14 of Intas, 2718
The Cafeteria
It had been nearly two weeks since the school year began, and Sienna still felt like a foreigner inside. To all outward appearances she was settling in well enough, with her classmates being too busy with their own workloads to spare too much attention for a quiet, slightly taller than average girl. Their attitudes ranged from indifference to mild curiosity to a harried sort of helpfulness. Sienna's air of neutral reserve did not typically encourage casual chattering, and many of her classmates had provisionally tagged her as either shy or snooty (or worse, boring).
Sienna was neither, but she was lonely, and the feeling seemed especially strong tonight. It wasn't just the more understandable displacement of a new class at a new school, or the pressure of taking two magics as her majors. Those were bad enough, but it was the hundreds of little things that tripped her up by being subtly.. off. The uniform still felt wrong, and the weather was too wet, and even the way people spoke sounded off to ears tuned to the lyrical accents of her Mugrobi friends. But what she couldn't get at all used to was... the passives. She took a gulp of water and kept on observing the few passives serving the students food, without quite staring at them. They didn't much talk among themselves, though she noticed that the man glanced at the older woman every few minutes when she wasn't looking. An infatuation? Could Ray truly be among one of them?
She'd patiently extracted a bare handful of tiny clues, more hints than evidence, from her parents. She'd wracked her brains in an effort to come up with a scenario in which Ray could still be alive.. But nothing had clicked till the last summer term when her class had been assigned an advanced history and sociology project on Anaxas by a visiting professor. It was then that the ugly, unsettling suspicion that Rayne had tested out as a.. passive.. had reared its head. Oh Gods she still felt slightly sick at the notion, though granted it was no longer as bad as when she had first thought of it..
Passives were dangerous, everyone agreed on that. And her parents had been much worse, careening between hostility and hate, fear and pity. She had been a little ashamed of what she had thought of as their irrational and bigoted attitudes, she was honest enough to admit to that, but now... She realised that thinking about the imbali society in the abstract was a whole different equation from seeing them around every corner, and possibly having Rayne be one of them too. Her feelings were still very muddled about it all, but it all made her feel vaguely guilty, and unaccountably nervous. She wasn't used to this feeling.
Her food finished, she stood up, her mind still wrestling with her feelings and thoughts about passives, and stepped out into the aisle. She hadn't noticed the girl moving past her seat with a tray full of dirty dishes. There was no field to give the usual subconscious warning either and with a loud crash, both the privileged galdor teenager, and the tired passive, ended up on the floor. Sienna managed to sit up, her hip stinging lightly, then noticed the girl, then the greasy leftovers and broken dishes around and on them., and lastly the sudden silence in the cafeteria. ”Well.” Sienna's voice was almost unnaturally even, ”That has clocking well cracked the water barrel.”