Dr. Moreau erased the blackboard vigorously. His mind cascaded emotions in waves of frustration, anticipation, annoyance, eagerness, and pride. He was a professor, but unlike the white haired, dried up, coots, he was still in his prime–or nearly anyway.

Endmur had no interest in most of his classes. Most young elves at his age relished their five year long introductory classes to the elven crafts. In his last class, he was instructed to forge a basic weapon that would be able to keep as a souvenir when the class ended.

After five years of practice and work, Endmur disappointed his teacher by presenting him with a foot long letter opener. The capstone project on these classes proceeded with secrecy, otherwise Master Altema would have stopped Endmur’s petty project and guided him toward a dagger or short sword.

It didn’t take them long to discover that the big red x indicated where they were on the map. Because they had no idea where they were, they just wandered roughly West for a while looking for landmarks that would help them get a bearing on their new found map.

I became a team lead in a software company about a year ago, and after things settled down a little, I realized that I didn’t know much about leading a team. I only had the experience from a few teams at his particular company, and I wanted to do the best I could.

So I started a How to Team group.

Candy didn’t return to the group, and after a day of searching, the group decided that she was probably in the pipes somewhere or back in the arena.

The troll–named Nobody–joined them in their search for Candy. He was convinced that she was actually made of candy, and often made the rest of the group uncomfortable when he made comments about eating or licking Candy when they found her. Perhaps it was best that she didn’t return just yet.