'All right, you fellows,' he sighed. 'Enough's enough for today. Time for tea, eh?'

It was so hard, he reflected, to get wizards to understand the concept of 'team spirit'. It simply wasn't part of wizardly thinking. A wizard could grasp the idea of, say, wizards versus some other group, but they lost their grip when it came to the idea of wizards against wizards. Wizard against wizards, yes, they had no trouble with that.

They'd start out as two teams, but as soon as there was any engagement they'd get all excited and twitchy and shoot other wizards indiscriminately. If you were a wizard then, deep down, you knew that every other wizard was your enemy. If their wands had been left unfettered, rather than having been locked to produce only paint spells -Ridcully had been very careful about that

- then this forest would have been on fire by now.

Still, the fresh air was doing them good. The University was far too stuffy, Ridcully had always thought. Out here there was sun, and bird-song, and a nice warm breeze—

—a cold breeze. The temperature was plunging.

Ridcully looked down at his staff. Ice crystals were forming on it.

'Turned a bit nippy all of a sudden, hasn't it?' he said, his breath tingling in the frigid air.

And then the world changed.

Rincewind, Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography, was cataloguing his rock collection. This was, these days, the ground state of his being. When he had nothing else to do, he sorted rocks. His predecessors in the post had spent many years bringing back small examples of cruel or unusual geography and had never had time to catalogue them, so he saw this as his duty. Besides, it was wonderfully dull. He felt that there was not enough dullness in the world.

Rincewind was the least senior member of the faculty. Indeed, the Archchancellor had made it clear that in seniority terms he ranked somewhat lower than the things that went 'click' in the woodwork. He got no salary and had complete insecurity of tenure. On the other hand, he got his laundry done free, a place at mealtimes and a bucket of coal a day. He also had his own office, no one ever visited him and he was strictly forbidden from attempting to teach anything to anyone. In academic terms, therefore, he considered himself pretty lucky.