Elanor was<i>fairly </i>sure her brain was going to explode one of these days. It was a surprisingly common thought for her to have of late as she listened to the pre-lunch break announcements and packed up her books from class. Supposedly Intro to Decoding and Cyphers was A) an intro course and B) about history and theory rather than actually decoding anything. But somehow she was leaving class with a very mild headache and<i>another </i>assignment that started with using the cypher discussed in class to actually decode the assignment in the first place. She was going to need at least a half hour to just figure out how much time she needed to block out to finish the homework before Friday. And she was pretty sure it was written in shell code.<br/><br/>She was going to have to figure out how to politely tell Dustin she was<i>not </i>going to be able to go with him to the duel<i>thing </i>later. She had a quiet period after lunch and she needed all of it to get as far into her homework as she could while he was busy elsewhere. He was going to be displeased that he couldn't show her off to intimidate any would be challengers but it was a school sanctioned event so he didn't<i>actually </i>need her. No official duels or rivals sneaking up. Just a bunch of witches with more magic than sense.<br/><br/>He was still going to be pissed.<br/><br/>Elanor... was going to just opt to avoid him until she couldn't. That would work great. He would probably be expecting to see her back in the Tower dorms for lunch. So she would just go to the cafeteria the other dorms shared and grab lunch there. She'd stick out like a sore thumb with her top ranked outfit but maybe if she just took off her cape it would be harder to notice? Or she could just take advantage of being weird for eating tenders instead of the Tower's lunch to just get some homework done? If people avoided her she might actually manage to get through enough of her assignments that she<i>could </i>go to the duel thing with Dustin.<br/><br/>If it wasn't so snowy outside she'd just sneak her lunch out and eat on the quad. Though that would defeat the point of being harder to find.<br/><br/>It was with these short term plans rolling in her head that Elanor shouldered her book bag and headed for the cafeteria between the Mason and Mantle dorms. At least she<i>liked </i>tenders.