AFTER ANOTHER hard week of staring at the wall opposite while a teacher droned on about various subjects according to their chosen discipline, the first year girls at Miss Plazenby's were ready for a change of pace and the year head knew this well enough, having had charge of such creatures over a good many years.
"Girls!" she said, gathering them from the various rooms they had fled when dismissed. "A special treat has been arranged for you all in the Wisdom District of Cherryball Flats."
"Is that the one just off Stupid Street?" Meresinth asked, raising her hand instantaneously. There was a cackle from among the girls.
"No, it is not. Goodness child, whatever map have you been consulting on your locator?" She took a step forward to seek answers.
"Sorry Miss," the mischievous Arbornica girl quickly deflected such an inspection. "Misread it. I meant Spud Street in the Allotment Ward."
"Nifty save," Anthera whispered through the side of her mouth.
"Survival," Meresinth whispered back. "It's one of the survival skills necessary to survive in Arbornica where only survivors thrive."
"That and insect spray," Pirouette interjected, having overheard a part of this muttered conversation.
Meanwhile the year head had moved on from the facetious interruption with all its intrusive vowels in order to deliver her good news.
"We are going to attend a thrilling exhibition currently taking place in the Museum of Past and Forgotten Things just off Orange Parade. Now you may have visited the place before and do not remember doing so, but this time I can assure you this experience will stay with you for a lifetime, even to future generations if you so happen to participate in such things."
"What is the exhibition called?" the Octora girl Sharshua Dragonsong asked politely and then disappeared behind others in attempt to avoid detection, like a sister Tinker in training.
"'Visual Trickery, or Seeing is Disbelieving,'" the mistress said grandly as if seeking customers outside a shop selling marvels.
"That should be interesting," Anthera said, adjusting her spectacles so they flashed in the sunlight coming through a corridor window.
"Trickery," Vetta began nervously.
"Is one of the five thousand wellsprings of financial success," Meresinth jumped in as the mistress, full of her own excitement at attending the odd sounding exhibition, led the girls to a waiting vehicle for the short trip down the mountainside into the hustle and bustle and even more hustle of Cherryball Flats.
Vetta merely sighed, pondering how best to deal with such matters without herself getting confused. Perceptions were precious. To deflect from reality was a scary thought, like missing a stair in darkness.
***
THE MUSEUM OF PAST and Forgotten Things was well-named of course. It was one of those quiet institutions that always seemed to sit there on a busy street corner with people milling around outside. Yet no one was ever spotted climbing the five wide stone steps to enter through the dark glass doors.
Thus it was a surprise to spectators when a large vehicle halted next to the entrance and a group of chattering girls in uniform poured out to race to the uppermost step. The twins from Nordeyer were first as usual, tripping Dolly Bloomen to ensure victory.
"Let us in! Let us in!" they shrieked, banging on the doors. "We hunger for memory loss."
"Hush children," the mistress said, hurrying forward to organise her charges who bunched up on the walkway as the sensation dissipated. Everyone could see it was just a school trip and that none of the participants were there willingly the poor things so the passersby resumed doing just that, passing by.
"Everyone here? Good. Let us enter. No need to pay anything Vetta. Education is free."
The Poldorama girl replaced her purse in her clutchbag and sighed happily at the thought. Then frowned, remembering they were to be entertained to an exhibition of visual trickery.
"You have a trampoline face," Meresinth observed as the doors opened and everyone shuffled inside where darkness replaced bright sunlight until their eyes got accustomed to the lower light level.
"A trampoline face?" Vetta said and smiled at this odd comparison.
"Moods going up and down like on a trampoline."
"Everything is so complex here. Papa always said simplicity is a truer path for there is less distraction to lead one astray." Then she screamed. A few other girls decided to do the same.
"Pay attention girls," the mistress said in calming tones as a gruesome spidery thing descended from the ceiling only to flatten out into a harmless chandelier shadow. She looked up at the swaying object. "Not sure that is part of the exhibition, but you can see what treats await us in the exhibition hall," she added gleefully.
"Excellent," the Evernight girl said, fluffing her enormous quantity of hair out in pleased anticipation at such scary exhibits.
"Careful you don't become a part of it," her dorm mate Pinky Ponsonby warned tartly, smoothing out her own pink hair more carefully after such an unsettling fright. "If the exhibitor catches a glimpse of you he won't want you to leave."
"Sounds great. Jumping out at visitors to the museum and giving them a scare seems a brilliant activity." Everyone already knew this was one of Danique Ferale's favourite hobbies.
The laughter that followed this died down as the main exhibition hall doors opened and the girls entered an intriguingly arranged space which looked larger on the inside than the entire building did on the outside.
"We have been transported to another dimension," Sharshua said and then walked into a wall that looked a little like a corridor to somewhere interesting. "Ouch," she added.
"That sort of deception is child's play," the huffy redhead Bubbles Bannatyne said indignantly as she sidled around what looked like a bottomless pit until Vetta wandered across it, pausing right in the middle. She looked as if she was floating on air.
"Look. The Poldorama girl can fly," someone said.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Vetta looked down and saw the distorted perspective at her feet.
"This is painted floor tiles," she said casually. "It has been very nicely done."
"Incoming!" Bubbles shouted and at least three other girls ducked with her as a great scythe hurtled down from above.
"Projection," Anthera declared, not moving as the thing passed right through her. Her glasses flashed in the change of light. "I can see the source," she added smugly.
Vetta also had not moved.
"To kill or maim visitors to the museum would be against the principles of any educational system," she said, blinking as the scythe reached the top of its swing before making another dip. However it disappeared before reaching the girls as if shamed into impotence.
"Still," Danique said, staring at the bespectacled girl from Meditia, "I half expect you to, you know, go two different ways at once, eventually."
"Attention girls," the mistress said, mopping her brow a moment, "these little tricks are merely meant to sharpen the mind, broaden perceptions and teach us all to keep a careful eye out. The real exhibition I can assure you is much more subtle and challenging. Mouse!"
There was a general shuffle to one side as a small dark thing scurried across the floor.
"Aw, it's so cute," Petal Mara said, bending down as it ran past her.
"It's not real," Bubbles huffed sternly. "Just another trick."
"Ow, it bit me," came the reply of Petal as the mouse, nonplussed by being handled, gave her finger a nip and then departed between a couple of incongruous exhibits no one could quite figure out the significance of in the clever lighting of the room.
"It's not real," Pinky Ponsonby said with a laugh. "Fake plaster?" and she handed the girl from Greenvale an antiseptic pad to seal the wound.
***
EVERYONE SEEMED to be getting into the spirit of the thing, the mistress noted with pleasure, as various odd little sights changed while the group sauntered along the carpet towards a brighter room that seemed to have mobile light displays within.
"Ah, a nightclub exhibition," Esper said as they entered.
"Are we expected to dance? I hear no music," Dolly Bloomen declared and was about to attempt some rhythmic star jumps when a flickering screen attracted everyone's attention.
"Welcome," a virtual figure said, some strange pointy-chinned individual in oval-shaped dark glasses that wound around a triangular head. A shock of pale hair flamed up behind the man's ears and he did everything he could to look like a severely insane scientist about to conduct live experiments on foolish schoolgirls now trapped in his laboratory.
"Hello," Vetta said politely. "I'm Vetta Mindal from the Blessed Hub of Poldorama."
There was some cackling from among the girls and even the mistress stifled a snigger.
"It's a recording you buffoon," Pirouette said, giving the girl a nudge.
Vetta turned to her.
"Yet still, being polite to this person, even if they are virtual, is a kindness," she said. "Papa says mindfulness even in the absence of others allows the feelings to follow a sure path all the time."
"Besides," Petal Mara added softly, "we still speak kindly to the spirit of those who have passed, even though they are no longer with us," remembering her grandmother who had died just before she started at Miss Plazenby's.
"Well, I hope everyone was listening to what Professor Saurel was telling us about the way our minds trick our perceptions due to pre-conceived notions implanted in us by the demands of society," the mistress said quickly.
"Yes miss," came an unconvincing chorus of replies.
"Who's Professor Saurel?" someone asked. "The crazy exhibitator who dreamed up all this nonsense?"
"Who said that?" the mistress responded sternly.
"Could have been anyone," Meresinth replied from a position very different from that where the irreverent question had been just asked.
"Ahem. Professor Saurel is merely the mouthpiece of the artist who planned this exhibit. The true identity of the individual has been concealed to add a layer of mystery to proceedings," the mistress explained. "What the virtual professor says is part of the deception."
"Then perhaps we may be too?" Sharshua Dragonsong said with a gasp of self-doubt.
"Huh?"
"If," the mischievous Meresinth jumped in eagerly, "the identity of the exhibitator person is unknown, how do we know it's not one of us?"
"Huh?"
Everyone looked at everyone else then, like in a murder mystery, trying to figure out the guilty individual among them.
"Well, it's not me," Pirouette Wrangely pointed out with a hand flutter. "I would rather not be associated with such tasteless jokings we appear to be surrounded by." She was looking at a floating screen as she spoke in which text scrolled so rapidly that patterns formed, then it juddered and words briefly froze, making sentences that bore no resemblance to the actual source text. "I mean, who speed reads nowadays when there are info snacks available at all reliable on-grid outlets?"
Sharshua had begun raising her hand slowly as the girl from Perfecta was speaking but carefully lowered it again before anyone noticed.
"It could be though," Meresinth pursued. "Your words might be a deception."
"How do we know if we are even here?" Dolly Bloomen burst forth, missing sunshine like crazy just then. Darkness was as abhorrent to her as to a sun-loving flower. Thankfully at night time she did not miss it so much by simply falling instantly to sleep only to awake with the dawn fully ready to consume energy for all of the daylight hours available.
"What is reality?" Meresinth added more confusion to the mix.
"Designer style," Pinky Ponsonby, also from Perfecta, added what she felt to be the obvious answer to the Arbornica girl's philosophical question.
All the while this fraying of the fabric of time and space was going on among the first years, with the mistress watching on with mixed feelings of delight and horror, Vetta Mindal looked around her placidly, noting odd things here and there but otherwise not very much moved by her surroundings. To her Frangea and especially Cherryball Flats contained so much novelty that what was real and what mere illusion blurred to her perceptions.
"Miss," she said, pointing at a curious display of mathematical formulas that glided slowly across a dark wall in symbols of gold. "What is this meant to do?"
The mistress looked at the algebraic lines and frowned.
"I think, my child, it refers to language, how ideas can be expressed in manifold ways," she said uncertainly, seeking guidance from her exhibition notes.
"Is that a nine or a zero?" Vetta asked, her finger jabbing at a digit as it marched along with other symbols.
"It can be either," a voice sounded next to her ear. It was Sharshua Dragonsong again. "I recognise some of the text," the Octora girl said. "Theories on gravitation and grid tension, flat planes and curved space. A fascinating conflict of ideas that has been going on for a thousand years I think."
"There is a battle between numbers?" Vetta said, horrified.
"On one side of an equals sign there can be a disparity," the other girl said, "and that creates inequality."
"Quite right," Pirouette jumped in. She often leant an ear to other people's conversations, hoping they might be talking about her in an admiring way. "Perfecta is the land that invented inequality, for it contains a society very much of a superior nature. If we were all on the same level where would be the opportunity of looking down on others?"
"Such feelings seem ungenerous," Vetta stuttered with worry at contradicting a dorm mate but the language used was too harsh for her just then. "Though you express what you believe to be right very nicely." This was an attempt to balance the equation in her own way.
There was a cackle from the shadows where the Evernight girl loomed, waiting her moment to jump out and startle someone but the noise gave her away and she sullenly reappeared.
"All I can see," Danique said, waving her arms this way and that, "is a deliberate attempt to throw doubt on what everyone believes. And I don't care. We are all going to die sooner or later, and then the confusion will end."
This effectively brought the pleasant afternoon's school trip to a conclusion and the mistress thought it was time to usher her charges back out onto the street and into the waiting vehicle. She knew she had one seriously long and complex report to write up for Miss Plazenby later as well as a few night watches to undertake for a week or two at least until she was sure the effects of the 'Seeing is Disbelieving' exhibition had fully worn off.
On the journey back Bubbles Bannatyne was mulling things over.
"How," she said to her dorm mate from Octora, "could both nine and zero be right? I don't get it."
Sharshua squinted a moment as she sucked upon a pencil, the ones from Octora being flavoured for just such an occasion, and then she smiled.
"Alternate realities," she said.