The cafeteria was uncannily almost-but-not-quite normal feeling, which matched everything else, as far as Danielle was concerned. The usual metal trays and disposable utensils had been replaced with cardboard trays and no utensils. Accordingly, the entree choice consisted of hamburgers, chickenburgers, or cold sliced ham on a burger bun. There were potato fries and veggie chips for side dishes, and whole fruit, and cardboard cartons of milk or orange juice. The familiar school cafeteria workers were there, line servers passing out sandwiches and cooks flipping burgers in the background, all trying to put a brave face on it for the Sent, though several of them looked like they might have done some crying of their own, off and on.

  Danielle found Sadie and Heather, sitting next to each other at one end of an eight-person table while a group of four took up the other end. Danielle waved to them, and got through the line, perhaps a bit distractedly, but how could you really go wrong? Well, sitting down opposite Sadie, she was surprised to realize she’d accidentally pointed to a chickenburger sandwich instead of a hamburger, but it was fine, she didn’t hate chickenburgers.

  “Learn anything new?” Danielle asked Sadie and Heather.

  Sadie shrugged. Heather answered, “People are depressed and angry and don’t want to talk plans anymore. Too many of us have realized that none of us knows what’s actually going to happen.”

  “You get anything?” Sadie asked.

  “Yeah, actually, my little sister looked up the voluntary Sending program on the netsite, believe it or not. It’s not an actual guarantee, because the programs are obviously different, but Dad was pretty sure the Advancement token that Sent get gives you more stuff than the regular one for Inside, and the netsite promised that volunteers would get a Class at Advancement; so assuming it’s at least the same Advancement token for both programs – ”

  “Oh, wow. A Class right away? Really?” Heather asked. She sounded torn between excitement and disbelief.

  “The other thing both programs have in common is that there aren’t any limits on how many System abilities you’re allowed to get, like there are Inside,” Danielle said. “My Dad made a big point about how that means we can afford to try something up front, see how it goes, and change later if we need to.”

  “Oh wow,” a boy to her right said, and Danielle glanced at the other end of the table, where she’d apparently caught the attention of the whole other group. “I hadn’t thought of that. My older brother’s always complaining about how hard it is to choose what Class to go for – he’s in college, so he needs to choose soon, you know? Inside, you can only have one unless you get a special permit, and it’s not easy. Every Class level gives you at least four System abilities, so by the time you level an extra Class to level 3, that’s twelve more abilities and you’re way over the ability limit. If being Sent really means we have no limits, that’s huge!”

  “There have to be some kind of limits,” one of the other boys said. “Otherwise, everyone would be everything.”

  “Time,” Sadie said. “Time to unlock things, time to practice Skills.”

  “Yeah, a lot of the time you have to learn how to do things the hard way before the System will see that you’re serious about it and give you a Skill to do it the easy way,” the first boy said. “My brother complains about that, too. My brother just complains a lot! Heh, I bet he’s still complaining about the visitation – the stupid schedule, and the teeny room, blah, blah, blah.”

  “Did he actually waste time during your goodbye visit complaining?” Heather asked, aghast.

  The boy smirked. “That’s how my brother lets people know he cares – he complains about stuff on your behalf, instead of just complaining about his stuff.”

  Most of the table group chuckled. “So, uh, Classes tomorrow for us though,” Danielle said. “That agent that met us coming in said something about doing last-minute unlocking exercises, too. What kind of stuff does your brother let drop when he’s complaining about unlocking stuff?”

  “Besides the whole thing with learning to do it the hard way first?” the boy asked.

  Danielle pulled out her notepad and noted that down. “That’s for Skills, right? Has he complained about Class unlocks?”

  “Oh – right, um. He says the good Classes all demand you get Class Skills first, but the easy Classes don’t give you as many Skills later? If I understood right?” the boy said uncertainly.

  “Weird. How would you get Class Skills before you get the Class?” one of the boys asked. Danielle vaguely recognized him; he had distinctive glasses. Wasn’t he in her Spanish class?

  “The hard way,” Sadie said. “Want to be a classed Crafter, first you have to be a craftsman. Or at least, know a craft or two.”

  “Do popsicle stick houses count?” the second boy joked.

  Sadie shrugged. “If you make a hobby of making them, probably. Not if you just made one in art class.”

  “Right, that makes sense,” Danielle said thoughtfully. “You’d show the System you do making stuff, and you’d get a Skill. Then maybe you do it for making a different kind of stuff, and you get a second Skill – ”

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “If by ‘get’ you mean ‘unlock’ I guess,” the first boy said. “You have to save up for mana to Advance the Skill, too, though; that’s the problem. Then you have to go to the Access Point and load in all your mana tokens.”

  “Unless you get the Skill from a Career, like our academic Skills,” the boy with glasses said. “Careers are always on, collecting up mana little by little to make new Skills.”

  “Sure, but then how’d you get the Career?” the second boy asked.

  “Yeah, that – plus it can take years to get Career Skills, and you have to be actually doing stuff in that Career in the meantime, which comes back to the whole thing where you’re doing it the hard way.”

  “Showing the System that it’s what you do, so it’ll decide to help you do it better,” Danielle broke back in. “Do enough of it to get more than one Skill for it, and it only makes sense for the System to start offering you other ways to improve. Adding a matching Class, so you can actually choose Skills, is a great way to get better at a given Career, right?”

  “What does that mean for us, then?” Heather asked. “We don’t have any Skills like that, and our Career won’t drop crafting Skills. Academy Student does academics, that’s – ” she broke off, glancing at Danielle.

  “Even my weird Skill actually does help me study,” Danielle reminded her. “We’re getting new Careers tomorrow, though. Didn’t you say that even Inside, you get a Career at Advancement?”

  “Well, yeah, but we’ve been nothing but students since Awakening,” Heather fretted. “How are we supposed to get Careers for crafting or, or anything?”

  “You could have Skills waiting to unlock,” Sadie said.

  “Yeah, my older brother had that,” the boy with glasses said. “He did a lot of sports in high school, and when he Advanced after graduation, it turned out he had a lot of physical Skills unlocked already. Even a minor healing Skill! He was really proud of that. It’s part of why he’s going for sports medicine.”

  “Plus, I guess there’s the easy Classes,” the first boy said. “Insiders might not want to take them, because they only get one Class, but if we’re allowed to do more than one? We could take an easy one now, and work on the unlocking requirements for better Classes to take later – like next year, even. We’d still have time to get them above level 3 before we got ourselves all the way to level 10!”

  “Especially if the easy Classes can maybe give you Skills that you’d need for unlocking better Classes in the same general field,” Danielle said. “Like, if there was a nurse Class but it gave you medical Skills in general, maybe you could use it to unlock the Physician or Healer Classes.”

  “So, if what we took at the store mattered, and what we talk about and do tonight matters,” Heather said slowly, “and if we wanted to maybe be Healers, then what we should do with the rest of tonight is talk about medical stuff?”

  “I don’t know, it seems like a longshot,” the second boy said.

  The fourth boy finally spoke up to say, “The rumors I’m hearing are, half of us have to die before the other half can come back. Emergency population control – our classes have been too big for a few years, and the next few are too, so they decided to cut their losses and cut the middle out of the overpopulation wave right now. If you want to do last minute Skill unlocks, work on your fighting and defense, so you won’t be part of the half that gets culled.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Danielle said, almost by reflex. “They’re going out of their way to get some kind of result with all this crazy necessities-store-based prep stuff. It’s got to be more than just killing us off; there are way easier and cheaper ways to kill people off. Doing nothing but kick us out would probably work just fine.”

  “It’s plausible deniability,” the fourth boy said. “Well, and maybe the fact that they still want half of us back with all the high-level stuff. They’re not trying to kill us all off at once, they’re trying to make sure we fight and struggle and stuff, hopefully without blaming it on the government.”

  That sounded unlikely, but Danielle couldn’t immediately think of a solid counter-argument.

  “Well. I’m not sure if I believe that, but if that was the case, all the more reason to be sure we have some Healers,” Heather said. “Come on, girls, let’s go to the gym and talk first aid.”

  “Keep the trays, please,” Sadie said. “I want to try something with them.”

  So saying, the three of them headed for the gym, where Danielle told Heather everything she could remember from her first aid course (taken a year ago, during the previous summer break), while Sadie attempted to weave the trays into a sturdier tray, or at least a sturdy mat. Eventually, the boys from their table came in and started trying to practice some kind of fighting, at which point Danielle and her roommates went back to the cafeteria. They were still serving supper for the later arrivals, so Danielle got her hamburger after all, and her continued recounting of the first aid class drew a cluster of interested boys and girls, some covertly listening in, and others shamelessly inserting themselves into the conversation. Danielle didn’t object; she didn’t lose anything by sharing knowledge.

  Other groups were obviously already worried about each other, though; Danielle noted more than a few hostile glances traded between small groups, especially of boys. She wasn’t sure whether to attribute that to boys just being more prone to fight, or if it was more that the rumor had started in the boys’ dorms the night before, or spread from some boy’s family. Whatever the case, it was a concerning development, and it gradually became clear that it wasn’t exclusive to the boys; there were some girls and groups of girls acting the same way, just fewer of them.

  Danielle and her dormmates went up to their pod just after eight by the cafeteria clock to shower and get to bed early. All three of them used the soap Danielle had opened, leaving the other two dry and wrapped. The little towels were annoying; thin, rough, and not nearly big enough. Heather was inclined to rant about it, but Danielle suspected she knew at least part of the reason why: the hand towels the three of them had packed were higher quality, but even smaller. Chances were, not many Sent would have full-sized towels the next night.

  The three of them emptied out their bags of packaging trash into the room trash bin, getting rid of the plastic wrap and packing blisters they’d removed, and little bits of heavy paper and cardboard that didn’t seem useful. Danielle kept the larger bits of cardboard, including the lunch boxes, and spread the little white towel from her shower to dry next to the bag overnight. When Heather asked her why she was taking such an unpleasant towel, Danielle barely paused before saying, “for cleaning, so we can keep the nice ones nice.”

  “You just now made that up,” Sadie accused.

  “I just now put it into words,” Danielle countered. “Anyway, am I wrong? Will it not be helpful to have a rougher rag for cleaning? Or we might even use it for a bath mat, or – or for wringing out laundry! My mom only does that for really delicate stuff, but my mom has a machine to dry stuff in. Are we going to have that?”

  Sadie didn’t answer, because of course they didn’t know, but she did lay out her own towel to dry next to her bags. Heather eventually did too, although Danielle didn’t see it until morning; she’d gone to bed by the time Heather finished the last shower.

  https://discord.gg/u5dtzpShv2