"Introduction letters?" Rose asked. "What introduction letters?"

Rose Argent didn't have our introduction letters. In fact, she didn't even know we were supposed to have them.

"Miss Rose, do you have any idea where their papers might be?" the Scamp Administrator on the left asked.

She tapped her boot as she thought. "The Hawk might have mentioned something about papers, but I thought he was being metaphorical."

"Metaphorical… about papers?" the Scamp Administrator on the right clarified.

"Yes."

Rose Argent isn't what I would call a 'detail' person. She isn't exactly a 'big picture' person, either. No, she's more of an 'unwavering conviction' person - and, maddeningly enough, that usually gets the job done. Unfortunately, the Perdita Free Collegium requires more than one woman's unwavering conviction to admit a new student. Fortunately, Rose is also a wellspring of high-conviction ideas. The tapped her boot in thought some more.

"Say… is either of you a notary?"

"I am, and so is my brother," Leftie said.

"Great! So I can just attest that I've seen the papers and everything, because I definitely probably have…"

"You definitely probably have?" Rightie asked, skeptical eyes peering over his spectacles.

"I definitely definitely have," she clarified. "And then Captain Hawk can deliver them personally later and definitely get you an autograph… no, a signed playbill. You like theater right?"

"We like theater," Leftie assured her.

"Great! So it's all settled, then. The three of them are in?"

"Of course, Miss Rose," Rightie nodded, jowls wavering. "We'll take your testimony and get started on their paperwork. Say, not to be picky, but do you think we could get Captain Hawk to sign a copy of Seas of the Predator? That's our favorite…"

Rose quirked her head to the side. "Your favorite what?"

"Our favorite play about him? He's coming to deliver the papers and sign a playbill?"

"Yes," Rose nodded. "Right. Definitely. Great! Well, I'm glad to see everything's in hand. I'd stick around, but I've got a dozen other things to do before this evening's debrief. I'll check up on you kids when I'm back in town!"

With that, Rose ruffled my hair, ruffled Mailyn's hair, attempted a ruffle of Aldo's hair, though he ducked to avoid it, and strutted back out of the Scamp Administration office, her boots clicking down the hallway, down the stairs, and right out of the building.

"She… she didn't…" Rightie said.

Leftie sighed. "She never gave her statement…"

"Does that mean we can't enroll?" Mailyn asked in a very small voice.

"No," Rightie sighed. "It just means more paperwork. Much more paperwork."

Fortunately, most of the paperwork didn't require our presence. After about an hour and a scant handful of signed forms, the three of us were officially Scamps at the Perdita Free Collegium. The first three records in my student file were as follows:

1) A notary form witnessed by Mr. Vernik (Leftie) that Mr. Vernik (Rightie) had heard Rose Argent, a Fellow of the Perdita Free Collegium, attest that she had definitely definitely seen our introduction papers.

2) A notary form witnessed by Mr. Vernik (Rightie) that Mr. Vernik (Leftie) questioned me about my legal guardianship and, finding I had none present in the Perditos, signed my guardianship over to the Collegium. I co-signed this form with Mr. Vernik (Leftie) witnessing that Mr. Vernik (Rightie) had received testimony from me about my place of origin.

3) My starting course sheet, which indicated I was to be placed in all 1 (remedial) classes since I barely spoke Perditalog, except for my arithmetic and language classes, where Perditalog fluency was less important, so I would start in the 3 (average) class.

Afterward, Mr. Vernik (Leftie) summoned one of the Sneaks on duty rotation at the Scamp Hall. Mr. Vernik (Rightie) then ordered the Sneak to show us to Scamp Hall #5 to find bunks and get situated.

The Sneak introduced herself as Cinni. She was a tall girl and solid for her age - probably about twelve years old - with the ebon-dark skin, gray eyes, and curly, red-tinged hair associated with Arkavy, a continent that I'd only ever heard of in tales of fantastic adventure. It was a land of exotic societies, ancient mountain temples, and secret martial techniques. And, presumably, quite a few regular people just living their lives who'd never quite worked up to getting mentioned in a travelogue. I'd never even seen a 'proper' Arkavian before - not many make their way to Barsoa - though Oumaa Dead-Eyes was pretty close.

"You an Arkavite?" Aldo asked her - not the subtlest kid, our Aldo. Fortunately for him, Cinni was only mildly offended.

"Piss off, boyo, I'm a Florian." She thumped her chest with a solid fist. Her Gionian came with the rapid rhythmicity of a native speaker, albeit with a distinct Florian accent. "Dunno about my parents, though, because I never met 'em. Alright, you lot… Hall Five… don't fall behind." Cinni took off at a fast walk across the dusty lawn, ignoring the Scamps lazing about in the open. She unlocked the big double doors of Scamp Hall #5 with her glossy wood work pass sigil and held the door open, eyeing us impatiently as we hurried to enter.

The entryway was a sizable atrium lined with sturdy wooden chests the size of a divan, each adorned with handwritten labels that I couldn't yet read. Their purpose was clear enough, though, because Cinni showed us. She lifted the top of one to reveal a jumbled mess of assorted clothes in varying states of wear and wash.

"The proctors bring in used clothes every few weeks. If you outgrow what you've got or it gets too dingy, take a root through. Most of what you find'll need a little mending which, if you don't know how to do it, there's people who will teach you for tollos. The list of those gets posted every fortnight." She tapped on one of the big slate boards, as green as the Pelagic, that lined the walls of the room. "Questions?"

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I raised my hand - I had about a dozen questions. "Miss Cinni, I…"

"Good. Next are the kitchens. Each hall is broken into three bunk rooms with about a hundred kids each, and each has its own kitchen." She led us into a cavernous room sporting a massive cast-iron stove, three metal griddles the size of a screen door, and a dozen sturdy wooden tables dented and discolored from years of use with names, messages, and crude pictures carved into just about every square centimeter. About two dozen stepping stools sat scattered across the room, too to make everything accessible at child height. "The kids in each bunkroom get split into six shifts, and on your shift day you've got to wake up half an hour early to make breakfast for everybody. The quartermaster will bring in a load of whatever food she got a cheap deal on and you got to make something edible for everybody. If you don’t know how to cook, you'll learn fast…"

"I can make fish-"

"Don't care," Cinni said. "Oh… and this is probably the most important bit: this is the only meal the Collegium will give you for the day, so eat as much as you can stomach, unless you got a good hookup on the outside. Some kids manage to find one and some don't. Quest-"

"How come there aren't any other kids here?" I blurted before she could ignore me.

Cinni laughed. "Scamps get kicked out of the hall after the noontime bell and don't come back in until the doors open an hour after evenwatch…"

"What's evenwatch?" Mailyn asked.

Cinni rolled her flint-gray eyes. "First watch. Starts at six o'clock. You kids don't know Enoch from your elbow, do ya? You got to find your own way in Floria from noon until seven o'clock, rain or shine. Oh, and if you ain't back in by lights out an hour after midwatch… that's eleven o'clock to you clods… you get to sleep outside for the night. Okay, and speaking of bunks - your bunkroom is last." She brushed past us, gesticulating down the corridor. "Bunk two just got filled up, so Old Man Vernik said to put you in three - got a couple spots left in there…"

"Um…" I said.

Every childish fantasy I might have had about Shadows-to-be living in decadent luxury was very abruptly crushed. The bunkroom was about as threadbare as a room could get - the outer brick walls were unadorned, save for a litany of scrawled names at a child's eye-level, and the room was partitioned off from the rest of the hallway with thick, unfinished boards affixed to the massive support columns. Lockers had been bolted into the near and far walls, many of them secured with clunky locks the size of my small fist, each of them the size of a medium suitcase and no more.

A grid of cinderblock partitions in the middle of the room partially divided the bunkroom into about a dozen smaller units containing eight bunks apiece. The bunks themselves were nothing more than sturdy fold-out boards bolted into the cinderblock, the edge of each labeled with a small white number. They didn't look very comfortable, but their construction was quite sturdy.

As if detecting my concern, Cinni ambled to one of the partitions and rapped on one of the oak boards with her knuckles. "I'm assigning you bunks seventy-eight through eighty. Take your pick…"

"I get top!" Mailyn shouted - there was only one top bunk, but neither Aldo nor I were opposed to getting a bottom bunk.

"Suit yourself," I said.

"They… um…" I said. "They look like writing tables?"

"Sure, some kids use them for that," Cinni said. "Assuming you don't like sleeping on plain wood, find yourself a decent bed pad. I remember mine took up about half of my locker space. I wouldn't store anything but your pad and a few changes of clothes in there - anything worth stealing is gonna get stolen unless you invest in a really good lock."

"Where do we stash vallies, then?" Aldo asked - street slang for valuables, I assume.

Cinni shrugged. "It's a big city, boyo. So… any more questions-no-okay! Time to git until an hour after evenwatch."

Without further ado, Cinni herded us out of the bunk room and onto the sunny lawn in front of Scamp Hall #5. She offered a mocking half-salute before jogging back to Hall #3 to see whether the Mr. Verniks had more tasks for her to complete. Mailyn and Aldo discussed amongst themselves what to do next. And me? I sat myself down in the dry grass and had myself a good cry.

Even at my worst moments, down in the chattel hold of the Auspicio, part of me had insisted that somebody was looking out for me, that somebody, whether it was Elzie, Uncle Horantz, Rook, Mrs. Sealie, or Rose would see to it that I was cared for. Some little hopeful idol of my mind had even insisted that I would be reunited with my family, that we would soon be able to laugh around the dinner table and put this horrible chapter of our lives behind us…

Something about our current situation impressed upon me that it wasn't going to happen. This was my new life.

I missed my parents and the rest of my family, even Chiaro, who was annoying at the best of times. I missed Triss, my stuffed magpie. I missed my cat, Musqi, and my pony, Pranto. I missed my home. I'd been convinced to board a ship, was nearly enslaved, and now I was stranded in a distant city where I didn't even speak the language. I'd been enrolled into a school, only it wasn't a fancy boarding school like proper ladies went to. I'd been told that I was mostly on my own and not even allowed to be indoors for seven hours a day. I had a lot of very good reasons to cry, and I took a good fifteen or twenty minutes to get them out of my system. Mailyn sat next to me, clinging to me awkwardly but saying nothing… I was too absorbed in my own misery to notice whether she'd been crying, too. Maybe she'd front-loaded all of her emotional venting…

Well, let's not kid ourselves. Mailyn walked around with a doozy of a grudge every single day, and the fury that literally flickered over her expression whenever she mentioned home wouldn't abate until she learned to bring her magical outbursts under control. But she'd turned her turmoil into a burning anger while I still wallowed in pain and guilt. My turmoil eventually stilled, like a roaring wave turned to sea foam, and I wiped my tears and brushed the grass and dust from my tunic dress, mindful that I might not be getting new clothes for a while.

"Where'd Aldo go?" I asked.

Mailyn chewed at her lip before gesturing with her chin, as the Wext often do. "Talkin' to that lot over there," she said with a sneer. "Thirty minutes a Scamp and the bastard abandons us…"

As if to prove her wrong, Aldo pointed excitedly in our direction. He wandered back over with two dirt-scuffed boys about our age. He grinned sheepishly, as if he'd been caught with his hand in the candy jar, and gestured to his two new friends. "I reckon Zev and Nate speak pretty good Gionian and they say they can show us a bit around the burb. What do you say?"

Zev was a lean boy of medium complexion whose hair was so dark he might have been a fellow Selenite. Nate was husky, sandy-haired, and rosy-cheeked every bit a stereotypical Feist country lad. It was Nate who approached us and stuck out his hand for a shake… a bit too close to my face for my liking. My mother had raised me to be a proper Gionian-Selenite lady, and we do not shake hands. I was so surprised with his familiarity, I shrieked and smacked him upside the pudgy face. He just stared at me in hurt bewilderment while, just behind him, Zev balled his fists and readied himself for a scrap.

"Honored Asuna! I'm so sorry!" I said, aghast. Nate's gesture hadn't even come across as aggressive - I'd just been so surprised that I'd responded on pure instinct. "I'm very sorry. It's… it's my first day," I said in a small voice.

"Holy hells!" Nate worked his jaw. "What do you reckon she'd do if I said I wanted to scrap?"

"I wouldn't try it," Zev guffawed. "If you ain't proper mad, we was… were… gonna… We're going to go down to the Step Wharf for a bit of a dip. We can show you a bit o' city along the way…"

"Reckon I smell like throw-up," Mailyn said. "I could use a dip."

I wasn't particularly enthused at the notion, but I wasn't about to be the odd one out. I indicated that I'd like to swim, too, and the three of us accompanied Zev and Nate eastward toward the Largotto.