A holiday, a gap year really, before throwing yourself into the long years of university study. Was such a thing really too much to ask? Having the desire to travel. To see the sights, smell the scents and taste the flavours of a world so rich and vibrant. Was it so selfish?
Eighteen year old Nina Sterling had just finished with her compulsory education and already, her dream of seeing the world felt out of her reach. As soon as she had returned home, the ink not yet dry on her high school diploma, her mother had plied her with a veritable mountain of academic brochures, insisting she hurry up and make a decision, before resuming her study in order to prepare for the required college entrance exams.
The late night cramming sessions for her prestigious boarding school’s stringent graduation tests still haunted the back of her mind. The stress of the exams themselves and the exhaustion, she knew would dog her dreams for months to come. The thought of going straight back to it with, it seemed, not a moment’s pause was too much.
“I want to take a gap year,” Nina said to her mother. “I want to see the world and travel a little before deciding on an academy.”
Her mother, unfortunately, was not pleased to hear such a request.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the older woman replied. “What will gallivanting around the continents get you? You already wasted most of your final year doing cultural studies, of all the useless things.”
“It was my passion,” Nina protested. “The world, its people—”
“What rot!” snapped her mother. “Do you think your father and I are going to support you for the rest of your life? You think because we’ve done well for ourselves, you can sit on your laurels?”
“I didn’t say that!”
“You need to get back on the right track, with proper academic studies. Finance. Business! You think your father will have you at his company just because you’re his daughter? If you want that apprenticeship you had better show him that you’ve earned it.”
“I do want it, I just—”
“You just what?”
“I just don’t know if I’m ready yet. It felt so far away when I started high school, and now that it’s here, I’m not prepared. More school isn’t enough, I want life experience.”
“Work is life experience,” said her mother. “You won’t experience anything worthwhile sunbathing on a beach somewhere.”
“I don’t want to go for that,” said Nina. “Daddy trades with people from all over the world, from different countries and cultures. How can I go out and meet with people, make deals with them if I don’t understand them? I want to travel to learn, so when I do go to work, I can bring something worthwhile to table.”
“And you expect everything to just wait around for you until you get back, do you?” asked her mother. “Your father is not going to break his company, which he put his blood and sweat into, to pieces just to suit you. It’s all or nothing and if your brothers are ready to start working, they will, and you will be the one playing catch up.”
“Then that’s the risk I have to take,” said Nina. “If I’m really an adult now, then I have to be able to make decisions for myself.”
“Fine!” snapped her mother, throwing her hands up. “I’m obviously not getting through to you. But if you think we’re going to pay for this you are sourly mistaken. You can waste your life on your own money.”
Nina sighed as she walked the wide paved streets in her home city of Pheras. What money? Minors weren’t generally allowed to hold jobs, part-time or otherwise, because why should you give a job to a child when an adult has a family to support? Most schools had strict rules against them anyway, preferring their students to focus their time on their studies and not outside activities. And even if all that hadn’t been the case, there was no way Nina’s mother would have allowed her to do manual labour for pocket money. Her family were aristocrats and she was certain the thought of Nina working as a waitress or some other “common” job would probably give her mother a heart attack. Regardless of how she felt, as far as her parents were concerned, they were too good for that kind of thing.
The bank was the obvious first thought. She could get a small personal loan for the initial travel expenses. Then perhaps she could odd-job her way from there, earning herself enough in each stop on her journey to pay for the next leg? It was certainly possible. But what about the repayments? Did she really want her first steps into adulthood to be paved with debt? And what if she couldn’t get approved in the first place? She had no collateral, and her travel was hardly going to turn some kind of profit to begin with; it wasn’t an entrepreneurial business trip.
As she walked, thinking about her dismal prospects, her feet took her to the place she always seemed to wind up when feeling down: the Phersian Museum of Natural History.
It had barely changed in all the years she’d been visiting. The same set of six massive columns holding up the second floor balcony. The same white stone steps leading to the imposing double doors, carved with the images of fantastical creatures. Pegasus in flight, dragons breathing fire, the great hydra spitting lighting from its mouth.
As a child, she had stood outside the building staring at those carvings, wondering if perhaps one day, she would get to lay eyes on such breathtaking creatures. The skeletons on display inside just could not capture her imagination in the same way as these images had.
Even now, so many years later, while the specimens inside took much more to her fancy, there was still something about those images of such fearsome, mystical beasts that filled her with awe. Oh, how she still wished she could see them in the flesh!
Today, though, there was a small addition. Just outside the open front doors was a sandwich board, painted a brilliant blue with shiny gold lettering.
New Addition: The Giantess Butterfly
She had never heard of such a thing. Was it a newly discovered species or a fossil that had been found? She couldn’t wait to find out.
The receptionists greeted her like an old friend. Nina smiled in return and gave them a wave. She swore up and down those two women had always been behind that desk, for as long as she had been visiting. It was as though they had just come with the building whenever it had been built and had, over time, become a part of the furniture.
“Is the professor in?” she asked as she approached.
“Sir Linesley?” asked one of the ladies. “I would think so. He’s probably up in the archives. He had some mail this morning and I haven’t seen him leave again.”
“Would you like me to send a message up in the tube?” asked the other woman, already moving her hands to her typewriter.
“Oh no, don’t trouble yourself,” said Nina. “I’ll probably have a wander before I go up.”
The Museum of Natural History was separated into three wings on the ground floor. The west wing held the history part. Rows of mannequins in preserved clothing dating back hundreds of years, royal coinage throughout the ages, walls of paintings and tapestries, and one of the world’s largest collections of historic weapons and armour. 80% of the collection was from the kingdoms of the central continent but even so it was fascinating. From the entrance, one could zig-zag their way through the exhibit in chronological order and see the human world grow and change before their eyes.
If one got tired of the history lesson, it was only a short walk across the main atrium, under the empty eyes of the towering skeleton of a long extinct predator, and you would enter the east wing and the natural part of the museum.
Nina felt she could while away her entire life in this exhibit. Skeletons and detailed taxidermy of creatures from all over the world, both current and extinct, were set up in dioramas that as closely as possible resembled their natural habitat. Cases of preserved plants, flowers and leaves of all shapes and sizes, dried and mounted for study. A collection of mineral specimens from the mysterious silver dust of the northern waste mountains, to the brilliantly coloured gemstones dredged up from deep within the planets crust.
And at the back of the east wing was the insect display. Moths, dragonflies and shiny-shelled beetles of all kinds were carefully pinned up in cases. In the centre a new case had been added, specifically for the exhibit’s new addition.
It was the size of a house cat, with sapphire wings patterned with tessellating diamond shapes. She had never seen anything like it before in her life. It was breathtaking. What she wouldn’t give to have seen it in flight, in its natural habitat.
She left the exhibit and headed to the north wing which contained an impressive library. Not in the mood to read she headed to the stairs at the back. Stepping around the barrier rope and ignoring the sign that read ‘Staff Only’ she went up to the second floor where the museum’s offices were located. She walked the halls with purpose and familiarity, passed rows of dark wood doors with shiny brass nameplates until she reached her destination.
Just below a nameplate that read “Professor Linesley: Department of Sociocultural Xenthropology” there was a white buzzer which she pressed without hesitation. Only the feel of the vibration under her finger let her know the device was working.
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The walls of the old museum building were the sturdy kind, making for quite effective sound proofing if you didn’t have your ear pressed right up against a door, so the only warning she had before the door flew open was the muffled clunk of it being unlocked.
The man who answered was somewhat ruffled, and a furrowing in his brow suggesting he wasn’t in the mood for disturbances. His expression cleared almost immediately, though, when he saw who his visitor was.
“Ah,” he greeted with a smile, throwing both arms out in welcome. “Lady Nina, always a delight, always.”
“Is there any point anymore in reminding you that I am not a Lady?”
“Your Uncle’s a Lord,” said the professor, waving away her objection. “And that’s good enough for me.”
The professor’s study was at the same time both unnaturally ordered and a frightful mess. No surface was clear of books or papers, and yet everything had found themselves into neat stacks. The entire right side wall was a bookcase, filled to the brim, but only partially with books alone. Loose papers, rolled scrolls, folders and groups of what looked like archaeological artefacts filled the shelves. At a glance it looked a nightmare, but further examination showed that everything indeed had its place to be, and was in it.
The opposite wall carried an enormous map of the world, each of the six continents outlined in a different colour and a rainbow of pins dotted about, some of them connected with string.
Underneath the map was the professor’s desk, a massive carved oak behemoth of an antique. She remembered the day he got it. She couldn’t have been more than seven or eight, and had visited the museum for the first time with her uncle. Lord Sterling had presented the desk to the professor, who had just been made director of the department, as a gift for his new office.
Today, all the usual books and letters had been pushed to the back of the desk, a dozen manila folders now occupying the emptied space. Nina just barely caught a few names and photographs from the opened one on top, before Professor Linesley brought her attention back to him.
“School’s been out almost a moth already,” he said, moving between her and the desk to sit against the edge of it. “And this is the first time you’ve come to visit me? Should I be worried my girl is losing interest in the natural sciences?”
“Oh never,” she assured. “It’s just, you start off trying to recover from all the exam stress and the next thing you know the weeks are flying by.”
“Just the same after we’ve published a new article,” the professor replied with a sage nod. “Everything winds down and you think you’ve got the rest of time to relax and wait to move on and before you know it people are asking you about the next one before you’ve even started it.” He let out a bark of laughter. “I suppose the next thing on your ticket will be academy applications, am I right?”
She sighed and sat down heavily on the couch in the centre of the room. She explained her conversation with her mother, her feelings tumbling out of her in a rush. “I can see the rest of my life stretched ahead of me as one long line of standardised tests,” she finished with a sigh.
“Yes it can feel like that sometimes,” said Linesley, moving away from his desk. He went over to a trolley in the corner and poured them both a cup of tea. “You finish your compulsory, you attend an academy, get an internship, then you finally get your certificate papers, and well, what do you know, you have to study more for every paper you work on. It’s never ending. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.
“What subject were you planning on following? Were you still planning on following up with archaeology, or did you want to stick with Xenozoology? You seemed to be really enthusiastic about your classes in the other races.”
“Mother wants me to study business. She thinks cultural academics are soft options.”
“Ah she would, wouldn’t she,” he said solemnly. “Katherine was always quite the industrious woman. I always said she suited your father more than James.”
“Uncle and my mother?”
“They were at Oaksfield together,” he said “But James was a flighty one even back then, so it didn’t last. After your grandfather passed away, he inherited the Sterling Lordship. Your father, of course, had to make his own name, and for his business ventures, I don’t think he could have done any better than Katherine.”
Nina could remember her uncle visiting when she was still young. He would take her on excursions to the museums and galleries, and every gift seemed to be a new book to engross her.
“I haven’t seen him since my thirteenth.”
“I’m surprised he was able to stay in one place for that long,” said Linesley. “He was a traveller, an explorer, the things he’d bring home from his trips, entire books were written about some of them. I think he saw that kind of wonder at the world in you as well. Maybe he hoped you’d follow in his footsteps.”
It was true her cultural classes had never really felt like work, so enraptured with the subjects she was. But if she continued with it seriously, she would definitely have to give up on working with her father’s company. She didn’t know if she was ready to make that decision yet. She shared her concerns with the professor.
“Well these aren’t decisions I can make for you.”
“I know.”
She just wanted to more time to think things through. If only her mother wasn’t so impatient.
“What did you want to do with a gap year?”
“Travel,” she replied. “Whether or not I end up joining father’s company I want to see the world and its people, and if I do join father, then knowing more about the world can only help a company that is in the business of international trade.”
“You’ve clearly thought about it. And I see exactly where you’re coming from.”
Too bad her mother didn’t agree.
“Do you have any savings?” asked the Professor.
“Some saved pocket money, but not nearly enough to travel for a whole year.”
The conversation lapsed into silence. Eventually, it was broken when the professor got up to refill their cups. As he waited for the water to boil, his gaze slid sideways to the files on his desk, then to Nina.
“So,” he said slowly. “How did your last report card work out? I hope the stress wasn’t for naught?”
“Well, the compulsory maths wasn’t the best. It was a pass but it could have been a lot better. And the final year’s set comprehension book had a story that flowed like molasses. I was able to put something together for the subject essay, but I still feel like I don’t quite get what Miss Barrington was trying to hammer into us.”
“What about your cultural studies?” asked Linesley in a casual sort of tone as he returned with the fresh cups.
“Good actually, great even. Much better than I could have hoped,” she said. “I exceeded my grade expectations for Xenozoology and Xenthropology. Religious Studies went well, and I managed to score in the 90s in World History and Culture.”
Of course when her mother had seen her report card, her only interest had been Literature and Maths, acting as though the rest of it had been blank.
“And how did you find the material for history and culture?” asked Linesley. “The textbooks, I mean.”
“Limited,” she replied honestly. “We spent a whole year on the human kingdoms. We had an entire section on each of the twelve, their rise, their kings, their treaties, everything. We spent another year on our closest allies, and then the third year was, well, everyone else. All the giants, the otherkin, the elementals. We got maybe a paragraph on the dragon clans. It was so frustrating, because I feel like I came out of it knowing almost nothing about them. I would question my teachers after every class, but it felt like a dice roll to see if they knew anything more than the textbooks.”
“That’s because the textbooks haven’t been updated in decades.”
“Why not?”
With modern ships the world was connected better now that it has ever been. It seemed to her that now more than ever should be the golden age of world cultural study.
“Remember that all our history books are being written by humans for humans,” explained Linesley. “The printing press was a human invention that spread like wildfire in the central kingdoms, and while some of the larger foreign cultures have taken it on board, it makes sense they would not only be printing books in their own languages, but would not feel the need to waste resources on human focused explanatory textbooks.
“As far as much of the academic community back home in concerned, humans are still the only ones printing real literature. Or more accurately, ‘they haven’t written a textbook I can read which answers all my questions yet, so until then I’m not interested. Gods forbid I have to talk to someone.’ You know Sam was saying…”
Professor Linesley trailed off and was quiet for some time staring down at the soggy tea leaves at the bottom of his cup.
“What was Doctor Ebon saying?” she prompted gently.
The professor got up and went back over to his desk. He sighed, placed his hands flat on the table and looked down at the files he’d been sent. Nina couldn’t see the expression on his face, but there was an air about him that suggested he was deep in thought.
“My colleagues and I,” he began slowly, turning back to her. “We’d started, perhaps the most ambitious project ever undertaken at the Pheras Museum, or in fact anywhere in the kingdoms. We were going to put together an encyclopaedia, a comprehensive collection many volumes long, on the history and culture of every race on Alvis. We would publish in the common tongue and make it available in every educational institution who would take it. Then, most importantly, it was to be a constantly evolving process. So as more people around the world read it and contacted us about potential corrections or improvements, we would update and release new volumes.”
As he talked, he gestured with his hands, his excitement about the project palpable as he emoted.
“I’d love to work on something like that. Traveling the world, writing about the things I saw and the people I met.”
“Would you be interested in joining the project then?” asked Linesley. “You could start an internship with the department, your travel and necessities would be paid for by our grant budget. A paid working vacation, what do you think? Take your gap year through us?”
“It sounds amazing,” she said her face lighting up, before falling again. “But surely there are better candidates. Your colleagues are all well-educated, and aren’t they already out in the field?”
“Yeah,” said Linesley, reaching up to scratch the back of his neck. “We’ve been working on it for about six months now, though it feels like we’ve barely scratched the surface of it all. I’m supposed to be coordinating their efforts and cataloguing their reports, but…”
“What’s happened?”
The professor looked between her and the documents on his desk, then shook his head, and smiled.
“Turns out a project of this magnitude takes a lot of work. We’ve been collaborating with some other academic institutions but it all comes down to getting bodies in the field. People who really care about the project and what it could mean.”
“You’re having trouble getting more field researchers?”
“There have been some incidents,” said Linesley, vaguely. “I mean well, the world is a dangerous place in general and most of the people in our kinds of fields seem to prefer to work behind desks rather than exploring uncharted regions of the continents.”
“That’s the kind of adventure I’ve been dreaming of.”
“Well you certainly have the grades for the internship,” said Linesley. “I’ll still have to process the request of course, but with my recommendation I don’t see why they would reject your application.”
“I can write one now if you’ve got some paper.”
“Ah, sure,” said Linesley, looking lost for a moment in his own office as he tried to find where his typewriter had gone.
She spent the next hour at the museum with the professor carefully crafting an internship request, talking up her academic achievements as much as they could, and even subtly mentioning hers and her uncle’s history with the museum.
When they were done and satisfied with the result, the professor quickly typed a recommendation letter to go with Nina’s application.
“That should be everything.”
“Very well, should I come back tomorrow?”
“No, not tomorrow. It’s good to give them a couple of days.”
“At weeksend then,” she said standing and making herself ready to go.
“That should be fine I’ll send you a telegram if something goes wrong, or they want to speak with you. Otherwise assume it all went well.”
“Like I said, I’ll see you at weeksend.”