“This is not rare,” Scylla said, shaking her head in disdain. “I knew they would fuck it up. I knew it. This thing is fucking burned beyond all recognition.”

“That looks pretty fucking rare to me,” her boyfriend said, before swallowing the bite of chicken sandwich he’d just taken. “I mean, what do you consider rare? Bleeding?”

“Twitching,” she said. “Of course, I’ll make an exception if the meat’s high enough quality… there was this great little steakhouse down the road from the aerie, right across the border, you know? Catered to more ogres and folk than humans. They did hand-cut steaks, aged for six months…”

“That’s, uh, a little riper than I like my meat,” he said.

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t believe how tender they were.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Jimmy said.

Scylla pushed her plate away.

“So, what, now you’re not going to eat it?” Jimmy asked.

“I didn’t even want hamburger,” she said.

“Then what did you order it for?”

“They don’t cook chicken to order.”

“So you ordered it but you don’t want it,” Jimmy said.

“I’ll pay for it,” Scylla said.

“No, I’ll pay for it,” Jimmy said. “I’m just trying to wrap my head around this, the logic of ordering something you don’t like… knowing you’re not going to eat it…”

“I would have eaten it if they’d cooked it right!”

“But you said you knew they’d fuck it up,” Jimmy said. “Listen, I’m not just bitching at you, I’m trying to show you a pattern. You do this all the time. You set yourself up…”

“I do not set myself up, I’m an omen of ill fortune,” Scylla said. “I’m already set up. I am a living breathing set-up.”

“It’s not some shitty destiny that made you order something you were confident would suck,” Jimmy said.

“Yours came out okay.”

“Like you said, they only cook chicken one way.”

“Right, and that happens to be the way that you like it,” Scylla said.

“Yeah. Fully. But that’s not because I’m lucky or you’re not,” Jimmy said. “It’s because I’m a human and we’re right the fuck in the middle of Humansville, population me. I can walk into any store and get a shirt that looks good on me and I can walk into any restaurant and get food that won’t turn my stomach or eat my face off. That’s just the way it is.”

“So, it isn’t lucky for you that you were born into a huge empire that dominates most of the continent while I got stuck out in the badland boonies?”

“Well, not particularly lucky,” Jimmy said. “There’s a whole bunch of us. Anyway, it’s all situational. Here and now, you can’t get a burger you like, but if I went back home with you for the Feast of Plentitude, I’d probably be starved before we got back.”

“No, I’m pretty sure you’d be stuffed before I got back,” Scylla said. Her mouth, with its protuberant and slightly hooked upper jaw, didn’t have the flexibility and animation of a human’s, but she smiled with her eyes.

“Ha fricking ha,” Jimmy said. “And that’s exactly why we’re not going to your place for the holidays.”

“I guess that makes it your place,” Scylla said.

“Yeah, I actually thought I’d wait until they finish paying for my classes before I tell my parents I’m with a harpy.”

“So you expect us being together in four years?”

“I don’t expect anything,” Jimmy said. “That’s why nothing ever surprises me.”

“Huh? Wouldn’t that mean everything always surprises you?”

“No, surprise is what you feel when your expectations are shattered,” he said. “For instance, my mother expects that I’m going to come home one day with a beautiful red-headed human girl. Because she expects this, if I showed up with a black-plumed harpy or a human boy, she’d go completely orcshit. If she didn’t have those expectations, her reaction would be more like, ‘oh’.”

“Why a red-head?”

“Because guys are supposed to end up with girls like their mothers,” Jimmy said.

“Your mother has red hair?”

“So did I.”

“Did you dye it?”

“No, that was a side-effect of soul-leeching,” Jimmy said. “But I let my mom think I dyed it. Same reason I’m not telling her about you. You don’t volunteer unpleasant information to somebody in a position of power over you.”

“You’re so smart, Jimmy,” Scylla said.

“Well, yeah… but, I mean, I just stop and think about these things,” Jimmy said. “Some kids write home to tell their parents to tell them they’re gay, or they’re becoming an Arkhanite, or they want to major in Illusions and then act like some terrible fate’s befallen them when they get an earful. What did they think would happen? Life’s unpredictable and dangerous enough as it is… you never just stand back and hand it a weapon.”

“See, you’re lucky you’re so smart,” Scylla said, hitting the table with her hand. “I would never have stopped to think like that before I ordered that stupid burger.”

Jimmy sighed.

“Babe, all you have to do to ‘be smart’ is quit thinking that way,” he said.

“But it doesn’t matter whether I’m smart or not because my luck…”

“You know, never mind,” Jimmy said. “Forget it.”

“Fine,” Scylla said. “So where do you want to go to get holed?”

“Pierced,” Jimmy corrected.

“Yeah, that. How about The Ring?”

“Nah, they’ve got some sweet pieces but I wouldn’t want to get pierced there,” Jimmy said. “And most places won’t sell you body jewelry unless you get it done right there, so their rep doesn’t get hit for somebody else’s bad service.”

“So what, don’t you want Caron to pierce you?” Scylla asked. “She looks like she does it a lot.”

“Have you ever heard the saying ‘When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail?’” Jimmy asked. Scylla stared at him blankly. “Okay, well, it’s a saying. And I think whoever invented it was talking about a dwarf… a dwarf with a great, big, heavy hammer the size of my head.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “We’ll poke around the bazaar until we find some place.”

“Where’d you get the rest of your stuff done?”

“Back home. But I had to work my ass off this summer and it was easier to find a job without any more metal in my face.”

“Why did you have to work so much if your parents are paying for everything?”

“They pay for everything essential,” Jimmy said. “But I won’t get to take my work home at the end of the year unless I pay the cost of the materials to the school.”

“So… you don’t think showing up at home with a zombie wouldn’t shock your mother’s sensibilities?”

“I won’t be sleeping with it,” Jimmy said.

“You don’t sleep with me.”

“That’s because you sleep standing up. In a tree. A hundred feet in the air. But you know what I mean.”

“You really think your mother will let you keep a zombie?”

“Why? You don’t even know my mother,” Jimmy said.

“No, but we just had this whole little conversation about you tip-toeing around her…”

“I don’t ‘tip-toe’! I manage the distribution of information.”

“Oh, you know that freak storm that was on the news?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “I kind of wish we’d been there for it.”

“I don’t,” Scylla said. “I sleep up in a tree, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Well, anyway… you remember that dwarf storm giant who tried to go out for the team and when the coaches told her they couldn’t take her because she’d bankrupt their point pool she started crying?”

“Yeah, you’re going to have to narrow it down for me some more,” Jimmy said.

“Oh, shut up. Anyway, that was her, having another little tantrum.”

“Shit,” Jimmy said. “What about?”

“Well, I heard from Gladys, who heard from Trina, who heard…”

“Okay, here’s another patented Jimmy Jurgens Life Tip,” Jimmy said. “Anytime you say the phrase ‘heard from’ three times in the same sentence, you’re about to say something that nobody actually needs to hear.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Scylla said. She pulled her rapidly cooling burger back towards her and started picking it apart.

“So…?” Jimmy asked after a minute of silence.

“So what?”

“You were saying something about the giant girl. Giantess. Whatever.”

“’Whatever’ is right. You didn’t want to hear so I’m not going to say.”

“I was just poking a little fun at how you said it. I didn’t say I didn’t want to hear.”

“Okay, well, apparently she signed up for the arena…”

“Of course,” Jimmy said. “That’s where everybody goes when they can’t hack the field.”

“Listen to you,” she said. “When we got conscripted you were all, ‘this is bullshit’.”

“It is bullshit,” Jimmy said. “But it’s bullshit I can hack.”

“Well, anyway Trina heard from one of the other gladiators that she—the giant girl—bumped into a friend of yours wandering around the arena cellars.”

“That’s ridiculous slander,” Jimmy said. “I’m a practitioner of the darkest arts. I don’t have friends… only pawns, and enemies… who will become pawns once their pitiful little lives have been ended. How’d that sound?”

“You shouldn’t use passive voice when you’re talking about killing people. It kind of ruins the menace.”

“Uh… plausible deniability?” Jimmy said. “Anyway, back to the story.”

“Okay, the giant girl…”

“Are we going to keep calling her that?”

“Do you remember her name?” Scylla asked. “I mean, what are we supposed to call her? ‘Tiny’?”

Jimmy laughed.

“Heh,” he said. “We almost should.”

“Anyway, I guess she bumped into your enemy,” Scylla said. “Though… considering how much you talk about her…”

“Oh, quit being so coy and spit it out,” Jimmy said. “Who was it?”

“Steff Johnson,” Scylla said.

“Fucking Steff. Last time I talked to her alone in the lab, she had her daggers out and she was twirling them. Like, balancing the points on her fingers and shit. She was trying to act all casual like she didn’t even know she was doing it, but she was totally trying to intimidate me. People do that all the time when they know you’re a skirmish caster, you know… they won’t pick a fight with the warriors but if you use magic they think they can score Big Dog points for pushing around someone on the team.”

“Were you intimidated?”

“Not a bit,” Jimmy said. “She likes to think she’s some bad ass mistress of evil or something, but take away her half-ogre boyfriend and her pet demon and she’s just another elfblood bastard coasting through life.”

“Okay, well, anyway, she came on to little whats-her-face, who didn’t realize what she was saying until she went back into the locker rooms and started telling the other fighters about it.”

“If it was Steff, she probably was being weird,” Jimmy said. “I don’t think it really reflects all that poorly on somebody if they don’t recognize what Steff considers flirting.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Scylla said. “But back in the badlands, we say that thunder means somebody told a giant a joke three days ago.”

“Dude, not funny,” Jimmy said.

“What?”

“Racial jokes.”

“Oh, shut up,” she said. “You’re a human.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means when you act all sensitive about race, it’s comes off as an act even if it’s not,” Scylla said. “Which it is. You even said you don’t feel bad about being born into the dominant whatever.”

“I don’t,” Jimmy said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m racist. Okay, well, the next time you see our weepy would-be warrior woman, why don’t you try sharing your ‘humor’ with her and see if she thinks it’s funny.”

“I would, but I don’t have that kind of time,” Scylla said, and Jimmy cracked up. “See? You think it’s funny.”

“A little, but that doesn’t make it right.”

“Let’s not talk about this.”

“Okay,” Jimmy said. “So when she found out she’d been hit on by a dick girl, she… what? Got pissed off about it?”

“No, it was when the locker room burst out laughing when she said ‘All I did was explain how I love to polish my spear…’, or something like that,” Scylla said. “She, uh, stormed out after that, and the next thing anybody knew the campus was getting hammered.”

“Shit… well, there’s another reason not to make fun of a storm giant for you.”

“At least not in front of anybody who’ll explain it to them.”

Infernal interference… what were the odds that this was a coincidence, when my pitchfork was on the loose? I decided it was probably pretty good… nothing Dee had said about the entity suggested that the thing was any kind of a long-term planner.

I’d asked Steff to come along because I wanted to give her some support, but I really would have appreciated some support from her when it was time to board the carriage into town. I knew that it was as simple as just climbing in… I’d never been challenged or repelled or ambushed by some authoritative person telling me I was doing everything wrong, but this would be my first time making the trip alone.

And joy of joys, it turned out I wasn’t making it alone. There were five people waiting for the eleven-thirty trip, and I was sort of on a schedule so I couldn’t wait for the next one. Not that the traffic was likely to decrease any as we approached noon.

I tried not to stand too close to the gaggle of girls who were waiting right on the painted line where the coach would pull up, but the conversations still died down as eyes flitted in my direction. I thought I recognized two of them from the lecture I’d just come from.

“You know, I’m going to talk to you later,” a girl said, her face towards her friend but her eyes on me. “I don’t feel like a ride into town right now.”

“Yeah, me, too,” another one said, and they and a third girl all peeled off from the group and dashed back towards the campus proper.

The girl they’d been talking to gave me a murderous look, like it was my fault, and I realized in shock that her hair was actually black and gray feathers, the arms hidden under the poncho-like coat she was wearing were actually wings, and she had taloned feet sticking out from the bottom of her ill-fitting black jeans. Apparently I was so socially toxic I could drive off a harpy’s friends. Nice. She wasn’t anybody I’d seen around Harlowe, though… maybe she was more integrated into human society.

“Well, anyway,” the other person standing with her said to her. At a glance, I’d taken him to be a slightly dyke-ish girl rather than a skinny guy with eyeliner and a lot of jewelry. “Like I was saying before, I didn’t get a good look… Steff was doing her work experience when they brought him in, and she said he was all fucked up.”

I bit back an urge to blurt out “Oh, you know Steff?” There was no doubt it was my Steff he was talking about… the guy looked like a necromancer, and he had to be talking about the unfortunate student who’d been killed on campus. It wasn’t the time to try to make friends, though… not when his girlfriend was still watching me like a vulture, not even reacting to his gruesome gossip.

Actually, that was probably racist.

The carriage arrived. I climbed into the opposite seat from the happy couple, slid all the way into the far corner and pulled out my mirror, looking forward to a long and awkward silence.

I was disappointed.

“So you’re the girl who lost us the first skirmish match,” the harpy said once we were underway.

“Oh, don’t start,” the guy said.

“I think the team had something to do with that, actually,” I said.

“Hey, fuck you!” she said, giving me a gesture that can only be described as “flipping the bird”. “We worked our pinfeathers off, but it hardly mattered since you gutted our squad.”

“Wait… you’re telling me you are on the skirmish team?” I asked. “You?”

“Death from above, bitch,” she said. “Only, without Belinda to draw their attention, the archers turned me into a shish kebab. And, just so you know… they can’t mock falling.”

What could I say to that? It sucked for her, but I wasn’t ready to apologize for the fact that she’d chosen to put herself in a position where people would be trying to blast her out of the real sky with illusionary weapons. Belinda or no Belinda, the risk was still there… I couldn’t imagine there were rules against putting a slow fall spell on flying fighters. In fact, since they couldn’t mock falling, it was surprising that they didn’t require it.

Maybe that was just more anthropocentrism, though. Humans couldn’t fly without magic. No wizard mastered flying spells without learning how to float and levitate themselves first, and they would tend to keep spells like those in place as a basic safety precaution as they set about learning to fly.

Hell, for all I knew, it was a requirement, but when the coaches or captains went around with a checklist of who was casting what, it just slipped their mind to take care of the natural flyer.

“Hey, did you hear me, dummy?” the harpy said. “Don’t go staring off into space when I’m talking to you. What do you have to say for yourself?”

“Ignore her, babe,” her boyfriend said. “She’s not worth your time. Everybody knows she’s an idiot.”

I decide to take his advice, even though it hadn’t been aimed at me. We only had to put up with each other’s presence for a little while and then we’d be going our separate ways. Hopefully we’d end up heading back to campus at different times, and then I’d never have to see either of them again.

He didn’t know me, and neither did the “everybody” who’d told him I was an idiot. As for his fine feathered friend, she was just some flying jock who had to find somebody to scapegoat for her starring turn as the Amazing Falling Pincushion.

This time, I was ready for the intrusive spells when we crossed the threshold, if only because I’d ended up staring fixedly out the carriage window. The anticipation was horrible, but it didn’t seem so bad when I was expecting it.

Also, my carriagemate jumped off the seat and squawked, which I had to admit was kind of funny. I might have been inclined to feel sympathy for her, since we were both subjected to the same unfair scrutiny, but she was such a bitch that I had to bury my mouth against my sleeve to keep from laughing.

The doors were only on one side of the carriage, so I let them get off first in order to avoid a log jam. The sky skirmisher threw a parting shot over her shoulder as she awkwardly descended.

“If that coat were lying in the road, I wouldn’t eat it,” she said.

I guess that was a harpy insult.

Once I stepped out of the carriage, I realized that I had badly overestimated the amount of free time my four hour block would give me. I had just over an hour to get to my appointment and only the vaguest memory of the route Amaranth had taken us down. There was no way I could shop for Two’s present and a Veil costume and still figure out how to get downtown, especially since I had no idea where to look for costumes. The bazaar would be a good bet, but it was out of my way and I wasn’t at all confident about my ability to get around the city in a timely fashion. I kind of wished Steff had come along, if only because she would know the transit system better than I did.

I did remember the way to the Borderlands, though. The costume could wait, but if I didn’t find something for Two in a hurry, I’d end up giving her something like a sweatshirt from the campus store or something stupid like that. I could spend forever and a half inside a bookstore, but the flipside of that was that I could also find something in a hurry there.

It took me a moment to spot the games and puzzles section. I passed on a book of brain teasers that seemed to hinge on the kind of intuitive leaps that she kept missing in her attempts at humor. The clues in a big book of crossword puzzles seemed to revolve around wordplay, too… it seemed like she’d either be really good or really terrible at them. I got a book of number puzzles instead, and a big omnibus activity book the size of a lore tome. It was obviously geared at children… the mazes and word searches wouldn’t challenge her at all… but I had a feeling she’d find it satisfying to complete the instructions.

I was heading to the front when a big hanging sign caught my eye: “Cooking”. How had I not thought of that? I couldn’t spend all day, but I thought that maybe something would jump out at me… maybe a book of banana recipes, or something with sweets. As it happened, the perfect solution was staring at me from a display at the end of the aisle: Barefoot In The Kitchen: A Treasury of Shire Cooking. It was more money than I’d planned on spending, but it was for Two.

After that I just needed a gift bag big enough for all three books… I had a feeling my surrogate sister’s sense of supposed-to-be-ness would just about break down completely in the face of my attempt at giftwrapping.

I was in and out of the store in about fifteen minutes. I felt a twinge that my first time visiting a bookstore on my own as a free adult had been so perfunctory, but then it hit me: I was a free adult. There were coaches back and forth and it was a short walk. There was no reason I had to keep treating the bookstore like it was some fabled promised land across the sea when I could come and visit it any time, as long as I didn’t let myself get hung up about the coaches.

On that subject, I needed to figure out what I was doing. The first step I knew… the coach stop was right near the bookstore. I knew I needed to be downtown, and that the place where we’d got off before was a great big transit center that a lot of coaches went through, so I hopped on a coach heading that way and hoped for the best. I recalled the ride to midtown not taking very long, so I’d know soon enough if I was on the right coach.

Once I was there, I could get directions from my mirror… it was just a matter of getting to a landmark within easy walking distance.

The city coach was a lot less crowded than it had been on the weekend. I tried to watch out the windows for familiar landmarks. A lot of the buildings in town looked similar, though, especially where they’d all been built squished together. When we started to get to the mid-town canyons, I had a pretty good feeling that we were going the right way. If not, I’d get off some place that seemed safe, find out where I was, and work things out from there. If I couldn’t work it out in my mirror, I was sure that Lee’s office could give me directions.

Okay, so maybe I should have just asked Amaranth for her detailed route notes or worked out the whole thing before leaving my dorm room in the morning, but I wasn’t completely lost. I was hoping for the best but I had a plan for the worst. That was one step better than what I usually did.

Then the coach slowed as the road began to angle down into the under streets and the dungeon-turned-municipal-coach-exchange. I’d made it… at least halfway, anyway. The hard part was over. I would be able to make my appointment in plenty of time.

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?”