Over time, he had come to enjoy the sport, most especially on Delgado, where the local game fish ate spiny nettles and hence could be hooked and released with no damage to themselves. It was an eccentricity his neighbors, his mistress, and his colleagues had come to accept--and to expect. Periodically, the professor would set off for the lake region and return, rejuvenated, laden with tales of the ones that had gotten away and on-scale holograms of the ones that had not. So it was this morning that he parted comfortably from his mistress, tarrying to share a near-perfect cup of locally-grown coffee with her--the search for the perfect cup and the perfect moment being among her chiefest joys--and with his pack of lures, dangles, weights and rods set off for the up-country lakes. The car was his other eccentricity--allowed however grudgingly by the collegiate board of trustees, who were, after all, realists. The work of Professor Jen Sar Kiladi was known throughout the cluster and students flocked to him, thus increasing the school's treasury and its status.
