The magic society ‘campus’ was really just one five story building set within its own courtyard. In the courtyard just before the building there was a small patch of green grass around a little pond, with people wandering here and there. It looked quant enough, but her eyes were instantly drawn away from the little patch of nature to the beautiful geometric designs on the walls.


    Hundreds of interlocking lines and shapes forming a larger, more intricate pattern. It almost looked like someone had stacked multiple formation circles on top of each other for purely aesthetic reasons.


    Seras was so distracted by the patterns on the walls that she nearly missed the person in front of her.


    “Hey, watch it!” A tall blue scaled Draconian shouted at her.


    Seras shook her head and returned to the present, “sorry, just distracted by the patterns.”


    “Patterns?” the draconian asked.


    For explanation Seras pointed to a wall.


    He looked over and nodded, “null-formations,” he blandly.


    “So you know what they are, could you tell me more?”


    “What do I look like, some tour guide for wayward Celestines. I am of the upper echelon of Draconian nobility.” His haughty tone seemed to imply that it should have been obvious somehow, but to be honest he looked like any other Draconian she had met. Then again she wasn’t to good at telling them apart yet other than height and scale color.


    Seras quirked an eyebrow, “if you don’t know you can just say so. I can just ask someone inside.”


    His reptilian eyes glared down at her, “your trying to bait me,” he growled softly.


    “Nope, I really just want to know about those patterns. You called them Null-formations, does that make them just broken formation circles?”


    “Broken? Are you trying to tick me off Celestine?”


    “Again, I just want to know about the cool art.” Seras knew that this might just cause trouble down the line for her, especially if this guy were actually important, but this was too fun to stop. Maybe Flint had a point about her and trouble.


    The Draconian pressed a hand through his neck spines, “ugh, no they’re not broken formation. The art style is inspired by the symmetry of magic formations, one stacked on top of another, with the angles and number of points each having intentional significance. It is an artform for only the educated to comprehend and critique due to the innate complications. Take that one there, see how all the intersecting lines seem to almost form a pattern, but not quite.”


    “Yeah, that’s the ratio of phi right?”


    “No its… the what.”


    “Phi, you know, like the Rust Sequence, one of those irrational numbers we keep finding in nature. Where A+B over A is equal to A over B, 1.618 and onwards.”


    The Draconian gave her a grudging nod, “you have strange words for things girl, but yes that exactly, each new shape on that is placed one and six rotations away from the first. Like the seed patterns in some flowers.”


    Seras stared at the wall with a new found appreciation, “that’s really interesting, and all of these are like this?”


    The Draconian smiled, “Yes, and in the most complex displays like this one you can actually derive a mathematical formula from all the shapes, this one here is the formula for the Corvalis formula, as this is the Magic society responsible for that contribution.”


    Seras recalled the Corvalis formula herself, it was a formula that was essential in setting up higher rank magic circles. It was a short cut in calculations that used to take much longer to crunch, with the Corvalis formula you just punched in the variables in ambient magic and got your number.


    Seras smiled “thanks pal, I appreciated that.”


    The Draconian stared at her a moment before nodding back, “no, it was a pleasure, sorry about my rude first impression. I just had a poor meeting with the board, yet again my research lacks the funding I need to complete my theory.”


    Seras nodded in commiseration, “funding’s a bitch.” While she wasn’t an academic mind, she still had a good head for tech and engineering. But her skills were held back for a long time due to a lack in resources. Heck that was her current issue as well, developing her guns into a viable weapon on Pallimustus would a long expensive journey of iteration.


    “You don’t look familiar to me, are you new around here?”


    “Yeah, just got into Cupric a few days ago, I was just going in to take the associates exam.”


    He gave her a confused look, “your not a member yet?”


    “Not yet, I’m self-taught you see, and my work is a bit… temperamental at times. My traveling companions don’t like me mixing volatile powders in our inn so they told me to take the exam and use magic society blast proof rooms instead.”


    “Hmm, well if your advanced enough to understand Corvalis’ formula then you shouldn’t have any trouble passing. Just head in and talk to the receptionist, not the main desk but the little side one in the corner.”


    Seras smiled at him, “thanks.” She considered just walking away, but that seemed a bit rude especially after the Draconian had apologized. She stuck a handout, “Seras Cross.”


    He hesitated for a moment before accepting her hand. “Ronan, of House Ignatius.”


    “Pleasure to meet ya, but if you don’t mind, I need to be heading inside.”


    “Of course, good day to you miss Cross.”


    They passed each other by, and Seras smiled to herself. People on Pallimustus were certainly more pleasant than Ruinites. Sometimes on Ruin a brush up like that could go bad in an instant, guns out and tempers up in an instant. Here she could just smile and talk with someone and at the end they would leave on favorable terms with each other. It was nice.A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.


    She walked into the expansive foyer of the Magic society campus and was treated to more of the null-formations she had see outside. Magical disks lifted people into the air and towards the higher levels, just like an elevator would on her world. She saw the main desk swamped by people wearing long impractical robes in every color. And in the corner just as Ronan had said was a smaller less busy desk. Seras walked that way.


    The elfin receptionist barely looked up as Seras leaned against the counter, “complaints, book orders, and facility reservations are at the main desk. If you’re here about a broken mana lamp or clogged up plumbing that’s a city problem and must be addressed with the bureau of civic affairs in the Duke’s manor.”


    Seras quirked an eyebrow, “and applications to join the magic society as a junior associate?”


    Again, without looking up the Elvin woman reached under her desk and passed Seras a form with check boxes and spaces for her write. “Fill this out to the best of your abilities and prepare to wait for a testing room to be set up.”


    Seras took the sheet and looked it over and saw a disturbingly familiar sight, a standardized form that seemed to suck out all the fun in the room just by existing. Somethings were universal it seemed, death, cats, and standardized forms.


    A quick glance over the sheet revealed some irregularities. Like the box requesting her race of origin, which was a weird way of wording it. Or the section requesting her to list her essences and essence abilities, but in very, very, small text it said the essence ability part was optional. Even the normal options like date of birth and place of birth would be harder for Seras. Did she list her first birth date on Ruin, or her second one her?


    “Uh, I think some of these options might be non-applicable.”


    “Please fill out all boxes to the best of your abilities, if you can’t understand a simple form then you have no place here at the magic society.” She said all of this without looking up, she even turned a page mid-sentence.


    Seras frowned, but decided that it would be a bit much to ask for an outworlder specific form just for her. She doubted they even had one. Outworlders were well known in the Five deserts, but they weren’t really that common despite their infamy. From Dustin’s account there were only a handful of them in the entire region, and they typically settled in the adventuring city of Basal. It was a large concentration compared to the global population of outworlders, but that number likely didn’t exceed a hundred at best.


    It was strange to think that in any other part of the world that Seras would be considered an extremely rare oddity. What would it be like to figure all this shit out with no one to guide you?


    She shook her head and went back to the form before her. She wrote down her essences, skipped the ability part, and listed her race of origin as human since that was her original race. For birthdate and place she wrote two, one the date on Ruin, and the other corresponding to her rebirth on Pallimustus. She wrote lower ward of Mantle; district eleven, and then Vestal gateway for the second place of birth.


    She finished the rest of the form and passed it back to the Elf lady.


    Finally, she glanced up and glossed her eyes over the form and frowned slightly, “you left a whole section blank.” She said pointedly, finally looking up at Seras.


    “I think you’ll find that the section was listed as optional,” Seras quipped.


    She squinted hard at the paper, “I might as well write vision enhancement powers, I can barely make that out. fine, but what about race, you wrote in the wrong race.”


    “No I didn’t.”


    She glared hard at Seras, “Yes you did. I may not be able to read the tiny text, but I can plainly see a Celestine when I meet one.”


    Oh this again, it was starting to become annoying constantly being mistaken for a Celestine. “No, I was born a human.” The first time at least.


    “You honestly expect me to believe that?” she said flatly.


    “Believe what you want, that has no baring on the truth.”


    She glared now, “fine, go sit over there until I call your name. I don’t get paid enough to argue with idiots about what race they are.”


    Seras opened her mouth fire back with something that might have been slightly speciest, when she recalled what Flint had said about her looking for trouble. This time she actually decided to close her mouth and not cause a fuss.


    Seras turned around and sat in one of the chairs around the desk. The Elf lady went back to reading and it was a solid five minutes before she turned back and slid her form into thin slot in the wall and the paper flew away. Half a minute later a Smoulder man stepped out and called Seras’ name.


    She stood up and glared at the receptionist for wasting her time like that. She followed the Smoulder man into a hallway behind the desk and waited for the door to close, “so, whats with the lady out there?”


    The Smoulder man winced, “ah, had trouble with her?”


    “She argued with me over my race, who even does that?”


    He sighed, “yeah, she’s not one of our most polite members, but we can’t fire her. The side desk is the only position we can stick her where she’ll do the least damage.”


    Seras had some things to say about ‘least damage’, but had another question instead. “Why can’t you fire her?”


    “She’s Pheonix nobility, the Caras family.”


    “I’m not from around here, is that a big name?”


    “Pretty big, they’ve been around for at least a thousand years, no diamond rank ancestors though. This whole section of the city is the Caras district.”


    “Hmm” Seras grunted, probably a good thing she didn’t say that snipy thing about Elf ears then.


    The Smoulder man opened a door to a small study room where a standardized test packet was waiting for her. “Please use the pen provided as its ink is magical and essential in the grading process.”


    So instead of bubbles and machines to scan them they had magic ink. How did that work?


    “Is this timed?”


    “It is, three hours, good luck.”


    Seras nodded and sat down in the chair and cracked open the test. It was different from what she had been expecting, she thought it would be multiple choice, with a few written answers. Instead it was all written answers, but not short answers. Instead the test wanted her to the answer the question by writing, verbatim, the entire section from her text book correlating to the source, and then to cite the source.


    That meant Seras was copying down massive blocks of flowery, go nowhere, paragraphs from Unlocking the World around By Roland Dundee.


    It was asinine the amount she had to write for simple questions like Magic density. One question had her citing three different volumes of text because Dundee had split the explanation across all three.


    She, she may have snapped and started writing insults about the author in the bottom margin, but any one with sense would agree with her about a blowhard like Dundee.


    The second frustrating part of the test were the questions about things she knew Pallimustus had wrong. For example, memory of weight. It was an explanation to why huge things were hard to push even if you made it magically weightless. The issue was that what they were really experiencing was the difference between mass and weight. Something Pallimustan researchers didn’t have a good grasp on because A; they didn’t have a good understanding of gravity, and B; because they didn’t have Thermov’s laws of motion.


    So she was torn between giving the answer they wanted versus the actual answer. So she wrote both. She did the answer they wanted from her, and then wrote below how it was wrong and what it should have been.


    Seras had in her time on Pallimustus heard rumors about how the Goddess Knowledge didn’t like people randomly spreading the knowledge of other worlds around willy nilly. But fuck that bitch, after what she had done to Seras she had no right to tell her what to do.


    Seras’ head perked up and whipped around the room as she got the sudden feeling that some one was perturbed with her. She had no idea how she knew that, or why she distinctly knew it be ‘perturbed’ versus any other similar emotions.


    The feeling faded and Seras just went back to her test. That was really weird.


    She finished writing and knocked on the door, the same Smoulder man opened the door and glanced down at her finished test, “already?”


    “Yeah, would have been sooner, but the text I had to cite was written by the most long winded bastard I had ever read.”


    The Smoulder chuckled, “oh I know that feeling. Which text books were your trained on, my master was fond of series written nearly four hundred years ago because he heard the author might have hit diamond, never mind that it was all out of date.”


    Seras grinned at the Smoulder man’s commiserating with her suffering, “I think mine are more contemporary, Unlocking the World, if you know it.”


    His smile faded away in a second, he glanced down and then back up at Seras. “I see, please, uh, wait here for a moment.”


    Seras frowned at the sudden change in his demeanor, “okay.”


    Seras flopped back into her chair and stared at the ceiling. It too had a null-formation painted across it and Seras admired the geometric patterns.


    ~~~*~~~


    The Magic society director shifted in his chair as someone knocked on his door, he sat up, straightened his jacket, and smoothed back a loose lock of bright orange hair. “Enter,” he commanded.


    A young Smoulder gentleman opened the door, one of the ash type Smoulders instead of the more typical flame or earth. “Director, I, uh,” he cleared his throat midsentence and fidgeted nervously.


    “My time is not so cheap to waste on you stuttering, say your piece.”


    He nodded, “yes director. We had a new applicant come in today and there were, ah, a series of irregularities in her, ah, application and test.”


    “The kind of irregularities worth reporting directly to the director,” he asked testily?


    “Um, well sir I did start with my supervisor, then I went to his manager, then his manager, then your deputy director, and now you.”


    He frowned, “give me the test and application form.”


    He took the two from the young man and glanced through it. The applicant, a human named Seras Cross, had filled out the form very strangely. She listed two birth dates, one he didn’t recognize, and another that marked her as only a few months old. Two places of birth he had never heard of, and for her essences she had listed one that did not exist.


    Odd, but not worth bringing to the director of the Magic society. He began to thumb through her test booklet. He looked at page after page and slowly began to grow more and more enraged. Was this some sort of call out? Was that ignorant buffoon from Karstess trying to test his patience again?


    He let his aura waft out and cover the whole building and located the applicant who dared to insult him in his own branch. He vanished from his office and appeared directly in front of the girl.


    The girl, a Celestine woman with steely grey hair and eye colorations, snapped to her feet in an instant. Blue sparks flashed between her hands and a long metal tube thing was pointed threateningly at his head.


    Good instincts, too good for a fresh iron ranker like her.


    “Who are you, and why have you come to insult me in my own branch.” He growled out as he slowly pressed down on her with his aura.


    “I don’t know who the fuck you are, but if you think you can push me around you’ve got another think coming.” She growled back, her finger moving onto a small trigger mechanism.


    He didn’t know what this weapon was, but she clearly put a great amount of stock in it if she thought it would be enough to even injure a silver ranker.


    He loomed over her, increasing the weight of his aura, still careful not to melt her brain. For now. “I am Director Roland Dundee, the Director of the Cupric branch of the Magic society.”


    The Celestine looked surprised; she blinked in comprehension. “Oh… oh!”


    “Yes”


    The woman met his gaze and held it. “I’m not apologizing.”