milliways_bar | (no subject)

Entry tags:

enzo matrix

(no subject)

A boy walks into a bar and abruptly loses half his vision.

"Huh? Is it another holiday?"

It probably is, if Bar's dressing people up. And here Enzo just intended to supplement his Academy lunch ~~with something that doesn't make him gag~~. Holidays, though, are always fun and novel, so he may be taking a longer lunch than planned!

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"She's my form tutor."

"Form tutor?" Tutor by itself, he would get.

Carlotta leads the horse back in for a quick groom.

"Yes. In charge of the second form."

"Is that like second term?"

"No, second year for most."

"Oh, okay. We've got two terms a year. Well, really two terms an hour, but, you know." He shrugs.

Carlotta wrinkles her nose. Time conversions between worlds are complicated and brain breaky.

"We have three. But we don't always go up after the same number in our school, we mostly go up when we're ready."

In Carlotta's canon, some pupils spend more than three terms in a form but don't age and a few, like Carlotta herself, pass the same age twice. The crowning jewel in this bizarre arrangement is that the first form book starts with them aged fourteen to fifteen, yet the sixth form six years later is eighteen year olds. The mun has yet to work out exactly how this is to be achieved...

The mun laughs hysterically because she has found a canon with a worse timescale than her own.

"Huh. We get held back a term if we fail more'n two classes. Otherwise we keep going."

"Doris had to stay in the first form for five terms." Carlotta says with a grin. "She's a dunce, but we all like her."

"Wow." He grins. "I don't think anyone'd get held back that much at the Academy. To be a cadet in the first place, you have to pass a test or else a full Guardian has to sponsor you."

A shrug.

"Well her parents keep paying the fees."

"Well, yours is just a regular school, right?"

"Well, yes. Though some people can get in with a scholarship."

Enzo nods. "But you're there to learn default stuff that everyone's supposed to learn."

"And the things that not everyone learns. How to be good and reliable women, to make the most of what we have and try to make the world a better place."

"That's good! But I mean, it's not training for a format—I mean a job."

"Well, no. But it's training us to be a certain type of person."

Enzo nods. "Just checking. My school's function-training, so they gotta see if we can handle the format first."

"Do you get to choose your function, or are you born with it?"

"Format," he corrects her. "You get to choose. I got mine sooner than most kids."

"Why?"

"I helped save the 'Net."

"What's the Net?"

"My universe. Well, the inside-the-computers part."

"Oh. Wow."