Moments after the castle disappeared under the front of the carpet, the rows of seats ahead began to rise up to be once again at the same level as Simon’s own row. As this happened, the view of the Smokies disappeared. However, shortly afterwards, wooden walls rose up at some distance on all sides of the carpet. Finally, Simon felt a bump, ever so slightly, as the carpet touched down.

  Mr. Johnson turned his chair again to face the passengers. “Welcome to Misty Peaks,” he said, his voice once again projected so that Simon could hear it clearly despite the distance. “I hope each and every one of you has a wonderful school year. You may now go and get your bags. Second years and up - you know were to go from there. First-years and transfer students - members of the Student Council will help you find where to go.”

  All the passengers on the carpet got up off their seats, including Simon, Clara, and Jesse.

  “This way, first years!” a voice could be heard calling from behind.

  “Where do we get our bags?” asked Simon.

  “I don’t know,” admitted Jesse. However, not knowing what else to do, the three of them proceeded to the back of the carpet.

  “First years this way!” said the voice again. “And if there’s any transfer students, you too!”

  They could now see that the voice belonged to a very young woman with long, flowing brown hair who was holding up a baton with what seemed like the sculpture of a flame at the end of it. She was wearing a school uniform - just like the one Clara was wearing and that Simon wished he was wearing - only below the crest there was a horizontal grey metal tag that read “SC President”.

  A moment later, Simon felt a tap on his right arm and looked down. He saw there what looked like another small, wiry person, also a foot tall, who looked a lot like the hobgoblins at the Sunsphere. Only instead of golden hair, this one looked as though some of the strands of hair were made of wood and others of thinly cut grass. The eyes, instead of being orange, shone bright green. It was wearing a yellow ankle-length tunic that seemed to be cut from an old pillow-case or bed-sheet held at the waist with a green rope that also seemed to be cut out of bed linens. In its hand it held a suitcase that looked just like the one Sleet had taken from him in Knoxville.

  “You Simon?” the one holding the suitcase asked.

  “Yes, I am,” said Simon.

  “I reckon this belongs to you,” the small figure said, handing over the suitcase.

  “Thanks,” said Simon, taking the suitcase from this small creature.

  “As always, them buffoons in Knoxville made a mess of things,” said this strange being, “always leavin’ us real hobgoblins over here to fix things up. Good thing we’re always up to it.”

  “Well, I appreciate it,” said Simon. “What’s your name?”

  “The name’s Marsh,” said the hobgoblin - and then scampered off and disappeared. Simon looked around and saw that Clara and Jesse also both had their suitcases.

  “Is that everyone?” asked the young woman holding the baton. “Okay,” she said after another moment. “My name is Emily Miller, and I am the President this year of the Student Council. I would like to personally welcome each of you all to your first year here at Misty Peaks. Since this is your first year here, the procedure for getting you to your dorms is going to be a bit different from how it is for returning students who already know more or less where to go. So I’m going to take y’all to the Great Hall where this will all be sorted out. Do you have a question?”

  Emily looked at a boy with reddish-blond hair near the back of the crowd who had his hand raised.

  “How’re they gonna decide where to put us?” he asked nervously.

  “Oh your dorm assignments have already been determined,” said Emily. “And I don’t know how they decided it. What we’re going to do now is just about orienting you to your dorms - and letting you know what they are and how to get there - not determining what they are.”

  The boy breathed a sigh of relief as the everyone’s attention focused back on Emily. “Any more questions?” she asked. After a moment with no questions, she began to turn. “Let’s go,” she said, waiving her baton forward.

  She took the students, luggage in tow, through a large oak double-door into a room which featured nothing but a break in a wide spiral staircase. There were, of course, one or two torches on each wall, each one a stick protruding outwards, holding a plate somewhat above even Emily’s eye-level, on which burned a bright fire. The light from those fires reflected off the ceiling to bathe the entire room in the glow. But these torches clearly weren’t the feature of the room. They were merely a means by which to illuminate the room that was centered on that one staircase.

  As soon as she reached the staircase, Emily got on and headed counterclockwise, taking her downward. Simon barely got a glimpse at the open doorway oppose the oak doors that they had entered the room through as he and the other first-year students followed her down to a floor below that was lit by torches just like the ones in the floor above. Finally, two floors below where they had gotten on the staircase, they got off. Simon could see that they were at a T-shaped intersection of two hallways, both of which were illuminated by the same kinds of torches that were lighting the two floors above. Only the walls did not just have torches on them. Below them there were what seemed to be paintings adorning all the walls.

  As Emily took the class down the hallway that ended at the T, though, Simon was no longer quite so sure that these were paintings. Of course, they definitely seemed to be inside what looked like the kinds of picture frames you would see paintings in at museums - but what was inside the frames seemed more like windows than paintings. True, each one looked out on a different scenery - which Simon knew wasn’t how windows worked if they were all on the same wall. One looked out on a lighthouse by the beach. Another proudly displayed the Gateway Arch of Saint Louis, Missouri. Yet another was of the Chattanooga Choo-Choo - apparently as seen from the middle of the train tracks. What made them seem like windows rather than paintings, though, was their three-dimensionality. On the frame with the lighthouse, Simon could even see the distant fluttering of seagulls. He could even faintly hear their cry.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “As you see,” explained Emily, “we have these paintings all over the underground tunnels - which connect the different wings of Misty Peaks. The tunnel system was first dug by the monks and nuns who made their home at Misty Peaks before it became the first USBME school near the end of the eighteenth century.”

  “How do they make the paintings 3D?” asked Simon.

  “What?” asked Emily. “Oramasynthy, of course!”

  “Orama-what?” asked Simon.

  “Don’t be silly,” said Emily. “You know what oramasynthy is.”

  Clara leaned in to Simon. “Oramasynthy,” she explained, discreetly, “is a magical art of painting not just still pictures, but scenes. I’ll tell you more about it later.”

  As Emily led the new students through one corridor after another, Simon was impressed by window-like paintings which never seemed to run out of scenes to portray. There were paintings of far away places on Earth, such as one of the Eiffel Tower and its surroundings in Paris, and another of the pyramids at Giza, and yet another of a giant stone meditating Buddha statue with what seemed to be ancient temples behind it. There were even a few that not long before Simon would have quickly recognized as fantastical, such as one of a city with green architecture everywhere, green paving on the streets, and even everyone walking by in full motion dressed in green whose label on the frame read “The Emerald City”.

  “The Emerald City’s real?” Simon gasped at Clara, pointing at the painting.

  “No, it isn’t,” said Clara, with a smile. “But it makes an awesome painting.”

  Eventually the students made it to another stairway just like the one that had brought them down into the tunnels, only this one Emily led them up clockwise, back to the ground level.

  As soon as the students emerged from the ground-level break in this stairway, Simon could see that they were in a foyer of sorts. There wasn’t any furniture, but three of the walls had windows, albeit shuttered ones. The wall without a window and the one opposite it were longer than the other two walls, giving the room a rectangular shape. The staircase emerged near one end of the rectangle. At the other end of the rectangle, there were two doors - a push door in the windowless wall and a regular door with a knob in the wall opposite it.

  Emily led the students through the push door into a large and majestic room. Most of it was filled with regular, rectangular lunch tables that could comfortably sit six people at each of them, and had chairs confirming that. What made this room seem particularly grand, besides its sheer size, began with what could be seen to the left as the students entered the room. At that end of the room, instead of the usual tables, there were three long bench-style tables, each one higher than the one before it. And instead of having chairs on both sides, these tables each had chairs on only one side, allowing those sitting at those tables to look out over the rest of the room. That is, they would have allowed that had there been people seated in those rows - but nobody was. Instead, just before the lowest of these three long tables, there was another makeshift long table made of a number of the smaller tables pulled together end-to-end. This table, too, had chairs only on one side - the same as the elevated tables. But here, there were people seated. Most of these seats were filled by young men wearing uniforms similar to Simon’s and Jesse’s or young women wearing uniforms similar to Clara’s.

  But two of them were filled by somewhat older people - also wearing robes, but not the same school uniform robes as the others. One was filled by an old man who seemed to be in his seventies. He looked very relaxed with his short grey hair and stubble of beard and half-circle glasses on his round face. He wore a light blue robe with repair patches on it. He wore a matching mage’s hat - that is, a pointed hat with a rim. This was not entirely unexpected, as Simon had bought a mage’s hat too with his school uniform supplies - though he wasn’t wearing it now as he had been instructed to save it for certain very formal occasions.

  But this man’s mage’s hat wasn’t like Simon’s. Simon’s was black, matching the rest of his uniform. This man’s mage’s hat, however, was the same light-blue as his robe and looked kinda worn.

  The other person older than the rest was a woman in her late forties with shoulder-length, brown hair, a diamond-shaped face, and a well-kept dark-purple robe with a matching mage’s hat. At the front of the hat, just between the rim and the cone, was sown a fabric flower made out of the same dark-purple fabric as the rest of her outfit.

  Elsewhere in the room, there were a few first-years seated at the tables, but not many.

  “This is the Great Hall,” said Emily. “It is where school assemblies are held - and also where you will have your meals. Those elevated tables there,” she nodded at the elevated tables, “are where the teachers sit. The students sit everywhere else. But right now you’re here to get your key clips and your dorm assignments. So just head over to that table there,” she pointed at the table with the men and women seated behind it, “and someone’ll be glad to help you out. I’d ask if you have any questions, but they can probably answer them better than I can anyway.”

  With that, Emily went out the door she had led the new students in through and disappeared.

  Timidly, Simon walked up to the table and approached a solidly-built young man with olive skin, a square jaw, and dark almost-black hair that sat in large curls on his head. He wore the same school uniform as Simon did, only below the crest on his left breast was a grey metal tag which read “SC Treasurer”.

  “Okay,” said the young man. “Your name?”

  “Simon Corbin,” Simon mumbled.

  “Excuse me?” asked the man.

  “Simon Corbin,” he repeated, this time louder and with greater articulation.

  The man waved his hand over a white, translucent orb that sat on a brass stand on the table in front of him. “Oh, there you are,” he said. He picked up a wand and tapped it on the table. Immediately, a circle of glowing yellow light, about a foot in diameter, drew itself on the table. Then, the string of light spiraled up from the circumference of the circle until it reached a foot high, formed a second identical circle there, and finally spiraled in to the center of that circle. As all this happened, the spaces between the repetitions of the line’s path filled up as well, resulting within moments in a solid cylinder of light. As soon as all this was finished, the exact same thing began happening in reverse, until there was no trace of the cylinder, or even the circle of light. But as this cylinder of light undid itself, it revealed on the table in its place something that wasn’t there before - a simple black clip sitting on top of a piece of parchment paper.

  The man put his wand back on the table, picked up the clip, and handed it to Simon. “Here’s your key clip,” he said. “You know how to use it?”

  Simon said nothing - just shook his head.

  “Okay,” said the man. “You wear this clip on your uniform. I suggest your belt. As long as you’re wearing it, the door to your dorm room, as well as the doors to your residence hall, will open for you. If you’re not wearing it, they won’t. So you shouldn’t leave your dorm room without it on.”

  “And where’s my dorm room?” asked Simon.

  “Oh,” said the man, picking up the piece of parchment and holding it in Simon’s direction, “this is your dorm assignment. Let’s see - it says Hemlock 103. That means you’re in room 103 at Hemlock Tower. You can just wait at one of those tables until someone comes in and calls for those going to Hemlock Tower.”

  “Thanks,” said Simon, taking the parchment.

  * * *

  Simon clipped his key clip onto his belt and rejoined Jesse and Clara at one of the tables near the middle of the Great Hall.

  “Looks like we’re going to be roomies,” said Jesse, looking at Simon’s parchment, showing his own which also read “Hemlock 103”.

  “And what did you get, Clara?” asked Simon.

  “Oh, I’m not in Hemlock,” she said, despondently, showing her parchment, which read “Hickory 107”.

  “Any of you lovely people headed for Hemlock Tower?” Simon heard a young man a few tables away call.

  Simon and Jesse got up.

  “See you later, Clara,” said Simon, as he and Jesse headed off in the man’s direction.