Anri stood at the door to a cabin that was in the middle of a soybean farm. Around his shoulders went the straps of a grey travel bag packed tight with all the worldly possessions he had including clothing, shoes, and medicines. Gina had told him that the soybean farm was completely automated and mechanised, and so there were only a handful of people on the farm including one mechanic and two guards.
He knocked twice on the door and waited when he heard footsteps. The door then swung open and he was met by an older gentleman with grey hair around his temples.
"Anri?" The older man asked in a gruff voice.
The sorcerer nodded.
"You're early."
Gina's fault. "I am."
"Well don't just stand there, son. Come in."
The cabin looked humble from the outside but its interior completely subverted that image. The old man was living the good life.
"Your room is there," he pointed Anri towards a door. "Put your bag inside and come meet me back in the kitchen over there. I'll be making us supper."
"Okay."
The teenager's room was simply furnished with a bed, a desk and a chair, a closet, and a workstation mounted to a shelf on the wall. Anri dumped his bag inside the closet and then headed off to the kitchen.
______
"I was told that you're some kind of idiot genius," the old man told Anri as he diced some carrots with a beautiful chopping blade.
"I am not," Anri stiffly replied.
"An idiot or a genius?" The man's back was turned to the teenager who was seated by the central dining table.
"Both."
The old man snorted. "I don't know what Nicholas was thinking when he decided to turn you into a candidate for Starfield in seven months. You can't read or write in federation. And you apparently can't even speak another language so where am I supposed to start?"
He made a fair point to which the sorcerer conceded. The commander's belief in him wasn't misplaced - because Anri was a gifted scholar when motivated enough to work hard - but seven months wasn't really enough time to absorb the various subjects that he was expected to be an expert at.
"By teaching me- read and write," Anri answered. "Two days I only need." It hurt him to speak in broken sentences but he had to keep up appearances.
"Is that so?" The old man stopped chopping. "And you say you aren't a genius." The teenager was fairly sure the old man was being sarcastic.
"I am hungry."
"Then start peeling those potatoes," the grouchy old man replied.
________
"Look at this and pay attention while I read out the characters to you." The old man was a bit of an old school teacher and still liked using papers though they were already made obsolete.
Anri and his tutor were seated outside under a tree. It was a peaceful place to be if one could ignore the sounds of machinery that came from all around the farm.
The sorcerer held the crisp sheet of paper on which he counted approximately 200 characters. For a normal person, two days wasn't enough. But he wasn't exactly normal.
"Okay."
Anri allowed the distant hum of machinery to fade out as he listened to the voice of his tutor. Each character was imprinted in his mind as the old man read out loud from the paper. Altogether, they did thirty characters.
"Do the first ten. I'll repeat it again," the old man told him. But Anri beat him to it by reciting out all the thirty characters without any mistake after having listened only once. His tutor's expression shifted from neutral to incredulous and then annoyed.
"If you already know the script then you shouldn't be wasting our time by lying about it."
"I am not."
The tutor was silent as he scrutinised Anri with a look that was as sharp as the knife he wielded in the kitchen.
"Alright, son. I'll test you then. If you fail, it means you lied to me. It means you'll get shipped right back to Nicholas. Do you understand?" The old man asked him.
"A little." All he wanted was to speak normally. The sorcerer gave himself a week after which he would drop all pretences.
The old man palmed his data pad which was folded inside his pocket. He turned the screen to Anri and showed him twenty squiggly looking characters that ended in sharp angles.
"Ever seen these?"
"No."
"It's called the Shur'tu script, only useful to historians. What's interesting about it is that the individual characters represent a consonant and vowel combination, rather than a single vowel or consonant," the old man informed him as he pointed at the complex symbols. "I'll read out a section of this paragraph. When I'm done, the sentences that I've read out will be scrambled into nonsense and you'll have to read out the jumbled nonsense from that supposedly genius memory of yours. You understand me?"
Why was he doing this? It was one thing to accept his former student's request to teach an unknown young student, and another to tolerate the boy's presence if he wasn't taking their study seriously. If Anri was a waste of his time then he would send him back to where he came from.
"Understood."
Anri turned his gaze down to the transparent screen over which floated the alien characters. His tutor then began to read out the script, some parts sounding smooth like flat river stones, other parts sounding guttural and rough. Two short sentences were given sound and it was over not long after it had begun.
"Go ahead then," his tutor told him as they watched the words rise and switch positions.
This was child's play for the sorcerer. He did as his tutor bid him to, perfectly even. Anri didn't consider himself a genius but he knew he was above the common rabble.
"Satisfied?" He asked the old man. His dark gaze rested on the old face that wore an expression of quiet satisfaction. "Nicholas did not send you an idiot."
The old man nodded, now taking the sorcerer seriously. "I won't apologise for testing you. It was necessary. And I won't waste your time with this anymore." Saying so, the tutor removed the piece of paper from Anri's hand and replaced it with his data pad. "You'll learn all two hundred and seven characters from this. I'm giving you ten minutes."
As the teenager quietly absorbed the characters, the old man wondered how he would compress ten years of study into material that could be taught in seven months. And did the boy even know the basics of hand to hand combat? It appeared that they were both going to be put through the wringer with the tutoring.
"I'm too old for this."