Brunnhold // Detention
Right now, that something else was outside of the window, beyond the tiny beads of rain that had been left behind when the sun came and took all the other ones away. Marzena was a bead too, left behind just the same, watching as students flocked their way across the campus grounds towards the airship that would be taking them to Plugit for the Cartographer's Convention. She recognised some of them, or at least imagined she did: each short-of-stature girl she saw in the distance was approximated as one of the students from her dorm room, the ones who had been so gleeful about the fact that they were allowed to go and Marzena was not. The cruellest twist was that they didn't even want to go. Marzena had heard them, talking about how maps were dumb and stupid. They weren't even excited about the prospect of riding an airship: they just wanted to not be here. With all the tragic despair her infant lungs could muster, Marzena heaved out a sigh.
Her eyes strayed away from the window, towards the corner of ceiling that offended her sensibilities. Corners were meant to be right-angles. Walls were meant to be straight, and ceilings were meant to be flat. This was not so in the classroom where she and her fellow inmates had been detained. Perhaps the wooden panelling had been mismeasured, or had warped with age, or perhaps it was an optical illusion and the person responsible for painting the dark chocolate brown of the classroom walls and the crisp frosting white of the ceiling tiles had lacked the kind of precision that the task demanded. Or maybe it was something else, something to do with angles, or perspectives; Marzena didn't know. There were spells that could tell her, of course, little quantitative word-equations for measuring such things: perhaps an even cruller part of her punishment was the fact that such magics were forbidden in detention. The initiative, the desire to apply what she had learned in a practical way as part of everyday life, was surely something that Brunnhold should have celebrated, and encouraged. Instead, Marzena was discouraged, stifled, limited, held back by the lower expected standards of the fellow students that just weren't quite as advanced as she.
Their supervisor, their jailer, the warden tasked with ensuring that the gathered students abode by the rules of the detention in which they had been placed, cleared his throat, breaking the uncomfortable silence that filled the room like a thick fog. Marzena narrowed her eyes at him. It was more of a squint than a glare, not quite conveying externally the emotions it was intended to, but Marzena was none the wiser: it was something she had read about in a book, and without the privacy she'd need to sit in front of a mirror and practise until she got it right, her best guess would have to do for now. He was the one to blame for all this; he was the reason she was here, and not getting to experience the miracle of flight for herself first-hand. She'd flown before, of course, but that didn't change anything: magic was magic, and with any luck, there would never be a day when Marzena stopped appreciating how wonderful it all was. She wasn't flying today though, and it was because of him, the stupid butthole of a teacher who was so stubbornly dedicated to his own erroneous ignorance that his only recourse was to punish Marzena for her heroic effort to prevent her classmates from being miseducated and misinformed. Why was it her fault that the tutor hadn't read a single new thing on the subject since he'd graduated from Brunnhold himself what seemed like approximately seventeen centuries ago? Why was it her fault that she'd read Ferman's Ruminations and he hadn't? Why was it that a teacher, here at an institution that claimed to promote knowledge and learning and education, was so afraid of hearing a simple truth?
Marzena knew the reason, of course: it was because she was eleven, and he was approximately one million. It was because she was a student, and he was a teacher. It was because he was the one who was supposed to be right, and because the idea of him being wrong upset the fragile balance of reality. It exposed Brunnhold for the sham that it was. It was supposed to make them better people, smarter people, but for Marzena it was like pouring water on something that was already wet. Back at home, in her safe space, with her private tutors, she could have learned more in a day from a single book than she'd learned the entire time she'd been here at Brunnhold; and she could have slept in her own bed, without the bickering, and the whispering, and the weird nightime noises that the other girls in her dorm were always making. She wouldn't have had to hear those same girls remark on how tall she was, or try to reassure her that aside from her height, there really was no way to tell that she was a Gioran at all, or to whine about how she read too much, and how she wasn't any fun, or to ask why she was wearing her hair like that instead of a way that might make her look more pretty.
Beneath the desk she'd been instructed to sit behind, Marzena fidgeted with the hem of her dress. She didn't like it here. There wasn't anything for her here. She missed Uric, and Eamon, and Tabitha, and Skye. She missed the people who made her feel welcome, the people who made her feel like knowing things was a good thing, the people who told her that being who she was made her special, instead of making her feel like being herself made her wrong.
The teacher's chair screeched across the floor as he slid backwards from his own desk. His coughing and throat-clearing had grown more severe as the minutes passed, and apparently, he had decided that the detention students could be trusted for a few minutes as he went off in search of something that might help. A surge of opportunity flared in Marzena's chest, and she waited, anxiously, as he clomped across the classroom to the doorway, leaving it agonisingly open as he disappeared up the corridor. The instant he was out of sight, Marzena flipped open the surface of her desk and frantically began to rummage within, searching for a scrap of paper and the mathematical tools she would need to unravel the mystery of the corner that wasn't right. There was a thing you could do with lines, and triangles. If you knew how far away something was, if you knew how tall it looked, and how tall it was supposed to be, then because similar triangles were similar, because the angles were the same, because -
Marzena fumbled, and the fabric drawstring bag full of rulers and protractors and set squares and compasses tumbled from her grip and clattered to the floor, rolling and skittering across the gap that separated Marzena from the desk behind her, and into the feet of the student seated there. Panic, horror, anxiety, and a slew of other emotions cascaded into Marzena's thoughts as her eyes climbed upwards, and settled upon a girl about her age, but who she definitely didn't know. Of all of the myriad things about Brunnhold that there were to dislike, the overwhelming number of strangers and unfamiliar faces was quite possibly the worst for Marzena, a girl who probably didn't even need her toes to count how many people she'd met in her entire life.
"Um." Marzena's voice was sheepish, and she tried her utmost to suppress the Gioran accent that Marzena didn't think was even there, but that the girls in her dorm insisted was so weird and funny. "Sorry, I dropped my stuff, sorry. Could you -" She felt heat and a flush of red rush into her cheeks, her every fibre recoiling from the attention that she was drawing upon herself. "Sorry."