Natalia's alarm clock rang at 6:40 AM. Hinata was already awake, and was doing push-ups.

"Good morning." She said "I was waiting for you to wake up."

"Good morning." Natalia yawned "I'll just change and we can go have breakfast."

Hinata had also changed her clothes, and now was using a different pair of shirt and shorts. Natalia put on a white skirt and a long-sleeved shirt before leaving together with her.

They went to one of the adequate cafeterias, which was indicated by a sign saying “human”. There were signs saying other things as well, but it wasn't unusual for a single cafeteria to specialize in more than one type of client, specially in Arcadia.

Natalia asked for three breads with ham and a strawberry juice, and Hinata asked for a chicken pie. They talked a little while they were eating, and the conversation ended up on the subject of the school's security.

"You mean the director protects this school by herself?" Hinata asked.

"Yes, she never leaves this place." Natalia's expression became thoughtful "So it's weird that she wasn't present for the entrance ceremony."

"Is she that powerful?"

"Mom told me that she is in the same level as the Legendary Heroine." Natalia mentioned.

"Wow..."

"It is necessary, considering how much knowledge and how many talented people are gathered here."

"You're right." Hinata agreed.

"So, the other countries and organizations send spies here instead." Natalia said in the most nonchalant way imaginable.

"Spies?"

"That's right. My sister told me all about that, some very important people got their positions because of good results in their missions here. Although the fact that the instructors here are very good likely contributed to it." Elidee always had interesting gossip to talk about.

"I can believe that." Hinata looked thoughtful "How many spies do you think there are in this school?" She asked.

Natalia thought for a moment "That depends, but I think a third of the students here must be reporting to someone, even if they are not full-blown spies."

Hinata looked around her, then she yelled “Hey!”

Everyone that was in the cafeteria looked at her. Natalia specially.

"Which of you guys are spies?!" she asked.

Natalia couldn't help herself, she laughed. How could Hinata have thought about doing something like that? The girl herself soon joined in on the laughter. The spectators lost interest in them shortly after.

After eating, the two of them went their separate ways to their classes. Hinata was going to Manipulation Magic and Natalia went to History of the 20th Century. Natalia went up some stairs and soon saw that the corridors were smaller, the ceiling was only twice her height when she got to the floor in it the classroom was located.

The classroom for her class was just after a bridge made out of boats. In comparison with the rest of the place, the double doors of the classroom were almost insultingly normal, but it was completely appropriate.

The classroom was exactly like the ones she had seen on TV and games, it was perfect for a history teacher, with a blackboard, bookcases full of reference materials and maps of all the countries in the world on the walls.

However, that only extended to the teacher's part of the room. There were some tables with chairs, but there were also tables without chairs, small tables in the air supported by wires, many screens at the back and a lot of empty space. It was a big room.

The teacher had not arrived yet, so Natalia sat on one of the chairs and started observing her classmates. Most of them were human or close enough, but there were two fairies sitting in the suspended tables, two of the screens were turned on, showing the faces of a giant and a centipede, and finally, in the middle of the empty space there was a water tank on wheels with a human-sized salamander inside it.

It didn't take long for the teacher to come, he seemed as designed for the role of history teacher as his side of the room was. He was a human, had thick computer glasses, several folders under his arm and informal clothes.

He advanced quickly to the blackboard and looked back at the students. He stayed silent for a few seconds and Natalia realized that he was seeing if all students were in attendance. Seemingly satisfied, he turned back to the blackboard and started writing.

“Reinate”. Natalia got confused for a few moments before realizing that this was the teacher's name. Reinate turned back to the class and started talking.

“Good morning, my students. I am Professor Reinate and I'm here to teach you about the history of the 20th century. Can someone answer me about the biggest difference between the study of ancient and recent history?”

The salamander tapped on his tank, attracting attention.

“Then, what is it, Sales?” Reinate asked.

Through tapping, he answered “The difference is that recent history is closer to our perceptions, so we aren't as objective about them.”

“That's right” the professor agreed “But this isn't as simple as you might expect. There are bad parts as well as good parts about our inclusion in the period we are studying.”

“One of the bad parts you have already noticed, it is our lack of objectivity about certain matters. But a good part is that we have context.” He kept going.

“I'll explain, have you already noticed that the study of ancient history frequently seems like a sequence of facts, simple and easy to understand? That's because we don't have the context for those eras, so we can't easily notice that there are innumerable subtle influences, coincidences and discordant voices that help make the confuse fabric of history. However, it is easier to see that in more recent times.” Reinate seemed very passionate about this subject.

“Now, before we begin, let's recapitulate the facts of the 19th century to serve as base.”

And that was how Natalia's first class in Arcadia started. Reinate seemed to think that the most important thing about history was the lack of precise answers, due to the fact that so many different influences act in all points of history. Natalia liked his classes, it reminded her of the style of some of her tutors.

After class, Natalia met with Hinata in the way for the Basic Concepts of Initiation in Magic class. They talked about their fist classes of the year while they went descended by a tunnel, and Natalia noticed that the floor they ended up in was the opposite as before, it was a little bigger than the floor where her dormitory was.

Natalia didn't pay much attention to the surroundings until they got to an hexagonal corridor where every facet had it's own gravity. The two of them walked in opposite facets, just for fun, until the signs directed them to a specific point in the corridor, from where they went into a passage that led to the classroom.

Compared to Natalia's first classroom, that one was acceptably bizarre. It was shaped like a diamond turned on its side, the professor's desk was located in the point of the diamond while the other desks where spread throughout the rest of the structure. Some desks had supports, while others were simply flying in the air, the theme of that room seemed to be wood, because both the walls and the desks were made of that material.

There were also various glass globes in a table close to the teacher, and a door that probably led to a deposit. Speaking of the teacher, he was a ferret, and was watching the students enter one by one.

Exactly at 10:00, the teacher got up, and suddenly an alarm clock appeared next to him. It ringed, attracting the attention of the whole class, before disappearing as suddenly as it had appeared.

After the teacher got the class's attention, a loud-speaker appeared next to him, and when a voice came out of the loud-speaker, Natalia realized that the teacher was using invocations, and now was using the loud-speaker to talk.

“Welcome to your first class. The first thing I want to do is clarify exactly what this class is about.”

He kept going.

“There are six basic Paths in modern magic and I will show you each of them, in order to help you choose which path you want to follow and to teach the basic about the other paths to the people who already choose one. Is there anyone here who knows what are the six paths?”

Many people raised their hands or similar, including Natalia, but the teacher pointed at her, or to be more exact, the ethereal white hand he conjured pointed at her.

“Void Magic, History Magic, Manipulation Magic, Contract Magic, Origin Magic and Permanence Magic.” Natalia answered.

The hand became a circle and the loud-speaker came back:

“That's right. Those are the most official designations and they will be used during this course. However, I will also talk about some of the other names by which they are known.”

He kept going.

“I will start this class with a general vision of the field of magic, so prepare to take notes.”

And the lesson went normally. Most of what he said Natalia had already been told by her mother, but he explained so clearly that she knew she would understand even if that wasn't the case. Natalia looked at the other students once in a while, and many of them were absorbing every word with a look of absolute concentration. That should probably be the first time many of them heard about magic in such an objective manner.

After class, Natalia and Hinata went to the closest cafeteria and talked about the class while they ate.

“Now I remembered” Hinata said “You said you learned two spells of pure magic, or Void Magic like they call it here.”

“That's right.” Natalia said.

“I know one of them is that sight spell, but what is the other one?”

“Ah, that's simple. It's a spell that explosively increases temperature close to my right hand. Mom said it was for personal protection, but it uses a lot of energy, so I've never used it outside of training. Not like I had an opportunity anyway.” Natalia explained.

Stolen novel; please report.

“Ahh. I can see how that spell could be useful. Could you teach it to me one of these days?”

“I can try.”

“Thank you.” Hinata bowed slightly, with a smile.

They finished their meals quickly and separated again. Natalia was going to the Introduction to the Theory of Magic class, while Hinata had one of her instances of Magic Practice.

This time the classroom was on a higher floor. Natalia found a staircase that went up. The fact that instead of being a spiral, the staircase simply inverted itself every few feet was noted by Natalia with no more than a shrug.

Reaching the higher floors, were Natalia could almost reach the ceiling with a jump, she saw a group of little goblins all walking in the same direction. She briefly imagined if there were classes so specific all their members belonged to the same species.

After that, crossing a blue glass corridor and seeing a passage that went directly to a water tube, Natalia reached the classroom.

It was a dark room, it was made of metal and it was a little rectangular. There were many low tables with what seemed to be transparent glass cubes, and the chairs were around those tables.

The teacher was a robot. Not one of those advanced androids that the ultra-rich bought to clean up their houses, he/she looked like a toy robot, only human-sized. The robot had wheels, arms ending in pincers, and several black lines that could be demarcations of possible openings in the body.

The teacher was evidently a very old model, but you wouldn't get that from the state of the body, which was so well preserved and clean that it seemed to have just came out from the factory. Natalia noticed he was the teacher because he was beside the blackboard, shining a red light on a name written on it. Asimov, which should be his(Natalia thought Asimov was a male name) name.

After some more students entered the room, Asimov spun his pincers to attract the attention of the students.

"Welcome, my students." He said "My name is Asimov, and I am your teacher of Introduction to the Theory of Magic."

He waited a moment to see if everyone was paying attention.

"You have chosen this class because you wish to learn more about how magic works, what are its structures, its laws and its capabilities."

"You should have noticed the presence of those tables. They will be used by us to hold several experiments that will give you all an idea of the properties of magic." He stopped for a moment "But before that, does anyone know what is considered the first law of magic?"

Natalia raised her hand, together with several other people. Asimov pointed to a girl who had butterfly wings on her back.

“Ah...” She started, clearly unprepared for the sudden attention. “The bigger the effect is, the more energy needs to be used?”

“Absolutely correct!” The teacher agreed. “Energy is an essential part of magic, and the spells can use various types of energy, but by far the most common is spiritual energy, that which comes from the soul.”

Asimov made a ball of light appear over one of his pincers.

“There's still a lot of things we have yet to discover about magic, and any of you may be the person who discovers those things. Let's start.”

And Asimov got right into it, explaining the Affinity theory, one of the ways of explaining why it was easier to use the other magic schools than it was to use pure magic.

After the class, Natalia went down again, going to the room of Magical Artifacts: History and Training.

The room in question was in one of the floors closest to Natalia's dormitory. It was a lot bigger than most, which was fair, considering that the class had triple the students of the other classes Natalia had been to. The room was divided in two halves. One was an amphitheater in front of a stage with a screen the size of movie screens. The other was a number of tables divided in three floors and with varied sizes.

Some of those floors had to be reached with ladders, others were next to rivers that crossed the air, while others had access “bridges” round and simple, with a slight incline. Each one of those tables also had a small ceramic sphere. The last thing Natalia noticed was that the “theme” of that room was some sort of black rock she didn't know about.

The teacher was on the stage, so the students went to the amphitheater. Natalia used the little time remaining to examine the teacher. She was a short woman with blue hair and such brilliant golden eyes they could be seen from a distance, she was using a multicolored kimono in imperial style from the same country as Hinata, she had rings of many types of jewels on her fingers, and so many varied bracelets that her arms couldn't be seen, even though her dress had no sleeves, and her skin was white to the point of paleness. But the thing that attracted the most attention about her were the two big wings on her back, each of them was longer than she was tall, they were also completely mechanical, seemingly being a combination of various mechanisms and materials. Natalia had a sudden suspicion that those wings had been made inside Arcadia Academy.

Five minutes after the marked time for the beginning of the class, the teacher attracted the students attention by flapping her gigantic wings. Then, she started to talk with a clear and tranquil voice.

"Welcome. My name is Rela and I teach about Magical Artifacts."

She stopped for a moment before continuing.

"This classes will have two parts, first will be the theory, where I will explain to you the history of the Magical Artifacts. Then, in the second half of the class, we will begin the practical part. You will go to the other half of the classroom and train in the use of the Artifacts. Those spheres on the tables will be your training Artifacts, but you can also use your personal Artifacts to train outside of class, and if you don't have any, you can talk to me so I can lend one of the Ceramic Spheres to you. Any questions?"

It looked like everyone had understood, so Rela adjusted the screen to show some images and started to talk about how the Magical Artifacts had been invented. They were very old, from the time of the first magic users in the world, the age of the Celestial Walker. Natalia heard everything with interest, Susan had never been the type to get too hung up on history, so that was all new to her.

When the teacher announced the beginning of the practical part of the lesson, Natalia went to one of the tables and obeyed Rela's instructions of trying to make her sphere move through the table. She had a little easier time at the start than most, because of her prior experience with the Eye of Light, but soon she was in the same position as the rest of the class, making a lot of effort for every inch the sphere moved. Obviously, there were some people who were doing better, and some even managed to make the sphere levitate or change form. But Natalia had fun the entire time she was working hard in the class, and the time went by fast.

After that, Natalia went to eat in one of the cafeterias before heading back to her room, Hinata was there, working on some mathematics questions she got as homework. Natalia didn't disturb her, preferring to use that time to organize better her school materials and surf on the internet, while listening to music on headphones.

Hinata finished her homework quickly and they talked a little about their classes of that day. However, soon the topic changed to their personal life. Natalia didn't have a lot to talk about, having spent most of her life inside her house and being taught by tutors through the internet. On the other hand, she got very interested on Hinata's story, which started with:

"Well, I have nine older brothers and sisters."

Hinata explained that her family had a tradition of producing really important people for the community of São Lourenço, and that two of her sisters and one of her brothers had been combat mages that reached important positions on the police and diplomatic corps, and had made several very unsubtle indications about where her talents for combat could be better utilized. Natalia understood that very well.

At 10:30 PM, Natalia left the room and went for her first lesson of Psionics.

The Psionics classroom was relatively normal, having the same basic arrangement of chairs, empty space and screens as the History classroom. It also didn't appear to have a specific theme, having white tiles and granite walls. The only thing that differed was the gigantic whiteboard in one of the sides of the room, that was longer than most cinema screens.

The teacher, a perfectly normal human with a beret on his head, was next to that board, and next to him was a muscular humanoid of gray skin, black hair and prominent fangs, that Natalia recognized as an ogre. Elidee had talked a lot about ogres with her. Really a lot.

The teacher, who called himself Marcos, made the requisite initial speech about his class. He said that it would focus on determining what mental abilities each student had. He said that some of them would be better at blocking, others would be better at listening and others still would be better at invading. He also introduced the ogre as Arto, his monitor. Any psionic with the ability to invade had to have a monitor for supervision. That was something Natalia knew well, given Aleksei's abilities. His monitor was a pretty nice woman.

After that, Marcos went over some basic concepts and gave some preliminary tests, as well as giving out basic exercises. He also asked which of them had experience, and several students, including Natalia, raised their hands. She was the first person he called to demonstrate, and the skills in mind shielding she had developed during Aleksei's early childhood managed to impress him.

The class was tiring, and when she came back to her room, Natalia fell asleep just as soon as she put her head on the pillow.