1. We would be heading to the Second Layer sometime in the fall.

2. We would be going down the Pillar beneath Zuva to reach the Second Layer

3. Our destination was a mining town who’s export is Sun Stones

4. We would hunt Nightmares

5. All of the teachers and the Forged Order will be there too.

6. Students who had yet to open their Dreamscape would be allowed to join as a last ditch effort to open it. Those who do not join will fail, those who join but don’t open it also fail.

That was all we knew about our final assignment for the year. We didn’t know how long we would be down there or exactly which mining town we were going to. There was no packing list, or advice given. Maybe as we got closer to the date we would get some.

“Do you think its because they don’t want students to try and create Wit that are suited to the situation?” Elina asked.

“Maybe, I think they are worried about information leaks. At the Forest of Living Dreams we had some people from the Bronze Isles interfere, and the Dreamer families of Zuva had to learn about the students here somehow,” Melanie said, sitting next to Elina with her hands propping up her face.

We were in the library, trying to do research on the Second Layer.

At least I was trying to, Melanie was useless. She couldn’t pay attention to the page for more than five seconds. Elina could have been useful, if Melanie had not been distracting her every ten seconds. If not for the fact that Melanie could have vital information I wouldn’t have invited her. I didn’t dislike her, she was just unproductive in this environment.

“Have you been able to get any information from the second-years?” I asked.

“Only that the place they went to last year was different from where the third-years had gone when they were first-years. Other than that the second-years are too busy with their own thing. Did you guys know that during our second-years we will have a chance to interact with the Dreamers of other countries? They apparently hold a huge competition between all of us younger Dreamers.”

“Which countries? And are Dreamer families included as well?” I asked, intrigued.

“Glass Kingdom and Bronze Isles obviously, but sometimes the larger countries from the Charred Continent and The Wandering City. I don’t know about Dreamer families though, didn’t ask.”

“Do you think that’s why we haven't seen any third-years? We’re half-way through the school-year and there hasn’t been any sign of them,” Elina asked.

I realized that Melanie had properly dislodged me from my research. Damn, I was no better than Elina.

“What are the names of the mining towns the second and third-years went to?” I asked, trying to get back on topic.

“Fireyard for the second-years and Purestone for the third-years.”

“Those names are rather generic,” Elina said.

“Well its rather common to have to relocate or rebuild a town in the Second Layer due to Nightmares so I guess they don’t put in much effort to name them.”

I tuned them out and looked to the map before me. Normal people had no access to documents like these, but for some reason being a Dreamer allowed fourteen year olds to get a hold of them.

It displayed the area around Zuva’s Pillar, the bridge between the First Layer and the Second. Zuva was a goldmine for the Sun State as not only did the Pillar reach the Second Layer, but it even went down into the third.

However despite the danger from the lower Layers it is necessary as it is the only known location to mine for Sun Stones in all the Layers.

I noted the distances between the two mining towns from the edge of the Pillar on another paper. The two towns were on nearly opposite sides of the Pillar, but rather close.

“Did they travel on foot or by vehicle?” I asked, interrupting whatever the other two had been talking about.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

“Uh, I think the second-years did a bit of both. I can ask for more details.”

I nodded. Looking once again at the map I created a list of all the mining towns that were a similar distance away from the Pillar. There were a lot. Now I needed to look at information for the towns of Fireyard and Purestone then cross reference them with the ones on this list to see if there are any similarities. If so then I will put more effort into the research of those, but still make sure to have a general knowledge on the other. If there are no similarities then I will have to do a broad scope where I try and get the essential information on each town.

I will also need to do research on other’s who had explored the Second Layer in the past. First hand sources would be best, but it would need to be a reliable one that didn’t boast about their exploits.

“Yeah I’m scrapping the Wit I’ve been working on. If we’re going to be hunting Nightmares in a mine then only being able to attack once every couple of minutes is useless,” Elina said.

“That sucks. I’ve been working on five different ones, but a few of them would be useless in a scenario like that so I’m going to try and focus on just one or two,” Melanie replied.

“Five?! That’s so many.”

I agreed, it made me wonder if I should have tried to branch out more with my experimenting. I probably would have already of found out what I wanted my first ability to be, maybe even my second, but I couldn’t bring myself to try that before understanding the Dreamscape’s mechanics as much as possible.

Hopefully the months of experimenting will have paid off in the long run.

“Yeah… sometimes its just hard to focus on one at a time so I craft others.”

“So, Melanie. What is your Dream? You don’t need to tell us your Wit if you’re not comfortable with it, but me and Monty-“

“Monty and I,” I interrupted.

“Shut up. Me and Monty have made a few guesses.”

“Oh? I’d like to hear them.”

“Well Monty thinks your Dream has something to do with flying. He said it had to do with how your Intent felt when we found you wounded in the city. I on the other hand think your Dream is to be a spy. You seem to really like talking to people and getting to know things about them.”

“Wow!”

Elina lit up.

“Those weren’t even close!”

“You’re a bitch.”

“Thanks. Anyways, nah, I don’t have an issue telling you guys. You see I want to be… a magician.”

As Melanie said that she twisted her hands only for a rose flower to appear in her right hand. She twirled it for a moment then slapped her hands together making the flower disappear. She snapped her left hand where the flower appeared in it, then snapped her right hand and the flower was gone once again. She clapped once more, but when pulling back her hands she showed us a card and on its face was a rose.

“That was awesome! It was slight of hand right? Not your Wit?” Elina said, bouncing in her seat.

“Yeah,” Melanie replied smugly. “I’ve been practicing since I was eight.”

“Do you normally have a rose on you?” I asked.

“I was trying out a new trick before I met up with you guys, but you are free to ask me at any time to see if I have one.”

“And you will?”

“We’ll have to find out won’t we?” She said leaning on the table once again.

“What else do you carry on you?”

“Your pen,” she said, twirling the pen I had just been using between her fingers.

I noticed that her fingers were rough, with scars on her knuckles and fingers. I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed before. I could excuse the incident in the alley way as there was a lot of blood and wounds, but I had hung out with her quite a few times since then and hadn’t taken note of it. They reminded me of Heidi’s hands who had similar scars, though Melanie’s were not as extensive.

“…”

She continued to twirl the pen for a few more seconds, but when she noticed I wasn’t responding to her provocation she placed it down next to my hand.

“Uh, sorry. I was only pulling your leg.”

Magician. Distraction. Had she been pulling my attention away from her hands during every meeting? A magician relied on slight of hand to pull off tricks, and that meant keeping the persons eyes from noticing the details. I lived for the details.

It made me feel a bit betrayed. As though she had been keeping something from me that I had deserved to know. That was ridiculous, they were not my hands.

“…”

“Don’t worry about him, he’s just thinking,” Elina said.

“I see…”

Someone who was serious about becoming a magician would take care of their hands. Melanie just said she had been practicing since she was eight, but the fading on some of the scars indicate that they are more recent than that. That meant that she was in a situation where she had no choice but to use her hands in a way that damaged them.

I looked up into Melanie’s eyes, she was now looking at me with a bit of a weirded out expression.

Did she have a bad home life? Abusive parents? Or was it her rebellious nature? Was she a thug before coming to the school? Her language could be crass sometimes.

“It’s no problem,” I said.

“Uh yeah, no problem.”

“I will go find some documents we need.”

“Kay.”