Being in the city always reminded Adrian what everyone back home meant when they said Satum was a "small town". Being given a front row seat to everything, he was able to take the chance to fully soak in the sheer scale of Tralis City's vibrant bustling atmosphere and the high-rise buildings that towered over it all. Each and every building they passed, no matter what size, seemed to hold an entire world of things to do.
“Never been in the capital before?” The chauffeur asked.
“Only a few times when I was younger," Adrian responded, his eyes still glued to the outdoors.
The car stopped at a traffic light in front of them, shining bright red. Adrian fixed his gaze towards a park where a large bronze statue stood on a stone platform right in the centre. People of different ages, races and paths of life gathered together, smiling, laughing and posing for pictures in front of the depiction of a man with his fist held high, as if he were declaring a grand victory to the world. It was a statue that was built in honour of his dad.
“Amazing isn’t it?" The chauffeur called, "Even sixteen years after your father’s retirement, this statue is one of the city’s most popular landmarks.”
Adrian had etched that view into his brain before, but that was on one of his visits before he started training. The statue’s meaning had only become bigger now. To him, and so many others from the looks of it. He made sure to etch the view, and that meaning, into his memory again. The beeping traffic lights meant moving away from the scenery, and even though it wasn’t in view anymore, he found his mind silently stuck on that statue for the rest of the journey, smiling and trembling at the same time.
“Last big turn now,” The chauffeur said after a while, “Welcome to Tralis West Branch Spirit Academy. One of the City’s two schools for aspiring spirit hunters such as yourself.” A large metal gate stood between them and the private land where the school’s main building sat off in the distance. Driving up the path on the grounds themselves wasn’t all that interesting. There wasn’t much going on besides some flowers and other greenery. The school itself looked like any other normal one, but was considerably smaller in comparison, being only two floors tall. “There’s an intercom next to the door. Just go up there and tell the lady on the other end your name. She’ll provide you with your next instructions.”
“Will do," Adrian said, climbing out of the car, "thanks for the ride!" He waved the chauffeur off as he drove away and at the same time, another car, this time pearly white, drove up the path towards him.
Different colour. Is it not one of the school’s?
A hooded girl emerged from the front passenger seat. Her face was barely visible. The only thing he caught a glimpse of was some curly brown hair hanging out the front of her hood. He lifted his hand, intending to say hi, but before the first breath left his mouth, she had turned back to her car. She took some time to give a meek wave towards whoever was in the driver's seat and started walking back, still covering her face slightly.
"Is that one of the school’s cars too?" Adrian asked. She just barely turned in his direction and quickly shook her head in response. "Oh… It looked pretty sick. Does your family own it?" This time she nodded. He wondered if he was bothering her, perhaps.
When you wanna continue the convo you normally look at the other person, right? Was I raised weird?
It took a few seconds, but she eventually removed her hood and did just that. She had a small scar, running downwards underneath her right eye and was also trying super hard to make a face that Adrian was only sixty percent sure was meant to be a smile.
"I, um... Do you wanna know more… about cars?" She spoke with a shaky voice. As if she was being held at gunpoint to speak to him.
“Oh, uh, go ahead-”
"They say that sixty million cars are produced... Every year I mean."
Adrian somehow found himself genuinely waiting for the next fact after that, but no. She stood there twiddling her thumbs, waiting for his response. He was stunned that he even managed to get caught up in whatever was going on, but he knew the responsibility of shifting this interaction into one with any hint of normalcy now rested on him.
"Well, damn. That's kinda a lot… Uh, anyways, you wanna go inside?"
He started walking towards the school’s sliding double doors, and muttering something under her breath, the girl followed him. "T-that didn't work at all... Stupid Jessie..." Whatever it was, Adrian decided not to pry.
A few seconds after pressing the button, some static could be heard and then a woman's voice came through.
"Welcome to the West Branch Spirit Academy! Could you give me your full name?"
Adrian stated his full name and the girl froze for a second upon hearing it. Thinking she had realised who he was, he casually indicated towards the mic for her to say her name too. Having people figure out he was related to William Hunter wasn't something he was worried about. It was more of an inevitability.
She awkwardly leaned closer to the speaker and said her name. "I-Isabelle Ambers, ma'am."
Adrian's eyes widened. Ambers. In his studies before joining the academy, he'd come across that name before. There were two families within the spirit hunting world that were undisputedly the most powerful, both when it came to the strength of their members and their political influence. The Donovans and the Ambers. It was common knowledge that the head of the Ambers family had two daughters, but across all the articles he had read, not one picture of either had ever shown up. In and of itself, that wasn’t too surprising to him. His parents had also decided to keep his face out of the media too. But still, next to him at that moment was someone a good few classes above him in the societal hierarchy but her weird first impression couldn't have been any more misleading!
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Soon after, the lady on the intercom opened the door for them both and they walked through to the reception area, where her desk was. There was another door at the opposite end of the room. "Go on through and turn right," she said, "You'll find seats labelled with your names on them in the small auditorium. It's the last door in the hall to your left." They thanked her and began making their way through the school's neatly decorated, beige coded hallway.
"...So, you're an Ambers?" Adrian asked after a while.
"O-oh, yeah." She didn't seem all too enthralled saying this but sprung back to life not even a second later, "And your dad is… Oh, actually, do you mind? Like, when people bring attention to it?"
A question he figured he'd probably be asked eventually. Of course, he had a few nerves about his whole "position" as the son of William Hunter, but he kept a nonchalant attitude in his response. "I mean, It's not that deep," he said, turning to face her, "How about you? Do you mind the attention on your end?"
She slowly turned back to the way they were walking. "Hmm... I've never really... I dunno."
He wanted to ask more about her family, but based on her response, decided he probably shouldn't. Instead, he scanned around the school's interior. On the walls, photos of previous students were hung up from different year groups, some even dating back to the eighties. Above, almost every door was labelled with what he was sure were meant to be motivational quotes in bold writing.
“Get stronger!” one read.
“Hunt down your future!” read another.
And finally above the auditorium door they were about to enter, “Get amped!”
Adrian squinted his eyes at the sign, unimpressed. “Man, how old do they think we are? Their pen game is kinda iffy, don’t you think?"
Isabelle wasn’t even looking at the sign. She had turned away and was covering her mouth while her shoulders bounced up and down. She quickly cleared her throat and composed herself. “They aren’t funny at all.”
“...Were you laughing at them or with them?”
“I-I didn’t.”
He cracked a smile and shook his head, “Whatever you say."
Try as he might, he couldn’t keep his calm persona on for much longer. Even as he placed his hands on the handles, his heart was almost pounding out of his chest with excitement. Opening the door itself, however, was a different story. He wasn’t quite sure what to call the emotion he felt once he saw what was going on in there, but also wasn’t sure he could have put a label on it if he tried.
"I am NOT the one you wanna be getting physical with, you hear me!?" On the left side of the room, a girl in a blonde ponytail was towering over another girl who was on the floor, tightly clutching her head. Small sparks of flames were sporadically popping out from her fists, making sounds akin to that of a firecracker. There was also a shorter brunette girl hiding behind her, on the verge of tears.
The girl on the floor slammed the ground and lifted herself up. "My business is with her!" She pointed at the short girl. "Keep. Out. Of. It!"
There was a devilish smirk on the blonde girl’s face as she said, “Try touch her again, bitch. See what happens.”
Everybody else was either calling for the conflict to stop, completely tuned out, or enjoying it a little too much. Nobody even noticed that Adrian and Isabelle had walked in. Looking around the rest of the room, he first took note of the sign on the wall behind the fight. "West Branch students," it read. The other side of the room had an almost identical one that read "East Branch students." Name tags were taped to the desks and after a bit of counting he determined that there were gonna be just six students in each school. His and Isabelle's tags were on the west branch side, and luckily the furthest from the ongoing argument.
Next to Isabelle's name tag was a dishevelled looking boy with dead eyes, sitting sideways on his seat and flipping through pages in a notebook, acting as if two girls weren’t screaming cuss words at each other. In fact, his thousand mile stare made it seem more probable that his brain just didn't have the capacity to process anything at all. Closely followed by Isabelle, Adrian walked over and side-eyed the boy's name tag before taking his own seat. Hope you get the rest you need soon, Alex, he thought to himself.
The seats were almost unnaturally comfy, but the awkwardness of watching a fight he had zero stakes in kind of soiled that relaxing feeling. All there was now was the loud threats of physical violence bouncing off the walls. Any left over anxiety from that entire morning was completely gone by this point, but he definitely wasn't expecting its comeback to be so soon.
He sensed something slowly growing from the doorway. A quiet but undeniably strong presence that made his body tense up, and forced the immediate attention of his sixth sense. Turning back, he saw a tall man with a black eyepatch covering his left eye, assessing the situation and slowly shaking his head. Underneath his feet were two menacing-looking black clouds of spirit energy. The sources of the sudden atmosphere switch. They grew for a split second, and in the next instant, there was a loud whoosh sound, and the man vanished. A faint trail of black mist followed the path his jump took, melting into thin air not long after.
Everyone began scrambling, trying to understand what none of them could have possibly seen. It had to have been less than two seconds. In that time alone, the man had gone from standing in the doorway to now holding the blonde girl's fist in place, literal inches away from it making impact. She stumbled backwards and caught herself on the desk behind her, taken aback by his sudden appearance.
"Please. It's the first day," he said, helping the other girl to her feet, "Things are only going to get more difficult from here, so let's all try our best to get along, alright?"
He motioned his hand towards the seats and both the blonde and short brunette girl slowly moved to go sit down without a word. Adrian peered over to their name tags before they sat down. The blonde girl was called Melanie, and the short, crying girl, Lyla. The other girl scoffed before fixing her hair up and stomping back to the right side of the room. They each had expressions ranging from frustrated to relieved on their faces.
"Y'know what?" Adrian whispered to Isabelle, "Somehow me and you might just be the most normal people here."
"T-that doesn't sound fun."
They both took a long sigh and looked at the man as he jogged down the stairs to take his position at the front. "We're a bit pressed for time, so I'll make this brief," he said, "First off, my name is Wayne Harrows. I'm the teacher here at the west branch. It's nice to finally get to meet you all.”