From the bottom of my heart, thank you to my p4tr0ns: Morpheaus, and RTB <3 <3 <3
Become a p4tr0n too and read up to FOUR chapters ahead!:
h t t p s : / / w w w . p a t r e o n . c o m / t r a s h w i t h g l a s s e s
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"Tell me your name. Now" ordered Ursus.
"Skyblue, of The Coyote Clan", I told him, expecting to get his full name in return. What he actually said afterward, however, was puzzling.
"Coyote. Such a weak animal."
"I… Guess…?"
A small smile grew on Ursus black lips when he continued: "I've heard you had some… problems after the little trip to the cave. How did you deal with it?"
"…I don't want to answer that, if you excuse me."
"I don't. Tell me."
"…I don't want to."
By this time, Ursus already had a full smile on his face.
"I see. You used your body, didn't you? Carrying the name of a weak animal, you must be weak too, and from the 'payment' Arapaima gave back to you, you must be poor too. Your body is the only thing you could have offered them to spare yourself."
I was confused. Why did he know so much about what happened after we got out of the cave? He must have been attacked too. But then, why was he saying those things? I was confused, but certainly gapping and blushing.
"It seems you were right after all, Ninebark. He's just a slave. Let's go."
"Yes, master Ursus! Did I already tell you that your hair is just lovely today?"
And just like that, the pair turned around, and walked away, leaving me behind, flabbergasted.
After putting on my new cloak, in my state of confusion, time flew by, and before I noticed, a teacher had guided me and a small group of people to a reserved room within the school. We would be tested again, even if that time it would not determine if we could attend the Bear Mountain or not.
I shook my head from one side to the other and slapped my own cheeks and re-assumed control of the situation. I was shaking, but ready! I was sweating, but determined! I was-
"You will come one by one and whisper your answers in my ears. Question one: when was the teleportation magic installed in this school?"
I was fucked.
"Awn, sweety, don't worry. Not everyone is good at this type of thing", the kind old tree-lady told me as I embarrassedly looked at my own feet while admitting I didn't know a single answer of the general knowledge test. "I bet you'll do much better during the practice test!" she concluded, pressing a red stamp on my right palm, a simple half red circle.
"T- Thank you…", I smiled at the old tree-woman, whose skin was so gnarled, and whose 'messy hair' was composed of many branches and leaves; she wore a dress made of flowers, accentuating her small hunchback, and, I noticed, a pendant similar to the one I've seen in the market before, a green stone with a type of rat carved in it. For some reason, it made me instantly more trustful of her. "I'll give my best at the next test!"
"You will be evaluated based on how many spells you know, for how long can you cast them, the quantity of magical waste you produce, and how your specialty fits into all of this!", a tall and very muscular woman with messy long hair frowned at us, eyebrows almost touching each other, her arms crossed.
"…What the heck is a specialty?" I whispered to myself. And to my companions who saw me getting every question wrong during the previous test, that apparently sounded quite funny.
The mean-looking teacher shut them up with a glance, and quickly started the test: some students spoke of long lists of spells, and proudly announced their specialty, in a way that I came to somewhat understand what both terms meant.
The "spells" were the actions done with the "energy" I felt inside of me, and more of a lose definition; for example, I saw many "fireballs", but each was quite different from the other. The specialty was some kind of "type" of spell in which the magic user excelled at, like in fire spells, or water spells. Throughout the introductions, there where even mentions of "channelers", that I didn't really get, but, surely, I would come to understand it in the future.
"I know how to make a shield, explosions, cover my limbs with stone, and manipulate the stones in the ground. I don't know what my type of specialty is" I said, my introduction being the shortest one. "T-that's it", I said, as the teacher seemed to be waiting for something more.
"And what kind of shield do you make? How do you make your explosions? And your stone spells are just too different from one another; creation and manipulation; how do you do it? Why?"
"Uuuh… My shield is the blue type?"
As the laughs died down, and after a long minute of being stared straight into my soul by the muscular woman, the teacher finally said:
"For how long you can use one of these spells?"
"For… ever, I think?" I shrugged. More laughs. Desperately trying to sound more certain, for some reason, I said: "You know, they are the type that doesn't get you tired."
"…There's no such a thing, boy.", even the mean-looking teacher had a hard time silencing the group at this point, so 'funny' was my situation. "That's enough."
She then pulled up a stamp, and pulled my right palm closer. She frowned even harder seeing my stamped hand (and I was sure she was already was fully frowning before!), and pressed her own mark on it, another half red circle, in such a way that my right palm ended up with a "ø" red symbol in it.
"Now that you've all been stamped, it's time to go choose your classes. The boards are in the main hall."
Back to the room with the hundreds-of-meters-tall ceiling, there were dozens of lines of wooden boards, each line with anywhere from tens to hundreds of boards. I noticed, however, that wooden poles have been placed before each line of boards, and they contained many different symbols of different colors. Only a few of them had my "ø" symbol, and these were the ones I walked to.
Even if the options available to me were few compared to the other symbols, there must have been at least some thirty boards, each with a different topic to learn about!
From "weather forecast" to "Talisman Making" to "Crops Protection"! They may not sound as impressive as that "Dragon Studies" I saw on one of the other lines of boards, but I wanted to learn about them anyway, perhaps because I knew almost nothing about the world, perhaps because I simply was more curious than I expected. Still, I couldn't learn everything, since each studying topic had a very well-specified day of the week to be studied on, often more than just one day.
After a quick examination, however, the many choices were but an illusion, and for the same reason that they were so exciting to me: I knew little.
How could I pick "Rain Calling", when I knew little about "Geography"? How could I pick "End Of The World Studies" when I knew little about "History"? The same went for "Principles of Magic" over any more specific magical class. And the real mystery was "Applied Magic", which could be picked by people with two different stamped symbols, and the board was almost full already.
In the end, I pressed my hand on some boards, my stamp burned itself on the wood, and my schedule ended up like this: two days of the week to study "History", three days to study "Principles of Magic", two to study "Geography", and three to dedicate to "Applied Magic".
I asked myself: would I meet anyone who I knew in these classes…?
Either way, it was time to go through yet another nerve-wracking test: where the heck would I sleep?