It took them an hour to get to campus.
On the way there, Alden managed to shove his uncertainty about the meeting on the train down and bury it. He had a busy morning to focus on. He alternated between texting Aunt Connie and chatting with Natalie about their different educational tracks. Their core academic curriculum would be similar, and they might even meet each other in some classes. But while he was enduring super P.E. and lectures on Avowed-caused catastrophes, she would be taking molecular gastronomy and learning how to source rare cheeses.
It’s enough to make a guy question his life choices, Alden thought when they finally parted ways at the bus stop close to the high school section of the Celena North campus.
He headed toward the place where most of his regular classes would be held. A lot of the buildings that weren’t named for alumni were named for virtues. The Forthright Building was a glass and steel oval chunk. Half of the ground floor was dedicated to a theater that doubled as a lecture hall, and the other half was the student coffee shop. The upper levels were all classrooms. An outdoor gallery for student wrightwork and artwork made a large social space on the rooftop.
Alden entered through the doors of the coffee place, checking his schedule more out of sudden first-day jitters than because he’d actually forgotten the room number for his class.
8:00 AM - 9:15 AM Preparatory Sciences - Forthright 1001
9:30 AM - 10:45 AM Engaging with the Unexpected I - Wong 6012
11:00 AM - 12:15 PM Artonan Conversation IV - Forthright 1810
1:30 - 2:45 Intro to Other Worlds - Forthright 1207
3:00 - 4:45 - First Year Study Hall E - Forthright 1901
5:00 - 7:00 - MPE Pre-course - MagiPhys Gym
This would be his schedule until his first full quarter started in January. The MagiPhys Ed sessions for Alden’s acceptance group would begin next Monday. They took place three evenings a week. Everything else was daily. The monitored study hall was skippable if you weren’t in danger of failing a class. Since it was eating two hours right out of the middle of the day, Alden was highly motivated not to be put in a situation where he’d have to sit through it.
All right, he thought, heading into the theater to find a seat for the science class. I’m finally a high school student once more. Let’s do this.
*********
Preparatory Sciences was a combined sciences overview, with a rotating set of teachers. Finlay and Maricel both showed up right as it was starting and grabbed seats in the row behind Alden. Maricel was definitely not a morning person. She kept yawning so much that she was sparking a chain reaction of drowsiness in almost everyone nearby. Finlay, on the other hand, was drinking an iced coffee and a hot tea, and talking so excitedly about the start of classes and the fact that they were all going to be heroes together that Alden was pretty sure they could have used him to power the building if they plugged him in.
He took notes on his laptop and tried to stay focused. The instructor for this week was downright soporific. It was going to be a rough way to start the mornings.
The next class was more interesting, though. Engaging with the Unexpected was only for the hero program students, and there were just thirty of them. It was small enough that Alden’s appearance in it was noteworthy. He waited until right before class started to enter so that he wouldn’t be the guy who stole someone’s very favorite desk.
When he walked in, eyes fixed on him.
“Are we getting a new person?” a girl asked.
“Unless he’s lost.”
“Fresh first year meat!”
“Ignore Ray. He’s the biggest idiot in the whole school.”
“Don’t listen to her; she’s just mad I hit five before she did.”
“A5 can’t even scratch an S1 in a totally balanced fight, so I don’t know why you’re bragging, you troll.”
“Says who?!”
“System theory.”
Alden wasn’t paying much attention to the argument. Instead, he was staring at a familiar face. Andrzej—the B-rank Polish boy who had given him the Chainer class in exchange for Cudgel Meister—was sitting in the back corner with a weapon that looked like a swollen baseball bat propped against his desk.
His face was totally blank as he stared at Alden.
Alden lifted his hand in a wave, but before the other boy could respond, their teacher jogged into the room.
“Sorry I’m late, everybody!” he said, yanking his long dark hair back with an elastic band as he skidded to a stop in front of the board. “I was arguing with someone about wolves.”
“Aww. Did Big Snake get caught smuggling in the puppies?” a girl asked, her mouth turning down in a pout. “He was going to let our class play with them if we beat up the Uni freshmen!”
“As motivating as that sounds, Penelope, we can’t have enhanced apex predators running around Apex. Even if they do start out small. And fuzzy. And so cute you just want to…” He suddenly realized Alden was in the room. “Oh how exciting! You came today. I wasn’t expecting you until next week. Let that be a lesson to me. Hello! I’m Instructor Marion!”
He leaned over the podium and stuck out his hand for Alden to shake.
“Everyone this is Alden. He’s joining our class mid-stream with my permission. We seem to be short a desk. Someone go steal him one from next door, and—”
“Me!” shouted a girl, leaping to her feet.
“Maria, by ‘steal’ I meant ‘borrow with permission!’” Instructor Marion said hastily.
One of Maria’s hands was flat on her desk. Her eyes were closed. She pointed over her shoulder toward the back wall of the classroom with her other hand.
“Similar Summoning 2!” Her hand flashed a series of signs. Her mouth moved in a chant that was only a few syllables long.
There was a crashing sound, and people in the neighboring classroom started laughing and shouting.
“Duck, Ray,” another girl who was typing away on her cell phone said idly.
“Huh?”
With a crack, a school desk appeared in the air over Ray. He yelped and covered his head with his arms, but the desk just hovered there. A boy wearing the black school uniform jacket that was optional except on certain occasions had stood up and was pointing at it.
“Thanks, man,” said Ray. “Sorry I said Object Shaping was dumb in gym last week.”
“Don’t tempt me to drop it on you.”
The desk floated toward Alden. “Your seat, sir,” the Shaper said grandly.
“Um…thank you all.” He felt a little lost, but he was definitely impressed by the amount of magic that had just gone down in less than a minute.
They made a space for him on the front row. Alden glanced back at Andrzej curiously. The Cudgel Meister gave him a half-hearted smile.
Is he just freaked out to see me or what?
Maybe he was afraid Alden would tell everyone he’d passed along Chainer? He’d been really worried about people resenting him for it. He’d implied his superhero uncle was anti-Velra, and Alden was assuming it was an extreme level of anti, since Andrzej had given up such a lucrative opportunity.
Alden hadn’t had time to waste on deeply studying the family since he arrived. He had glanced through some local news headlines to see if he was mentioned in connection with them, though. Thank goodness he wasn’t.
“Tragically Missing Avowed Teen” was a weird but minor story here, and it wasn’t at all related to the much juicier news that Aulia Velra had blasted her whole family with hardcore magic, resulting in “unknown amounts of havoc and potential damages” to the rest of the island. Alden was thinking that the blowback from the chain was mostly people discovering it had been cast in the first place and the political fallout from that.
Aulia had lost the Unified Rares and Uniques seat on the Anesidoran council. It was a position she’d held for decades, representing all of the ultra rares and uniques, whose population was too small to justify having their own individual class councilpersons. Beyond that, many Velras had had old scandals come to light—a mistress, a drug problem, suspicions of genetic engineering that wasn’t legal even on Anesidora.
And to top it off, there were a lot of lawsuits being filed against them.
Some people who’d had upsetting and bizarre things happen to them were trying to blame it on the uberluck wordchain’s butterfly effect. It wasn’t going to result in much since, “Maybe the Velras made my upstairs toilet fall through the ceiling; I really feel like they might have,” wasn’t a strong legal argument. But it had to be a headache for them.
Still, while public opinion had turned against the family, it didn’t seem as though the average Anesidoran spent a ton of time worrying about them. They were more fascinating than the other important families on the island, for sure, because of the secretiveness about their class and the maniacal lengths they went to in their efforts to keep an iron grip on it. However, Alden still had the same impression he’d had when he first read about them all those months ago. The people who really cared were the other Avowed who were trying to establish their own political positions and class dynasties.
Billionaires whining about more successful billionaires. The only reason I have to think about them at all is that one of them believes I’m cosmically significant to her.
Maybe Andrzej’s uncle was just politically inclined, too.
Alden put it out of his mind for now and turned his attention to class. Instructor Marion introduced himself and the course for Alden’s benefit. He was a Sway in his late twenties who’d graduated from the university program just a few years ago. He wanted a heroing job, but since he hadn’t landed one yet he was getting an advanced degree and focusing on mental coaching.
Engaging with the Unexpected was a class on how to approach unexpected situations from the correct mindset.
Every week, they would be presented with a different real-life situation encountered by a working Avowed, and they would have discussions about it. The method Instructor Marion was teaching was supposed to be a multi-pronged approach to calming yourself down, thinking clearly, and checking your own assumptions.
The situation the other students had been given to think about over the weekend was one in which the hero, an audial Brute who had been listening in on an apartment tower in an attempt to locate a suspected terrorist, had overheard a clear case of domestic violence.
The first question they were supposed to ask themselves was, “Is the thing I’ve encountered actually a problem, or is it something else?”
Everyone in class said that the domestic violence incident was a legitimate problem in need of a solution. After that, however, they broke down arguing in a way that made Alden think lengthy disagreements were a frequent occurrence.
“Question Two is, ‘Is this my problem to handle?’” the Shaper who’d floated the desk to Alden said. “And the answer is no. The hero is looking for a terrorist who’s suspected of planting a bomb somewhere in the city. Anything less important than that gets sidelined.”
“The bomb isn’t going to go off for hours!” a Wright argued. “The guy is beating his wife right now. It’ll take like three minutes to go punch his lights out.”
“You’re assuming it’s a man beating a woman,” said a girl. “We weren’t actually told that.”
“Why does it matter?”
“Well, if it’s an adult hurting children, it’s extremely urgent, isn’t it? If it’s, like, a tiny little old lady hitting a bodybuilder it’s still bad, but he’s probably not going to be injured if we leave him to handle it on his own.”
“What? So we only care about helping people if they’re on the verge of death?”
“Don’t put words in my mouth. But if you’re on your way to stop a terrorist from blowing up a hospital, and you take a break to save one single person, you’re fucking bad at math.”
“Respectful language or you lose your right to join the discussion!” said Instructor Marion.
<<We should use a wordchain,>> someone suggested.
“You always want to use wordchains.”
<<They’re a resource. It’s dumb that the rest of you ignore them unless the situation is something completely unmanageable.>>
“We do have recommended wordchains in this course for a reason.”
“Peace of mind?”
“What? Why that one? Unless your adrenaline is off the charts here why are you going to sacrifice your edge?”
<<Not that one. I think the one that reduces your attachment to recent memories is appropriate, so that leaving the domestic violence incident behind doesn’t weigh on the Brute for the rest of their terrorist pursuit.>>
“That one looks so impossible to cast.”
“I’m not even going to try to learn that one. It’s completely inappropriate for a superhero to deliberately care less!”
<<It’s a very weak chain. And it’s not like it’s permanent.>>
“You’re already leaving the domestic violence case unaddressed, and we haven’t even decided to do that.”
Before long, a third of the class was involved in the fast-paced argument. Alden was trying to follow what they were saying, catch up on the case itself, and read through the course syllabus on his laptop at the same time.
Instructor Marion spoke up again. “I think I’ll give you a little more information now,” he said. “Since we don’t seem to be moving forward. The domestic violence incident is taking place between two adult women. Neither of them sounds like they’re badly hurt at this point. There are three children in the apartment with them who are currently uninvolved. The hero hears the children whispering about calling the police.”
“Calling the police is what the hero should do, and then they should go back to their actual job.”
“If there are children there, then I switch my opinion. The hero should take a few minutes to remove them from danger.”
Almost everyone was nodding their head in agreement.
A girl in a paisley dress raised her hand. “I originally said the hero should break up the fight. And…I know this sounds bad, but…hearing that there are three kids there makes me change my mind.”
Everybody, including Alden, stared at her.
She winced. “Breaking up a fight between two adults would only take the audial a couple of minutes, like we said. You just separate them. Maybe even drag one of them out of the building and tell them not to come back in until they’ve cooled off? They’re capable of taking care of themselves since they’re not seriously hurt. But if you go and pull three kids out of the apartment, you become responsible for them. You have to stay with them and keep them safe. It wouldn’t be a short interruption anymore. It would be a long one. The terrorist would definitely get away.”
“Just give them to a neighbor!”
“No…that’s not right, is it? You can’t break down a door in the middle of the night, steal three kids from their home, and give them to a stranger. That would be more traumatic for them than the fight!”
“The optics of that would be terrible.”
“Optics this, optics that. Someone’s always bringing up how things are going to look. That’s not how superheroes should think!”
“It is if they want to be superheroes for more than five minutes.”
“Andrzej,” said Instructor Marion, “you haven’t spoken up yet today.”
“The B-rank has the same boring opinion as always.”
The instructor sighed. “Snide comments about other students’ rank or abilities also mean you’re out of the discussion for the day. And you don’t get credit for attendance.”
“I think it’s relevant,” the boy who’d spoken protested. “Since his solutions are almost always based on his rank.”
The teacher gave him a sharp look, and he snapped his mouth shut.
Andrzej cleared his throat. “I would call in to my handler,” he said. “And I would do what they instructed to do.”
He’s getting his English down great, thought Alden.
“That’s not an answer,” a girl said in an exasperated voice. “Asking someone else to choose for you is just a way of shifting responsibility.”
“Heroes have to <<answer to the authorities>>. Calling them is responsible and appropriate,” Andrzej said.
“We’re crunched for time hunting a terrorist. There’s a problem that needs dealing with. Are you going to wait five minutes for someone else to debate what to do, or are you going to solve the problem yourself in three?” a boy with a pugnacious look on his face asked.
“Three?” someone else asked.
“One minute to break up the fight. One to take the kids to a neighbor’s place. The third is to explain to the neighbor that you’ve already called whatever government agency you’re working with and told them to send child protective services to fetch the kids.” The speaker cracked his knuckles. “Done. Superheroes are supposed to be competent enough to handle shi..stuff fast and smart without begging for permission from people who don’t even understand how our powers work. We’re a one-stop solution to serious superhuman shi…stuff. If on the way to handle the serious superhuman stuff, we patch up some human stuff in a less than perfect way, that’s on the normals to brush over and fix.”
“I think a lot of governments would disagree with you.”
“Maybe out loud? But in practice, everyone knows we’re not cops. We have a different set of skills and different mandates, so we follow a different set of rules.”
“This is a change of subject, but I looked up the statistics on the lethality of domestic violence incidents, and…”
The discussion continued at a rapid-fire pace until the end of the period. It was a lot…really a lot…of thorny moral problems. Before Alden could even begin to think his way through one, the class would get divided into two or three factions that were all absolutely convinced they knew the right answer and that everyone else was a horrible person who deserved to be kicked off the island. He liked it a lot more around the midpoint, when the instructor made everyone start fitting their arguments within the course framework instead of just butting heads. Their homework was to write a few paragraphs about what they thought their own personal reactions would be to finding themselves in a similar situation, and describe how they would manage those reactions.
Instructor Marion called Alden over after class for a quick discussion. “Given the way this class is structured,” he said, “I think it’s fine to come into it late. We can just grade you on your performance and discussion over the next few weeks and pretend you’ve been here all along. Try to get an A so I don’t feel like it’s unfair to everyone else? Anyway, what I actually wanted to talk to you about is the second half of the course coming up next quarter.”
“The advisor mentioned they were paired.”
“Yes,” said Marion, sitting on the edge of the teacher’s desk. “The way I teach Engaging with the Unexpected II is heavily practical. Students are required to take part in a pre-approved term project outside their comfort zone, and then we only meet twice a week for everyone to report on the difficulties they’re facing and discuss solutions and mental approaches to handling them.”
“What kind of project?”
“You can choose all sorts of things. Some do community service work. Others take up hobbies they’re ill-suited for or even part-time jobs. The idea is to put yourself around people who think differently than you and sincerely pursue success in an area you don’t have qualifications for. I’m telling you now so that you can take your time thinking about whether or not you want to take the course in the normal way or if you want to skip the practical component. It seems to me that unwillingly spending months away from Earth would be far enough outside anyone’s comfort zone. We could count that as your practical experience if you were willing to have discussions about the challenges you faced in class, or you could go the normal route if you prefer.”
“Oh. Okay,” said Alden, surprised and not sure what he thought of the offer. “Thank you for the consideration.”
“Just be ready to let me know before next quarter.”
So that was my first ever real hero class. It was lively. And now I’m stressed out on behalf of an audial Brute I’ve never even met. It sounds like we’re going to be talking a lot about what it means to be a hero in the first place and how to do the right thing. I don’t know if I can fit myself—
He almost ran into Andrzej standing in the hall.
“Good morning,” said the boy, smiling more readily than he had earlier.
“Hey, man!” said Alden. “How’s the cudgel working out for you?”
Andrzej hefted his bulbous bat. “I like it. Simple but <<effective>>.”
“So you got into school,” said Alden. “That’s great.”
“Thank you. You also. Did…” He paused as a group of students exited the neighboring classroom. Then, whispering, he said, “I hope the people you gave that class to didn’t…do anything bad to you?”
Alden was surprised. So that was the reason for the awkwardness?
“No. It wasn’t exactly a good experience, but it was no big deal. There was a little kidnapping situation. It only lasted a few minutes. And they paid me really well.”
Andrzej heaved an enormous sigh.
“Good. Good!” The Polish boy held a hand to his chest. <<I knew you were the person who had disappeared because I looked you up, and I thought…what if they did that and their Artonan friends used the System notification to cover it up? But then I did not want to tell anyone because…how would that…I’m very glad you’re all right!>>
“Thanks. But they weren’t involved in that at all. It was completely separate.”
Alden didn’t think he had never met an Artonan who could and would casually cover up a random assassination, using the System, for a human. Probably not even Joe. Either the Velras had way scarier alien friends who loved them way more than he’d imagined, or Andrzej had completely unrealistic ideas about what they were capable of.
<<You should come to…wait, my English. I’m trying to practice.>> He sighed. “It is hard to remember when I am excited. You should become members with The B List.”
“The B List?”
“It is our rank club for the hero students. Almost every B is a member.”
“That sounds like it could be cool.”
Or sad. He could see it going either way.
“It is very helpful. We have several meetings every week. There is a study meeting, and we have private gym time at eight PM on Sundays. I always go to both of those. There is also a meeting off the campus sometimes. For fun.”
They only had a couple more minutes to talk before Alden had to head back to the Forthright building for his conversation class. He’d wanted to take Convo VI, which was the highest level offered at the high school, and which his test scores should have qualified him for. But according to the advisor, the teacher for that one wouldn’t take mid-term students.
This should be easy, and it’ll give me credit so it’s not a total waste I guess. The more requirements he could satisfy this quarter the more freedom he’d have in later ones to pick classes he needed.
Conversation class was being held on the eighth floor, and as Alden emerged from the stairwell, he had a sudden sense of displacement. This floor was styled differently from the others. Abstract wood carvings decorated the walls, and rows of shoe cubbies stood beside each classroom door.
It wasn’t exactly like LeafSong or the lab, but it was clearly Artonan-inspired.
They must do all the culture and language classes up here, and this puts you in the right frame of mind? Or if they occasionally had visiting instructors from the Triplanets that would explain it.
Alden felt an urge to video himself walking down the hallway so that he could share it with Kibby. She’d get such a thrill out of seeing him in a school.
I’ll get here really early one day and do it when there aren’t so many people in the halls. If I’m having class here, does that give me an excuse to buy my own learning cushion?
It hadn’t occurred to him that he wanted one until just this second, but he did. Sitting on a sofa or chair for your auriad practice just didn’t feel the same.
He found his classroom, stuffed his shoes into a cubby, and headed in.
Look at these monsters, he thought, staring at his fellow students. Cushions all the wrong distance apart, chip crumbs on the floor, sprawling, butt sitting. Kibby would lose her mind.
Maybe he would video the class for her one day. The respect humanity would lose because of it would more than be made up for by the joy Alden would get out of listening to Kibby in ranting mode. It had been too long.
He grabbed a cushion from a stack by the window and positioned it on the edge of the room beside a boy and girl who were touching up each other’s elaborate face paint.
“New?” the boy asked, while the girl squinted and applied tiny rhinestones to one of his eyebrows.
<<Don’t move!>> she commanded in Hungarian.
“It’s my first day,” said Alden, wondering what on earth they were doing.
“Welcome, fellow Northie.”
<<I said don’t move, Mikkel. You keep knocking the jewels off.>>
“What track are you?” Mikkel asked.
<<Say arts. Arts is best,>> said the Hungarian girl.
“Not Arts. I’m in the hero program.”
“Nice. Come to me in a few years when you want costuming. I graduate from high in two quarters, and I’m already accepted into the fashion department for uni.”
<<You hope you graduate. Do you even remember your lines for our next class?>>
Lines. So they’re probably doing skits or something for another class.
That would explain the number of people in the room wearing odd accessories and makeup. It was at least half of the other students. The artists were obviously heavily represented here. Alden figured it made sense. Arts and sciences were larger programs than the hero track to begin with, and it was more normal for hero students to take human languages since Earth-based bilingualism was required for their university graduation.
The teacher, an orator Brute named Instructor Rao, breezed into the room five minutes late—which would have convinced Kibby the world was ending—and class finally started. The first half involved everyone standing individually to recite memorized poems.
They weren’t bad, but most of them weren’t great either.
“I don’t believe you’ve gone yet?” the instructor said in Artonan, pointing at Alden.
He blinked up at her. “I was admitted to the school on Saturday,” he responded in his best Thegundese accent. “This is my first time in this class.”
“So you haven’t memorized any poems?”
“I didn’t know we needed to.” And if he had, memorizing one in a single day was kind of a big ask. “I…guess I can try to translate one from English?”
She waved at him in a way that looked semi-encouraging, so he stood up and excavated the only poem he could remember from ninth grade from the depths of his skull.
“I guess I will be saying the Artonan version of ‘The Road not Taken’ by Robert Frost. ‘Two roads parted in a yellow forest…’”
He managed it.
Rhyming poetry sounded terrible in another language, and he had to keep pausing to remember the lines before he could translate them, but he got through it. And when he was done, people clapped.
“Man, that was phenomenal!”
“Why the hell do you know how to say undergrowth in Artonan?”
Luck. He’d used the words for ‘weeds,’ since Kibby had liked to insult Thunder Lettuce with it.
“That’s not even the most impressive thing. How did you know what word to use to get the System to translate it as ‘hence’?”
“I was leaning formal. Since it was a poem,” said Alden, trying not to feel absurdly proud that he’d finally found humans who appreciated his language learning efforts. “I’m glad the System translated it right.”
He tried to decide if “hence” was good enough for “orbital stonechild” to be forgiven.
Instructor Rao was harder to read than his classmates. She said, “Well done.” But it was the same thing she had said to every other person regardless of whether they’d done well or not.
After recitation, they had conversation in pairs. Everyone already had a favorite partner, so Alden ended up looking around for anyone else who’d been left out. The only person remaining was a boy in a white Venetian mask with a long beak.
Alden would have bet he’d be the one, based mostly on the fact that he’d been in isolation already. Nobody had put their cushion next to his. Since he was sitting in the center of the room, it was very noticeable.
He was also betting he knew who this person was. The boy had recited his poem with precision but in a listless voice, and almost his entire face was covered. So there wasn’t a lot of information to go on. But his height was a giveaway; he was shorter than the shortest girl in the room by a couple of inches.
And Alden had just been talking to Andrzej about his family.
I guess he’s not coming to me, he thought, watching the other boy sit there.
He sighed, picked up his cushion, and headed over. “I think we’re learning partners today,” he said, sticking with Artonan since the teacher had told them to. “You’re Lute, aren’t you?”
The beaked mask turned to him. “No,” he said flatly.
Yikes.
“Sorry!” Alden said. “I thought you looked a little like someone I met once. I’m Alden.”
I guess I should have figured it out when he didn’t feel even a little bit uneven?
Lute and Aimi Velra both had been the last time he’d met them. He’d actually been running into more people who were clearly wordchain users here on campus, but the feeling didn’t bother him much now that he had confirmation from Gorgon that his gremlin wasn’t even supposed to be worried about that kind of debt.
He would still have expected a Velra to trigger it pretty hard, though.
“My name is Clarence.”
“Hi, Clarence. She said we’re supposed to be talking about the weather, so I’ll start. It’s nice that the sun is out. I’m looking forward to eating second meal outdoors.”
Alden waited.
The other boy heaved a dramatic sigh. “Fine,” he said in English. “I guess you aren’t a tool sent by the Grandwitch. Unless her tools have gotten really good at faking gullibility.”
He pulled his mask off. “Yes. I’m Lute. Hello.”
Alden was so taken aback it was a second before he could respond. “Why would your grandmother send me to talk to you?” he demanded. “And why on the Mother would you lie about your own name?”
And how is it gullible to believe someone about their own name?!
Lute’s pale blond hair was sticking up where the elastic from the mask had tugged at it. He finger combed it while he scowled at Alden. The power of the scowl was enhanced by a black eyepatch over his right eye that had rivers of dried costume blood crusting and flaking below it on his cheek.
“Aulia is delusional and thinks I only hate her temporarily. Instead of eternally. So I was just checking.”
“Artonan, Mr. Velra!” Instructor Rao called from the front of the room.
“My preferred name is Lute!” Lute spat in English.
Then he muttered, “Teachers always use other people’s preferred names. Funny how they can’t remember mine.”
All right. Well. This has been weird already.
“We should probably talk about the weather,” Alden said in Artonan.
“I like sunshine,” Lute said dryly in the same language. “I like crushable clouds. I like thunderstorms.”
Alden blinked at him. “That…that was the wrong word for fluffy…unless you do things with clouds I’m not familiar with.”
Lute sighed and dug at the strap on his eyepatch. “The word is fluffy?”
“Yes. That thing looks like it’s cutting into your face,” Alden added. “Don’t you want to take it off, too?”
“Huh?”
“What’s wrong?”
“You talk too fast,” said Lute. “And I have translation being off for educational time. What are you saying?”
Oh. This is an early intermediate class.
He had assumed the Velras would all speak fluent Artonan. It seemed like an obvious thing for them to learn to prep for Chainer before they were old enough to be selected. But even though Lute’s pronunciation was flawless as far as Alden could tell, he seemed to have a limited vocabulary.
“The covering over your eye looks uncomfortable,” Alden said, trying to enunciate each word carefully.
“It’s a new one.” Lute was prying at the eyepatch again. “I think I have bought the wrong smallness for my face.”
“It looks like it’s chopping your face in half. Just take it off.”
Lute glared at him.
“Why? You got a thing for gawking at prosthetics?” he asked in English.
Alden’s blood froze. He switched to English, too, without even thinking about it. “It’s not part of your costume?”
“Why the hell would it be part of—?” Lute snapped his mouth shut and touched his finger to his bloody cheek. “Oh. That’s right. I forgot I was fooling around with the stage blood this morning.”
“Oh shit,” said Alden, mortified.
“Artonan, Alden!” the teacher called.
“Oh shit,” Alden said in Artonan. “I’m sorry.”
Lute cackled. “Yeah. Bad person. Making jokes of the one eye boy!”
“I am very sorry.”
Lute beamed at him. “Guess how it happened. More fun than weather”
“No, it’s fine. I—”
“Guess.”
It took them an hour to get to campus.
On the way there, Alden managed to shove his uncertainty about the meeting on the train down and bury it. He had a busy morning to focus on. He alternated between texting Aunt Connie and chatting with Natalie about their different educational tracks. Their core academic curriculum would be similar, and they might even meet each other in some classes. But while he was enduring super P.E. and lectures on Avowed-caused catastrophes, she would be taking molecular gastronomy and learning how to source rare cheeses.
It’s enough to make a guy question his life choices, Alden thought when they finally parted ways at the bus stop close to the high school section of the Celena North campus.
He headed toward the place where most of his regular classes would be held. A lot of the buildings that weren’t named for alumni were named for virtues. The Forthright Building was a glass and steel oval chunk. Half of the ground floor was dedicated to a theater that doubled as a lecture hall, and the other half was the student coffee shop. The upper levels were all classrooms. An outdoor gallery for student wrightwork and artwork made a large social space on the rooftop.
Alden entered through the doors of the coffee place, checking his schedule more out of sudden first-day jitters than because he’d actually forgotten the room number for his class.
8:00 AM - 9:15 AM Preparatory Sciences - Forthright 1001
9:30 AM - 10:45 AM Engaging with the Unexpected I - Wong 6012
11:00 AM - 12:15 PM Artonan Conversation IV - Forthright 1810
1:30 - 2:45 Intro to Other Worlds - Forthright 1207
3:00 - 4:45 - First Year Study Hall E - Forthright 1901
5:00 - 7:00 - MPE Pre-course - MagiPhys Gym
This would be his schedule until his first full quarter started in January. The MagiPhys Ed sessions for Alden’s acceptance group would begin next Monday. They took place three evenings a week. Everything else was daily. The monitored study hall was skippable if you weren’t in danger of failing a class. Since it was eating two hours right out of the middle of the day, Alden was highly motivated not to be put in a situation where he’d have to sit through it.
All right, he thought, heading into the theater to find a seat for the science class. I’m finally a high school student once more. Let’s do this.
*********
Preparatory Sciences was a combined sciences overview, with a rotating set of teachers. Finlay and Maricel both showed up right as it was starting and grabbed seats in the row behind Alden. Maricel was definitely not a morning person. She kept yawning so much that she was sparking a chain reaction of drowsiness in almost everyone nearby. Finlay, on the other hand, was drinking an iced coffee and a hot tea, and talking so excitedly about the start of classes and the fact that they were all going to be heroes together that Alden was pretty sure they could have used him to power the building if they plugged him in.
He took notes on his laptop and tried to stay focused. The instructor for this week was downright soporific. It was going to be a rough way to start the mornings.
The next class was more interesting, though. Engaging with the Unexpected was only for the hero program students, and there were just thirty of them. It was small enough that Alden’s appearance in it was noteworthy. He waited until right before class started to enter so that he wouldn’t be the guy who stole someone’s very favorite desk.
When he walked in, eyes fixed on him.
“Are we getting a new person?” a girl asked.
“Unless he’s lost.”
“Fresh first year meat!”
“Ignore Ray. He’s the biggest idiot in the whole school.”
“Don’t listen to her; she’s just mad I hit five before she did.”
“A5 can’t even scratch an S1 in a totally balanced fight, so I don’t know why you’re bragging, you troll.”
“Says who?!”
“System theory.”
Alden wasn’t paying much attention to the argument. Instead, he was staring at a familiar face. Andrzej—the B-rank Polish boy who had given him the Chainer class in exchange for Cudgel Meister—was sitting in the back corner with a weapon that looked like a swollen baseball bat propped against his desk.
His face was totally blank as he stared at Alden.
Alden lifted his hand in a wave, but before the other boy could respond, their teacher jogged into the room.
“Sorry I’m late, everybody!” he said, yanking his long dark hair back with an elastic band as he skidded to a stop in front of the board. “I was arguing with someone about wolves.”
“Aww. Did Big Snake get caught smuggling in the puppies?” a girl asked, her mouth turning down in a pout. “He was going to let our class play with them if we beat up the Uni freshmen!”
“As motivating as that sounds, Penelope, we can’t have enhanced apex predators running around Apex. Even if they do start out small. And fuzzy. And so cute you just want to…” He suddenly realized Alden was in the room. “Oh how exciting! You came today. I wasn’t expecting you until next week. Let that be a lesson to me. Hello! I’m Instructor Marion!”
He leaned over the podium and stuck out his hand for Alden to shake.
“Everyone this is Alden. He’s joining our class mid-stream with my permission. We seem to be short a desk. Someone go steal him one from next door, and—”
“Me!” shouted a girl, leaping to her feet.
“Maria, by ‘steal’ I meant ‘borrow with permission!’” Instructor Marion said hastily.
One of Maria’s hands was flat on her desk. Her eyes were closed. She pointed over her shoulder toward the back wall of the classroom with her other hand.
“Similar Summoning 2!” Her hand flashed a series of signs. Her mouth moved in a chant that was only a few syllables long.
There was a crashing sound, and people in the neighboring classroom started laughing and shouting.
“Duck, Ray,” another girl who was typing away on her cell phone said idly.
“Huh?”
With a crack, a school desk appeared in the air over Ray. He yelped and covered his head with his arms, but the desk just hovered there. A boy wearing the black school uniform jacket that was optional except on certain occasions had stood up and was pointing at it.
“Thanks, man,” said Ray. “Sorry I said Object Shaping was dumb in gym last week.”
“Don’t tempt me to drop it on you.”
The desk floated toward Alden. “Your seat, sir,” the Shaper said grandly.
“Um…thank you all.” He felt a little lost, but he was definitely impressed by the amount of magic that had just gone down in less than a minute.
They made a space for him on the front row. Alden glanced back at Andrzej curiously. The Cudgel Meister gave him a half-hearted smile.
Is he just freaked out to see me or what?
Maybe he was afraid Alden would tell everyone he’d passed along Chainer? He’d been really worried about people resenting him for it. He’d implied his superhero uncle was anti-Velra, and Alden was assuming it was an extreme level of anti, since Andrzej had given up such a lucrative opportunity.
Alden hadn’t had time to waste on deeply studying the family since he arrived. He had glanced through some local news headlines to see if he was mentioned in connection with them, though. Thank goodness he wasn’t.
“Tragically Missing Avowed Teen” was a weird but minor story here, and it wasn’t at all related to the much juicier news that Aulia Velra had blasted her whole family with hardcore magic, resulting in “unknown amounts of havoc and potential damages” to the rest of the island. Alden was thinking that the blowback from the chain was mostly people discovering it had been cast in the first place and the political fallout from that.
Aulia had lost the Unified Rares and Uniques seat on the Anesidoran council. It was a position she’d held for decades, representing all of the ultra rares and uniques, whose population was too small to justify having their own individual class councilpersons. Beyond that, many Velras had had old scandals come to light—a mistress, a drug problem, suspicions of genetic engineering that wasn’t legal even on Anesidora.
And to top it off, there were a lot of lawsuits being filed against them.
Some people who’d had upsetting and bizarre things happen to them were trying to blame it on the uberluck wordchain’s butterfly effect. It wasn’t going to result in much since, “Maybe the Velras made my upstairs toilet fall through the ceiling; I really feel like they might have,” wasn’t a strong legal argument. But it had to be a headache for them.
Still, while public opinion had turned against the family, it didn’t seem as though the average Anesidoran spent a ton of time worrying about them. They were more fascinating than the other important families on the island, for sure, because of the secretiveness about their class and the maniacal lengths they went to in their efforts to keep an iron grip on it. However, Alden still had the same impression he’d had when he first read about them all those months ago. The people who really cared were the other Avowed who were trying to establish their own political positions and class dynasties.
Billionaires whining about more successful billionaires. The only reason I have to think about them at all is that one of them believes I’m cosmically significant to her.
Maybe Andrzej’s uncle was just politically inclined, too.
Alden put it out of his mind for now and turned his attention to class. Instructor Marion introduced himself and the course for Alden’s benefit. He was a Sway in his late twenties who’d graduated from the university program just a few years ago. He wanted a heroing job, but since he hadn’t landed one yet he was getting an advanced degree and focusing on mental coaching.
Engaging with the Unexpected was a class on how to approach unexpected situations from the correct mindset.
Every week, they would be presented with a different real-life situation encountered by a working Avowed, and they would have discussions about it. The method Instructor Marion was teaching was supposed to be a multi-pronged approach to calming yourself down, thinking clearly, and checking your own assumptions.
The situation the other students had been given to think about over the weekend was one in which the hero, an audial Brute who had been listening in on an apartment tower in an attempt to locate a suspected terrorist, had overheard a clear case of domestic violence.
The first question they were supposed to ask themselves was, “Is the thing I’ve encountered actually a problem, or is it something else?”
Everyone in class said that the domestic violence incident was a legitimate problem in need of a solution. After that, however, they broke down arguing in a way that made Alden think lengthy disagreements were a frequent occurrence.
“Question Two is, ‘Is this my problem to handle?’” the Shaper who’d floated the desk to Alden said. “And the answer is no. The hero is looking for a terrorist who’s suspected of planting a bomb somewhere in the city. Anything less important than that gets sidelined.”
“The bomb isn’t going to go off for hours!” a Wright argued. “The guy is beating his wife right now. It’ll take like three minutes to go punch his lights out.”
“You’re assuming it’s a man beating a woman,” said a girl. “We weren’t actually told that.”
“Why does it matter?”
“Well, if it’s an adult hurting children, it’s extremely urgent, isn’t it? If it’s, like, a tiny little old lady hitting a bodybuilder it’s still bad, but he’s probably not going to be injured if we leave him to handle it on his own.”
“What? So we only care about helping people if they’re on the verge of death?”
“Don’t put words in my mouth. But if you’re on your way to stop a terrorist from blowing up a hospital, and you take a break to save one single person, you’re fucking bad at math.”
“Respectful language or you lose your right to join the discussion!” said Instructor Marion.
<<We should use a wordchain,>> someone suggested.
“You always want to use wordchains.”
<<They’re a resource. It’s dumb that the rest of you ignore them unless the situation is something completely unmanageable.>>
“We do have recommended wordchains in this course for a reason.”
“Peace of mind?”
“What? Why that one? Unless your adrenaline is off the charts here why are you going to sacrifice your edge?”
<<Not that one. I think the one that reduces your attachment to recent memories is appropriate, so that leaving the domestic violence incident behind doesn’t weigh on the Brute for the rest of their terrorist pursuit.>>
“That one looks so impossible to cast.”
“I’m not even going to try to learn that one. It’s completely inappropriate for a superhero to deliberately care less!”
<<It’s a very weak chain. And it’s not like it’s permanent.>>
“You’re already leaving the domestic violence case unaddressed, and we haven’t even decided to do that.”
Before long, a third of the class was involved in the fast-paced argument. Alden was trying to follow what they were saying, catch up on the case itself, and read through the course syllabus on his laptop at the same time.
Instructor Marion spoke up again. “I think I’ll give you a little more information now,” he said. “Since we don’t seem to be moving forward. The domestic violence incident is taking place between two adult women. Neither of them sounds like they’re badly hurt at this point. There are three children in the apartment with them who are currently uninvolved. The hero hears the children whispering about calling the police.”
“Calling the police is what the hero should do, and then they should go back to their actual job.”
“If there are children there, then I switch my opinion. The hero should take a few minutes to remove them from danger.”
Almost everyone was nodding their head in agreement.
A girl in a paisley dress raised her hand. “I originally said the hero should break up the fight. And…I know this sounds bad, but…hearing that there are three kids there makes me change my mind.”
Everybody, including Alden, stared at her.
She winced. “Breaking up a fight between two adults would only take the audial a couple of minutes, like we said. You just separate them. Maybe even drag one of them out of the building and tell them not to come back in until they’ve cooled off? They’re capable of taking care of themselves since they’re not seriously hurt. But if you go and pull three kids out of the apartment, you become responsible for them. You have to stay with them and keep them safe. It wouldn’t be a short interruption anymore. It would be a long one. The terrorist would definitely get away.”
“Just give them to a neighbor!”
“No…that’s not right, is it? You can’t break down a door in the middle of the night, steal three kids from their home, and give them to a stranger. That would be more traumatic for them than the fight!”
“The optics of that would be terrible.”
“Optics this, optics that. Someone’s always bringing up how things are going to look. That’s not how superheroes should think!”
“It is if they want to be superheroes for more than five minutes.”
“Andrzej,” said Instructor Marion, “you haven’t spoken up yet today.”
“The B-rank has the same boring opinion as always.”
The instructor sighed. “Snide comments about other students’ rank or abilities also mean you’re out of the discussion for the day. And you don’t get credit for attendance.”
“I think it’s relevant,” the boy who’d spoken protested. “Since his solutions are almost always based on his rank.”
The teacher gave him a sharp look, and he snapped his mouth shut.
Andrzej cleared his throat. “I would call in to my handler,” he said. “And I would do what they instructed to do.”
He’s getting his English down great, thought Alden.
“That’s not an answer,” a girl said in an exasperated voice. “Asking someone else to choose for you is just a way of shifting responsibility.”
“Heroes have to <<answer to the authorities>>. Calling them is responsible and appropriate,” Andrzej said.
“We’re crunched for time hunting a terrorist. There’s a problem that needs dealing with. Are you going to wait five minutes for someone else to debate what to do, or are you going to solve the problem yourself in three?” a boy with a pugnacious look on his face asked.
“Three?” someone else asked.
“One minute to break up the fight. One to take the kids to a neighbor’s place. The third is to explain to the neighbor that you’ve already called whatever government agency you’re working with and told them to send child protective services to fetch the kids.” The speaker cracked his knuckles. “Done. Superheroes are supposed to be competent enough to handle shi..stuff fast and smart without begging for permission from people who don’t even understand how our powers work. We’re a one-stop solution to serious superhuman shi…stuff. If on the way to handle the serious superhuman stuff, we patch up some human stuff in a less than perfect way, that’s on the normals to brush over and fix.”
“I think a lot of governments would disagree with you.”
“Maybe out loud? But in practice, everyone knows we’re not cops. We have a different set of skills and different mandates, so we follow a different set of rules.”
“This is a change of subject, but I looked up the statistics on the lethality of domestic violence incidents, and…”
The discussion continued at a rapid-fire pace until the end of the period. It was a lot…really a lot…of thorny moral problems. Before Alden could even begin to think his way through one, the class would get divided into two or three factions that were all absolutely convinced they knew the right answer and that everyone else was a horrible person who deserved to be kicked off the island. He liked it a lot more around the midpoint, when the instructor made everyone start fitting their arguments within the course framework instead of just butting heads. Their homework was to write a few paragraphs about what they thought their own personal reactions would be to finding themselves in a similar situation, and describe how they would manage those reactions.
Instructor Marion called Alden over after class for a quick discussion. “Given the way this class is structured,” he said, “I think it’s fine to come into it late. We can just grade you on your performance and discussion over the next few weeks and pretend you’ve been here all along. Try to get an A so I don’t feel like it’s unfair to everyone else? Anyway, what I actually wanted to talk to you about is the second half of the course coming up next quarter.”
“The advisor mentioned they were paired.”
“Yes,” said Marion, sitting on the edge of the teacher’s desk. “The way I teach Engaging with the Unexpected II is heavily practical. Students are required to take part in a pre-approved term project outside their comfort zone, and then we only meet twice a week for everyone to report on the difficulties they’re facing and discuss solutions and mental approaches to handling them.”
“What kind of project?”
“You can choose all sorts of things. Some do community service work. Others take up hobbies they’re ill-suited for or even part-time jobs. The idea is to put yourself around people who think differently than you and sincerely pursue success in an area you don’t have qualifications for. I’m telling you now so that you can take your time thinking about whether or not you want to take the course in the normal way or if you want to skip the practical component. It seems to me that unwillingly spending months away from Earth would be far enough outside anyone’s comfort zone. We could count that as your practical experience if you were willing to have discussions about the challenges you faced in class, or you could go the normal route if you prefer.”
“Oh. Okay,” said Alden, surprised and not sure what he thought of the offer. “Thank you for the consideration.”
“Just be ready to let me know before next quarter.”
So that was my first ever real hero class. It was lively. And now I’m stressed out on behalf of an audial Brute I’ve never even met. It sounds like we’re going to be talking a lot about what it means to be a hero in the first place and how to do the right thing. I don’t know if I can fit myself—
He almost ran into Andrzej standing in the hall.
“Good morning,” said the boy, smiling more readily than he had earlier.
“Hey, man!” said Alden. “How’s the cudgel working out for you?”
Andrzej hefted his bulbous bat. “I like it. Simple but <<effective>>.”
“So you got into school,” said Alden. “That’s great.”
“Thank you. You also. Did…” He paused as a group of students exited the neighboring classroom. Then, whispering, he said, “I hope the people you gave that class to didn’t…do anything bad to you?”
Alden was surprised. So that was the reason for the awkwardness?
“No. It wasn’t exactly a good experience, but it was no big deal. There was a little kidnapping situation. It only lasted a few minutes. And they paid me really well.”
Andrzej heaved an enormous sigh.
“Good. Good!” The Polish boy held a hand to his chest. <<I knew you were the person who had disappeared because I looked you up, and I thought…what if they did that and their Artonan friends used the System notification to cover it up? But then I did not want to tell anyone because…how would that…I’m very glad you’re all right!>>
“Thanks. But they weren’t involved in that at all. It was completely separate.”
Alden didn’t think he had never met an Artonan who could and would casually cover up a random assassination, using the System, for a human. Probably not even Joe. Either the Velras had way scarier alien friends who loved them way more than he’d imagined, or Andrzej had completely unrealistic ideas about what they were capable of.
<<You should come to…wait, my English. I’m trying to practice.>> He sighed. “It is hard to remember when I am excited. You should become members with The B List.”
“The B List?”
“It is our rank club for the hero students. Almost every B is a member.”
“That sounds like it could be cool.”
Or sad. He could see it going either way.
“It is very helpful. We have several meetings every week. There is a study meeting, and we have private gym time at eight PM on Sundays. I always go to both of those. There is also a meeting off the campus sometimes. For fun.”
They only had a couple more minutes to talk before Alden had to head back to the Forthright building for his conversation class. He’d wanted to take Convo VI, which was the highest level offered at the high school, and which his test scores should have qualified him for. But according to the advisor, the teacher for that one wouldn’t take mid-term students.
This should be easy, and it’ll give me credit so it’s not a total waste I guess. The more requirements he could satisfy this quarter the more freedom he’d have in later ones to pick classes he needed.
Conversation class was being held on the eighth floor, and as Alden emerged from the stairwell, he had a sudden sense of displacement. This floor was styled differently from the others. Abstract wood carvings decorated the walls, and rows of shoe cubbies stood beside each classroom door.
It wasn’t exactly like LeafSong or the lab, but it was clearly Artonan-inspired.
They must do all the culture and language classes up here, and this puts you in the right frame of mind? Or if they occasionally had visiting instructors from the Triplanets that would explain it.
Alden felt an urge to video himself walking down the hallway so that he could share it with Kibby. She’d get such a thrill out of seeing him in a school.
I’ll get here really early one day and do it when there aren’t so many people in the halls. If I’m having class here, does that give me an excuse to buy my own learning cushion?
It hadn’t occurred to him that he wanted one until just this second, but he did. Sitting on a sofa or chair for your auriad practice just didn’t feel the same.
He found his classroom, stuffed his shoes into a cubby, and headed in.
Look at these monsters, he thought, staring at his fellow students. Cushions all the wrong distance apart, chip crumbs on the floor, sprawling, butt sitting. Kibby would lose her mind.
Maybe he would video the class for her one day. The respect humanity would lose because of it would more than be made up for by the joy Alden would get out of listening to Kibby in ranting mode. It had been too long.
He grabbed a cushion from a stack by the window and positioned it on the edge of the room beside a boy and girl who were touching up each other’s elaborate face paint.
“New?” the boy asked, while the girl squinted and applied tiny rhinestones to one of his eyebrows.
<<Don’t move!>> she commanded in Hungarian.
“It’s my first day,” said Alden, wondering what on earth they were doing.
“Welcome, fellow Northie.”
<<I said don’t move, Mikkel. You keep knocking the jewels off.>>
“What track are you?” Mikkel asked.
<<Say arts. Arts is best,>> said the Hungarian girl.
“Not Arts. I’m in the hero program.”
“Nice. Come to me in a few years when you want costuming. I graduate from high in two quarters, and I’m already accepted into the fashion department for uni.”
<<You hope you graduate. Do you even remember your lines for our next class?>>
Lines. So they’re probably doing skits or something for another class.
That would explain the number of people in the room wearing odd accessories and makeup. It was at least half of the other students. The artists were obviously heavily represented here. Alden figured it made sense. Arts and sciences were larger programs than the hero track to begin with, and it was more normal for hero students to take human languages since Earth-based bilingualism was required for their university graduation.
The teacher, an orator Brute named Instructor Rao, breezed into the room five minutes late—which would have convinced Kibby the world was ending—and class finally started. The first half involved everyone standing individually to recite memorized poems.
They weren’t bad, but most of them weren’t great either.
“I don’t believe you’ve gone yet?” the instructor said in Artonan, pointing at Alden.
He blinked up at her. “I was admitted to the school on Saturday,” he responded in his best Thegundese accent. “This is my first time in this class.”
“So you haven’t memorized any poems?”
“I didn’t know we needed to.” And if he had, memorizing one in a single day was kind of a big ask. “I…guess I can try to translate one from English?”
She waved at him in a way that looked semi-encouraging, so he stood up and excavated the only poem he could remember from ninth grade from the depths of his skull.
“I guess I will be saying the Artonan version of ‘The Road not Taken’ by Robert Frost. ‘Two roads parted in a yellow forest…’”
He managed it.
Rhyming poetry sounded terrible in another language, and he had to keep pausing to remember the lines before he could translate them, but he got through it. And when he was done, people clapped.
“Man, that was phenomenal!”
“Why the hell do you know how to say undergrowth in Artonan?”
Luck. He’d used the words for ‘weeds,’ since Kibby had liked to insult Thunder Lettuce with it.
“That’s not even the most impressive thing. How did you know what word to use to get the System to translate it as ‘hence’?”
“I was leaning formal. Since it was a poem,” said Alden, trying not to feel absurdly proud that he’d finally found humans who appreciated his language learning efforts. “I’m glad the System translated it right.”
He tried to decide if “hence” was good enough for “orbital stonechild” to be forgiven.
Instructor Rao was harder to read than his classmates. She said, “Well done.” But it was the same thing she had said to every other person regardless of whether they’d done well or not.
After recitation, they had conversation in pairs. Everyone already had a favorite partner, so Alden ended up looking around for anyone else who’d been left out. The only person remaining was a boy in a white Venetian mask with a long beak.
Alden would have bet he’d be the one, based mostly on the fact that he’d been in isolation already. Nobody had put their cushion next to his. Since he was sitting in the center of the room, it was very noticeable.
He was also betting he knew who this person was. The boy had recited his poem with precision but in a listless voice, and almost his entire face was covered. So there wasn’t a lot of information to go on. But his height was a giveaway; he was shorter than the shortest girl in the room by a couple of inches.
And Alden had just been talking to Andrzej about his family.
I guess he’s not coming to me, he thought, watching the other boy sit there.
He sighed, picked up his cushion, and headed over. “I think we’re learning partners today,” he said, sticking with Artonan since the teacher had told them to. “You’re Lute, aren’t you?”
The beaked mask turned to him. “No,” he said flatly.
Yikes.
“Sorry!” Alden said. “I thought you looked a little like someone I met once. I’m Alden.”
I guess I should have figured it out when he didn’t feel even a little bit uneven?
Lute and Aimi Velra both had been the last time he’d met them. He’d actually been running into more people who were clearly wordchain users here on campus, but the feeling didn’t bother him much now that he had confirmation from Gorgon that his gremlin wasn’t even supposed to be worried about that kind of debt.
He would still have expected a Velra to trigger it pretty hard, though.
“My name is Clarence.”
“Hi, Clarence. She said we’re supposed to be talking about the weather, so I’ll start. It’s nice that the sun is out. I’m looking forward to eating second meal outdoors.”
Alden waited.
The other boy heaved a dramatic sigh. “Fine,” he said in English. “I guess you aren’t a tool sent by the Grandwitch. Unless her tools have gotten really good at faking gullibility.”
He pulled his mask off. “Yes. I’m Lute. Hello.”
Alden was so taken aback it was a second before he could respond. “Why would your grandmother send me to talk to you?” he demanded. “And why on the Mother would you lie about your own name?”
And how is it gullible to believe someone about their own name?!
Lute’s pale blond hair was sticking up where the elastic from the mask had tugged at it. He finger combed it while he scowled at Alden. The power of the scowl was enhanced by a black eyepatch over his right eye that had rivers of dried costume blood crusting and flaking below it on his cheek.
“Aulia is delusional and thinks I only hate her temporarily. Instead of eternally. So I was just checking.”
“Artonan, Mr. Velra!” Instructor Rao called from the front of the room.
“My preferred name is Lute!” Lute spat in English.
Then he muttered, “Teachers always use other people’s preferred names. Funny how they can’t remember mine.”
All right. Well. This has been weird already.
“We should probably talk about the weather,” Alden said in Artonan.
“I like sunshine,” Lute said dryly in the same language. “I like crushable clouds. I like thunderstorms.”
Alden blinked at him. “That…that was the wrong word for fluffy…unless you do things with clouds I’m not familiar with.”
Lute sighed and dug at the strap on his eyepatch. “The word is fluffy?”
“Yes. That thing looks like it’s cutting into your face,” Alden added. “Don’t you want to take it off, too?”
“Huh?”
“What’s wrong?”
“You talk too fast,” said Lute. “And I have translation being off for educational time. What are you saying?”
Oh. This is an early intermediate class.
He had assumed the Velras would all speak fluent Artonan. It seemed like an obvious thing for them to learn to prep for Chainer before they were old enough to be selected. But even though Lute’s pronunciation was flawless as far as Alden could tell, he seemed to have a limited vocabulary.
“The covering over your eye looks uncomfortable,” Alden said, trying to enunciate each word carefully.
“It’s a new one.” Lute was prying at the eyepatch again. “I think I have bought the wrong smallness for my face.”
“It looks like it’s chopping your face in half. Just take it off.”
Lute glared at him.
“Why? You got a thing for gawking at prosthetics?” he asked in English.
Alden’s blood froze. He switched to English, too, without even thinking about it. “It’s not part of your costume?”
“Why the hell would it be part of—?” Lute snapped his mouth shut and touched his finger to his bloody cheek. “Oh. That’s right. I forgot I was fooling around with the stage blood this morning.”
“Oh shit,” said Alden, mortified.
“Artonan, Alden!” the teacher called.
“Oh shit,” Alden said in Artonan. “I’m sorry.”
Lute cackled. “Yeah. Bad person. Making jokes of the one eye boy!”
“I am very sorry.”
Lute beamed at him. “Guess how it happened. More fun than weather”
“No, it’s fine. I—”
“Guess.”
