A Call from Home

The next morning, he was taken back to his dorm by Victoria and Jacob, both of whom stuck closely to him as if he were a president being bodyguarded.

As much as he appreciated their concern, he was a little annoyed at the difficulty he faced walking in such proximity.

Despite his internal grumblings, they made it back to his dorm without issue before deciding to meet up as a group later.

Not without explaining the situation to Shin first and ensuring that Jacob wouldn't go walking alone in the evening anymore.

Shin agreed surprisingly quickly to accompany him. Almost like he expected Jacob to get beaten up at some point and was wondering why he hadn't asked for protection sooner.

Eventually, the group met up and Jacob was made to recount his experience to the lot of them.

"Well, the long and short of it is simple. Victor and his buddies picked a fight with me, and I managed to get most of them to back off and then went after Victor but he blasted me without even trying. Luckily Arthur was around and saved me before I got beat up even worse." Jacob explained.

"…" Silence was all that came from his friend group.

Not what he was expecting.

He had deliberately downplayed the situation, he didn't see a reason to elaborate on his desperate struggle to get away or his repeated penis-stabbing technique.

"Uhhh, hello, what's wrong? Did all of you suddenly take a vow of silence?" Jacob asked with a grin.

The look of disbelief on his friend's faces continued as Stephanie got out a laptop.

She spent a few seconds using it before she turned it to face him.

What she was showing him was security footage cut together of his chase and fight.

"Ahhhh… Shit." Jacob said.

Needless to say, his friends knew the actual circumstances behind his little adventure, and they weren't very happy with how he'd downplayed it.

Stephanie seemed especially annoyed at him for hiding the truth, Jacob wondered if she'd had a similar experience and was projecting onto him.

It took promising to always walk with someone who could fight to get them to stop lecturing him.

Victoria remained quiet like she agreed with the sentiment but didn't want to voice it.

On the other side of the spectrum, he could tell that Ressana was finding the whole thing mildly hilarious.

Mainly because after the lecturing had finished, she asked.

"So what made you aim for the dick?" with a barely suppressed laugh.

The truth was that it was a dire enough injury to a rarely guarded weak point which would prompt them to seek immediate medical attention.

"Well it worked the first time… and I kinda figured. If it ain't broke…" He joked as he remembered what went through his head at the time.

This sent Ressana into a fit of laughter which was quickly joined by the rest of the group. The only one not laughing was Victoria, she still looked apologetic.

Jacob didn't fail to notice this and made sure to pull her aside after their group get-together.

"Stop it" he said to her sternly.

"Huh?" was he only reply.

"With that face, and the guilty look you keep giving me. It's not like you went out of your way to make Victor beat the crap out of me and to be honest looking at you feeling sorry for me is almost humiliating. I managed to deal with all three of the people he brought with him and even ran him off with Arhtur's help. I call that a win and it's pissing me off that you're looking at me like I lost." He said in a huff.

Victoria looked at him stunned for a few seconds before her eye started twitching in anger.

The next thing he knew a fist was planted in his stomach and she was walking away in anger, much more energetically than she had been a few minutes ago.

A small smile appeared briefly on his face before he got back up and walked over to Shin to complain about Victoria's violence.

With that another week passed.

***

Jacob was currently sitting in his dorm room with Shin, helping him with his English writing.

It was a fun reminder of the oddities of the language.

One example was the fact that vowels changed the sound of the letter E.

Or the fact that the letter 'P' sometimes made the sound of an 'F'.

Because why not?

He was sitting next to Shin explaining the fact that there was a weirdly subconscious order to how adjectives were used to describe words.

Like how saying a big brown dog is correct but a brown big dog is incorrect.

To which he didn't have an explanation about why.

It had been a week since the incident with Victor and nothing much had happened.

He had tried submitting the video of him being beaten to the school in the hopes of something like a restraining order against Victoir.

The only response he got was that the footage didn't serve as conclusive proof of Victor's involvement.

It seemed like the whole 'strong prey on the weak' ideology that Victoria had mentioned was more prevalent in the school than he thought.

He was thinking about how he should get away from Victor the next time he inevitably decided to jump him.

That's when he got the phone call.

One he was not exactly thrilled to take.

But he had to pick up regardless.

"Hey Dad, what's up?" he said.

His father and he had only communicated minimally since he had come to England to learn about the dreamer world.

It wasn't that they had a bad relationship, or that he was a bad father.

But growing up his sister had always been so impressive, outgoing, and generally chaotic that she had accrued most of their dad's attention.

It didn't help that their mother wasn't around.

Despite that he didn't particularly resent his dad, he just wasn't super close with him.

Of course, when his sister had left home a few years before he did, his dad had tried to close the gap a bit, but it was too little too late.

"Heya kiddo, what ya doing?" his old man asked.

This led to a small round of verbal jousting as Jacob talked vaguely about his experiences without giving away the supernatural part of them.

Lying at this level was as easy as breathing for him.

Especially since he could mostly stick to the truth.

"Well, it's good to hear you've made some friends. But I gotta say I'm a little worried about you over there by yourself…" Jacob's dad trailed off.

Jacob knew that tone, it meant he was leading up to something he knew Jacob wouldn't like and was trying to justify it beforehand.

"This can't be good…" Jacob muttered under his breath before answering.

"It's fine dad, I'm an adult already and it's not like I'm living alone, I'm on campus with a roommate and everything" he tried to mitigate whatever was about to happen.

"Yeah well, your sister is going through the area cus of her work in travel so I asked her to check up on you" the phone answered.

"What? When?" Jacob asked in a panic.

"15 minutes, more or less. I knew if I gave you too much notice you'd find a way out of it." His father knew him well.

"And don't even try and say you're busy since the first thing I asked was what you were doing and you told me you were 'just chilling' in your room!"

Maybe too well.

"Argh, fine, fine… where are we meeting." Jacob gave up, realising he had no way out.

"At your university, apparently your sister knows it." His dad finished before hanging up abruptly.

"Wait what, no! Dad! Shit…" Jacob tried in vain to call out to him.

This was a bit of an issue since the campus wasn't meant to be visited by the dreamless. When it wasn't avoidable you had to notify campus staff so that they could make sure everything was in place so that the dreamless wouldn't see anything supernatural.

The mist may be able to alter their perception and memories to a degree but if enough people kept having weird experiences in the same place it would eventually become a problem.

He now had pretty much no time to alert the staff or redirect his sister.

Not to mention no time to prepare mentally for her existence.

Similar to his dad, they had a friendly yet slightly strained relationship.

She had always excelled at everything she did, creating more than a little jealousy from Jacob.

Eventually, he had outgrown the pettiness of trying to compete with her over everything, but a little resentment remained from all the attention she had gotten compared to him as a child.

After she had moved out, they had gotten along better than when they were forced together. Since they were limited to interacting when they actually wanted to interact, there was a lot less frustration in the sibling's relationship.

Of course, the amount he contacted her was minimal.

But she, for whatever reason, made an effort to stay in contact with him which led to them knowing more or less about what was happening in each other's lives.

She was currently a foreign diplomatic negotiator.

Whatever that meant, to Jacob it meant that she was in a new place every week and had travelled the world.

While he was debating whether to run straight to the campus's main entrance or if he should call his sister, he heard a knock on the door.

His head snapped over to it as he signalled Shin to keep quiet.

A fairly moot point since he was the silent type in the first place.

Not to mention he seemed slightly in shock at the fast-paced phone call that Jacob had just had.

Or was he judging him?

Jacob could never quite tell.

He went over to the door and looked through the peephole only to be greeted with.

"Hey dumbass, open up! Your big sister's here and she demands snacks!" His sister yelled from the dorm corridor.