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“In the Golden Age, the city of Arindell always had ten to sixteen ‘Great Ladies’ who controlled the social scene. These were not unlike the celebrities and taste-makers of today. While fashion was a major component, the concept of “style” more accurately applied to everything a person did.”
- Atlas of the Greater Continent, Circa N.D. 500, collector’s edition.
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Chapter 7:
Failure
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#7.1 – Thursday, the 12th day of the 9th month…
The car ride mercifully provided Scarlet enough time to cry. She spent it hunkered down in the foot well of the back seat, several jackets covering her head. Desperate to keep quiet, she bit down on the shoulder strap to her messenger bag and held it between her teeth the whole way home. It took being physically dragged into the house to get her into some semblance of normality.
Red eyed, exhausted, and uncomfortable, Scarlet sat on the sofa in the living room while Ann paced back and forth and Roy sat reviewing the report.
“I do not believe this,” Roy stated.
Scarlet licked her dry lips and let her eyes dart back and forth. “Emmerich only helped me some, he didn’t do any of it for me!”
“Oh, you’re fine,” Roy waved. He sprung up out of his easy chair and carried Scarlet’s report over to Ann. “See that? F. That’s the only marking. She didn’t even draw a circle around it, that snapper.”
“Royland Drew Jusenkyou, language!” Ann pointed at Scarlet and glared at her husband.
“See, here,” Roy tapped the page. “This word is misspelled. And not just a little. Grievously so. The girl wrote ‘jsut’ practically every single time—Scarlet, honey, did you spell-check this thing at all?”
“I tried too, before I printed it,” Scarlet said in a small voice. “Y-your compute-thing grew an arm and stabbed itself.”
Ann glowered at Scarlet, but Roy only nodded understandably. “I mean, it is a couple of hundred pages long and, every third word is the name of someone who lived before the invention of consonants.” Roy handed the paper to Ann and went for the home phone. “I’m calling the president of the school board, I don’t care how late it is,” Roy pressed the receiver to his ear. “Jerry, hi!” He motioned for his wife and daughter to get comfortable while he entered his office and shut the door.
“Mrs. Winkledorff HATES me!” Scarlet grabbed two fistfulls of her own hair and then leaned forward until her head bobbed between her knees. “Mom, I’m not joking. She hates me. She wants me to be miserable. What happens if I don’t pass the assignment?”
“I’m not sure,” Ann folded herself into one of the chairs and placed a hand over her brow. “I’ve never heard of that happening to anyone. It means you failed history last year, but it’s obviously too late for summer school… I just don’t know.”
“They can’t hold me back, right?” Scarlet insisted. “You have to fail more than one class for that, right?!”
“Are you forgetting math?” Ann pointed out. “How’d that remedial assignment go?”
Before Scarlet could reply, Roy emerged from his office and plunked the phone into the charger on the wall. “Jerry is gonna call the principal and get back to me. In the meantime, maybe Scarlet can shed some light on this?”
“I think my teacher blatantly hates me?” Scarlet suggested. “She’s not even trying to hide it.”
“Go get washed up for dinner,” Ann ordered.
Alone in her bathroom, Scarlet scrubbed her face and frowned at herself. Bad marks in school never much bothered her, but she couldn’t stomach the idea of being held back a grade. She’d seen it happen before, last year; some kid who no one even knew ended up repeating eighth grade. Very suddenly he became the laughing stock of the entire school, the running joke. Scarlet wasn’t a total nobody; so the teasing would only be a lot worse. After middle school she’d be at the local magnate high school, but a grade behind everyone her age. It felt impossible, inescapable.
The whole notion filled her with impalpable horror.
Whatever it took, she had to escape.
But the sting of it all was even worse than that.
At the very heart Scarlet felt the sense of abject failure the grade brought her. For all her shortcomings, and Scarlet freely admitted there were many, none of them should have anything to do with intelligence. If she could identify a passage of Common down to the century it had been written, with no more than ten words, she couldn’t be as dumb as Mrs. Winkledorff frequently claimed.
Yet still, every time she tried, she failed. The science projects with her pets, the writing assignments for literature. No matter how much she worked at anything, she almost never got above a C. The marks themselves didn’t bother her; but the sense of inadequacy that came with them sure did. If she spent an entire summer writing a meticulous, detailed report; a treatise so in-depth Emmerich frequently described it as ‘post-graduate level work’, and still couldn’t pass a seventh-grade history class, what did it mean for her?
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* * *
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#7.2 – Friday, the 13th day of the 9th month, Summer Intertwention Day…
The following morning, Scarlet sat in the back of her closet.
She got up at four that morning, considering her options. Running away was always a good bet. She felt pretty sure the vastness of the Library of Arindell could hide in for the rest of her natural life, but couldn’t figure out how to feed the duck if she did that. Also, running away from home forever in order to dodge a single day of school felt like a slight over-reaction at best.
Hiding was a better approach.
Under the bed looked viable, she could read. But her parents were likely to check their first. The bathroom wasn’t great either, though she wondered briefly if she could burrow into the walls. The low-set house did seem to have an inordinate amount of unaccounted for space.
After much deliberation, Scarlet settled on the nook at the back of her closet created by the book case and the wall. With all of her hanging clothes pulled to that side and her laundry hamper in front of her, it formed a nice little Scarlet-sized niche.
She should have brought a book, but none of hers were small enough to fit in the space with her. Then of course she would have needed two more to cross-check that one, and all three together would probably just have pointed her to a fourth.
And she’d need her reading glasses.
And a light.
Instead, Scarlet hugged her knees up under her chin and began to wrack her brain, going over her experiences in the tomb in as acute of detail as her prodigious memory would allow.
The weapon enshrined in The High Place* in Valley Gale Keep† should fully be called ‘Echbaldam, Sword of Rightousness’. According to lore it had been spoken into existence by the One King himself.
Now, a powerful mage could transform one object into another, which was a neat party trick and all, but not really the same thing. The God of All Creation, King of Kings and Holy of Holies, and in point of fact the only extant ‘god’ according to the teachings of Cardinalism+(of which Scarlet was supposedly an adherentSS, If not a very observant one). If Echbaldam really was made by that most supreme deity, it meant the very power of creation existed in the blade. It was a part of heaven, a fragment of divinity; here, now, in the mortal world.
The stories spoke of it being given to the Hero of Light in the Age of Myth. In more recent history, Conri Jusenkyou used Echbaldam to slay the Dark MessiahP on the Day of Black Sun#.
But Echbaldam was not Echbalder.
And Echbalder ended the Mage Wars. Echbalder ushered in six thousand years of peace. All those stories about Echbaldam were just that: stories. Maybe not the part about Conri using it. Everything else, all that ‘Age of Myth, spoken into existence’ stuff? Stories.
The world needed Echbalder††.
Scarlet hugged herself a little tighter. More than anything, right now, she wished she’d listened to her mother hounding her to do laundry. Such proximity to the overflowing hamper for an extended duration did little for her moral.
Still the inscription on the stone haunted her most. Buried away from light and air, the letters stayed sharp, perfect. The characters were in Egregts**, the standard form of the Common alphabet, which had not themselves changed since Lieber/Eieber’s time. New characters were added or removed here and there, but those forms were, quite literally, set in stone.
How, then, had his named changed to Lieber?
Knowing she had a long wait before she could safely exit the closet, Scarlet curled up a little tighter and buried her face in her knees. She felt confident she would not be found up until the exact instant her father opened the door and politely asked her to finish getting ready for school.
“How’d you know I was in there?” Scarlet said as she began gathering up her supplies.
“The duck,” Roy shrugged. “D’you want to tell me what it is you think Mrs. Winkledorff has against you?”
“She wasn’t that bad for the first couple weeks last year,” Scarlet said. “Dad, she doesn’t fact-check anything. She gets all her lessons off that internety-thing.”
Roy cocked his head and eyed her. “Do you actually think that’s what it’s called?”
“It breaks every time I touch it,” Scarlet said. “I’m afraid to say its true name. It’s like the bear.”
“Not everyone gets your little linguistic puns, daughter,” Roy said. “Come on, get out of that closet and get ready for school.”
“Dad, I don’t want to go,” Scarlet said. “PLEASE don’t make me go?”
“We have a meeting with your principal.”
“We WHAT?!”
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* #7.3 (Friday, 13/9) *
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The spine-chilling cold of early morning bit through the thin material of Scarlet’s long-sleeved t-shirt, reminding her once again that while the calendar said late-summer, it lied just a little. Accompanied by her father, Scarlet waited in the school principal’s office. She hated this sort of thing, and suspected every child did.
Jenkem, the school principal, seemed more or less mortified. It was unclear exactly what had been said the previous evening, but he didn’t appear at all interested in opening his mouth until Mrs. Winkledorff arrived.
The Crone, as Scarlet called her, inside her own head where no one else could hear, arrived late. Scarlet guessed she meant to stall out long enough to avoid the conference all together. She walked in, took a seat, and immediately opened with a rant about Scarlet.
“She’s belligerent!” Mrs. Winkledorff announced, perhaps a bit louder than she meant. “She’s always interrupting in class! It undermines my authority!”
Roy patted Scarlet on the arm to reassure her. “I’m aware my daughter can be something of a handful,” he said to the other adults in the room. “What, exactly, would you say she is doing wrong?”
“She brings her own books to class,” Mrs. Winkledorff replied through clenched teeth. “And she looks up every single detail, and interrupts eeeevery lesson to ‘correct’ me.”
“Well,” Roy paused and cleared his throat. “I’m sure you’re working from properly researched and vetted materials. But is she really correcting you, or just asking questions?”
Winkledorff flared her nostrils. “That’s not the point.”
“Look, the girl is something of a prodigy,” Roy explained. “Did you know she taught herself to read? Two, maybe three years old—we were understandably impressed. She started reading illustrated history books—and not the children’s picture-books, mind you—real, adult books. She skipped right over cutesy ‘I can read!’ things and went straight to those glossy ones you get in museum gift shops.” he turned and smiled proudly at Scarlet. “We had quite a collection of those.”
“That doesn’t excuse her behavior,” Mrs. Winkledorff said.
“Yeah, well, what excuses you not knowing the Dynastic Period* from the Intermediate Period†?” Scarlet murmured the words, not even meaning to say them out loud.
“You see what I mean?!”
“Enough,” Roy raised a hand. “The remedial assignment was to be completed over the summer, so Scarlet’s behavior could not have been a factor. Would you kindly explain the failing mark?”
Mrs. Winkledorff pulled her shoulders back and spoke in a short, curt style. “Her paper went off-topic and was improperly formatted.”
“Could we see this report?” Mr. Jenkem asked.
Roy hefted the paper onto the desk and let it drop. The monster landed with a loud ka-wuff that kicked up small dust-devils. Cautiously, Jenkem ran his thumb along one corner, fanning the pages in disbelief.
“My office printer was not thrilled,” Roy commented. “But you say it goes off-topic?”
“I told her to compare one Slayer Dragon from the modern era to one of the ancient era,” Mrs. Winkeldorff said.
“I just used that as a jumping off point,” Scarlet told her father and the principal. “Then went into how the Order today differs from that of the Old Alliance+ era. Then I got into how a lack of understanding about the old Order shaped the last four centuries of the New Day AllianceSS, and—”
“The assignment was supposed to be ten pages.” The way Mrs. Winkledorff interrupted her, Scarlet felt as if no one even listened. Winkledorff went on. “Double-spaced, on standard letter-sized paper—though I never thought I would have to SPECIFY that last part!”
“In my defense,” Scarlet felt her ribs tighten as she let the words escape. “The actual assignment-part of the page stays on a letter-sized sheet. The rest is just annotations.”
Roy opened the cover for Jenkem and tapped a finger on the red F. The principal picked up the whole thing using both hands and began to flip through it.
“I am going to make a supposition,” Roy declared without waiting for Jenkem. “I work as an accountant, and all day long I ask people to read and sign forms. I ask if they understood what they read… and most of the time, they make the exact face as the good lady Winkledorff, here, is making at me right now. I know that face. That’s the ‘I didn’t read any of this, just shut up and take my signature, damnit’ face. So… I’m going to call your bluff.”
“I—Ur—” Mrs. Winkledorff fumed.
“That’s what I thought,” Roy nodded.
“It’s got to be more than three hundred pages!” Mrs. Winkledorff blurted out. “Single-spaced! Her works-cited section is forty pages by itself! Every other kid’s was half a page…”
“See, here’s the problem,” Roy’s voice sounded blunt. “You could have just rubber stamped this, written ‘A-plus’ where you put ‘F’, and gone on with your day. You could have actually graded it. Either proposition would have been acceptable. What you did instead, well; I’m not going to make any more suppositions. But it was not acceptable.”
“What about my report?” Scarlet asked.
“I’d be happy to grade it,” Jenkem offered. His voice sounded a bit hesitant as he struggled to hold up the paper. “I did used to be a teacher, you know.”
“Already worked that out,” Roy said, taking the ream of paper back from Jenkem. “I ran this by Jerry Richards, the school board president. We’re going to have someone else look over it.”
Scarlet felt a little ripple in her stomach. Emmerich, dear Emmerich, would have been the obvious choice.
But he was gone, now.
“You know the Foundation School?” Roy asked, raising his hands casually at Jenkem. “The free university under Valley Gale Keep? Because practically the entire budget goes to hiring the best professors, they are technically a non-profit, and my firm does their accounting. I’ve had to call in a few favors from my boss, but I’m going to get someone from their historical studies department to grade Scarlet’s report.”
“Are you… certain that’s entirely wise?” Jenkem questioned.
“They’re not going to go easy on it, but they’ll be fair,” Roy shrugged. “What do you say, Mr. Jenkem? If four university professors admit my daughter deserves to pass middle school history, how about that happens?”
With a sort of casual calmness, Roy glanced at his watch. “Looks like its nearly time for school.” He pushed his chair back and stepped away from the table, tapping Scarlet gently on the shoulder and motioning her to stand. “Now, I’m guessing you’ll want to have a word with your teacher,” Roy gestured to Winkledorff as he ushered Scarlet out of the room. “We won’t keep you.”
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End:
Chapter Seven
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