The Cabinet convened on three days a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, to discuss any pressing topics together and work on common projects, and were otherwise free to use the office as needed. Being a prefect could be likened to workplace training, but it was mostly only a light extracurricular activity on the side of other things that people did for a few extra credits and a nice note on your resume.

  Beside keeping records on student life and helping with events, the prefects' most important task was, as said, to help maintain security on the grounds. The prefects patrolled in pairs, in two-hour shifts between 4 PM and midnight. The hired guards watched the gates and kept an eye out for external threats, while the prefects mostly only had to see that the students didn't murder each other, returned to their rooms by the curfew, and the division of males and females in the dorms held as intended.

  There was a decent number of volunteer patrollers, especially from among the Sword course seniors looking for extra credits, so it wasn't necessary for the Cabinet members to be out there every night. I had only one shift every other week.

  But it was mysteriously reassuring to have a “duty” to attend to. So used to the regular RA garrison routine, I was always a little uneasy to be free and drifting. The lecture schedule was too irregular and undisciplined to fill that void. The prefect office was a small step closer to the hierarchical world I used to know, though still a playground in comparison.

  The first day in the office, I was introduced to a couple of new faces. Those two weren't technically prefects and didn't participate in every meeting, only when the topics were relevant to their respective positions.

  The first was the head of the Health committee. Meaning those students who helped the medical staff at the sick ward. Mostly magic-users gifted at healing arts, or general-ed students who studied medicine. Though there were exceptions too.

  The man representing the Health committee was a seven-foot mountain of muscle. His uniform struggled to contain his broad, sculpted frame, and he actually had to bow to fit in through the door. He seemed to find Calidea’s chilling October too sultry to his taste, as he’d left the jacket off and had his shirt sleeves rolled high up.

  The slight blueness of the man’s complexion suggested his roots were in the wintry far north of Kargasia, where the warrior clans thrived in the harshest environments on the planet. It was unexpected to see one of the clansmen down south in Calidea, let alone studying medicine.

  Another odd trait was his hair. Kargasia customarily took great pride in their long dreadlocks and believed that the longer their hair, the stronger the warrior. But this youth's head was shaved short close to the scalp, catching the ceiling light in a vaguely silvery halo.

  “I’m Kreos of Kollhagen,” that grim senior said and shook my hand. “Magic course, third year. Class A. Also, chairman of the student Health committee. ‘Healthy mind in a healthy body’ is my motto.”

  Trapped under his steel palm, no sign of my own hand remained in view.

  “Just kidding,” he added without a hint of a smile. “I don’t have a motto.”

  “Nice to meet you, senior Kreos,” I said. “May I ask what got you into healthcare?”

  “Hitting a person and giving pain is easy,” he answered, gripping my hand gently but with no option to withdraw. “But taking pain away—is hard. That makes it a challenge worth pursuing.”

  “That’s a reason.”

  My hand thankfully still resembled a hand when he let it go and went to his seat.

  I turned to face the next person.

  “Here we have the chairwoman of the Dormitory committee,” Vanille introduced. “Our lovely senior godmother, Leyseritt Rolan! Magic course, third year! Of course, the very finest A-material!”

  “Hi,” the young lady called Leyseritt greeted me, bashful about the glowing introduction. She had an easygoing air about her and extended her hand to me. “Just call me Serie.”

  She was as much a godmother as the General was a dragon, I felt. Leyseritt reminded me a lot of Charlotte with her long, wavy burgundy locks and tall, graceful figure. Only clumsier, less practiced and less self-confident, in an endearing, genuine way. I wondered if there was a time when Charlotte was as fresh-faced and unsure of her charms.

  Ironically, this girl would’ve made the more effective spy thanks to that unfiltered immediateness and sincerity of expression. I found the fat distribution in her body marveling. Her arms and neck were thin and graceful, but her chest sagged heavily and her hips were rather wide.

  “Uh, my eyes are up here,” she notified me with a wry smile. “This is the first time I have to tell that to a girl...”

  “Sorry, I was just lost in recollection for a bit,” I said and moved to take her hand. “I met someone else named Rolan a while ago. Are you maybe re—”

  “Ow—!”

  At the moment our palms were about to touch, a small spark flashed in between, lashing at our hands with an audible snap, and we reflexively drew back at the same time.

  Static electricity? The discharge was unusually harsh.

  “Aw, shoot, sorry,” Leyseritt apologized with a wince, shaking her hand before offering it anew. “I study polarity for my thesis and my experiments tend to leave me a little—overcharged. It should be fine now.”

  “An electro-sorceress then?” I remarked and smiled as I returned the now-harmless handshake. “How interesting. That's a subject I'd like to discuss with you at length sometime.”

  “If you’re not scared of being randomly electrocuted,” she replied with a little laugh and blushed a little. There was surely no mage out there who didn’t enjoy talking about magic.

  “You guys done holding hands soon?” Vanille interjected from the side and shook my wrist.

  “Oh, we have an established food chain!” Leyseritt let go and made a goofy face at the president, who responded by sticking her tongue out.

  It appeared to be their private flavor of humor, in which the uninitiated shouldn’t get mixed in.

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  We took our seats and quietly got to work. The office was well-manned now, with five girls and four boys sitting together. I was glad to see I didn’t stand out too badly in that eccentric company. In fact, I may have well been the most ordinary student present, at least if you only looked at appearances.

  The day’s agenda was soon shared. No big news and no major decisions pending. The only noteworthy event in nearby future was the upcoming forest survey for the freshman classes, but those were standard fare at Belmesion.

  As the secretary, my duty was to record the main points brought up in the session on a ready template sheet. In the future, this would be a job done at the computer, but none of us was yet confident enough in their typing to keep up with the keyboard. So I took notes by hand and let Vanille type it out later, since the machine still sat at her desk.

  The Cabinet sessions had two hours reserved for them, to be extended by need, but we were all done with the talking before twenty minutes were up, and continued from there with our respective projects.

  Lycan and I helped Vanille with the archive digitization. We would unwrap old paper folders and sort the not-so-organized documents into marked bundles by subject, for the president to type them out and save them on the crystal drives. It was mindless, stress-free factory work that let me quietly learn what the office was like, and what I could expect in my own future.

  Although, I didn't have the leisure to dive too deep into it.

  “Hope! Help!”

  I heard the president whisper-shouting my name, and looked up to see her beckon at me from behind her lone desk.

  “What's wrong?” I asked aloud, not bothering to act stealthy, since everyone in the room had to have heard her.

  “There's something weird going on here,” she said and pointed at her projector display. “Come see!”

  I got off my chair and went over. Because of how the projector worked, the ghostly, spectral-blue image broke into a pointillized mess when viewed from the side. To make out the image clearly, I had to face the display directly from in front, which meant going to stand close next to the president.

  It felt a little—risky.

  Lawless, in a way I couldn’t easily put into words.

  But it would’ve looked even weirder, having to stand close to each other but still trying to maintain a formal gap somehow. Sort of comical, looking but not really seeing. Someone watching us from the side might want to ask, why was I acting so excessively self-conscious next to another girl? That would've put Vanille to an akward spot too.

  Therefore, the correct thing to do was clearly to show no care at all.

  So I leaned with one hand on the backrest of Vanille’s chair and on the edge of the desk with the other, and lowered myself down close to her eye level, to see exactly what she was seeing. Her face right beside mine, her body heat on my cheek, her scent filling my nose, that peculiar smell of washed hair and a mild perfume that I couldn't recognize and which reminded me of cloudberries.

  Vanille quickly leaned away from me.

  Ha. My courage won over a star fencer.

  Although it was a bittersweet victory…Never mind.

  What was the problem then? A large, pale blue rectangle shape had appeared to cover the document view, with white capital letters inside.

  “Hmm. ‘Error: 610.’”

  “This thing appeared out of nowhere,” the president explained. “I didn’t press anything I shouldn’t have, did I? What does it mean?”

  “I don't know. Do you have the manual nearby?”

  She excavated the heavy white-cover paperback from the desk drawer and shoved it to my side like a bundle of cockatrice guts, diseased and contagious.

  “The manual contains an ordered index of all possible error codes,” I told her, having briefly leafed through the book back when we brought over the machine. “You should take a look at it, if you come across anything new and strange.”

  “I know I should. But looking at all that small print—it's just so scary!”

  True, every thin page of the manual was used very economically from corner to corner. But I had no idea why that made it frightening. It was good use of paper.

  “605...609. There. Let's see. ‘Out of memory. Document overflow. The size of the writer document exceeds the display capacity. Further inputs are automatically blocked.’”

  Vanille frowned at my recital like a dog denied its dinner.

  “Can you explain that to me like I'm not an archmage?”

  I wasn't so sure I understood it any better myself. The expectations were heavy. But I had a vague hunch and put it to the test by poking the backspace key a few times. After erasing a couple of words on the article, the rectangle shape with the error message disappeared.

  The theory appeared proven.

  “Wow, you fixed it!” The president clapped her hands in delight.

  I fixed nothing. It wasn't broken in the first place.

  “The document simply got too long. It seems it can contain only a certain amount of text and is set to lock when the limit is met. I think you should start a new file and continue there. Just give it the same name with ‘part 2’ added to the end, so that other users can see the articles are connected.”

  “It can’t even remember this much text? This thing is even dumber than I am,” Vanille remarked as she faced the keyboard again.

  “You're not dumb,” I told her again and impulsively petted her head.

  Why did I do that? It was right there on the petting range. This had to be the same instinct that made you stop to “good boy” all dogs that came up. But Vanille made no note of it, and I returned to my seat. Planting my rear back in the chair, I noticed Leyseritt Rolan looking back and forth between Vanille and me, blinking, and her eyes looked like they had big question marks in place of pupils.

  Was she interested in computer science too?

  The prefects resumed their quiet toil, each in their own right, avoiding unnecessary chatter, and looking appropriately stern. Aware of bearing the quality of student life on their shoulders, following the example of their parents and elders in how respectable work was supposed to be done. For a time.

  Then I noticed someone frantically waving at me again.

  “Hope, come take a look. What does this mean?”

  “....”

  How did she survive before I joined?

  The president kept on discovering new hiccups, loopholes, and glitches in the device and called me over to analyze each and every little thing. And I did my best to answer her, though I wasn't any better informed, and rather wished she'd followed the example I was trying to show before, to work out the solutions on her own using the manual.

  But it wasn't such a bad feeling, being relied on. It made me feel like I had a reason to be there.

  So I patiently indulged her bottomless curiosity, trying not to look like I enjoyed it.

  Until Harlow put a stop to the show.

  “President, could you stop interrupting the secretary, and let her do her job?”

  “I can't help it!” Vanille protested, gesturing at the computer. “This thing hates me! There must be little devils inside and they’re all making fun of me!”

  “Then I'll ask Professor Ruthford to give you private tutoring tomorrow. She’s better qualified to answer your questions than a student is, anyway.”

  “That…won't be necessary.”

  From there on, Vanille worked quietly on her own until the end of the session.

  Did she have something against my aunt?