I hit the cold ground hard, throwing my arms up behind my head to protect it. I was already curling when the first foot hit me in the side. I activated the spell I was holding foremost, and the world slowed to a crawl. I was suspended in pain, but with my thoughts moving faster with the essence of lightning I was able to sort out my confusion and disorientation.

  The girl had hit me with her books. Probably because I was slow to drop the bubble and let her out of this terrible situation. But also possibly because she was terrified. Probably a combination: learning that you're trapped in an invisible sphere with someone, and learning that person was a mass murderer, was probably a tough combination to get hit with at once. I'd be more sympathetic but she did just sucker-punch me while these guys are looking for a chance to beat me down.

  All right. It takes a few seconds and a free hand to start a new spell, but I've got several operating right now that I can activate much faster with some mental direction. I went with the air first, pushing back against them with a hard wind in all directions to give some space. The foot in my ribs pulled away as the kicker was knocked back off-balance. Then I crafted a steel fence around myself, to keep them at bay while I recovered. Once I had the space around myself cleared and safe, I released the lightning so I could react normally.

  I rolled onto my hands and knees, coughing and gasping. My ribs hurt pretty bad, they're just little bones doing a lot of important work, and a swinging foot can hurt a lot. I looked around, heaving for air, and I saw the girl laying almost flat on her back, propped up on her elbows to stare at me, dazed. The three boys were still some distance back, staggered.

  The one in the middle looked to be holding onto the other two, but his balance was backward, as if he'd been pushing them backwards. And none of those three were close enough to be the one that kicked me.

  "Gods damn it," I grunted, and grabbed the bars of the steel fence to pull myself upright. "I spent three years in prison. More than any of them ever did. They all died fast. Painless or as close as I could get. Not like my friends who choked on smoke and burned to ash. The conspiracy they were part of tried to kill me and my family for being in the way. Listen now, one time. Don't ever ask me to be sorry for what I did."

  And then I dropped through a door of blinding light, and curled around my ribs again.

  I spent about five minutes inside the void, making myself presentable. It would not do for Natalie Harigold to make a poor first impression.

  When I stepped out of the next portal I was wearing a pair of leather-and-steel goggles with no glass, just a thick reinforced blindfold. I still had a good bruise under my dress, but I could walk without wincing and move on with my day. I walked the hall to my literature class, dispelling the goggles and my leather overcoat, working on my unworried, dignified stride. No crescent-shaped bruises on me from the toe of a shoe, no way.

  Won't be the last time, I thought with some regret. The downside of setting yourself up to be widely hated, is that a lot of people are going to hate you. Technically this was part of my plan. I was not feeling as good about my plan anymore.

  Also, what the hell am I doing, going to goddamn war when a scrawny girl with no levels and at least twenty pounds lighter can lay me out in one hit?! I should have my head examined, and not just from the recent blunt-force trauma.

  I pushed open the door to my class, and strode in with all the imperious conviction befitting my station, my powers, and my role as the overconfident villain. The roll call was already started, and I ignored stares as I made my way to an empty seat. This was one of the lecture halls with the raised layers looking down on the presenter, all focused on the lectern, with bolted seats and a long curving tabletop separating each row.

  Just for the flex, I brought warm, flower-scented air with me in a wave, and I raised the oxygen level just enough that everyone near me would feel a small rush, until they adjusted to it. Small theatrical flairs like that will make a big impression. Nobody needs to know how much power it really does take for me to make it look effortless to be majestic.

  "Lady Natalie Harigold I presume?" the teacher said, looking quite disapproving.

  "None other," I said with chilly confidence. "You may continue."

  Fuck my ribs did hurt. I channeled steel to bolster my pain threshold, but all it really did was help keep me from reacting. There's not many essences that are good for actually healing oneself, or for continuing while damaged as if one is not damaged. Channeling steel did not make me less injured. A cracked sword is in just as much pain as a cracked bone, a dented helmet is wronged just as much as bruised flesh. They're just stoically silent about it. I borrowed that stoicism.

  Gods, that's another reason to just void-walk everywhere. I won't get ambushed if I don't walk where people can approach me. Maybe I shouldn't be trying to act at all like a normal student, maybe I should put those ideas away and just make myself seen where I'm already rested, relaxed, and preferably with my back to a wall.

  What even is the odds that someone from Byeview is in this school? And the son of one of those gangster foundrymen? Well, honestly, just about 100%, that's how narrative structure works. Still, I could've enjoyed not going through all that.

  And that's when my head snapped up to pay more attention to the teacher. My paperwork listed his name as Fled Fuster, and he was a gangling baldheaded man with dozens of deeply-lined wrinkles on his forehead and nowhere else. And he was in the middle of saying " - our new units on literary analysis, examining different ways to view and interpret the stories we have all around us. It's not enough to know what the pages say or what the author meant, the story takes place inside the audience, after all."

  Hell yeah. Just a few steps from death of the author, unreliable narrators, alternative interpretations. Let's get those stories told and retold, mixed and remixed.

  There was a lot of things I did not feel good about today. But my literature class had me feeling hopeful.

  There were a dozen people lined up in front of me as I stepped through the doors, and I started to leap back to avoid an ambush. Once bitten, twice shy. But it was not a firing squad. Or, at least, not an unfriendly one.

  "Lady Harigold, let me-"

  "-honor to have you and we should-"

  "-simply must see the brand new ways-"

  "-true that there's over two hundred elements-"

  "-key to immortality, I'm sure of it!"

  "-classed as a solution or a mixture, because-"

  "-simply absurd on the face of it, and-"

  "-a brighter future of course, but-"

  This period was assigned to Developing Theories. That's a gerund verb, we're not here to develop theories, we're studying the theories being developed. The developing theories. A quaint way to refer to the fact that we are at the cutting edge of science, studying the information that is just entering study.

  I held up my hands, palms out, and lowered them slowly. The voices slowed and lost conviction, everyone followed the gesture and slowly hushed. I had considered using some kind of magic to stifle the sounds, but Dean Krasp had reminded me that I should try asking politely first. "Good afternoon everyone. I'm sure it will be a pleasure to work with you all. I'd love to see what you've all been working on, in a clockwise direction, shall we?"

  They took me on a tour of the premises, where I was genuinely shocked by what I saw. I'd introduced electricity a few years ago, and the periodic table, germ theory, and Punnett squares, and mathematically-constant gravity, thermodynamics, and optics to see individual cells and cell structures. I did some early work separating chemicals to identify pH in a sample, and the need for a consistent alcohol thermometer. Vaccines were in the works, and people were starting to understand how heavy-metal poisoning worked.

  Some basics, but a good start.

  They had independently invented telegrams, vacuum cleaners, telescopes, mole weights, and more. I went from station to station, and I got excited by what they were doing, and in turn I got them more excited in turn. These were the finest research minds in the kingdom, and they were going wild with this new information. They didn't even want my help, they just wanted my approval. They wanted to show me their work, and receive my blessing, and for me to tell them they were doing a good job. I wasn't a student or a teacher here, I was a patron saint. The pope of technology. They wanted to catch me up on their last few years of development, just to show off and brag.

  I did have to explain, carefully, slowly, and very firmly, that it would not be possible to use enough electricity in the human body to make it immortal. You have an interesting theory and it won't work. I was impressed by the old woman who had figured out that splitting light meant that it was representing different frequencies, extrapolated the existence of infrared and ultraviolet light, and started building specialized bulbs to create them. I warned her that some frequencies of high-frequency light could cause tumors, and her eyes got wide like Christmas. I think that encouraging tumor growth might be a major research goal for her.

  I did not share a lot of my own ideas, for them it was enough that I was there, and that I was everything they had hoped for. I was a brand new person that walked into their lab, listened to a brief explanation, and understood it easily. And I would ask a couple questions here and there, how did you come to this conclusion, or did you consider scaling this down for a battery pack, things like that. Yes, you can record sound waves in the air, but a trumpet to collect them would help, and using a wax cylinder would let you keep a more compact recording of the sound.

  When I got to my regular-function science class I was attacked by questions from people that wanted to peel me open and find the secrets of the universe. The real scientists were down here, and they did not need anything more than "very interesting, it certainly looks like you're headed in the right direction".

  Or occasionally "no absolutely not we do not apply this to any forced human breeding programs not even a little bit". I introduce the knowledge of genetics and someone independently invented eugenics almost right away. "Listen, whatever benefits you're imagining: instead, imagine that as soon as your hand is off the tiller, this will get taken over by every aristocrat and politician that you hate, and you'll wind up being responsible for what they do with it."

  And thankfully that solved the problem. We got through a decent percentage of their work before the bells were ringing again, but I could already tell it would take me a week just to give my blessing to the work they had already done. And then later we'd get down to the new stuff.

  I grabbed a snack on my way to music class, because if you've got a cheater's teleportation device you gotta use it. A small plate of carrot sticks and dressing carried me all the way to my music classes, where for once I was prepared to lay low and keep quiet. The first day of music class was introductions, grading, concert schedule, instrument assignments, tickets to the quartermaster's office for supplies, and the early issue of our sheet music to start familiarizing ourselves.

  There was nothing here that I wrote. Is it weird that I was relieved by that? I was getting weirded out by how much stuff was all about me. Everywhere I went, like people were staring at me. Yes it was my own doing. Yes it was my own fault. Yes I absolutely should have expected an extremely abnormal experience when I entered the school as a once-in-a-generation genius, one-of-a-kind sorcerer, and convicted murderess. But sometimes, it's fine just to be third-chair flute, playing someone else's music, having trouble with my fingerings.

  This day was just running on though. A school that gives you ten subject classes in a day? Too much, too much. Yes I know it was arranged this way so that the protagonist would see all of the love interests in their own setting every day. And when I was playing a video game it seemed fine. But this is my real brain getting real tired. But at least that part is over now.

  It's time for practice.

  I strolled down to the practice grounds, and followed the signage to the field sports section, and from there to the women's events, and from there to camogie. No, I don't need polo or dressage, or croquet or track and field. And forget about rugby- there's an unskippable career-ending injury in the second act.

  Most of the women that were gathered near the sign outside the closed dressing rooms were taller than me, and had a solid look to them. Athletes. Most of them looked like they had a history of manual work, helping on the family farm or hurling sacks of flour for the family mill, something like that. I was not the smallest or most slender one there, but I was nearly there. And of the women assembled here, I'm the only one wearing a silk-satin dress in house-crest colors with up-to-the-minute fashion design.

  Hah hah why would I be self-conscious?

  The woman that strolled up to us was wearing worn denim trousers, calf-length boots, and a faded gray knit sweater. She had dishwater-blonde hair, thick eyebrows, and a jaw like a cliff face. She looked us all over. "I normally tell each new batch of recruits that they're the sorriest lot that I've ever seen," she said, nodding appreciatively. "I won't bother this time. You all look all right. Let's get you to your lockers and I'll show you to your uniforms."

  The uniforms were helmets, long tunic-like jerseys, knee-breeches, socks and shoes. We were encouraged to sort out our own underwear situation. I cast to conjure cotton and made sure I had a custom-fitted sports bra on before we went any further. Issuing lockers was easy, we were handed keys to open each one. And then, to get changed.

  I know that I was not the only girl there blushing from my hairline to my collarbones, but I wouldn't know for sure because I did not at any time turn my eyes to the side at all. Around me, young ladies were bantering and taunting each other, but I focused on removing my gown and getting it off of me. And that's where I paused. I had not brought a garment bag of course.

  So, wearing only my smallclothes, I carefully laid my dress across my hands, so as not to wrinkle or crease, and started feeding it into my locker. I opened a small portal to the void there, and the absence of space or time would preserve my clothes until I needed them back. I kept the aperture small, only about a foot across, but the lockers were near together and it puts out a lot of light.

  "What the stars is that?" the girl to my right demanded, leaning in.

  "It's a pocket dimension to hold my things," I said. Now I'm really self-conscious.

  "Well of course it is. What's a pocket dimmythingy?"

  "It's a space that only exists when I need it to, with an opening only I can access," I said. "Like an invisible bag that is with me all the time."

  "Sounds handy," she said. "Where can I get one?"

  "I wouldn't know," I admitted. "I'm not supposed to have this either, I don't think."

  "Interesting," the other girl said. "Can it knock heads?"

  I had to boggle at that change in topic. "....No?"

  "Hmm. Well, show me again when it can," she said, and finished dressing by slamming her helmet down onto her head and shutting her locker firmly.

  My fussing about with clothes made me one of the last ones out of the locker room and out to the practice pitch. And then, drills. The main thing she wanted from us on day one was to see us running. I was all right with that- I really learned to love running when I was in prison and could only really do it from a treadmill. So I ran my heart out. It wasn't nearly good enough.

  The coach would move to different players, and with a touch on their shoulder and a few quiet words she'd get us sorted to positions. One or two girls, the biggest and fastest ones, were given a few words and a pointing finger, and with a huge grin they would race off our field altogether and join a different pitch where other teams were practicing. Promoted to junior varsity on their first day.

  I was not promoted away from the freshman team. I was one of the last girls tapped and placed. "You've decent height and good wind. I'm gonna try you out on the half back position. If you grow into it I could keep you there, if you don't I'm gonna run you down every day and put you in midfield."

  "Yes ma'am," I said, saluting.

  "Now get back to wind sprints, I need a half back with good explosive speed off the mark."

  I was happy to do it. Of the sports that the game offered, they all had different benefits to training. In most cases, it was a benefit to a skill or two, or either the Strength or Stamina stats. There were two that offered both Strength and Stamina, and the game mechanics did not assign them any skills since none of the skill sets in those games were transferable to any of the other activities in the game. And, there were other downsides especially early in the game.

  I don't know what sport Nathan was playing, but I needed both Strength and Stamina; attributes were a lot more important to me than skills. Maybe he's in fencing, working Strength and his swordsmanship skills. Or any of the equestrian events, or in track building Stamina. Most of the rogue skills benefit from gymnastics, too.

  But while I'm always tempted to try to figure out what he's doing, I need to keep my head in the game. Coach can tell if I'm not concentrating.