It was a weird kind of normalcy, granted, given that instead of waking up underneath Amaranth in a tiny little bed, I woke up underneath her in the middle of a great big one. The new furnishings really did have the effect of making it seem like I was waking up in an entirely new place, not the room I’d spent the last week in.

I didn’t mind that little mental reset one bit. The summer housing dorm I’d stayed in for the preceding three months had never felt anything like a home. The room in Gilcrease had felt like that: just somewhere I was staying. Somewhere with a place for me to sleep and room for me to store my stuff. Amaranth’s arrival might have been enough to turn it from “some place” into “home”, but turning it into a cozy and comfortable home with little resemblance to the crowded and strictly utilitarian place it had been was even better.

It also gave me the sense that it was more her room than mine, which I also didn’t mind… it had been years since anywhere had really felt like it was mine. While I’d made a lot of strides in dealing with it, feeling out of place was still one of my bigger sources of anxiety. How could I feel out of place in Amaranth’s room? It was where she kept her belongings. She even had a place for me.

When we unpacked her books, it occurred to me that she had a practical reason for delegating the shelving to me… it wasn’t just a matter of giving me a task for the sake of doing so. She seemed almost inherently incapable of picking up a book and just putting it on the shelf. Each one that she took out of the trunk, she ended up at least flipping through, if not sitting down to read. I like books, and I can’t pretend that none of them caught my eye, but a lot of them were things like old natural history or philosophy textbooks from the 160s or 170s… fifty, sixty years out of date and looking like they’d felt every day of it. Amaranth cooed over each and every one of them like they were children, which meant I got a dozen or two books up on the shelves for every one she took out.

“You have your class with Coach Callahan this semester, don’t you, baby?” she asked me, while paging idly through a large book about wildflowers. “The additional one you promised you’d take when she gave you a pass/fail grade last year?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. My replies were more likely to come out “yes, ma’am” than anything more conversational when I was actively working on not sounding snappish. She knew this already. We’d gone over my whole schedule before. “It’s my last class of the day, every day.”

“A five credit-hour class,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’m taking 17 hours this semester, but don’t worry… I’m still ahead of where I need to be, credit wise, and I’m not going to slack off just because I got extra classes in over the summer.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about you slacking off in that regard,” Amaranth said. “I’m just thinking about what a bad grade in a five hour class would do to you. What grade do you think you would have earned in your last melee class, if you hadn’t been given a pass?”

“Probably a C,” I said. “That’s what Callahan thought I would end up with when she made the offer.”

“Coach Callahan,” Amaranth said. “I want you to start practicing proper respect for her.”

“I don’t think that’s going to affect my grade,” I said, then added, “ma’am.”

“No, but it will affect your attitude, which might affect your performance, which would affect your grade,” Amaranth said. “Say it.”

“Coach Callahan,” I said. “Coach Callahan told me she thought I could end up with a C.”

“If you get a C this time, it will be a third of your grade,” Amaranth said.

“Not quite a third,” I said. “Ma’am.”

“More than a quarter of it,” she said, and I couldn’t argue with that. “So we’ll have to make sure that doesn’t happen. Therefore, one of your tasks will be to get an A from her.”

“Yes, ma’… wait, you mean to get my collar, I have to get an A from Ca… Coach Callahan?”

“Whose collar?”

I lowered my eyes.

“Your collar,” I said.

“Do you not think you can get an A?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Honestly, her grading system is kind of… well… arbitrary.”

“Do you think it’s unfair?”

“I couldn’t say,” I said. “She says she assigns the grade she thinks students deserve. Anyway, even if I do get an A, that means it’ll be winter break at the earliest that I get to wear your collar.”

“I didn’t say they would be short tasks,” she said. “You’ve been mine for almost a year. If you don’t think you can wait one semester to make it ‘official’…”

“I can wait!” I said. “But… what if I don’t get the A?”

“Let’s just focus on getting the A, shall we?” she said with a broad smile, and that was all the discussion she would allow on the subject.

I sort of understood why she wouldn’t discuss alternatives. If she told me that failure would mean she’d give me some other task, that would be the same thing as saying that if I didn’t mind waiting longer I didn’t have to try to ace Coach Callahan’s class. But it felt very much like she was telling me I had to do something impossible and I wouldn’t get to wear her collar after the inevitable failure.

Still, even when she was proposing that I should scramble up the dome of the sky and peel the moon off of it for her to use as an umbrella, I loved being in her presence again. Amaranth was warmth incarnate, and I basked in her. It was like the sun had put on flesh and was now sitting on a battered sofa that looked like it was missing at least three inches of height in the form of legs.

Other than getting Amaranth’s things in order, it was an utterly routine day. We ate all of our meals in the cafeteria, we went and hung out in the library in the afternoon. It was what had become a typical Sunday in my life.

Steff and Ian went to the library with us, but they didn’t stay very long. None of us had any homework or studying to do, obviously, and the others wanted to go check out the newer additions to the campus facilities. Amaranth seemed content to just enjoy being with me in a familiar place for the moment, and of course none of the additions were new to me anymore.

I took an odd kind of comfort in the knowledge that by staying over the summer I had spent more time living on campus than about half of the undergraduate student body, assuming an even distribution of students over the four years. In our little group, Steff had been at MU longer than I had but she’d missed out on the changes over the summer.

“It’s kind of a shame we won’t be here when the library gets remodeled,” Amaranth said, in between flitting between books. “It’s part of the five year plan, but there are no funds allocated for it yet, which means it probably won’t be done in the next two years.”

“I’m kind of glad,” I said. “I like the library the way it is.”

The multistory school library was one of the biggest and the nicest library I’d ever been in. The municipal library in downtown Enwich was bigger and more impressive looking on the outside, but its inside was kind of dingy and institutional-looking. The MU library was very modern in its design. Its floor plan was very open and well-lit, with skylights on the top floor and a lot of glass in the front that illuminated all three stories. I couldn’t imagine a building on campus in less need of renovation.

“Well, I look at it this way,” Amaranth said. “If they expand it, it’ll have room for more books. Anyway, it’s hard to say what will happen in the next four years… Bethany Davies is laying out all these big changes, but she’s not staying to see them through.”

“You seem really up on this stuff,” I said.

“I got the Gazetteer, the alumni newsletter, and the Enwich Times in Paradise Valley so I could keep up on it,” Amaranth said. “Last year none of us really came here with our eyes all the way open… I didn’t want to make that mistake again. Anyway, it’s obvious Chancellor Davies is concerned about the legacy she’s leaving now that she’s retiring. I just hope she’s thinking about more than buildings and landscaping projects.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, it’s not like we’re not giving her plenty of opportunity to get her name attached to something positive.”

My case against the school for the little matter of one of their employees warding me inside a room with a divine seal and another one accidentally dumping me into the ancient magical labyrinth used for delving exercises was still pending, though a settlement offer was on the table that would let them off the hook without much financial hardship or metaphorical egg on their collective and equally metaphorical faces.

They’d have to admit wrongdoing, of course, but since what we were really looking for was improvements in the handling of racial matters there was plenty of room for a moderately skilled P.R. department to spin the whole thing into something good for the school.

“I keep wanting to ask if Lee knows you’re back,” Amaranth said. Lee Jenkins, of course, was my lawyer, who was handling my arbitration case against the school and who had helped me out in some of the bigger trouble spots of my freshman year. “But of course you didn’t leave.”

“Yeah, we’ve been in touch,” I said. “He’s inviting us to the wedding reception, by the way. It’s in the first weekend in Polyantha, so if you want to go you’ll probably want to make arrangements to stay past the end of the year next semester.”

“I would have thought it would have happened already,” Amaranth said. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised they’re opting for a longer engagement, with his career and all.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “His wedding’s been pushed back by his in-laws-to-be again… something about an insufficient bridal gift. They want time to put together a better offering.”

“I can’t imagine he cares about that,” Amaranth said.

“I’ve got the idea that it would be insulting for him to tell them that,” I said.

Lee didn’t talk about himself very much, but when he did he was really talking about his fiancee, K’thindi. She had a half-orc mother who’d raised her orcish, and they were a close-knit family. The stereotypical view of orcs wouldn’t lead one to imagine they could approve of someone with a white collar job, but most cultures tend to view someone who makes a good living in high regard. If anything, orcs had a higher regard for lawyers… trial lawyers, especially… than humans typically did.

Orcs didn’t practice trial by combat. They viewed trials as combat. Two people standing up in front of an audience of their peers and a respected authority, making contrary claims and trying to show the other up as a liar or trip them up on a point of traditional protocol? That was the kind of thing orcs could understand. It was more or less how they’d settled disputes of honor for ages, during times when a lot of humans were still dueling.

“Anyway… in my mind, it felt like during the summer you went somewhere else,” Amaranth said. “I know I was writing to you here, but it was like you left MU and went to some other school and then came back. I’m sure that doesn’t make any sense…”

“It kind of does,” I said. “The campus feels different during the summer. It’s the same buildings, a lot of the same people, and the same place… but somehow it adds up to something different. I can’t explain it.”

“I think you just did,” she said. “As much as I can, anyway… it seems like we both understand what we’re talking about, and that’s what matters.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, smiling so wide that my cheeks blushed out of apparent belief that I couldn’t possibly be so happy without having something to feel self-conscious about.

It was nice in some ways to be put in my place, to fall into the familiar rhythm of yes, ma’am/no, ma’am with my Owner in her room… but it was also nice in other ways to just have a quiet conversation with my girlfriend in one of our favorite places to go together.

The next day we went back to the union for breakfast… myself, Amaranth, Ian, Steff, and Two. Despite how familiar the buffet-style cafeteria was, this felt a good deal less routine, because it was the first day of class. I’d been through this three times before but each time it was different. I was less than an hour away from starting a new class with a new instructor.

“Lot of new faces,” Amaranth said as we sat down at a pair of tables in the middle of the room.

“Yeah,” Ian agreed.

“Thirty-three that I can see from here,” Two said. “No, thirty-two. I’ve seen the girl with the green earrings before.”

I took their word for it… Two’s, particularly. I wasn’t really good at faces, and I’d never been much of a people-watcher. I tended to keep my head down. When I did look around the room… which I did reflexively since the others were talking about it… my eyes gravitated towards the faces I recognized. They were mostly non-human.

There was Belinda, the half-ogre, who was sitting with some of her human teammates from the Skirmish team. She saw me looking and waved. I returned it, a little awkwardly. We weren’t exactly friends, but she’d been friendly enough towards me after the beginning of the previous year.

Celia was sitting with a couple of lizardfolk… one who I thought was Hissy, our floormate from last year… and the gorgon who’d been in the room beneath me in Harlowe.

Twyla, a quiet girl who looked completely human except for a pair of pointy little horns jutting out of her forehead, was sitting by herself at a two-person table, her head down low over a notebook. I didn’t know much about Twyla. She’d hung out with the Leighton twins, who seemed to have managed to make it from junior high to higher education without maturing at all… but that was probably more due to bad luck in the roommate lottery than any personal preference.

“I wonder how many people are coming over for meals as opposed to the Archimedes?” Ian said.

“We call it the Arch,” I told him.

“That’s how you can spot the cool kids here at the Mag Univ,” Steff said. “They’re up on the newest campus slang, or ‘camp slan’, as they call it.”

“I’ll bet a lot of the new freshmen in Harlowe are going there instead of here,” Amaranth said. “It’s so much closer to those dorms. I mean, I don’t think I see any obviously non-human students I don’t recognize here.”

“They must be going there,” Steff said. “The school quietly dropped their Food For Freaks program… no more catered meals to keep us from upsetting the normals.”

“Huh,” I said. “Kind of works out nicely for them that the new student center with the whole racial harmony message is so much more convenient to Harlowe.”

“Yeah,” Ian said. “A human who’s got a big problem sharing eating space with other races wouldn’t go to the dining hall that’s all in-your-face with the tolerance. So they come here by default, while most of the people they’d object to go to the new place.”

“Well, to be fair,” Amaranth said, “the new dining facility is designed to cater to more diverse dietary needs. Considering how many people had problems finding adequate nutrition in the cafeteria options before, putting it close to Harlowe seems like a goodwill gesture, really. It’s not a perfect solution, of course, but you have to remember the whole campus is getting overhauled. Presumably when the student union gets its own re-do, this place will offer similar options.”

“I’m not saying it’s all bad,” Ian said. “I mean, I don’t think there was some conspiracy by the school to trick Harlowe people into going one place and not the other. But… well…”

“It’s complicated,” I said. “There’s good and there’s bad in what they’re doing.”

“I agree,” Amaranth said. “I just don’t want the good to be overlooked.”

“I’ll tell you one good thing about dining at the ‘Argh’,” Steff said. “They do take-away boxes. You swipe your card like normal, but instead of all-you-can-eat, it’s all-you-can-cram. Not that I don’t enjoy a little mealtime social fun, but I’m looking forward to that for those nights I just want to be alone, or alone with Viktor… popping out and bringing back something resembling real food is going to be a lot better than trying to make a meal out of the stuff they carry at the little hallway store in the Nexus.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “I wonder if this place is going to start doing that? The Arch would be a bit out of our way for food, but that would be nice.”

“Oh, Little Ms. Here All Summer didn’t know about the take-away boxes?” Steff said. “I guess the chosen one hasn’t penetrated all of Magisterius University’s secrets, after all.”

“Who’s the chosen what now?” Ian said.

“It’s really not worth asking,” I said. “And no, I didn’t realize they let you do takeout. If I had…”

I was cut off by a whooshing sound, a flash of light, and then the clattering of a chair and several screams. We all turned and looked. Twyla had jumped up from her table, several things on which seemed to be burning… it looked like the whole tabletop had burst into flames but most of it was already dying out.

Two very calmly pointed a finger at the table and the rest of the flames went out with a puff. A wave of her hand dispersed the acrid smoke. A couple of people who’d been in the verge of running towards the burning table stopped mid-stride. Other people who’d been running for the exits kind of stumbled to a stop as awareness that the emergency… such as it had been… was over caught up to them.

“Gesundheit!” Steff yelled to mixed chuckles as Twyla grabbed her bag and made a very hasty exit.

“A spell must have run away from her,” Amaranth said. “That’s why you’re not supposed to mess around with fire magic outside of labs. I wonder if someone should go after her and make sure she’s alright?”

“She wasn’t burned,” Steff said. “That look on her face was embarrassment. I don’t think there’s anything you could say or do that would make her less embarrassed, Amy. If you want to be kind to her, I’d say the best thing to do would be to never mention it. That girl’s got a serious case of Really-I’m-Normalitis.”

“I suppose not saying anything is safer than saying the wrong thing,” Amaranth said. “But it feels like there should be some right thing I could say, that would let her know it was okay.”

The cafeteria manager was surveying the damage and shaking his head by this point. He wheeled a trashcan over and began disposing of the damaged tray and silverware and table accessories, and the burnt paper goods.

“Anyway,” Amaranth said, “getting back to the previous subject… if you had known about the takeout boxes, baby, you would have turned into a hermit the day they opened their doors. That’s something I am not going to permit you to do now.”

“Okay, yes, I probably would have taken food back to my room a lot of time,” I said. “But when I was here by myself, it’s not like I was sitting and talking with people at meals anyway.”

“No, but you were getting out for them and sitting somewhere where there were other people around,” Amaranth said. “That’s something. If it’s not a step forward, at least it’s not a step back. Now that we know we can do takeout, we’ll use it sometimes, but only when we’re going to be being sociable back in one of the dorms or for a picnic or something, or when there is an ironclad academic reason you need to be eating alone somewhere.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“In fairness to Mackenzie,” Ian said, “we’re acting like the new dining hall is the first time there’s been an alternative to eating in the cafeteria. But she could have got food from one of the burger stands and taken it back to her dorm, and she didn’t do that. So it’s not like the Arch thing would have given her a new and exciting opportunity to withdraw from the world if only she had known about it.”

“Oh,” Amaranth said, her cheeks coloring slightly. “I completely forgot about that. I’m sorry, baby.”

“I actually forgot about it, too,” I said. “We went to the food court so rarely that it didn’t even cross my mind as an option. Otherwise, I probably would have been eating chicken sandwiches and burgers by myself in my room all summer, and that probably wouldn’t have been a good thing.”

“Thank you for saying so. In any event,” Amaranth said, “how about we go check out the Arch for dinner tonight? I’m kind of curious to see it.”

We all agreed, and after that the conversation turned to more academic subjects.

As apprehensive as I was about all the unknowns involved in starting my first class of the year, I was really looking forward to it. ENC 217: Spellbinding For Enchantment was going to be a major step along the way to my major. Thus far in my education as an enchanter, I’d learned how to manipulate the inherent properties of an object. I could make a sword sharper, a coat warmer, or a door stronger… for a little while. I’d learned how to prolong the effects of such enhancements, though I couldn’t yet make them permanent. I could even make a person faster or stronger or more perceptive, though that didn’t last nearly as long.

I’d also picked up as a necessary skill in all of my lab classes the basic art of spellbinding, of taking magical techniques that worked for me and shaping them into a formula that could be repeated at need. It was very much an art, and there were a lot of trade-offs involved in taking powerful and useful magic and reducing it to something that could be more or less relied upon.

But that was what my major, Applied Enchantment, really consisted of. Humanity and other races of the world had been using cooling magic for millennia. When you took that magic and stuck it inside a box in such a way that it was always there, you had a refrigerator, and something like a refrigerator could change the world.

ENC 217 would focus on how to craft spells with an eye towards attaching them to objects. I still wouldn’t close out the semester any closer to being able to make a permanent magical item, but my spells would be a lot tighter and I’d be able to store them as charges in an object. I was really looking forward to that, especially considering how often during the winter months I’d had to repeat the insulation spells I put on my coat.

In fact, that was why I’d decided to take it during the fall semester. By the time the sunny, summer-ish weather left us I’d be able to deal with the cold in proper wizardly fashion.

Ian was a bit less sanguine about his first day of class.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said quietly to himself near the end of breakfast. “I am so not ready for this.”

“Relax, sweetie,” Amaranth said. “It’s the first day. I’m fairly certain you don’t have to be ready for it.”

“What’s there to be ready for?” Steff asked. “I’m sure your syllabus-receiving skills are still in top form even after a summer without so much as an agenda.”

“Okay, maybe you all don’t have to do anything for a grade today, but I have to play an audition in front of my professor and the music department head,” Ian said.

“Isn’t that the sort of thing they should have you do before they let you into the class?” I asked. “If they’re going to be picky about it, I mean.”

“They did,” he said. “This is… I got a notice over the summer that I’ve been ‘selected’ to give an additional audition.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” Amaranth said. “I mean, I can’t imagine how it would be bad.”

“It’s bad in that I already made it through the process once without blowing it and now I have to do it again,” Ian said.

“It sounds to me like you’re under consideration for some honor or advanced class,” Amaranth said. “So the worst thing that would happen is you’d be in the class you signed up for and nothing would be different, right?”

“Except my professor, who had thought I was worthy of consideration, would now know he was wrong,” Ian said. “Seems like that would be worse than never having caught his attention in the first place.”

“Well, if that’s how you feel, you could just tell him that you’re comfortable where you are and decline,” Amaranth said.

“And give up without trying?” Ian said. He sounded borderline offended by the suggestion. “You’re kidding.”

That seemed to make up his mind, like he’d decided to go in and give it his best shot out of sheer stubbornness. Amaranth had always been the sort of person who would encourage people to excel, but she’d become a little more nuanced in her approach.

“What do you have today, Two?” Amaranth asked.

“My friend Hazel and I are taking Small Business Management together,” Two said. “And then I have a pastry class, and then I have The Art of Presentation.”

“Does this small business thing have anything to do with your friend Hazel’s three or four plans for making money?” I asked. I was long past my initial suspicion of Hazel taking advantage of the easily-disadvantaged Two, but that didn’t mean I was thrilled at the thought of her rearranging her curriculum around Hazel’s pipe dreams.

“No,” Two said. “My friend Hazel says it’s planning for the future.”

“I think it’s a very good idea,” Amaranth said. “I mean, college only lasts a few years… if you don’t want to live at Hearts of Clay for the rest of your life, you do need to be planning ahead.”

“My friend Hazel says she is pretty sure she can get the money to open an inn,” Two said. There wasn’t a hint of doubt in her voice, but I knew from experience that this didn’t mean she believed Hazel’s claims. She had no problem blithely repeating the things the burrow gnome said, because she was confident at least that Hazel had said them.

I knew there were a lot of things that could change between sophomore year and graduation. Two and Hazel could have a falling out, as hard as that was to imagine. They could drift apart, especially given Hazel’s growing friendship with Shiel and the fact that they weren’t even in the same building anymore when they had used to be just a few doors away from each other. I knew, too, that they didn’t have anything like a firm plan for post-college life, but I envied that they had as much figured out as they did.

In theory it was easy to make money with an enchantment degree, but I didn’t have anything firmer than that theory. I knew I wanted to stay with Amaranth, but I had no idea how that would work. Making a living as an enchanter would probably require me to live in a city, and she was bound to a plot of land in a farming commune. Her divine nature wasn’t much of a hindrance to me at school, but back home she acted as something like a priestess. Then there was the fact that her home was the field of amaranth that was her “other body”… how could we live together there?

“What happened to your excited smile, baby?” Amaranth asked, breaking into my thoughts.

“Just thinking about the future,” I said.

“I thought that’s what you were excited about.”

“I mean the long-term future,” I said.

“Isn’t there a lot to be excited about there, too?”

“There’s a lot to be uncertain of.”

“That’s another way of saying there are a lot of possibilities,” Amaranth said. “I can’t think of anything more exciting than that.”

“Ah, you all are so cute,” Steff said. “It’s just a bunch of sophomore jitters, which are like first-year jitters but a year more advanced.”

“And I suppose you have junior jitters,” I said.

“No such thing,” Steff said. “Or at least there won’t be until next year, when I’m a senior and you’re all juniors, with your junior jitters. Oh, it will be freaking adorable. I can’t wait.”

Friday: Mackenzie’s first class.

But she’d just barely begun to feel a trickle of panic when the reptilian head whipped up and looked over at her. A few swishes of that long tail turned her body around and propelled her towards the end of the pool where Lucinda stood.

“Ms. Blake,” she said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I was simply doing some memory exercises while I waited.”

Her voice was quiet and distinctly feminine to Lucinda’s human ears. It was somewhat flat, but not emotionless… it sounded like she was mildly but pleasantly surprised by everything.

This surprised Lucinda. She knew her interview subject was not human… that was the point. She had been braced for something distinctly inhuman, maybe croaking or hissing and probably subjectively creepy. She was known by the nickname “Hissy”, after all.

“That’s… that’s fine,” Lucinda said. “Are you… are you ready to do this?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Okay. Would you like to go somewhere we can sit down?”

“I have no objection if you’d like to. I am comfortable here.”

“Oh, okay,” Lucinda said, and she sat down near the edge of the pool, folding her legs underneath her. She took a crystal and a pad and pen out of her bag. “Is it alright if I make an echo of this?” she asked, holding up the crystal.

“Of the crystal?”

“Of the interview,” Lucinda said. “It will store everything we say, so I can check on it later.”

“I have no objection.”

“Okay,” Lucinda said. “Do you have any questions before we begin, about what we’re going to be doing, or why I’m doing it, or anything?”

“No,” Hissy said.

“Or about me?”

“No.”

“Okay. Then to start off, the first question I’d like to ask… because I’ve found it varies somewhat from race to race… is how your people greet one another,” Lucinda said. “Some races bow, some shake hands. What do you do?”

“We look at each other like this,” Hissy said. She tilted her head and stared at Lucinda. “To let people know that we see them. We acknowledge their presence. If we wish to be rude to somebody, we do not do that.”

“Do you say anything, like ‘hello’ or ‘welcome’?”

“I could tell you that you are welcome somewhere, or that I appreciate your company, if I meant to,” Hissy said. “But we don’t do that as a matter of course. We talk when it is needful or desirous to do so, and we remain silent otherwise.”

“Interesting,” Lucinda said. “Do you still do that when you greet people, normally? I mean, non-lizardfolk?”

“No,” Hissy said. “It used to be automatic, but I’ve learned not to. Other peoples often consider it to be rude or unsettling.”

“I’ve always seen your race called lizardfolk, which is descriptive enough but… well… it’s almost more of a description than a name. What does your race call itself?”

“Well,” Hissy said. “I could make the sound for you, but I don’t know how you’d spell it.”

“What does it translate as?” Lucinda asked.

Hissy sat there, silently… disconcertingly still, considering that she was floating in twelve feet of water. There was no outward sign Lucinda could discern that let her know the lizardwoman was thinking, but the student reporter waited patiently. She was trying hard not to be anthropocentric. Cetea, the gorgon, had been the most inhuman of her interview subjects, but even with her scaly skin and her strange, reflective eyes, her face had been… human-like.

Hissy was not just a humanoid with lizard-like characteristics, though. She was a humanoid lizard. Her face had an elongated muzzle filled with pebble-like teeth. Lucinda wouldn’t have known what to watch for in it.

“We, I suppose” Hissy said finally. “We folks here. It’s actually two words… one would translate as ‘we’ and the other ‘here’, but we say them together and they mean us, the people, folk.”

“You say them together? Like a kenning?”

“A knowing?”

“Sorry, it’s not a common concept in Pax… it’s something I learned in my Northern Literature class,” Lucinda said. “It’s a figure of speech where words are strung together to make a sort of allusion, like a fang might be called a wolf-spear or a spear might be called a battle-tooth or something like that.”

“Oh,” Hissy said. “That’s interesting.”

“Do your people do that?”

“Not really. We… it’s hard to explain, it seems natural to me. We speak in multiple registers, and the words we say together are important.”

“So you can literally say two entirely different things at the same time?”

“Yes,” Hissy said. “Sometimes more, though usually not.”

“Could you be talking to one person and having a second conversation with someone else?”

“Well… we call that circle talking or sideways talking, but it’s still one conversation,” Hissy said. “That’s a different mode, though, since in the one-on-one mode I’d still be talking in multiple registers. It’s hard to explain if you don’t understand it. You might think of it as each word is a root that means nothing on its own, it only gains meaning when it’s placed with another.”

“I guess that’s not so different from any other language, than,” Lucinda said.

“It doesn’t sound so different when it’s simplified to that point,” Hissy said. “I could explain it very easily in my own language, but that isn’t terribly helpful. It’s caused a lot of confusion. When three or more of us would stand in a circle and talk among each other, the missionaries thought we were singing. We didn’t understand what the word meant, so they showed us… it just sounded like more of their talking, to us, but with more repetition.”

“That’s interesting,” Lucinda said. “You mean a group of you standing together, all talking at the same time?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t that get confusing?”

“How so?”

“Well, I mean… how do you keep track of who’s saying what?” Lucinda asked.

“The same way we are now,” Hissy said. “If you and I started talking at the same time, I would not forget which of us was which.”

“But that would be rude,” Lucinda said. “I mean, in our culture. People talking over each other is rude.”

“Yes, and that’s strange to me,” Hissy said. “In mine, it would be rude to expect everyone else to be silent just because you have something to say. ”

“I suppose that makes sense,” Lucinda said. “So, then, what does it sound like when you sing?”

“It doesn’t,” Hissy said. “We don’t.”

“Do you play music?”

“I think you might say we recite poetry,” Hissy said. “I would say something, two words, and you would have to say something with one of those words and another, and the next person in the circle would then make a pair, and so on. It’s called… flow-weaving, I suppose.”

“Is it hard?”

“Children do it. But some do it better than others. You can do it alone, but it’s more interesting with others to chain off of,” she said.

“One of my other interview subjects told me she thought music was universal,” Lucinda said.

“That’s interesting,” Hissy said.

“Uh… so… how did you learn Pax?”

“From missionaries,” Hissy said.

“Was it hard?” Lucinda asked. “Given the different sounds, the differing basis?”

“It was and it wasn’t,” Hissy said. “It seems simple, in comparison. Most languages do. Elvish is a little more complicated, but Gobol and Kharoline were easy to pick up. Pax was harder because it was first, and I didn’t realize how easy it was.”

“Holy crap,” Lucinda said. “I mean… you speak all those languages?”

“Yes,” Hissy said. “And others. I speak Kobol, but I can’t read it. I learned High Draconic at the mission school. I taught myself Kharoline, Low Draconic, and True Draconic from that.”

“True Draconic? You speak True Draconic?”

“I can’t make all the sounds,” Hissy said. “But I understand it. The… logic… behind it is the same as High Draconic, and a lot of the words are similar to my own language. It’s only that High Draconic is intended for more mouths.”

“How did you learn True Draconic?”

“Talking to dragons,” Hissy said. “There are a mated pair of great green dragons whose territory included my village. They never hunted us because they liked having a ‘buffer’, as they put it, between the Imperium and themselves. We gave them gold and other things we didn’t need, when we found it. One of them guarded our egg clutches at all times, since they didn’t have any of their own. Ours and five other villages in their territory. We had better relations with our neighbors than many folk, because of that. We were all practically siblings.”

“And after you were born… hatched… you would, what, just chat with them?”

“Yes. We called them the Uncles.”

“What are their names?”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“Green dragons… I would have expected black dragons, in a swamp.”

“Alkaline swamp,” Hissy said. “Black dragons don’t like alkaline. They fought with a black dragon whose territory butted against theirs, but it was never very serious because she didn’t want their territory and they didn’t want hers.”

“You said ‘uncles’,” Lucinda said. “Are they both males?”

“Yes,” Hissy said. “That’s why they didn’t have any eggs. Although their agreement with the Imperium was that they wouldn’t raise any, anyway. I don’t think the Imperium knew.”

“Gay dragons,” Lucinda said, shaking her head in disbelief. “Gay dragons and a polyglot lizard.”

“I think most of us are good at picking up other languages,” Hissy said. “We all learned Pax and High Draconic quickly, and most of the other students could read Kharoline poems. Everyone who cared to try. The missionaries had books of poetry but they didn’t consider it important that we read them. So most of us didn’t.”

“Why did you?”

“Languages interest me.”

“So, jumping back a bit… the eggs were kept in a communal clutch, but you did know who your parents were, right?”

“Yes,” Hissy said. “We have five of them.”

“Five?”

“The closest to literal translation would be parent/wife, parent/husband, parent/egg, advocate/parent, name/parent,” Hissy said.

“I think I got the first two,” Lucinda said. “Mother and father?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know whose children are whose?”

“We are carried for eight weeks,” Hissy said. “During that time we form a bond with our mothers. We can later recognize each other instinctively. Fatherhood is as uncertain as it is for any other race.”

“What are the others?”

“The parent/egg is the clutch attendant who bonds with our egg,” Hissy said. “Mostly they are women, usually a maternal aunt if one is available and on good terms with her sister. An older female relative, or a well-regarded person, can also be a clutch attendant. It is a necessary position for most villages, though because of the uncles, it has become more like a pleasant tradition for us. Our advocate is the parent who takes our part in all things, so that the others need not worry about being harsh. The name-giver constructs our name out of parts of our other four parents’ names. They are usually selected by the father, as the clutch attendant is selected by the mother, but both have some say.”

“Now, ‘Hissy’ isn’t a translation of your real name, is it?” Lucinda asked.

“No. My real name is formed out of the words bell, leaf, gold, and apple,” Hissy said. “Each of which comes from one of my other parents’ names. One of those words will go into any child I stand as a parent for, unless I’m doing the naming myself.”

“You don’t have music, but you have bells?”

“Wind chimes, water chimes,” Hissy said. “We like the sound. I guess that’s music.”

“Did all five of your parents play a part in raising you?”

“Yes, more or less. Our villages are very communal. All children in a village are the village’s children. But the networks of parents ensure a tightly-woven net through which none can slip unnoticed,” Hissy said. “The missionaries tried to reform that arrangement. They discouraged any talk of our other parents and urged mothers to care for their own eggs directly.”

“How did that go?”

“They had little success,” Hissy said. “Some women took their own eggs and let the missionaries name their children. Nobody interfered. The other adults still looked after their children as much as the mothers would let them. Most of those children grew up to leave the village. Two of my teammates are such children, though they came from different territories.”

“So why did you leave the village?”

“My language hobby was taken to be a sign of unusual intelligence. The missionaries sent me to their school.”

“The mission school wasn’t part of the village?”

“No,” Hissy said. “The missionaries had a fort just outside the uncles’ territory, and they taught classes there, but the big school was in Blackwater. They told my parents that it would be a waste to keep me in the fen, so I went there for four years. The missionaries there encouraged me to take some tests, so I did, and they said I should go to university.”

“Do you think you’re unusually intelligent?”

“I have been told I am.”

“Do you think it’s true, though?”

“They have tests,” Hissy said. “They say I am. It isn’t a thing that I think about.”

“Is that cultural?”

“I suppose it is. Our idea of wisdom is tied to age and accomplishments,” Hissy said. “I’m thirteen years old.”

“Is that… is that young?” Lucinda asked. “I mean, when does your race reckon maturity?”

“When a person is mature. I haven’t taken adult rites, though I don’t know if I will,” Hissy said. “Being away from the village muddies the water.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s an expression we use…”

“We have it, too,” Lucinda said. “I guess I meant ‘how so?’”

“Ordinarily, my parents would decide when I was grown up,” Hissy said. “I suppose when I graduate from the university, human society will consider me an adult. But I’m a child, and we have a saying that would mean something like ‘child’s achievement, child’s crimes’. We say it when you would say ‘it’s no big deal’ or ‘it’s nothing’.”

“You don’t think high test scores are an achievement?”

“Words on paper,” Hissy said. “I like words, but talking is not something to be proud of.”

“You’re on the skirmish team, on the notorious seventh squad, the so-called ‘Monster Squad’… how do you feel about the decision to put all the Harlowe students on one squad?”

“I have no opinion about that.”

“Were you told not to speak about that?”

“No,” Hissy said.

“Did you play skirmish before you came here?”

“No,” Hissy said. “The mission school didn’t have anything like that. We couldn’t have spears. We were discouraged from fighting.”

“How’d you learn how to fight, then?”

“I come from a wild place.”

“Do you like skirmish?”

“Not for itself, no,” Hissy said. “I enjoyed the structure of the seventh squad. Belonging to it felt closer to being back in my village.”

“How so?”

“There were other lizardfolk to talk to,” Hissy said.

“Boys?”

“They are male, yes,” Hissy said. “Also, I enjoyed the sense of belonging to a group. I still do, a little, but I’m coming to understand the difference between my family and my skirmish teammates.”

“Do you feel like you had a choice in coming here?”

“No.”

“Why’s that?”

“I was told I should,” Hissy said. “I didn’t know I could say no. I don’t know if I would have been listened to if I had.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“It doesn’t bother me.”

“Why not?” Lucinda asked.

“Should it bother me?”

“It would bother me,” Lucinda said. “I think, among most races, there would be some resentment at the feeling of being forced into a course of action.”

“Oh,” Hissy said. “Very few people decide things for themselves, among us.”

“You mean somebody always tells you what to do?”

“Group consensus is sought. Usually with a circular discussion.”

“What about personal things? Say you had a decision to make that only affected you,” Lucinda said.

“I would seek another person to discuss it with, and we would arrive at a decision together,” Hissy said.

“Can you really get much done that way?”

“We get everything done that way.”

“Will you go back to your village when you graduate?”

“Probably,” Hissy said.

“What will you do there?”

“I’d have to talk to the others,” Hissy said.

“Is there tolerance of subtle artists?”

“It’s not an uncommon condition. Most of us have some degree of empathy with our mothers and clutch attendants,” Hissy said. “And with the Uncles, which they find amusing. It sometimes approaches telepathy. Those of us who have wider talents often end up being called to lead the larger discussion circles.”

“Like a moderator?”

“Yes.”

“Would you find that sort of life satisfying?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well… now that you’re here, how do you feel about life at Magisterius University?” Lucinda asked.

“It doesn’t bother me.”

“Is that it?”

“There are some times that something annoys me and times that something pleases me,” Hissy said. “But it doesn’t bother me.”

“Some of the non-human students have reported problems dealing with human students, or with the faculty,” Lucinda said. “Have you encountered anything like that?”

“I’m used to dealing with humans.”

“I mean, racism.”

“It doesn’t bother me.”

“But you’ve noticed it?”

“That people don’t like other races?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” Hissy said.

“And how do you feel about that?”

“It doesn’t bother me,” Hissy said.

“Really?”

“Yes,” Hissy said.

“So if somebody avoids you, or picks on you, or singles you out somehow, you don’t worry that it might be because of your race?”

“Oh, no,” Hissy said. “I know if it’s because of my race. People don’t usually disguise that kind of feeling. It just doesn’t bother me.”

“How can it not bother you?”

“I don’t know,” Hissy said. “I don’t know why it would.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, that covers about everything I’d meant to ask,” Lucinda said, though she was in fact throwing out a whole host of follow-up questions that were apparently meaningless to Hissy. “Um… is there anything you’d like to say, a message to other students or anything like that?”

“No,” Hissy said, which she’d kind of expected.

“Okay, I guess that’s it,” Lucinda said. “Thanks for your time.”

“You’re welcome.”

Discuss this story.

Spectators filled all six sections of stands which surrounded the battlefield a mile outside of town. For this game, the visitors had selected the heavily wooded side five for their home base, leaving the home team defending side two.

The visitors’ team was actually a coalition from two smaller school districts, one of which overlapped an elven forest. While all their fighters were ostensibly human, they had an unusually high concentration of skilled archers and lightly armored, highly mobile infantry.

They’d managed to hold their wooded turf with a small number of defenders using traps and hit-and-run tactics, freeing the rest of the coalition to concentrate on offense.

It seemed like a good strategy on the face of it, but two hours into the skirmish match it was becoming apparent that the coalition’s generals would have done better to reverse the starting positions, forcing their opponents to try to defend the wooded section against a force of highly-skilled elfbloods.

Instead, the home team had erected their standard on the largest hill on side two and massed their defenders around it. The two-school coalition had lost so many men in their assaults on the hill that they would lose handily by default once the five hour mark was passed.

As the tipping point had already been reached, they couldn’t wait the other side out… if they couldn’t win outright, they would have to inflict more casualties. They’d begun to get creative in their attacks.

Five different groups of archers launched volleys of arrows in waves, concentrating their aim near the top of the hill. Each flight of arrows was obviously smaller than a massed volley would have been, but by loosing their projectiles in turns they were able to keep a more or less constant stream going.

A wavery blue energy shell appeared in the sky seconds after this assault began. It was curved like a section of a dome, and it intercepted most of the arrows. They were ready this time, but the defenders’ wizards hadn’t always been so quick, and the side of the hill was dotted with shafts, and a handful of bodies lying motionless.

A figure stood near the top of the hill, dominating the scene in much the same way that the hill itself did the surrounding terrain.

She, too, was dotted with the red-fletched arrows of the opposing team. The arrows’ tips hadn’t quite penetrated through her tough hide, and while she could no doubt have just brushed them off of her arm like the irritants that they were, she instead left them in place so that anybody who charged up the hill would see them sticking out of her arm like the quills of a porcupine.

At the same time that the rain of arrows began, a magical wind rammed into the line of defenders who guarded the hillside in a ring halfway up its slope. One group of lightly armored fighters in red charged through the hole this made. The wind-battered soldiers picked themselves up and quickly closed the gap, fighting back the rest of the attackers and preventing any more from joining the charge up the hill.

However, the attackers started to lose momentum almost as soon as they were past that first obstacle. They slowed, their formation losing cohesiveness, and more than one of them actually glanced behind at the path of retreat through the enemy line.

Just as they’d known would happen, the massive figure gave a fierce bellow and swooped down in a counter-charge, sending the lead warrior flying with a swipe of her gauntleted arm, bowling several over, and breaking up the tight formation. The other hilltop defenders rushed in after her, slaughtering the scattered and distracted soldiers. The attack was quickly repelled with no casualties among the hilltop group, though two soldiers were sent down to replace those who’d fallen on the line.

The hulking fighter hadn’t even taken the sword off her back.

On a floating disk hovering high in the air ten yards outside the hexagonal boundary of the skirmish field, a representative from Magisterius University watched with an air of practiced skepticism.

“Let’s be honest,” he said to the head coach. “She’s not that great a solo fighter. She broke their formation with momentum and because they’re afraid to engage, but in a straight one-on-one fight I think a good swordsman could take her out.”

“That’s why she’s a skirmisher, not a gladiator,” the coach said. “Look, we’re seven and two so far this season and she wasn’t even playing for one of those losses.”

“Well, she holds the line well enough on a small field like this,” the man said. “But we have one of the largest skirmish fields in the Imperium.”

“That means you’ve got a lot of spaces to fill,” the coach said. “You can’t tell me that you don’t have room for an ogre among them.”

“Half-ogre,” the scout said. “Raised by a human parent. ‘Belinda’ doesn’t sound very imposing, does it?”

“When she’s out on the field, the other team doesn’t know if she has a flower print comforter on her bed or if she has jam and toast with her tea,” the coach said. “And for somebody who’s never met a full one, she’s ogre enough.”

“Still, I can’t guarantee her a spot.”

“Are you telling me you’ve got other players on the hook that can hold a hundred and fifty yard radius all by their lonesomes?” the coach said. This was an exaggeration, of course, as the figure on the hill was hardly holding the entire field, but the scout was used to dealing with hyperbolic coaches. “Look, I know you’ve got a bigger operation than we do, but you give her a squad to lead and she’ll do the same thing for you that she’s done for us as team captain.”

“Being the captain of a small team isn’t anything like being squad leader on a big team,” the rep said. “Do you think she’d be able to handle that?”

“For a chance to play with the big boys?” the coach said. “We didn’t start her out as captain. She worked her way up. She knows how it goes. Anyway, why so many questions? You can see how she handles herself. You’ve met with her. We know you’re not going to have an answer for her immediately… but you know, of all the teams that have scouted us—and that’s a lot of teams this year—nobody’s seemed as, well, skeptical about our little Lindy as you are.”

“We’ve been burned before,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing I want to talk about, but let’s just say I’m going to be damned sure they’re really interested in college skirmish before I sign any more ogrebloods.”

“You won’t be burned by her,” the coach said. “Skirmish is her life… literally. Maybe I’m not doing her any favors by telling you this, but you have to understand, she’s got no prospects, nothing to look forward to. Her grades are shit right across the board. We help her out, but she just manages to scrape by with the minimum passing grades. She doesn’t have any interests or aptitudes except for fighting. I’d be worried about the kid, but we both know she’s got a future with some school’s program. I guess it’ll probably come down to who wants her the most.”

Monday, Astera 7th 222

“This is your squad’s room, Belinda,” the earnest young woman with the clipboard said as she led the half-ogress into a long, narrow room that looked more like a hallway with beds and footlockers. “As freshmen, we had to let the school assign you dorm rooms but you’re more than welcome to stay here.”

“What was that other room?” Belinda asked.

“What other room?”

“The barracks one,” she said. “The big open one.”

“Oh, those are the regular quarters,” the coach’s assistant said. “Since you guys in the seventh squad are kind of a special project, you get your own all to yourself.”

“We don’t get to be in the main room with everybody else?”

“Only the best squads get their own quarters. Oh, and see that door at the end? That leads to your personal quarters. It’s also your office. The joke around here is that the officers’ quarters are just broom closets with the signs painted over, but in actual fact, they are slightly larger. Now, if you’d like to meet some of your squadmates…”

“They told me I could pick my squad,” Belinda said.

“Who did?”

“The recruiters.”

“Oh, well,” the assistant said, flipping through the pages on her clipboard as though they had any information aside from room assignments and schedules on them, “of course squad leaders are allowed to have some input, but the final choice belongs to the general coach.”

Belinda glowered. While what the assistant said was technically true, everything she’d ever heard had led her to believe that skirmish team officers had a more active hand in things and that the coaches only moved people around after seeing how they fit together.

“But if I’ve already got squadmates, how can I have input?” Belinda asked.

“Well, again, the seventh squad is a special project this year, and in order to maximize the effectiveness of your unique contributions…”

“Whatever,” Belinda said. “Let’s meet them.”

“Go ahead and send them in, John!” the assistant called.

One of the doors opened and an extremely varied group of beings began to file awkwardly in: a half-orc, a woman made of rock, a big burly bear of a man with a bushy brown beard, a minotaur, a weedy-looking human boy dressed in black and wearing heavy eyeliner, a harpy, a muscular triclops, a ratman, and three lizardfolk… two in a pair and one who stood off alone. Some of them were freshmen, like Belinda, and they looked around the room and at each other. Others simply glared at the new squad leader. These were returning students who’d played on other squads and who now found themselves reassigned under a freshman.

“Belinda, these are the men and women of the seventh squad,” the assistant said. “Squad, this is Belinda. She’ll be leading you in battle.”

Nobody said anything.

“Well, I’ll leave you all to get acquainted with each other. You all are free until three, when you need to form up on the practice field for team orientation,” the assistant said. “And, if nobody else has said it yet, I’d just like to welcome the new fighters to Magisterius University.”

With that, she left. About half of the seventh squad did, too. Among those who remained, no one approached Belinda immediately.

“This is bullshit,” the dark-clad boy said to nobody in particular. He went to the one of the twelve beds that was furthest from the officer’s room and dumped the contents of his duffel bag out into the locker at the foot of it. “This is my bed. Nobody take the bed next to it. I want a buffer between me and all you freaks.”

“Watch who you’re calling freaks, corpsefucker,” the stony woman said.

“Watch who you’re calling corpsefucker, freak,” the boy said. “I am a necromancer, and I wouldn’t even be wasting my talents on this stupid game if the narrow-minded nitwits who run the university had given me any other choice. Honestly, they acted like I’d siphoned an entire soul… meanwhile, an actual corpsefucker just got a semester of community service… in the vaults. Three years, and I never had to lock my materials up before.”

Belinda watched the exchange, absolutely bemused. She hadn’t had any idea what to expect, but she’d had a vague idea that her squad would consist of squishy little full humans who would be intimidated by the sight of her. Nobody in the room seemed especially intimidated.

The woman rolled her eyes at the necromancy student, then strolled over towards Belinda.

“Hi,” she said, holding out a hand. “I’m, uh… well, just call me Rocky. I was a squad leader in high school… they usually had me lead charges and take point on difficult missions. I wondered what kind of strategies do you prefer to employ?”

“Uh… I like to make people come to me,” Belinda said. “But I like going on the attack, too.”

“Flexibility,” Rocky said. “I like that. They said you were captain, your junior and senior year?”

“I was,” Belinda said.

“What was it like leading an entire team?”

“I didn’t really do much leading, actually,” Belinda said. “I just went where the general told me to.”

“But you were the captain.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh,” Rocky said. “Okay. Well, good to meet you. I’m going to go stow my stuff. Are you planning on assigning bunks?”

“Um…”

“I’ll just go stow it, then,” Rocky said. “And if you need any help with strategy, or planning, or anything, let me know. I was a good officer.”

Friday, Astera 11th 222 (Morning)

“I think our squad’s really starting to shape up,” Rocky said as they watched the rest of the squads practicing coordinated maneuvers. “With Hissy coordinating our movements, you on point, Scylla doing air support, and Jimmy’s skeletons to do surprise flanking, I think we can be a real force to be reckoned with.”

“Yeah,” Belinda grunted.

“I think once they see us in action, they’ll start fitting us into the overall strategy instead of using us as a bunch of ‘scary monsters’ to spook the other side,” Rocky said. “I mean, we can fight. Even Jimmy can. It’s stupid for them not to make use of us. We are good for something besides holding a spot they don’t want to have to defend.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, there are two weeks of practice between now and the first match,” Rocky said. “I’ve been working on getting the coaches to put us on the field wherever we would most likely be during the actual match… supposedly so that the rest our team gets used to us, but hopefully everybody will see how well we do our things.”

“Hopefully.”

“I mean, you’re used to standing there and looking scary, but some of us are real fighters,” Rocky said.

Saturday, Astera 19th 222

“I have great news!” Rocky announced, after walking into Belinda’s private room without knocking. “I’ve been talking to Coach John and after seeing us beat squads one through three during practice maneuvers, he says they’re going to revise the battle plans for the game against Blackwater. Instead of just cutting off one chokepoint, we’re going to be working with one and three. Depending on which side BPC picks, we might actually be the ones capturing their standard.”

“Really?” Belinda said. “That’s… awesome.”

“Isn’t it?” Rocky said. “I’ve worked up some contingency plans based on the side they think Blackwater’s general will pick, and the rest of the squad is excited about them.”

“The rest of the squad?”

“Oh, yeah, I showed them to everybody,” Rocky said. “Actually, I wanted to get Knossos and Scylla’s opinions before I did anything, but I’ve got everything just about finalized now. If we can pull off what I’ve got in mind, we’ll never be relegated to static defense again. It’ll be tricky, but with Hissy coordinating and you soaking up their attacks, I think we can manage it.”

Friday, Astera 25th 222 (Final Practice Before The First Game)

“Where’s Belinda?”

Finally, it came to her: Magisterius University… but not any room in any building that she was familiar with.

She swished her tail around to clear the covers and then slid her legs over the edge, getting to her feet. Her knees bent backwards under her weight and she had to catch herself.

She blew out hard through her nostrils to clear them, then sucked in air to inflate the vocal sacs in her throat. She tried holding it in for the count of five before exhaling, but it was too painful. Everything felt stiff, dry.

She looked around the room for water and didn’t see any.

The door opened. Simultaneously, she felt the entrance of another mind into the immediate area… a presence which should have registered sooner.

“You shouldn’t be out of bed,” said the human woman who’d just entered the room.

Water/thirst, she projected, knowing that she’d never make herself understood verbally.

“Certainly. I’ll be right back,” the human said. “But please, you’re too weak to be out of bed.”

The lizardwoman clicked her agreement and climbed back onto the bed, arranging herself on her side so that her tail could hang over the side.

The human left. Though she left the door open, the trace of her mind disappeared from the lizardwoman’s consciousness as soon as she was out of line of sight… evidently the walls and door were shielded.

She returned with a pitcher of water and a large glass. The lizardwoman sat up and reached for the pitcher. After a moment’s hesitation, the human handed it to her.

She opened her mouth wide and poured some of the water down her throat, filling her throat sacs and “gargling” briefly before swallowing it. She repeated this several times, then drank the rest of the water.

“Thank you, I am grateful,” she said once she’d finished.

“You’re welcome, Miss… uh, is it Eve or Goldapple?” the human asked. “Some of the forms say one and some say the other, or both.”

“It is neither,” the lizardwoman replied. “Eve Goldapple is what they called me at the mission school.”

“What is your name, then?”

“They call me Hissy here.”

“I’d call you your proper name, if I knew it,” the human said.

After warming up with the slow, cumbersome human speech, it was a pleasure for the lizardwoman to produce her own name in her own language, even as she knew that the series of hisses, rattles, and clicks would be impossible for the human to reproduce.

“Um, does it have a meaning in Pax?” the human asked.

“What is your name, and what does it mean in Pax?”

“Teddi,” the human said. “Theadora Lundegard. ‘Theadora’ means ‘gift of the goddess’, and Lundegard means, um, ‘of the Lundegard family.’”

“Do you think you would answer if somebody called you ‘Lundegard’s Goddess’s Gift?’”

“Actually, I’d probably look at them funny.”

“My name approximates to 7-Leaf/3-Bell Gold/Apple, but 7-Leaf/3-Bell Gold/Apple is not my name.”

“Gold Stroke Apple?” Teddi repeated, confused.

“To say it properly, you have to say them both at the same time,” the lizardwoman replied. “But they are actually the same word. Our name for the color comes from the fruit.”

“That’s a bit odd,” Teddi said. “When I think of apples, I think of red.”

“When I think of apples, I think of gold,” the lizardwoman said. “I don’t mind being called Hissy. A nickname grates less than having my proper name mangled.”

“Very well, then, Hissy,” Teddi said. “Do you know why you’re here?”

“I do not know where I am,” Hissy said. “And I have even less idea why.”

“You’re in the mental healing annex of the student healing center,” Teddi said. “You were brought in yesterday…”

“What day is it?” Hissy asked urgently. “I apologize for the interruption.”

“It’s Sunday,” Teddi said. “Astera 27th.”

“The match,” Hissy said. “The skirmish match. Against Blackwater Province. Was I injured? Is that why I’m here?”

“You didn’t make the match, I’m afraid,” Teddi said. “Sometime in the late afternoon, you made mind contact with an infernal.”

Hissy made a rattle in her throat and projected an impression of negation.

“I have no memory of that,” she said.

“You wouldn’t,” Teddi said. “We had to remove a whole section of your memory in order to stop it from destroying your mind. Other portions of your memory which were infected may be fragmented or suppressed. Some of that will heal on its own over time. Some of it, we’ll have to work on recovering. What’s the most recent thing you remember?”

“Swimming in the fen,” Hissy said. “I had just caught a large fish and… that’s not right.” She rattled. “I’ve not been swimming like that since before the mission school.”

“Things might be a bit jumbled for a while,” Teddi said. “Your mind will put your older memories back in their proper order eventually. For now, you’ll probably have to focus on context. Remember, yesterday was Saturday, the weekend after your second full week of classes. Look inward, search for a memory which fits with that… and if you find something which feels dangerous, or hurts or disturbs you, look away.”

Hissy focused, probing her own memories, ignoring her impressions of chronology. There were some memories of her parents which seemed distressingly fresh. Doubtlessly, Teddi had meant something else when she talked about painful and disturbing memories, but she pushed them to the back of her mind all the same.

Eventually, she found what seemed to be a truly recent one, though it carried with it the impression of a lengthy passage of time.

“Rocky—Raquel—wanted to talk to the Blaise girl,” Hissy said. “I said it was a bad idea but she’s the lieutenant, and she said it was a squad matter.”

“That would be Miss Mackenzie?” Teddi asked.

Hissy clicked, then nodded.

“Did you try to touch her mind?”

“I do not remember,” Hissy said. “But I think that was the idea.”

“We thought so, but Miss Ra… uh, Ms. Peters wouldn’t say anything and we couldn’t safely examine your memory of the incident,” Teddi said. “Didn’t you know what would happen?”

“She seemed so… innocuous?” Hissy said. “Like a small kitten.”

“Cute?”

“Helpless,” Hissy said. “Edible.”

“Uh, right,” Teddi said. “Well, any mind of extraplanar descent is generally too alien to make unprotected contact with. It’s a bit like looking directly at a bright light and a little bit like me trying to imitate your language. The minds just don’t mesh. An infernal mind is even more dangerous, because it wants to actively destroy whatever it can.”

“I did not know,” Hissy said. “I suppose I’ve learned that lesson now.”

“Did you have any formal training with your gifts before coming here?”

“Only from the village teacher/shaman/witch,” Hissy said, using the sounds of her own language as there was no direct translation. “Those who ran the mission school would have rather we did not develop such abilities, and the only thing they told us of demons was they were to be avoided, though that seemed to be a human concern.”

“Well, it was good advice, in this case,” Teddi said. “Can you tell me anything about your confrontation with Miss Mackenzie?”

“I cannot,” Hissy said. “I have no memory of it.”

“But do you remember any plans? Intentions?”

“To talk,” Hissy said.

“Do you have an impression of any hostility from Miss Mackenzie?”

“I do not have any impression whatsoever, relating to the event.”

“I see,” Teddi said. “Well… we’re going to need to keep an eye on you for the next few days, in case of secondary effects.”

“What sort of effects?”

“Mindless aggression, bloodlust, that sort of thing,” Teddi said. “It sometimes comes through after direct contact with an infernal mind. You might find yourself craving raw meat.”

“I do that, anyway.”

“Well, it’s best if you try to avoid crowds of humans for a while, in any event,” Teddi said. “Assuming you’re not showing any signs, we can release you for classes, but we’ll want you to return here at night, as sleep is when you’ll be most likely to turn.”

“This bed is not comfortable for me.”

“I’m sorry, we don’t normally put patients on their faces, but we didn’t know how else to manage with the, uh, tail,” Teddi said.

“In my room in Harlowe, I make a nest of blankets on the floor,” Hissy said. “What time is it? Have I missed the temple services?”

“You’re… you’re Khersian?”

“That’s what they told me at the mission school. I didn’t have any particular objection.”

“Well, there’s still the afternoon service, but it’s probably not a great idea,” Teddi said. “It’s too soon to tell if you’ve been affected, and the sight of holy symbols and icons could trigger something.”

“It’s not a great loss,” Hissy said. “Did we lose the skirmish match?”

“I’m sorry, but yes, you did,” Teddi said. “The seventh squad kind of fell apart on the field, and BPC rushed in through the hole and cut our army in half.”

“It’s not a great loss,” Hissy said. “Do you have more blankets? If there isn’t anything more you need to do with me, I’d like to go dormant for a while.”

“Yes, of course,” Teddi said. “Just, you know, call out or something if you start to feel any strange urges.”

“What about skirmish practice?” Hissy said. “Can I attend squad drills?”

“I think it’s a good idea to avoid anything that might involve aggressive impulses for the time being,” Teddi said. “We’ll give you an excuse form for any combat classes, as well. I’m sorry.”

“It’s no great loss,” Hissy said. “They told me I should try out for the team and I did. They told me that I needed a weapons class so I took one.”

“Right, then,” Teddi said. “Well, I’ll go get your blankets.”

“Thank you, Lundegard’s Goddess’s Gift,” Hissy said.

Teddi smiled.

“Is that what you consider a ‘funny look’?” Hissy asked. “I’ve always thought so but I didn’t realize humans agreed.”

“I’ll go get your blankets, smartass.”