Lunch hour, the highlight of many students' day. The cafeteria was unconventionally placed on the top floor of the main building, closest to the sky. A long, long hall with a sharply ridged glass ceiling. An airy web of thin steel beams held up the clean sheets of glass, filling the space with light upon the peak hour of the day. The dormitories had smaller canteens, where we'd have our breakfast and supper, but probably nobody disputed lunch being the best of the meals.

  The school food wasn't comparable to Mr Lennard’s artworks back at the Ruthford estate, maybe, but still landed leagues above the crude army food that only fed the body and disregarded the soul as an unnecessary decoration; every calorie calculated by minds who found no pleasure in living. The academy matrons knew how to season their dishes, the meat and fish were fresh, the ingredients locally produced, and we had the luxury to sample the final product amid daylight and clouds and the company of like-minded, cultured people.

  The dining times were arranged so that not all the students hit the line at the same time. The Sword course had priority, while we mages got to go only after noon when the fencers had long left, in order by class, from A to C. Maybe the administration thought brain work wasn't as consuming as physical training, and we could survive longer, or at least wouldn't make as much noise if we couldn't. They probably had the right of it.

  I made my way up after the lecture, lost in thought, when an unexpected view met me on the stairs.

  The prefect president Vanille D'Arnos descended the same track, and we ended up on a collision course.

  It was rare to encounter this girl without a platoon of her classmates around her. I couldn't tell why she was moving solo this once, but it was unmistakably the celebrity herself.

  That fledgling knight looked visibly tired, dark rings under her eyes, and her steps lacked their usual youthful spring. The training regime the Sword course was put through had to be truly excruciating, to wear down a strong young lady like her. I could only be glad I didn't have to endure the same crucible day after day.

  I courteously moved aside and let her pass. She wasn't looking at me, lost in her thoughts, and we weren't really even friends, but I figured I should say something, anyway. What was the appropriate phrase, in this case?

  “Good day, senior,” I tried.

  “Ha?”

  Vanille snapped out of her deep reflections, as if her mind had wandered in dimensions wholly separated from the body, and she only now recognized me. Her feet came at once to a sharp stop, and she made a swift 90-degree turn to lunge at me, like a lion spotting a coincidental hare in a heap of grass. Before I could even think about running away, her hands were squeezing my shoulders the way a drowning sailor clutched a buoy, and she leaned close to my face with an intense light blazing in her eyes.

  What's going on? Did they run out of food in the cafeteria and force students into cannibalism?

  No, it wasn't famine on her mind. As I stood stiff in her grip, uncharacteristically confused and lost for words, she yelped,

  “Hope, you have to help me!”

  A moment later, the two of us were back in the prefect office, which I hadn't seen since the day we dropped by to install the computer. The same as that time, the room lay vacant and still, the tall antique chairs empty around the courtly rectangle of desks. The sunlit front yard beyond the windows in the back seemed to voicelessly ask, wouldn't you rather be out here than inside right now?

  “Okay. Could you show me again how it works? Slowly. Please.”

  That was Vanille’s request to me, as I sat in her chair, at her desk, with the mechanical typewriter and the projector in front of me, and her excellency hovered over my shoulder.

  “We gave you a detailed guidebook together with the device,” I pointed out. “Didn't you read it?”

  “I did!” she claimed. “Tried to. But it was full of all these esoteric words, projector lenses and terminals and switch relays and whatnot, I didn't really understand half of it. 'Crystal definition,' 'drive partition'! Is that supposed to be English!? My head feels like it's going to split, just looking at the thing. Are you telling me a human being built this? There's no way!”

  With the arrival of the machine, the faculty had assigned the prefects to "digitize" the Cabinet records when they had downtime. That is, rewrite all the paper documents onto the crystal containers. Likely a task they'd have to pass on to their successors, with decades of materials to go through, but someone had to get it started.

  The problem was, there was only one computer at the moment and no willing volunteers. After a reluctant vote, the duty of operating the machine had fallen on the president herself. Who was raised on a farm and had never seen anything more complicated than a streetlight before the hunk of magitech was hauled in. She’d made no progress to speak of in all this time since, and was reaching the limits of her ability to fake it.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “But I can't just tell the others I don't know how to use this thing, after how easy you made it look!” Vanille confessed to me. “They'd think I'm an idiot. Well, I am, but I don't want them to know that.”

  “You're not an idiot,” I told her. “It always takes time to learn the ways of new tools. Wasn't it the same when you first picked up the sword, too?”

  “Was it…?”

  She recalled her experiences, puzzled. My comparison didn't seem to ring a bell. Never mind.

  I wasn't exactly an engineering expert myself. But a mage's head was made to identify cause-effect relations and memorize complex processes, and the computer was deliberately designed to have very limited operations. Its inner workings were still fairly plain to my eyes. So I showed Vanille the basic functions of the system once again, how to turn it on and off correctly. How to create, name, and edit a text document, and how to browse the stored documents in the main directory, the same as when Ms Asia showed it to me.

  Vanille diligently wrote down the main steps in her notebook and drew guiding pictures, and I smiled at her earnestness.

  A knight was a knight, whether she had a sword or a pen in hand. She then noticed my look.

  “Hey! Don't laugh! I need to do this, okay?”

  “I wasn't laughing,” I said.

  “You were!”

  “I just thought what a good student you were.”

  “So you were laughing at me!”

  “I meant it, honestly. It’s a thing to be proud of.”

  “Hmmm.”

  Vanille stared at me, pretending to be upset but her lips were smiling. Then she suddenly said,

  “Hey, Hope, have you thought about becoming a prefect?”

  I raised a brow.

  “I wasn't aware you could just ‘become’ one at will.”

  “I can recommend you. I haven't heard about you causing any trouble, and I think you'd be a big help to us.”

  “Though I haven't been here for a month yet?”

  “That's okay. It's rare for freshmen to be appointed, but there's no rule saying they can't be. Leander and I were first-years too, when we joined up. And a freshman fencer only joined last week. You'll be fine.”

  A royal prince and a sword saint candidate sponsored by the Kingdom, not really comparable to my case…

  Suddenly becoming a prefect would bring a lot of attention to me and not all of it—if half of it—would be positive.

  On the other hand, the office records could give me information regular students weren't privy to. Prefects patrolled the campus and helped organize events throughout the academic term, operating quietly backstage. That suited me. I might have an excuse to go to places you normally couldn't without raising suspicion, and through the Cabinet, I could learn about any irregularities in the Wood too, and maybe anticipate the Tarachians’ movements.

  Those gains should've been well worth fifteen minutes of fame.

  So I put on my humble face and asked, “What should I do then?”

  Vanille tossed her shoulders.

  “Nothing too special. We have a session today after school, and I'll let the others know you’re interested. You met Tom too, and he liked you. We have another meeting later this Friday, when you'll probably be invited to introduce yourself to everybody. We’ll have a quick vote to put in the books, and that's about it. Just so many small formalities and papers to fill out. There's always a paper for everything here.”

  “That's a familiar pain to me. Well, if you think I can actually be of use, I'd be honored to join.”

  Vanille pointed at the computer, a wry smile on her lips, and answered,

  “If you can help us with this guy, they'll all be begging you to join. None of us wants to touch it!”

  “That's kind of sad.”

  Progress, rejected for being different and scary. A story as old as time.

  “Oh, right.” Vanille jumped a bit at the realization. “It was your aunt who made this thing! I'm sorry! It's just so—intimidating. The way it looks. The general vibe it gives. It's like a small devil lurking in a box. I fear it'll bite my ankles or breathe fire at me without warning.”

  Technically, Ms Asia didn't invent the computer. But whatever. If that impression was my ticket into the company, then far be it from me to undermine it.

  The end of the lunch break neared. My verbal application given, the guidance wrapped up, we left the office to eat together. Vanille hadn't actually had a bite yet. On the way to the cafeteria, I noted the prefect president looked visibly livelier again. Revived. Could it be that it wasn't sword training that had worn her out so badly, but simple stress over the machine…?

  I feared it might take another generation or two before this invention saw widespread success in the Kingdom, if that day should come at all.