“My lock box!” Amelia cried before her brain had fully reconciled itself.

It is well known that the majority of experiences in a day aren’t worth the time or energy to acknowledge and that only a tiny sliver of a percentile of those justify a response.

Bon Bon and Ellie registered nothing.

“Don’t worry,” Ellie said dismissively. “Like I said, those things are indestructible. Even if she had a cannon for an arm she couldn’t break it.”

Her eyes narrowed for an instant. She raised her voice and pitched her next words at the insolent Vulpes. “Cleverer and stronger beasts than her have tried.”

Bon Bon glanced up at her with a mixture of indignation and challenge. “I bet you’re wrong,” she snorted. Then she continued pounding on the padlock as hard as she could with the already abused implement.

Ellie strode over and handily relieved her of the battered object before she could render it completely unusable. Apparently undaunted, Bon Bon proceeded to viciously claw at the lock with her pointed nails. The only success she achieved was in breaking them.

“Ahh!” She wailed, “my lovelies!”

She glared with pitiful bale at Ellie. “Now what am I supposed to do with all my nail polish?”

Amelia was buffaloed. She thought she had been braced for the worst, but this beast sitting before her gave pure delirium something to aspire to.

It was then that, for the first time, Bon Bon fully recognized Amelia's presence.

“Who’s the short-stalk?” she asked, flicking the candlestick at Amelia like a warding talisman.

Ellie answered as though teaching a brain-damaged pet the difference between its water and toilet bowls. “Her name’s Amelia. She’s our new roommate.”

Some inarticulable note about Ellie’s tone prompted Amelia to think, and then to ask of nobody in particular, “new?”

Without breaking stride, and never so much as loosening her eye contact with Bon Bon, Ellie said, “you don’t want to know what happened to the last one.”

Witches, warlocks and medicinal “wise” shamans and hermits of all races and cultures have known throughout the Eras that the simplest and most fertile font of magickal energy is mystery.

The edges of those dark woods, the precipice of the infinite abyss, the paradoxical allure and revulsion felt around intractable swathes of ignorance, prompts investigation, urges exploration, fuels conquests and inspires imagination like wind washing over a brush fire.

Whether Ellie knew any of this or not, she had just stoked a fanciful furnace of such precipitous nature that it would make the industrial Viverrian blast forges look like medieval alembics.

Amelia was about to ask if her predecessor’s fate had been Bon Bon’s doing, but then she noticed the other in question looking her over as though through a store window.

“You sure she’s up for it?” the Vixen asked. “She seems a bit slow to me.”

This drew from Amelia a kind of blistering fury she didn’t know she’d had access to. As if Bon Bon had just pissed down her back and insisted it was rain.

What Amelia could not have imagined was that this was all entirely according to design.

Ellie, by contrast, maintained almost unreasonably neutrality. “No,” she said in a voice as still and even as a tripwire. “In fact she’s the one who found you tonight.”

Amelia’s mind folded back over itself. Ellie’s astounding mental agility had left her turning yarn off an empty spindle. If she’d been a psychic she would have foreseen an epistemological course on the Pyratical Way in her future.

Even if it was true, Ellie was gambling heavily that Bon Bon was too dense to realize that they would have returned to the dorm eventually, and so would have run into each other regardless. Thankfully, her calculations seemed on point.

“HA!” was the Fox’s coy answer. She then resumed her attempt to open the lock, this time with her teeth. “Well I’ll have you know that I’m not that hard to find when I want to be.”

She aimed a decapitated nail at herself and flashed a calculated grin. “See?”

Ellie’s eyes narrowed involuntarily and Amelia knowingly scowled. One of them knew the game but neither could help playing along. Such was their adversary’s elite level of skill and preponderance of experience.

This lass was about as dense as a common brick. Amelia dearly hoped she wouldn't get stuck on a ship with this lanker.

“In any case,” Ellie said with enough force of civility to crush a string of diamonds, “since she’s going to be staying with us, I suggest we all try to get to know one another.”

The threatening sheen on her words was hardly invisible to the sly Fox. Nor was the hard, precipitable punctuation at the end.

The towheaded Vulpes glared menacingly at her superior. Then she shrugged and said to the room at large, “if that’s what floats your bucket.”

She set herself back to work on the lock, seeming to have forgotten that its owner was still standing a few paces away.

Amelia went to take a step but Ellie barred her advance with an arm.

“Charlotte,” she said, her voice strained to keep at a level temper, “your locker is that one there.” She stabbed a thumb at the opposite bunk spot.

Bon Bon didn’t look. “I know,” she grunted, “I want to see what’s in this one.”

“MY stuff!” Amelia snapped.

The Vixen’s head snapped and stared at Amelia in genuine bewilderment.

“Your duffle?” she asked, as though the notion completely evaded her. This wasn't really all that too far-fetched, in retrospect.

“My … what?” Amelia asked, stumbling over her failure to familiarize herself with basic Pyrate slang.

“Your stuff,” Ellie translated.

“Ah ... yes,” Amelia said. She realized pulling out her key.

Bon Bon made a dive for it, but Ellie caught her by the scruff and physically hauled her back onto Amelia's bunk, which gave a loud squeak in protest.

Wrenching the strong box from the scrawny girl’s clutches, Ellie set it by the foot of the bunk, then began a long, obviously well-worn speech about the sanctity of another beast's property.

All the while, Bon Bon bemoaned , “but I want to know what’s inside!” To which Ellie repeatedly countered, “it’s not yours to know.”

Her demeanor was one of increasingly inflexible calm. Her cadence and inflexion turned unnaturally still and crisp like the reportedly translucent apex on a Masamune bevel.

Even the best actors can’t upstage rudimentary biology for long. Through her aloof veneer Bon Bon was starting to betray like signs of a caged animal expecting to feel the bite of its master’s whip.

Her pretty face pulled into an unissued expression of muted concern. Her auburn fur rustled along the pattern of her light but sturdy muscles as they systemically tensed and released like a legion of camouflaged soldiers preparing for an attack.

Flint had once referred to nihilists as “the terminally sane”.

“Sometimes fate is a fertile river plane. Other times it’s a desert island whose sands produce only hordes of miserable dregs with charred husks for souls,” wrote one Savionian by the name of Antvon Solgtovoy.

However, a less philosophical take, and thus a more popular one, held nihilism as the only logical output of a hopelessly tragic equation.

As airy as her head was, neither hopelessness nor sanity appeared on, or in any sustainable orbit of, Bon Bon’s list of vices. But like any semi-rational beast she knew a hopeless path when she saw one.

Openly challenging the strongest female fighter in every sense of the word at the Academy could only end one way. A conclusion only further compounded by their environment. Tight, restrictive quarters being Ellie’s battlefield of choice.

Bon Bon knew all of this better than all save for Drake. And with her head not being entirely made of sawdust rightly concluded that her last and only sensible recourse was a petulant sneer. Which she took as vigorously as a besieged city guard to his antiquated deputy spadroon and aptly named Casket rifle.

Ellie returned the candlestick she freshly realized she was holding to its proper place before proceeding to assume the role of mediator. A role at which, she had become supremely adept through years of educational experience. Throughout most of the following makeshift session, she had only one willing participant.

But she wasn't about to let that stymie her efforts to induce reconciliation. As Drake could well attest, she was nothing if not relentless. She set the two girls down on opposite sides of the small round table and insisted that they come up with a topic to begin their conciliatory dialogue.

It went about as well as she expected. Both girls sat silently cross-armed and stared blankly at one another across the table. After a protracted period of dead air, it became abundantly clear that neither one could think of anything to say to the other from which to tease a productive conversation.

So Ellie took the reins. Or at least snapped them.

She patiently suggested that they find some common interests and start to build their conversation from there. This too would prove to be easier said than done. For never in the thirty eight year history of the Academy had there been such a drastic disparity of minds and spirits than those who faced each other that night across the table in the Penirn Academy dorm tower.

Every time one of them uttered a sound, she was immediately discouraged by a scorching look from the opposite party.

Stolen story; please report.

Nevertheless, over the course of the next quarter hour, each learned as much as was needed about her new roommate.

Bon Bon, for instance, learned that Amelia was shy, liked being out in the rain, and was deathly afraid of heights. Not exactly a desirable quality, considering they literally lived above the clouds.

Amelia, on the other hand, had discovered that her roommate was smug, arrogant, vain and had absolutely zero care for and only the barest minimal comprehension of the world that lay beyond the tip of her own nose.

In other words, almost exactly the caricature she’d imagined.

Ellie, meanwhile, was quite pleased with how things were going all things considered. Now that they had finally settled down and were talking like civilized beasts she was free to …

A stroke of memory tolled in her brain. A glance at her watch sent her spinning silently on a heel and ducking off into the night to meet her date. Leaving her catalytic bunkmates to develop their dubious chemistry.

Which, at first, seemed to be holding steady. When Amelia noted Ellie’s absence the two looked at each other, shrugged and continued about their tightrope conversation.

It didn’t take long for their combustive elements to run their course however. Without Ellie’s constant prodding and kindling the novelty of this friendship exercise quickly wore bear down to its bones.

She couldn’t care less about boys or clothes or gossip, or anything else that was in any way of interest to the common teenage girl. And thus she saw no clearing on which to plan her and Bon Bon’s common flag.

What did interest her intensely though was Ellie and Drake’s secret meeting, which could be the only logical reason for Ellie’s disappearance.

The fact that it was a secret alone booted Amelia’s naïve imagination into a wild tailspin down a carnival-ride of a rabbit hole. Thoughts of classified documents, ancient maps and buried treasures flew through her mind like unfastened debris caught up in a tornado’s vortex.

The anticipation of imminent adventure gnawed feverishly at her mind until finally, she could stand it no longer. She had to know what was going on. She glanced cautiously over the table.

Bon Bon for some time had been on a rant about how her last three boyfriend had all left her over some stupid comment or other she'd made regarding her “first and truest lover”.

Aside from that Amelia could only recall his name on account of it being metaphysically burned into her brain.

But Such was Bon Bon’s affection, bounding closely on obsession, for the beast that she remained oblivious as a sleeping faun when Amelia stood up as swiftly and silently as a leaf on a breeze and stealthily made her way to the stairs, being careful not to alert any of the other girls in the dorm who were all amazingly bad at pretending to be asleep.

She crept down the winding stairway and through the long, vacant hallways. This place felt even more colossal when empty of chattering, hormonal throngs. Moving along the desolate causeway in the sole company of her own shadow Amelia knew a strange sort of sympathy for fiction’s great heroes.

Had the young orphan Zephyr felt this infringing frost when infiltrating the Nightmare King’s castle spire alone to steal his scepter?

Had Prince Ivan’s heart felt the sting of doubt when he’d entered the Black Forest to slay the undead wizard Koschei and reclaim his love?

The only light came from Aevon’s two moons. One waxing, the other full. Their pale blue and somber violet blush streamed in through the large apex windows lining the courtside wall. Coating the place in an eerie paint, reminiscent of the last winter ice before the thaw.

Under other circumstances Amelia’s chief worry would have been a disastrous loss of direction. But once again the Flint Pyrate Academy proffered a simple, elegant solution.

Richard Vandomir, the Academy’s Master Mason, had once described his creation as “the cross section of an onion baked into a bagel, impregnated with grape vines for body and with a bit of dark wizardry thrown in for seasoning”.

Concentric rings of bulwarks, firebreaks, corridors and rooms concealed and housed within a dense fortress wall which encircled a ten acre courtyard and bastioned by a quartet of towers at the cardinal compass points.

There was the pair of dorm towers on the Zen and Nadir sides. The front gatehouse and watch tower that led out to the main harbor on the Zen side, and a central clock tower that stood to the Apheler looking Penirward which housed the Headmaster’s office and personal quarters.

Rumors had circulated for decades that Flint, after constructing the Academy with his own resources, converted his remaining wealth into raw minerals, including silver, quicksilver, gemstones, gold and Sundust as well as an army’s worth of other basic supplies and raw materials.

It was said he’d used part of this stockpile to commission the monolithic time watcher and the rest to physically construct it. But any records pertaining to this, if any such formal documentation existed at all, would be securely kept, or in better likelihood hidden, by the Headmaster. And Avlon did not give up such secrets lightly.

Whatever the real facts of the matter were, like the rest of its home base the chrono pillar was truly a marvel of innovative craft and precision engineering. Half again as tall as the already impressive gatehouse. The clock’s hour hand was the length of a mid-range schooner.

Another rumor one that few beasts believed said that the heart of the clock held one of the seven Solomandian Wishing Wells. Vessels of magickal energy so concentrated they were said to house the power to warp reality by sheer proximity.

This was the most frequently cited reason for why the Academy’s peerless crown never needed maintenance and always kept perfect time down to the microsecond.

Just like those harbor and pub storytellers, Amelia knew better than most. If she had been content with fantasy she would have stayed in Amurza. She could have found a mate, settled down, lived a typical, boring life, sustained by her own elbow grease and a steady supplemental regimen of shamanic “love potions” like her mother.

But she was her father’s daughter, as she was here to prove. And thus she wouldn’t be backing down because of a little ghostly ambiance.

She sought out the densest spot of brush she could find and took shelter within. It was half past midnight, and the stars were out in full force. But there was still no sign of Drake or Ellie. This was the only place she could think of that coincided with Drake’s cryptic wording of “enjoy the view”.

She settled back into a more comfortable position. ‘Nothing to do now but wait and watch’ she supposed.

Luckily she didn’t have to wait long. Ten strokes of the minute hand later a pair of cowled figures appeared out of the darkness at either end of the common yard. One pulled behind them a curtain of deep summer green, the other trailed a sheet of stark, clashing jet.

Like actors moving on a predetermined mark, they both stole towards the center at once. Keeping to just the inside edge of the far wall’s shadow. When they met they stood beneath a striped Agape tree whose figure was both beautiful and disturbing in the onsetting nocturnal umber. Like a dancer captured in a glacial tomb its calcified sphere sprawled reaching for stars it could never touch and would never again see.

Safely beneath the lightning tendrils, the occultic pair conversed.

Amelia could hear nothing of what was said but what white, airy reverberations the common yard’s peculiar turbulence carried her way. But she tried regardless and silently cursed herself all the while for not thinking to bring a spyglass.

Of one thing she was absolutely certain. That was that whatever topic had conjured this gathering was the furthest thing in the world from romance.

By what the moons’ light revealed and what of their body language was not obscured by dense weatherproof fabric, shocks of rallying tension and potent urgency warped their aura. The inarticulable scent of an imminent fight met Amelia’s keen epistolic nerves.

She could make out the contours of Drake’s outstretched arm and hand as he passed Ellie what basic deduction informed her was a rolled-up piece of parchment and a brass tube that sparkled like a jewel-laden broach.

The nature of these objects beyond this aeronautical view eluded her, due to her being too far away to discern any further details.

No matter. For the time being Amelia could not have cared less.

Her heart was throttled. Her mind raced.

Maybe it was a treasure map.

Maybe it was some secret code written by an evil secret order of dark wizards.

Maybe it was the key to a forgotten crypt or perhaps a gate that had been made to seal away an ancient eldritch abomination.

Or maybe it was some supernatural riddle that, once solved, would reveal some great and terrible cosmic secret that the very universe itself designed to keep out of mortal minds whatever the cost.

Or maybe she had just been reading way too many story books.

So enthralled was she with all these competing imaginations that Amelia failed to heed the first rule of Pyrate safety.

‘Know your target and what’s behind you.’

“Whatya doing?” Asked an entirely too familiar voice.

Amelia did not need to turn around to know who it was, but biological impulses she wasn’t quick enough to step in front of insisted she do so anyway.

She whipped around, nearly twisting her one foot off at the ankle, to see that Bon Bon had concluded her psychotic dialogue and decided to hoist her unique brand of lunacy back upon the world whether it was willing or not.

“Don't you know it's rude to sneak up on a beast?” Amelia hissed through clenched teeth.

Bon Bon snorted indignantly and crouched down beside her in the bushes. “Don't you know that Prospects aren't supposed to be outside after dark?”

Amelia had predicted this response but had no ready answer. She chose to let the Damoclean silence do the talking for her. But it fell on deaf ears.

“Also,” Bon Bon continued unfettered, “don’t you know it’s rude to just walk out on someone when they’re …”

Amelia’s hands had clasped the Fox’s troublesome mouth before her brain had fully arrived at the problem’s doorstep.

What Bon Bon lacked in social grace she complemented with a complete and utter lack of subtly. She had raised her voice slightly to mock Amelia’s startled remark. In doing so, she had more than likely alerted the two hooded canines to their presence.

Amelia glanced back furtively over her shoulder. Her hopes that the two had not heard were dashed when she saw their ears twitch and their heads swivel beneath their hoods.

Drake and Ellie kissed hastily goodbye and darted back into the opposite shadows from which they’d come.

“Damn it!” Amelia cried after she was sure they were out of earshot. Giving Bon Bon back her voice she shot to her feet and faced the Vixen. This time being at no loss for words.

“Now look what you did!”

Bon Bon stared back, genuinely speechless. Her eyes were wide and shimmering like miniature moon crystals. In their bipolar orbits Amelia could see wheeling her broad range of emotions.

Amelia stared back at the spot where Drake and Ellie had just been standing. After a long moment of furious hesitation, in which she seriously considered slugging Bon Bon, she decided there was no point in hanging around here any longer.

Discouraged, Amelia stood slowly, and with Bon Bon nipping at her heels, she retreated back to their dorm room. Ideally, she wanted to get there before Ellie did. Ellie may have been young, at least for a Pyrate, but a simpleton she was not. With both of her juniors absent from their bunks, she was bound to put the pieces together.

Sure enough, when they got back to the room, there Ellie was, sitting quietly cross-legged on her bunk spot with a dark blue leather-bound book in her hands. Her dark green cloak had been folded and was lying neatly on top of her strong box. Ellie raised her eyes from her book when they entered and smiled at them warmly as though nothing had happened.

“Ah, there you are,” Ellie said with a vagrant smile that might have appeared totally guileless to someone less informed than Amelia.

Deciding it best to let sleeping wyntyrdyrs lie, Amelia chose to project her own innocence with an inverse psychological gambit learned from watching her godfather. “Where’d you go?”

The auric glass filaments gluing Ellie’s composure to her narrative melted. She had taken Amelia’s baited hook and swallowed it.

“I had a quick errand to run. Nothing really worth talking about,” she said with plastic evenness.

Amelia swallowed a bout of telling anamorphisms. Ellie’s honeyed maternal aura was starting to show a sordid tint of pale green.

If Bon Bon knew or cared that anything at all was amiss she was a much greater actress than Amelia gave her credit for.

With perhaps a bit more forceful eagerness than she’d intended, Ellie said, “I see you two have made some progress,” passing her eyes from one silent figure to the other,

The two other girls stared at each other blankly for a long moment. Nothing between them had really changed. Bon Bon’s unexpected appearance in the courtyard notwithstanding, Amelia’s opinion of her new bunkmate remained stubbornly as it had been before.

Nevertheless, to maintain their charade of innocence, Amelia replied cleverly, “I think we’ve learned a lot about each other.”

She readied her boot for a swift indictment of Bon Bon’s shin but the Vixen was already smiling and nodding like a grifter in an art gallery so she stayed the blow. For now.

If Ellie had recognized this pars-specular veil she hid it well. She held onto her simulacra of warmth in a similar way to a compost heap and wordlessly went back about her reading.

For want of something better to do, Bon Bon reclaimed her old seat at the table, while Amelia took to setting out her new stretch bed.

After an hour of quietude, interrupted only once or twice by garbled curses from Amelia’s quarter, the three girls independently, all at once, changed into their sleep garments, retired to their respective bunks, blew out their candles and retreated to the less passively aggressive peace of dreamland.

For a long time, however, sleep eluded her. She lay there awake, staring up at the star cross-bars above. The events of the courtyard meeting kept replaying in an endless loop in her mind.

What had Drake handed her?

What was so important that it necessitated a dark-lit rendezvous?

These were just the Consoles captaining the composite legions of questions that tore into her field like a dragon in a dry library.

As the nocturnal chemicals wove their supple magicks, her eyelids became anchor weights and her body sank into the alyssum clouds. Her tempestuous maelstrom unspooled into a borealis grid of Apophis rapids.

As the last vestiges of daytime thought got swept into the down current she vaguely assessed that if tonight’s events were in any way predictive of things to come, maybe, just maybe, her impulsive leap into this anarchic Abyss might just have had an inkling of wisdom about it after all.