Mortimer nodded approvingly, “I’d hoped that would be your answer. Well then, let's work on getting you situated with what your life is going to be like going forward. To introduce myself again properly, I’m Commander Mortimer, Head Director of the NSA.”
He stood up from where he was behind his desk and walked around it heading towards the door.
“If you would follow me, I’ll take you to your instructor. They’ll have a better idea of what you’re going to be doing day to day than I will since they’re going to be the ones telling you what to do.”
I nodded and stood up to follow him.
“So as you’ve seen, we have our training grounds for various different purposes. Individual training, skill training, obstacle courses, team battles, it’s hidden behind one of the buildings, but we have a fortress assault as well. We also have classrooms for teaching various subjects. Math, literature, history, alchemy, magical application, among other things.
“We expect our operatives to have a fundamental understanding of every subject, so you’ll probably end up learning a bit about history, and maybe a couple of other subjects you know little about based on your written tests. But we don’t expect expert-level proficiency. For example, you aced the maths portion of your test, the way you wrote things down and explained them was… a little strange, but they worked. You have above and beyond knowledge of what we’d expect.”
So basically it was college all over again. I could test out of classes if I was smart enough, in this case, though I failed to do so in several of the areas. I didn’t really know any of the history and I could somewhat infer the answers on the alchemy and magical applications courses, but I didn’t have a true understanding of what was happening.
Magical applications have been the understanding of magic and how it interacts with the real world. So a fantasy twist on science. Kind of like; does fire created with mana still burn up oxygen sort of thing. Coincidentally the answer to that is no. But fires subsequently created by magic fire do.
“On top of learning through these courses, you’ll be put with a squad, as I’m sure you’re aware. You’ll do team-building exercises with them until the full group is comfortable. You’ll train for the course of a couple of months before being sent out on your first mission. Every time you complete a mission you’ll return back here, barring extenuating circumstances, to receive your next orders. That’s a rough overview of what’s going to happen, if you have any questions I’d save them for your instructor at this time.”
I nodded silently, taking time to internalize the information he had just given me. A few months to get a full fundamental understanding of history? Was that world history or national? What was the level of proficiency they expected me to have with alchemy as well? I wasn’t particularly interested in brewing potions. I was interested in the magical applications lessons though.
I’d kind of wanted to go to a school while I was in this world to learn more about magic and stuff, this was a good opportunity to essentially learn all of this for free. I was actually probably going to be paid for it.
Well, I was fine with that all things considered.
We left the admin building we were in, picked up a guard entourage on our way out, and made our way to the other side of the massive compound, where all the training areas were.
I was led through the training building again with the dozens of massive training rooms inside. Mortimer stopped at one of the doors and inside I saw a familiar woman training around two dozen individuals.
Katherine walked around the students who were paired off and sparring with each other. As she walked around them she idly corrected postures or gave some words of advice. The training here seemed a lot more laidback than what she was doing the other day when I had sparred with her.
Mortimer walked on in like he owned the place.
…
In a way, I guess he did.
“Katherine,” He stated curtly.
Katherine turned around and upon noticing Mortimer gave him a quick salute as she walked over to him.
“Commander,” she reciprocated his curt greetment, not unfriendly, just businesslike.
She glanced at me, “I see you’ve brought the elf back.”
Mortimer nodded, “He has agreed to join the NSA, as such he’s now under your direct care. He’ll need the usual for new recruits, in addition to being attached to a squad and signed up for provisionary courses in his subpar scores from his assessment. I’ll let you handle this from now on.”
Katherine gave another salute as Mortimer turned around with his entourage, assumedly to go back to his office and keep working.
I turned to look back at Katherine who was looking at me. I held her gaze levelly. Her eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly as we stared at each other.
She then whipped around, “I didn’t say stop!” She roared at the trainees who had been looking at us.
Katherine's voice startled them back into action and they continued where they had left off. Katherine then turned back to look at me with a slight sigh.
“Alright, we don’t have you fully assessed for a squad just yet. Mainly because someone misplaced the roster so now we’re having to completely restructure it by hand. In the meantime, we can get you set up in the dormitory and collect all the things you’ll need for your courses. Any questions?”
“The only immediate one I have is how I’d receive my pay. I wasn’t under the impression that this was a volunteer position so I’m assuming I’d receive wages.”
Katherine nodded, “We’ll open an account in your name, you’ll access it with your employee number once you receive that. Which should be later today, if you don’t get it before the end of the day come find me and I’ll finish sorting it out.”
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I nodded, “Understood, I have no further questions for the moment.”
“Very well, follow me then. Kilran!” She yelled over her shoulder.
“Yes ma’am?”
“You’re in charge until I come back, keep this group in line! If I come back and you all are screwing around again I’m going to make you run 100 laps.”
“Yes ma’am!”
With that, she led me out of the room. Instead of heading outside, we headed further into the building.
“So the dorms are just behind this building, there’s an exit on the backside of this building so you don’t have to walk all the way around, but the faculty rooms are also kept in this building instead of over in the admin building. Thankfully someone had the foresight to keep everything that needed to be centralized around this one area.”
We made our way through the building, the hallways were rather busy as people rushed back and forth to various locations. It didn’t take us long to make it to the faculty section Katherine had been talking about.
She had me wait outside as she went in. As I waited I got a lot of strange looks from people walking by, but none of them lingered. It took nearly thirty minutes before Katherine came back out. She had several large books. They were ominously similar to textbooks from Earth. Which, upon looking at the titles on the cover, I determined what they actually were.
World History, Alchemical Understanding, and Beginners Magical Application.
The titles were terribly boring. I barely managed to suppress a sigh as I took the books and held them under one arm. Katherine immediately began walking off as she started talking again.
“All your learning courses will be held in this building. Under the front cover of your history book is a slip that shows what rooms your classes are in and what time they’ll be held. Room numbers are pretty simple. This is the first floor, one floor up is the second, and the top floor is the third. The first number is the floor, the next three are the room number. Odds on left, evens on right.”
As she spoke she led me out of the building and towards what I assumed was the dormitory, “You won’t have any classes this week, they’ll start next week. You’re a little early in being recruited compared to when we actually bring in people, but that’s fine. I would take the time to familiarize myself with the area. Learn your way around the buildings and such.
“The dorm building has a cafeteria in it, food is pretty cheap and directly subtracted from your wages, so you technically don’t need to worry about carrying money for it. You’re also free to use any of the training facilities at any time. People are up all day long, and there are no designated schedules, really.
“For now I’m taking you to your dorm, you’ll have it to yourself, but you’ll probably end up sharing it with someone when we bring in more recruits for the initial training period. If you need to you can request to switch rooms if you and your roommate don’t get along. But only request that if there are actually irreconcilable differences, not for something asinine like ‘they prefer red instead of blue’ kind of crap. As for outfits, you’ll receive them before your first assignment. Although I think that’ll be less of a concern for you. The armor is well made and slightly enchanted, but the baseline stuff doesn’t really hold up to what you can make with that skill of yours.”
We made our way into the dorm building, climbed up some stairs to the second floor, and walked through the hallways before eventually stopping at a door while she explained everything that I needed to know.
“But I think that just about covers it, if you have any questions you can direct them to any of the faculty, or more likely myself. I have an office in the building we were just in, the one we stopped by earlier. I’m usually there in the hours approaching sundown to midnight. So you’ll be able to find me there. Anyway, this is your room. If you had any stuff with you I’d suggest this is where you’d leave it. But obviously, you don’t have anything, in the meantime you can leave your books in there. Any questions?”
I shook my head, “Not at the moment.”
Katherine just nodded and took another moment to look at me for a moment, “Alright then, I need to get back to that class. As I said, if you have any questions you know where to find me and at what times.”
With that she turned around on her heel and walked away, leaving me to my thoughts.
With a slight shrug, I entered my room and closed the door behind me. Unsurprisingly it was empty aside from two beds arranged on opposite ends of the room. The room itself was symmetrical if you didn’t account for the doorway being off-center.
Which bothered me slightly. How hard would it have been for them to just make sure everything lined up nice and neat?
But it was just a large rectangle. It was connected to the outside wall of the building and therefore had a nicely sized window in the middle of the wall to allow for some natural lighting. It would be nice if I ever decided to spend time here so I wouldn’t need something funky like a lamp or a torch just to be able to see in my own room.
That’s something they never really talk about in medieval fiction. A lot of rooms are dark. Simply because they’re inside, with solid stone walls to prevent light from getting in, and don’t have windows. That means when you close the door, it’s pitch black. Not even my enhanced senses really made up for the fact that there was zero lighting.
Maybe I’d get a skill or something eventually that would alleviate that issue, but for now, it was something I needed to account for.
I set down my books on the bed closest to the door. There was a small dresser at the foot of each bed with four drawers on it. Opening them up revealed them to be empty, not that I actually expected there to be anything inside of them.
There were two desks arranged in front of the window assumedly for doing work in the confines of the room. But I had to assume there were also designated study areas as well. Hopefully a library? Somewhere where I could look stuff up… if I ever had a reason to, I guess. Right now I couldn’t think of a reason I’d go there other than pure curiosity.
I walked over to the desk closest to the bed I had chosen and placed my books down taking a moment to look at them again. I’d take time to look through them later perhaps. I should spend a little bit of time getting used to finding my way around.
Glancing down at the slip of paper in my hand again I took note of the classrooms and the days of the week I’d be taking the classes.
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I’d be taking a four-hour course in magical application.
That was a lot more extensive than I thought it was going to be. I was honestly just expecting one-hour courses, but this was a full college primer designed to fit a full semester into a quarter of the time.
On the remaining days of the week, I’d be handling my other two courses, World History and Alchemical Understanding. These ones were both two hours each. Not that I particularly minded, I wasn’t necessarily interested in history as a subject even for this world. Sure there was some cool stuff to learn about and it was a good subject to learn, I just didn’t get fired up to learn about it.
Alchemy was a little more interesting to learn, but I was never partial to brewing potions and whatnot. It always just seemed a little… mundane.
Sure sure, the whole ‘bottle fame, brew glory, stopper death.’ Everyone’s heard it before. Just not for me I guess.
I let out a small sigh at the feeling of nostalgia I was getting. It reminded me of my college days before I dropped out. It did how it do.
Well, better get to looking around the ‘campus’ then.