As Micheal continued his speech, the whole auditorium stayed silent. Not a peep came out of the once chattery and boisterous students. Micheal talked with a tone of pride and conviction, expressing his beliefs for the first-year students, and what achievements they would accomplish together at Solcrest Academy. His voice filled the space without any issue, each word landing with the weight of someone who had thought carefully about what he wanted to say and had no doubts about his right to say it.
As Micheal kept delivering his speech a certain boy in the crowd started to slump in his seat and let out a quiet yawn.
Yawn
I covered my mouth with the back of my hand trying to not let anyone know of my boredom.
Who does this guy think he is? The main character?
I chuckled quietly at my own thought, keeping the chuckle low enough that the girl to my left didn't seem to notice.
If anyone was the main character, it had to be me. Right?
There was a beat of silence inside my own head.
A small seed of doubt quietly pushed itself into the soil of my consciousness. I looked at Micheal Valeheart standing at the front of the auditorium with his gold blonde hair catching the stage light and his captivating red eyes were steady and certain while scanning the crowd
Shortly after, the speech finally came to a close. The auditorium cheered and applauded as Micheal gave a polite bow before retreating towards the backstage. Almost immediately the room shifted from an audience into a crowd, students standing and moving toward the front of the auditorium where several long tables had suddenly appeared along the base of the stage, each one staffed by a member of faculty with stacks of papers piled in organized columns in front of them.
I watched this happen for a few seconds without moving, having no idea of how I was supposed to respond in this type of situation.
A few more seconds passed.
I decided that I would follow the crowd, the same reliable strategy that had gotten me through most of the morning and began to stand up from my seat.
"Get up, you're slowing down the line!"
The voice came from my right; the voice was sharp and immediate and clearly not interested in being ignored. I turned to look.
My brain seemed to have short circuited for a moment.
The girl standing behind me waiting for me to vacate my seat was, without question or competition, the most beautiful person I had ever seen in my life. Her hair was a deep and vivid red that fell in a long cascade over her shoulders, the kind of red that resembled the color of expensive wine. Her eyes were the same color, a deep crimson that caught the auditorium's glimmer and never let go. Her features were the kind that made the word beautiful feel inadequate.
I stared.
I was aware that I was staring. The awareness did not help.
Her expression, which had started somewhere in the vicinity of impatient, began to turn into something considerably darker as the seconds passed by. Her eyes narrowed slightly. Her jaw clenched. When she spoke again her voice had flattened out to something chilly rather than pure rage.
"Get up, bitch."
I snapped out of my trance almost immediately.
I opened my mouth to try and apologize but she spoke first.
"Didn't you hear me? Are you also deaf, bitch!"
The apology I had, decided to jump out the window after her following remark.
"There's no need to shout." I said in a monotone voice. "Didn't your mom not teach you any manners, you piece of shit?"
Something changed in her expression. A shift in her rubylike eyes, the specific quality of a nerve being located and struck with some precision. A vein made a brief appearance at her temple.
"You—"
"YOU TWO." The voice came from the front of the auditorium, cutting through the noise of the students as the neared the front of the auditorium. One of the faculty members at the tables was standing, looking directly at us with an expression that communicated an entire paragraph in a single look. "Middle row. Stop. Or both of you will be sent to detention on your first day."
I looked at the faculty member.
I looked at the girl.
I immediately stood up, stepped past her into the aisle and started walking toward the front of the auditorium.
"Where the hell do you think you're going?!" Her voice echoed down the row of chair, loud enough to turn several heads. "I'm not done talking to you, you as—"
I kept walking. I found a specific point on the back wall of the stage, I looked at it and I kept moving forward with the focused calm of a man who could not hear anything happening around him. Yet, I couldn't help but to curse her out inwardly.
I swear I'm going to make that crazy bitch pay one day
But for now, all I could do was ignore her.
The faculty member at the nearest table watched me approach with an expression that had not fully recovered from what she had just witnessed.
"Name?" She asked
"Noah Wilson."
"Here's your schedule." She said, holding out a folded paper.
I took it. "Thank you."
"First day." She said, with a weight to those two words that compressed an entire lecture into them. "Not even first period. First day."
"I apologize for my actions." I said. "It won't happen again."
She stared at me skeptically for a tad bit longer before waving me away and moving to the next student.
I unfolded my schedule as I made my way out of the auditorium into the corridor beyond.
First period: Detailed Research into Attributes. Room 14, East Wing.
I found the room with ten minutes to spare before the period started, which I used to select a seat near the back of the class. The warning from the staff lady had settled into the back of my head with a weight I intended to respect, at least for the first week.
The room filled around me gradually, students coming in from the hallway in groups of ones and twos, finding seats with the particular social navigation of people who had not yet figured out where they stood relative to each other. I watched without participating and kept my schedule on the desk in front of me and placed it down like any other ordinary paper.
The professor walked in exactly on time.
He was a tall man, somewhere in his fifties with reading glasses insinuating his intellect and experience. He was carrying a stack of folders under one arm and a piece of chalk in his other hand. He set everything down on the front desk, looked out at the room with the brisk energy of someone who had a specific amount of material to cover and a specific amount of time to cover it in and did not intend to waste any more time than he had to.
"Good morning." He said. "My name is Professor Aldren. This course is focused on Detailed Research into Attributes. If you are in the wrong room, now is the time to leave." He paused for a brief moment. Nobody moved. "Good."
He set the piece of chalk down and clasped his hands behind his back.
"Attributes are not abilities. I want that distinction established immediately because the two are mixed up constantly and it produces sloppy thinking. Your ability is what you do. Your attribute is what you are. Some of you have none. Some of you have one. A small number of you may have more than that." He let that sit for a moment. "Attributes are a correlation of your inner self, it defines how the world responds to you. In short, your attributes are your foundation."
He picked up the piece of chalk once again and turned to the board behind him.
"Open your status window. Take a close look at your attributes, if you have any."
I had not used a status window since arriving in this world, mostly because I had no idea that I even had one in the first place. So now the issue was, how exactly do I access my status window. I did what anyone with a shred of common sense would do.
'Open status.'
Something opened in my peripheral vision, not quite physical, not quite mental, sitting in the space between the two in the way that this power of mine also lived somewhere between thought and action. A panel of information that presented itself without fanfare.
I scanned it quickly.
–––
Name: Noah Wilson.
Rank: Low 1st Rank.
Power: Whisperer.
Category: Miscellaneous.
Attributes: Other Worlder
–––
My attributes.
There was only one.
Other Worlder.
I stared at it in shock.
The professor's voice continued at the front of the room, telling the students who had attributes to examine their descriptions, I was only half listening because I was looking at those two words and feeling something move through my chest, it wasn't pain, but I felt a pang of pressure.
I focused on the attribute.
The description came up beneath it.
'You are not a being belonging to this world. The world will reject the existence of your kin, as such your kin should stay together to try and survive what the world may throw at you.'
I read it twice.
Then a third time.
Then underneath the description, listed as a derived ability attached to the attribute:
Kin Locator — If any of your kin are nearby this ability will help you locate them.
I had to take deep breaths to calm myself down.
The professor was still teaching the class. Around me students were whispering quietly to one another, some looking around awkwardly, others nodding like they had confirmed something they already suspected. The ordinary sounds of a classroom resounded.
I looked at the attribute again.
Your kin.
Not your family. Not your allies. Your kin. The kin of an Other Worlder. Which meant, by the only logical extension that phrase allowed for, people who shared that attribute. People who had come from somewhere else. People who had arrived in this world the same way I had, from a different one, with no map and no warning and nothing to orient themselves by except whatever fragments of context they had managed to gather on the way down.
The world would reject us, the description said. We should stay together to survive what it would throw at us.
I thought about the cages. The figure. The bull tearing through the building's walls. The machete and the sound it had made and John's open eyes in the grass.
The world throwing things at me was, it turned out, not a metaphor I needed explained.
But the other part.
Stay together.
I looked at the Kin Locator ability sitting quietly beneath the description and felt the shape of what it was implying settle into place with a certainty that was almost uncomfortable in how clean it was.
There were others like me.
Somewhere in this world, possibly even in this academy, maybe even closer than that, there were other people who had come from somewhere else. Other people sitting in classrooms or dormitory rooms or somewhere else entirely looking at the same two words on their status window with the same dawning expression I could feel on my own face right now.
I was not the only one.
I closed the status window slowly and looked at the front of the classroom where Professor Aldren had moved on to something about attribute rarity classifications, his chalk moving across the board in clean precise strokes.
I picked up my pen.
I wrote nothing.
I sat in my desk while my thoughts were somewhere else entirely. Where could other of my "kin" be? How many of us are out there?
I was left there to ponder until the period ended.