Chương 9: Day Nine

Dear Diary, Okay, after trying for a while last night I'd realized that those butterflies weren't going away any time soon and they were making it impossible to concentrate enough to decode the torturous logic of not just a legal textbook, but a legal textbook from another world, I shut off the light, stripped down, and lay down to sleep.

I'm not sure how long I lay there trying to drift off, but as I contemplated self-service as my only available soporific, a quiet click from the direction of my door interrupted my musings completely. I slipped out of bed, crept to the door, turned the knob, and pulled. The door opened. Slowly, as it was still a huge fuckin' slab of wood. I let it open just far enough to peek my head out.

A couple girls who looked to maybe be my age trudged down the hallway; I figured they must be on the way home from some late night class, because nobody looked that beat making the walk of shame. I pulled back and closed the door, then reopened and closed it twice more just to be sure it wouldn't lock me in. Satisfied I wouldn't wind up trapped again, I walked back to bed, reveling in my newfound ability to see enough to navigate in the pitch blackness of my room.

I lay down and tried to get some sleep; I wanted to be well rested for my first day of classes. I was so excited it took two full doses of soporific to get to sleep. Marie's knock on the door snapped me out of pleasant dreams of world domination. I slipped on enough clothes to cover my private bits and skipped over to the door. I mean, as much as one can skip in a tiny room half filled with Marie's cart. I opened the door to see Marie standing there cartless.

"Is the Dining Hall still serving breakfast?" She looked like it caused her physical pain to use more than one word at a time, so I'd begun adjusting my dialogue options with Marie to allow for simple one word answers.

"Yes."

"Great!" I pulled Marie's cart to the door, and she took it with a look of gratitude. I had no idea why, since she'd done me a huge favor by delivering it, but I wasn't about to ask her for an explanation. Or had she? Was a cart full of food normal for people on their 'Devotion' day? I had no idea, but I figured she didn't have to go overboard with breakfast in any case, and while I hadn't felt bloated, I still felt not-hungry for the first time in recent memory, life in Camden included.

I turned to get dressed as Marie maneuvered her cart around to head back to wherever Marie went when she wasn't bringing me food when one of those Very Important Questions popped into my head.

"Marie?" She stopped and turned to me, waiting expectantly.

"Thanks for the food yesterday. Also, is there a bathroom somewhere in the building?" The thanks brought her normal weird emotional roller coaster, followed by a muttered "De nada", but my question prompted nothing but a confused look.

"Uh... lavatory? Washroom? Water closet? Someplace to get cleaned up and crap or piss?" At that last, she blinked, and I stifled a giggle at how much she looked like a light bulb had gone off in her head. She pointed to the bed, or rather to the space beneath it.

"Pot." She paused a moment, I guess to make sure I saw where she was pointing, before forcing out two whole words.

"Bath? Tonight?" I forced my face into a smile and replied, "thanks, Marie, a bath tonight would be great." She nodded and rolled her cart off down the hall, headed for Marie-land. I closed my door, cranked up my light, and got down on my hands and knees to look under the bed. That led me to discover that my wireframe vision worked in spaces too dark to see in even when my regular vision still took care of the rest of my field of view. Under the bed was, indeed, a simple ceramic pot roughly the size of my head.

My lack of need to crap or piss moved from 'mystery I must solve' to 'gift from the goddamned gods' in that instant. I pulled out the pot, because I saw something else under the bed. Weirdly shaped, all angles and lines. I pulled it out too, only to find it nearly as mysterious in the light of my lamp. A bunch of thin boards with two flat panels, all connected with hinges. It looked a little like a collapsed easel. When I went to lift it up, it unfolded into... something.

A rickety stand with a pair of reasonably level shelves. I shrugged, set the chamber pot on one of them, and slid it next to my armoire. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. For no apparent reason, my personal alarm bells jangled a little, but I was in too much of a rush to care. I stripped out of my dirty clothes, gave my pits a quick sniff... Pumpkin spice? My unwashed pits smelled like pumpkin spice? What was I, the Incarnation of the Basic Bitch?

No time for that now. I didn't reek, so I pulled on a clean set of clothes, left my room, careful to shut the door behind me in case anybody else decided to snoop like I had done, dropped yesterday's dirty clothes into the laundry chute, and ran to the Dining Hall. When I got there, all of the tables were set out, most of them fully occupied by groups of students. Maids pushed serving carts around, delivering fresh food to the tables, although from the look of things the tables and carts were both running low.

A quick scan of the room revealed that the full tables were occupied by kids with uniforms that screamed 'custom tailored'. Most of those tables were either all guys or all girls, but I saw at least one with a mix, although everyone there had golden blonde hair with the kind of luster and shine that required special chemicals and professional application. I had a good guess at which table was the Dan table, at least. Two tables clearly had room left, although the first one I'd have to shove in.

That one was full of kids who looked like they barely knew how to wear clothing, let alone a uniform. The other had just three students. Two girls, one guy, at least I presumed that from hairstyles; one of the 'girls' had the kind of build that made you think if Truck-kun hit them, Truck-kun would get isekaied.

All of them had their uniforms on right, and instead of the kind of mass grabbing and gobbling that went on at what I mentally dubbed 'the gobbo table', these three ate with the kind of mechanical efficiency that came from too few good clothes and too many times going hungry. I plonked myself down across from the girls, next to the guy, and nabbed myself a loaf of bread and a pitcher of water. The stares they gave me weren't cold, exactly, but the guarded stares I had given to strangers myself back in Camden.

"Good morning. I'm Tabitha Diaz. Is this your first day too?" Having introduced myself, I proceeded to tear into the bread. It had gone cold already, but it still had some flavor, and the texture was, if anything, better than the warm ones I'd eaten. Truck-kun Slayer smiled a lopsided smile and gave me a nod while she finished chewing her last bite. After swallowing, she nodded to me and said, "Angel Mac Conno. Good to meet you. Are you one of the registrar's pet projects too?" Dammit.

No help on whether she was an absolute tank of a guy with a high pitched voice or a chick with a massive rack and the torso to avoid the comorbid back problems. I swallowed my current mouthful, washed it down with a solid gulp straight from the pitcher, and replied, "I think so? I never met her, what with all the shit that went down at the aquarium." Angel nodded, but she'd already filled her mouth with another big bite of food.

I took the hint and polished off the last of the loaf and started gulping down sausages as fast as I could. While I did, the smaller girl introduced herself. She wasn't just 'smaller than Angel', by the way, but legit had to be no more than four eleven, and if she weighed a hundred pounds wearing the ten pounds of uniform, I'd eat my own boots.

"Hey. I'm Saffron Aetos. I got to meet her, gave her my name, and next thing I know I woke up in the Infirmary." She smiled and nodded at Angel.

"If she hadn't been there, I wouldn't have woken up at all." Okay, that gave me a gender for Angel, at least. I finished off the last of the cold sausages and switched over to the eggs, the only thing remaining on the table. The first one I cracked glopped all over the table, as undercooked as every other egg I'd gotten. I realized immediately why the others hadn't eaten any; no way to do so without screwing up the uniform.

I decided to give my oubliette of a digestive system a challenge and just started popping them in my mouth, shell and all, giving them only a few more cursory chews than I had the sausages. While Angel and Saffron looked on in mixed horror and admiration, mind you not slowing their own consumption in the slightest, the guy beside me spoke up in a higher pitched voice than either of the girls; worse yet he had a lisp, and I couldn't tell if it was real or an affectation.

"Bill Driver. I..." I didn't get to hear what Bill was about to say. Someone at the head table stood up, and in a parade ground shout that had my ears ringing despite the size of the room and the distance between us, shouted, "Any Cadet candidates who do not yet have a class schedule, out to the Practice Yard on the double!" He paused, eyes scanning across the room.

"That means NOW! Move! Move! Move! Move!" None of the kids at my table heard much of that last outburst, really. Long before he'd finished his first sentence, we were on our feet and moving, and the moment he said 'on the double', we all broke into a sprint. I wasn't sure exactly what clique I'd attached myself to, but it seemed to be a good fit for me. I hoped so anyhow, because that Drill Sergeant didn't sound happy.