If the manner the Perdita Free Collegium handles its youngest members seems bizarre, callous, or downright negligent… well, perhaps it's all of those things. No other organization I know of leaves its young charges to their own devices for a third of the day, and I'm certain none treats their activities off school grounds with such benign(?) neglect. There are two reasons for this: first, and most importantly, forcing children to be independent and self-reliant, while undoubtedly dangerous, cultivates valuable decision-making and leadership qualities. And second, and not to be ignored, is that Scamps are seen as somewhat expendable.

Scamps are the youngest of three student tiers within the Collegium. While students are brought in at anywhere between six and nine years of age (and, on very rare occasions, older), the vast majority start their tenure as a Scamp at seven years old, just as I did. There are no terms or semesters at the Collegium, and so Scamps are brought in on a rolling basis, whenever the Collegium's dozens of contract recruiters, like Rook the Shadowbroker, can get them to Floria with introduction papers. Around five hundred of us enroll in the average year. Of these, around four hundred graduate to Sneak at the age of ten - it's at this rank when the Collegium begins a serious effort in protecting and cultivating the talents of its students, as well as levying their labor for school tasks (for instance, Cinni, our somewhat lackluster student guide).

Collegium students are Sneaks from ten until thirteen or fourteen, at which point they're either advanced to Greycloak or apprenticed to a guild or employer better suited for their talents, as is most often the case. Among the one third or so who make Greycloak, perhaps one in seven will pass the Shadow Trials and be inducted into the hallowed ranks of Shadows by Nurass, the Prince of Shadows, the Tyrant of Floria, himself.

The Collegium, like the city it resides in, has its own culture with some remarkable idiosyncrasies. For instance, fights and bullying are rarely punished, unless they result in severe injuries, and when students fall into trouble with city authorities, the Collegium's opprobrium is in the fact that you got caught rather than the fact that you committed a crime. Amazingly enough, most students emerge from their time in the Collegium with their health and sanity intact, and some (though perhaps not most) are even well-adjusted individuals. But my first day at the Collegium certainly wasn't well-adjusted - it was borderline traumatizing.

For instance, I did not respond well to my first scandalized gawp at the Step Wharf, the favored swimming and bathing spot for Collegium students.

"Everybody is naked!" I shrieked, somewhat inaccurately. Only a substantial majority of those in the water were naked - those lounging about the sunbaked sandstone steps were mostly clothed, albeit not at all conservatively. My hysterics only brought more attention to us. When we arrived, perhaps a hundred people were already swimming and socializing in the river with several dozen more lazing about the sun-bleached marble 'steps' of the wharf. And their state of dress was entirely unacceptable.

Gionians are not an overly modest people, but neither are they notably immodest, and the Gionian-Selenite subculture tended to be considerably more conservative. In Selenite culture, boys and girls alike are told to maintain modesty, so as to maintain our dignity before Honored Asuna when They judge us - there is scriptural support for this in the Asuranad, but it is quite tenuous: Be you dignified in body and mind alike, and you shall be as kings and queens in Our palace!

But Floria, with its year-round tepid climate, has almost no nudity taboo. You don't often see naked people wandering the streets - it's considered uncouth in the same way that wearing a ball gown to a funeral would be questionable. Which isn't to say it never happens. But, if you venture near any swimming spot, or even reasonably deep public fountains, you can expect to see a lot of anatomy.

"And you're naked!" I added, looking skyward to avoid the sight. Only Zev and Nate were naked - they'd laid their clothes out on the steps well above the waterline and started toward the river without a care in the world.

"I'm not swimming with clothes on," Zev guffawed, as if the very thought was the most ridiculous thing he'd heard all week. He held up a bar of white soap. "Soap don't get through hemp, you know…"

"Oh, hey, I need to wash my shirt…" Nate said, jogging back up to fetch his brownish tunic shirt. I shrieked and almost slapped him for the second time that day when he passed within a meter of me but, fortunately, Mailyn stayed my arm and I calmed myself. He gave Mailyn and me an odd look. "You coming in or not?"

To my horror, Mailyn shrugged and began disrobing - as did Aldo - soon leaving me as the odd fish in our school. "Nobody look at me!" I announced. I proceeded to remove my tunic dress, but not my underclothes - that was a bridge too far.

"Oh, for saint's sake," Zev mumbled, but he and Nate turned away, and all four of my fellow Scamps waded down into the waters as, with burning cheeks, I carefully folded my dress atop my shoes and, checking to make sure they weren't looking, bunched my underdress just above my knees and dashed into the modesty-preserving murk of the river.

The Largotto is a relatively slow river, flowing through Floria at just over a knot, and reasonably wide. It sits at just over a kilometer across at the Step Wharf. Consequently, in the north of the city, where the Floria's stinking efflux hasn't yet adulterated its flow, the Largotto is clean and reasonably clear. You can see the bottom at two meters - three on a good day - and the water plants by the shore do a good job of filtering out waste.. Even so, it's barely murky enough to preserve a young Selenite girl's modesty… that, and peer pressure is quite possibly the most powerful force in the universe.

"I can't believe I'm doing this," I mumbled, my underclothes wavering scandalously in the slow current.

"Good to get clean, though, yeah?" Aldo observed.

"You didn't even know you stank back at Rook's."

"I knew," he said. "I was just used to not bein' able to do nothing about it."

Realizing that his voice was well behind me, I made a face and turned toward him, tying a knot in my dress fabric to keep it in place. "You're not even up to your waist!"

"Can't swim," he said. "You know that…"

"Well… so? You don't breathe through your belly button, do you? You were about to jump off a ship and into the ocean with me…"

"Don't think they like one another much," Nate snickered.

"Sounds like love," Zev observed.

"It's not love!" Aldo and I shouted, and everybody else laughed.

I had a good time despite myself, and I somehow forgot that I was swimming underclothed with a hundred other people for minutes at a time. Once we coaxed Aldo out into water higher than his navel, Zev and I managed to teach him to doggy paddle, and he even went out into water where he couldn't touch the bottom, if only for about a minute (and he complained that he was about to drown the whole time).

The water was warm, the sun's afternoon harshness was tempered by intermittent clouds, and the river stretched before us, its smooth surface broken by big, flat-hulled cargo ferries sliding by from upriver and passenger boats, mostly sandolos and gondolas, going upriver, downriver, or across, ferrying scores of passengers. Mailyn and I competed to see who could stay underwater the longest (she claimed she won, but I was certain it had been a tie), and Zev and Nate proved they were much better swimmers than either of us, cutting through the water like shameless dolphins.

"You're only better swimmers because you do it all the time," I observed… perhaps tacitly admitting that I planned on returning to the Step Wharf in the future.

"Yup… that's how you get good at stuff," Nate agreed. His stomach gurgled… and Nate definitely looked like a kid with a generous appetite. "Hey, let's go get some food, yeah?"

"We ain't got any money," Mailyn observed.

"Hey, no worries. I'll spot a pretty girl a tollo any day of the week and twice on Saintsdays. You can help us earn it back later."

"Sounds good," Mailyn said.

"How do you earn money?" I asked.

"We've got our ways," Zev said with a mysterious quirk of his eyebrow.

"I'm going to get dressed - nobody look!" I announced. I wasn't yet familiar with the fact that ordering people, and especially children, not to do things is about the best way to get them to do it. But, to their credit, my friends managed to glance away just in time so I couldn't catch them watching scampering out of the water to get dressed.

Of course, when I scampered over to the spot where we'd left our clothes, I almost immediately discovered that somebody had taken my dress. Most of the other stuff was utterly untouched, including Zev's little leather satchel, and including my little leather shoes with the smoke-gray stockings stuffed into the toes. I fumed and stomped, turning back around in my dripping underdress.

"My dress is gone!"

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"That's a shame," Mailyn said, suppressing a snicker.

"Yours is gone, too!"

That got her a bit more invested. "What?!" She scampered out of the water and stomped around angrily, casting angry glances at all the nearby sunbathers, though none of them appeared to be smuggling the stolen dresses of two seven-year-old girls. "That was a really nice dress," she seethed.

"Yeah…" Nate said, plodding over to the scene of the crime. "Shoulda warned you about that. Anything that's too nice is likely to get nicked. Girl's clothes especially - some of the guild girls will take any nice clothes that aren't bolted down. Gotta wear your working clothes to the Step Wharf. But you can find something in the clothes crates this evening, I'm sure…"

"It's likely to be a bit dingy, though. That stuff usually is," Zev added.

"This evening? What am I supposed to do until then?" I said.

"You still got that…" Aldo gestured to the dripping-wet, flimsy fabric of my underdress. At least Mailyn's was dry.

"This is underwear! I can't walk around in underwear!"

"Hey, looks like a dress to me. Nobody's gonna care," Nate said. "You know what would take your mind off it? Food! Aren't you hungry?"

I was about to deny it, but my stomach chose that moment to let its opinion be known. "I am a little hungry," I admitted.

The food did help a bit - not much makes an already-bossy child even more intolerable than being hangry on top of having a generally lousy day. The 'street food' that Rose had got us earlier in the day had been quite good, and I eyed the food stalls greedily as we headed back out from the wharf. And then Zev and Nate proceeded to walk right past the stalls of sizzling kebabs, roasted vegetables, and steaming cauldrons of fried rice.

"But… the food's back there," I said in a small voice.

Zev waved my objection off. "Nah. That stuff's way too expensive to feed all of us. Tollos don't grow on trees, sister. No, you got to go to the grocer's stalls."

Nate nodded sagely. "Trick is to find a stall where the veg behind the stuff in front has a little wilt to its leaves and they've got a few loaves of bread right where you can see 'em. That means they're desperate to sell, so you can get whatever's wilted or leftover from the morning at half price - sometimes even less!"

Nate soon identified a stall matching his exact description, right down to the three loaves of rye bread sitting atop the counter, and he and Zev negotiated the price in chattering Perditalog with plenty of the emphatic hand gestures that Floria is known for. For only two tollos, they managed to secure enough rye bread, slightly-soft pears, and piquant potter's cheese to feed all five of us.

We ate on a nearby stoop near the River's Run market, with Nate and Zev chatting away as they stuffed their mouths, telling us about life in Floria and how Scamp classes worked at the Collegium. Rather, I should say that they ate on a nearby stoop, because I kept myself crouched behind a rain barrel for most of the meal. Even though my underdress was already mostly dry from the day's heat, I was still painfully aware of my immodesty. As we finished the last of our food and took swigs of water from Zev's water pouch, our two new friends offered to show us how they made money on the side - enough for afternoon meals and the occasional splurge of luxury.

"You gotta promise not to tell anybody, though. It's a good secret," Nate said.

"You sure we should even tell 'em?" Zev asked.

Nate leaned over and whispered, without much secrecy: "We can give them the hard jobs…"

"Yeah, ok." Zev smiled. "Come on, we'll show you. But, like Nate said, you can't tell nobody… anybody. Like Nate said, it's kind of a secret…"

"Um…" I said, looking around. The marketplace wasn't exactly crowded, but it was still doing a bustling trade. People walking with purpose, the women with elaborate wicker backets dangling from their arms, the men with tasteful satchels, chatting, bartering, and exchanging coin. They congregated beneath colorful canvas awnings or else traipsed between islands of shade, braving the sun with broad-brimmed hats and light cotton demi-capes. I was not about to be seen by the whole city in my underwear.

"Psst. Hey, Vix!" Aldo prodded my side, and I responded by punching him in the shoulder. "Ow! What was that for!"

I scowled at him. "Don't surprise people, Aldo!" What's that?

He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb - behind him, in the narrow gutterway between two shops, was a pile of discarded canvas. Leftover trimmings of low-quality canvas from apprentice exercises, no doubt, because we were quite near the canton's Tailor's Collective. It took me a moment to realize that Aldo had rummaged through the pile and found a particularly large and intact strip, over a meter long and perhaps half that wide, frayed and marked with a dizzying array of stitching and amateurish attempts at floral patterns. He proceeded to wrap the strip around his waist.

"Look!" he said, swaying his hips back and forth. "I mean… it ain't a dress…"

"That's for me?" I asked. I snatched it away from him before he could respond, wrapping it around my waist with plenty of give to spare. "It's basically a skirt!" I said happily.

"Just until we get back…"

I nodded contritely. "Sorry I hit you… this was really thoughtful… thanks."

He rubbed at his shoulder. "Yeah. I just gotta remember that I'm good at sneaking. You like it?"

I clipped the makeshift skirt with a brass hairpin I'd found discarded on the ground near the Step Wharf and took a few practice steps - it held just fine. I wouldn't have worn the thing any other time, but it sure beat the alternative. "I like it!" I told him. I strode out into the sunlight, appropriately attired for a young Gionian-Selenite-Florian lady of acceptable modesty, and I turned to Zev and Nate. "So what's this amazing money-making scheme?"

Nate grinned conspiratorially. Zev leaned in and made a grand sweeping gesture, his hand arcing out to demonstrate the long expanse of the River's Run market. "Messages!"

"Um…" I said.

"Messages?" Mailyn asked.

"Messages," Nate repeated with a slightly different flourish but no less pride.

"Explain," Mailyn said.

"Well…" Nate gesticulated vaguely, sandy hair bright as it tumbled in the sunlight. "It's like this. See how long the stretch of the River's Run is? It's… well, I reckon it's a click, isn't it? That is to say it's a kilometer from end to end. And sometimes the merchants and sellers, they like to talk…" he pointed to a group of arguing peddlers near our stoop. "Only sometimes, their stalls aren't next to one another, are they? Sometimes they're all the way across the market, and they aren't about to go all that way themselves, are they? So if you know who needs to talk to who and you ask really nicely, some of them will pay for that. Sometimes a whole tollo for a simple back and forth!"

"Usually just a pico, though," Zev clarified. If you aren't familiar with international denominations, pica are the little Mouldevican coins worth about three-fifths of a tollo. Still… not bad for a task that wouldn't take more than fifteen or twenty minutes.

Nate raised his pudgy hands obligingly. "Right, usually a pico. That's fair. But still… say you managed twenty messages in an afternoon? That's more than some grown-ups make in a whole day! Like… there's this pair of old ladies… well not granny old, but, you know… old enough that they don't want to run all around the market during the day. Only these two like to play Citadel in the afternoon… you know, the game with the little knight and castle pieces? They like to play during the day, only their shops are about five minutes apart, so they send the moves back and forth. They pay a tollo per four moves!"

"That sounds like a lot of running," I said.

"Yeah, but it's steady pay. And sometimes Mrs. Choso will give you lavender tea while she's thinking over her move. If she's brewed it and has extra, I mean. And they sometimes ask if we got friends when we get too busy, so it's a pretty solid scheme. What do you think?"

"Um…" I shared a look with Mailyn.

"That ain't exactly a scheme," Aldo observed.

"How do you mean?" Nate asked. "It's a solid scheme!"

"I mean… it seems like legit work. Like being a messenger. Not a scheme."

Zev clarified: "Exactly… they think that just 'cause… just because you're delivering messages for them that you're some kind of messenger." Apparently, he and Nate had a very different idea of what constituted a scheme from former-street-rat Aldo. "It's foolproof! You gonna help or not?"

"We could use the money," Mailyn mumbled.

I nodded definitively. We could use the money. "We'll do it!"

Nate and Zev showed us around the River's Run market, pointing out a few of the stores that occasionally had need for messengers before directly introducing us to some of the stall and shop owners that they were on good terms with. Like most of Floria's entrepreneurs outside of the Mercantile Quarter, they were all petty merchant of modest means. My parents' business could have bought any one of them out ten times over without straining their budget… but I was no longer a rich mercantile daughter, and my mother would have insisted that even the smallest of tradespeople deserves a lady's respect, so long as take pride in their own work. Therefore, I put mother's lessons to practice - with unfailing politeness, each potential client received a sunny smile, a curtsy, and a polite inquiry about their business.

"I'd love to know more about what you do, sir!" I said - in Gionian, of course. The stall owner didn't speak a word of it, instead chuckling and quipping to the next stall-owner over in Perditalog before mimicking my picture-perfect curtsy. I suppose getting a proper curtsy from an urchin in a makeshift canvas skirt is quite amusing, but it only made me more aware of my current status within the city. "Aw…"

"We'll find some that know Gionian," Nate said, nudging my shoulder with his fist. "I think Mrs. Choso does!"

After our introductions, Nate and Zev left us to our own devices so they could earn some actual coin. Then Aldo disappeared, only Asuna knows where to, and minutes later, Mailyn approached me, looking very contrite. In her hands, she grasped a neatly-folded sheet of scrap paper. She'd gotten a messaging job without me!

"Sorry, Vix. I gotta deliver this. You can follow if you like?"

"No, that's fine," I frowned - it was most definitely not fine. "I… I'm going to see if that lady with the tall hair needs help!"

Mrs. Choso, who kept her graying hair in a big top bun, didn't need any messages delivered at the moment, but she did know somebody who did - in fact, Jospun the Smith (who spoke a vague smattering of Gionian) needed a proper courier. I don't imagine Jospun was a particularly good smith, because most of his product involved the products that smiths generally get their apprentices to make - nails, stakes, straight-bolts, and so on… basically, anything that was vaguely cylindrical with an optional taper or enlargement at one end. He might not have been the best smith, but he had quite a few small products, and I spent my day crisscrossing the marketplace and beyond, taking orders from construction and maintenance crews, delivering them to Josun, and bringing small packages of nails, braces, and other needed items back, receiving a little brown pico for each completed delivery.

It was a lot of running…

I was never a sedentary child, but I wasn't used to that amount of running, let alone running along the golden sandstone bricks of the River's Run in well-worn shoes beneath the baking Florian sun. I was sweaty and well in need of another bath by the time Mailyn flagged me down and informed me that the others were headed back to the Collegium. I made do with wiping down by a public fountain and then filling up on bread when Aldo found a whole loaf of stale poppyseed - bought for a pico, he claimed. I suspect he either stole the thing or found it in a dumpster. Alas, to a Scamp, food that won't make you sick is food you don't pass up.

We made our way back to our residence hall as the sun set. My legs felt like jelly and I'd lost my dress, but I couldn't say I hadn't enjoyed parts of my first day as a Scamp. Stumbling through the big double doors of Scamp Hall #5, I rummaged through the clothing bins and found a rough-spun brown dress close to my size. It would make me look like an unrepentant urchin until I figured out how to properly mend the thing, but in a way I was an urchin now. An urchin being schooled at the most notorious educational institute in the world.

Or at least I would be soon - my classes didn't start until the morning.