The lecture hall.
“...and it’s this series of transitive polarity abstractions that allows us to induce a strong querrassa force along the edges, each polarity field’s radius following the Nershurin function of Qatinian circuitry recursion,” the mild mannered looking old man explained.
Emmet was bored. Leaning slightly back in his seat as he stared at the old man, for the first time, he felt a strong lack of interest pervade him. So far, at the Gemini Academy, this feeling was completely unique. Prior, he had only ever felt a mix of either extreme confusion or extreme intrigue, causing the lecture hall to have long become associated with dynamic feelings, but now, he only felt numbness, an intense desire to do virtually anything else.
It was already a bit more than a month and a half into the semester, and he was currently sitting in on Introduction to Warding. At first, he had felt it was somewhat interesting, but the professor was incredibly boring. He spoke only monotonically, as if even he himself was bored with the material, and there was nothing he would say that wouldn’t be straight out of the textbook.
It wouldn’t be so bad if Emmet wasn’t already familiar with everything he was saying. However, maybe it was due to his excessive diligence, but within a month of tackling the text, he had already read the course’s textbook front to back several times. Aside from the confusing terms and language, he found it pretty straightforward. In the beginning, he had thought warding was a fresh new topic, since it was something he had never explicitly learned about it before. However, it turned out that he had already grasped most of its concepts without realizing, just from his experience debugging formations and solving puzzles in his puzzle book. Really, it was just using circuits and specific materials in a unique parallel manner (called Qatinian recursive logic) to build a formation that would induce a pushing force, called ‘querrassa.’ This circle of querrassa force would form an intruder-resistant protection field.
This was a basic level class, so that was about the limit of the course’s breadth, and to Emmet, was pretty intuitive. The one tricky bit was that the theory used several complicated polarity abstractions in order to induce the querrassa force, but Emmet had already read all about it throughout the textbook, and further had already debugged numerous faulty warding formations (in which he fixed numerous implementations of those exact polarity abstractions), so he was well aware of all the intricacies. After memorizing all of the different terms and complicated names for everything, he was basically set.
Thus, nothing the professor said was new, and the professor had nothing else to add besides his dry tone of voice, so Emmet couldn’t help but droop in his seat. After resisting the urge for a few moments, he gave in and pulled out his trusty picture puzzle book to work on. There would always be new and ever present challenges within that book.
After class, Emmet hopped onto his hoverboard and pondered as he casually sped away. It wasn’t just Introduction to Warding, Basic Locomotives was the same. At this point, he had also read through its textbook multiple times as well, so every time he sat in on lecture, he couldn’t help but feel like he was wasting his time. All of those structures they were learning about, he had seen countless times during his debugging job! Was it really worth it to sit in on more of Tauruk’s boring classes in the future, when he already knew all the material? Maybe he could start sitting in on other different, more interesting classes, not just Tauruk’s!
Most basic level courses at the academy were large and freeform, and often had several hundred students per lecture, so if he wanted, he would likely be able to sit in on pretty much any course. His mind whirled, pondering multiple other classes that caught his interest but that he had never taken a second look at. He would have to take a look at the official listing later.
From then on, Emmet’s mind was set. He no longer attended Tauruk’s classes and instead went all about, sitting in on several of the other basic level courses he had been eyeing and some that had been suggested by Maisy. Although two of classes in particular were significant distances away from the dorm and all other academic buildings, causing his transportation route to become much more winding and significantly longer, it was now much easier and faster to navigate now that Emmet had his hoverboard.
Most of the new classes were based in fields that actually didn’t come up often in his debugging or even his puzzle book, so they were entirely new material, and Emmet would vigorously dig in, borrowing the textbook and reading it front to back. As if compensating for his previous lack of reading experience, the more he read, the more he developed quicker and quicker reading skills. Within the second month, he was reading through each textbook thoroughly in a matter of two or three weeks, although he would spend some additional time rereading and pondering its more complicated aspects. In actuality, this wasn’t too shocking. Most of the textbooks weren’t actually that large, just dense in content. Since Emmet had a strong baseline for the material, and had a great craving for interesting knowledge, he was able to read through them much faster.
It took a bit for Tauruk to notice the change. He didn’t pay attention to Emmet much, so he hadn’t noticed that he had stopped attending the enormous lectures in his classes. What brought his attention back to him was that one time, he randomly spotted him speeding along on campus on an interesting-looking hoverboard! Hoverboards were incredibly common on campus, but he had never expected Emmet to even have one! He couldn’t help but click his tongue in annoyance. He himself, an actual first year student, still had to constantly buy materials for classes, so he couldn’t yet save up his income like that. Somehow, the squire had managed to purchase his own hoverboard before even he could!
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However, he didn’t have that much time to worry about it. Even with only two courses, the assignments were piling up and he was constantly pressed for time. Further, the end of year assessment was coming up, and he had to prepare. Although for first years, it didn’t have a major impact since there wouldn’t be a cut, there were still rewards for earning high scores. Most importantly, the second year built off the first year, so if he was already scoring low in the first year, wouldn’t that mean he would probably get cut at the end of the second year?
Emmet didn’t worry about any of that. By now, his life had become full again, and he went through mountains of fascinating and mind-bending new content every day. He absorbed it ravenously.
During this time, he pretty much dropped all of his time that he spent solving problems in his picture puzzle book, and focused 100% on his textbooks and personal studies. Yet, unintentionally, he still ended up pondering its questions just as often. Many a time, reading from the various new interesting textbooks he would come across, he would have flashes of insight for puzzles he had been stuck on, and so would go back to the puzzle book to flesh his idea out to solve the problem. Like this, he once again began to steadily advance through the book.
By four months in, when winter arrived, Emmet was virtually living in the library. It was much too cold outside to be about too much, even with the hoverboard’s useful sun empowered array warming him up. He had also realized his inefficiency - why pay points to borrow books when he could just stay in the library and read them there? That way, he didn’t have to constantly carry such a big load with him too. Thus, the Kikuuran West library became his new home. Every moment he wasn’t attending some new class, visiting the dining hall, experimenting constructing something new, sleeping, or working at his debugging job, he would be holed up in the library, reading books. At this point, he had realized just how wide of a selection the library had, encompassing literally tens of thousands of fascinating topics. Thus, his eyes would wander and he occasionally moved on from just textbooks to skimming some other interesting books.
This would often not exclusively be about formations - Emmet also read through books about various histories and cultures, different interesting creatures, and the geography of the area. The more he read, the more his ignorance of the world was shed. Within a few books in, he made fascinating discovery after fascinating discovery, causing his mind to whirl crazily. He never knew about this stuff before! Was it true?
One such book that opened up his mind was called Our World, the Sun, and the Moon. It detailed just how the world worked, and the process of the sun and moon’s rotation.
The world was an enormous enclosed concave spherical space surrounded by a nondescript layer of bedrock and dirt, and everyone lived within on the inside surface, bound by the mysterious outward force called querrassa gluing them onto the outer edge. There were two energy bodies that rotated within the center of this world - the sun and the moon, and they were the source of all life. Forever present in the same exactly upward location when people looked up, these two bodies were equally sized, and by some mysterious compelling force, would rotate around each other in a regular daily cycle. Every night, the moon would move in front of and completely block the sun’s rays, causing night, and every morning, the sun would rotate back in front of the moon, causing day. Over the course of the year, their lateral orientation would also shift, causing fluctuating temperatures and spurring the different seasons.
Because these celestial bodies were far away and hard to pinpoint, this finding was disputed heavily for over a thousand years. In fact, many had even questioned the very structure of this supposed enclosed world. Many proposed that it could be that the world was a round globe, humans resting on the edge facing out, and the celestial bodies were far away outside, revolving around each other far away in an empty space. However, this idea never picked up much steam, and was largely disproven by frequent observations that distant seafaring ships would appear slightly above the horizon, indicating an upward curvature instead of the assumed planarity or downward curvature.
It was then that Gemini stepped into the limelight, and introduced his new invention called the Gemini telescope. For the first time, humans were able to see clearly this sun moon rotation process in action, thoroughly proving the full conjecture! They were certainly inside this enclosed world, with the sun and moon rotating in strange patterns within the center!
Reading about all this, Emmet couldn’t help but be completely and utterly stunned. He had always just assumed that the world was a flat plane, with the sun and moon shifting back and forth in a set place in the sky. The world was enclosed within bedrock? How would he be able to know different? As far as he could tell, everything was flat, and the sky was open and wide!
As it was proven that the world was in fact an inwardly concave sphere of space, the logical follow-up question was of what was beneath, or rather above, the ground they stood on. If they digged down, was it all just rock? Were they alone, enclosed in this enormous spherical hole in bedrock? What was beyond? This question had plagued scholars for centuries. One notable personage had once even attempted to utilize a gigantic powerful formation to dig a nearly thirty mile deep hole into the earth, but only met bedrock and more bedrock. No one knew what was underneath. It was one of the biggest mysteries in this world, a common one told about in stories to children to spark intrigue.
Another particularly eye-opening book was called Our Geography and the People that Inhabit It. It was an old, thick book, comprehensively detailing the entire geography of the land and remarkable features of it.
The inwardly concave world was frequently categorically split into four main regions, each with thousands of inner localities and interesting features. These were: Oceana, the great sea, Gaea, the great earth, Petram, the great land of rock (also called the Great Magma Expanse), and Silva, the great evergreen thicket.
Oceana was an enormous ocean, over fourty thousand miles wide and unfathomably deep. Gaea was the territory of the humans, made up of half woodlands and half grassy plains. Petram was a gigantic stretch of sparsely populated barren bedrock dotted with frequent molten volcanos and sheathes of hot magma. Finally, Silva was a medium-sized expanse of pure vibrant wildlife. Forever in daylight due to the angle of the sun’s rotation, it was so full of life and vital energy that it would often overflow, flooding various powerful herds of magical beasts into Gaea and causing great trouble to humans.
Emmet could hardly fathom what the book was talking about. The world was really this vast? Outside the scope of his migrant farming tribe, there was a massive perilous world out there! He felt dazed just thinking about it.