbing with the girls this weekend, and what kind of makeup to do.”

Zuna’s smiled dropped as confusion crossed her face. “Which girls?”

“Tansy, Violet, Leelee, April, and Yen and Tan, the twin elf girls that were watching. They said they all want to hang out with you, and I said I’d make it happen.”

Zuna looked at the boxes she was about to drop into the recycler. “To think, all that from some children’s blocks.”

“Bricks,” Nita corrected her, “and not just for children. It says, ‘Ages 4 to 3999’ right on the box.”