A Game of Cards

Chapter VI: Rodina Paget

My parents gave everything just for me to stand in the corridors of this school as a student.

Magislight Academy is the best school in all of the United Empires, no competition. The school used to be an academy for Magi students, hence its name, but it was since taken over by the common population and transformed into some sort of royal academy.

Although it was located in Clovers, the most uninvolved country there is when it comes to any sort of conflict, the school ground itself was neutral territory to and designed by all the nations. This meant that the professors were all of different nationalities, and the utilities available to students of each nation were vastly different. This meant Diamonds, being the richest nation by far, of course had the best of everything. Best dorms, best uniform, best training areas. Magislight had a history that spanned centuries, being the school of famous historical figures and Impersonations. Magislight was the school for royals and families with high status, while I was just the daughter of an average Daemia merchant.

Of course, Diamonds being the Land of Merchandise, nobody was really poor, and even the penniless in the country would be worth mounds of gold elsewhere, but in Diamonds, my family really was average. Mom and Dad had worked off an arm and a leg to send me here, the least I could do was take this chance to excel. But whenever some test would come up, all that I did was disappoint them. They never said so, of course, but the expression on their faces when they looked at another last-place rank on my papers more than told me that they had expected more.

...

The nurse frowned at the sword wound at my side, the sheer amount of bandages used indicating the seriousness. The other contestants really weren't gentle with me, considering how uninfluential my family was, they saw no reason to be.

The Starlight Project was one of the major projects in a semester, accounting for sixty percent of the final grade. Its importance was the only reason why I still came to lessons with a giant stab wound at my side. You would be paired with a partner to complete a project on a topic of your liking, presented however you may wish. You would then be personally graded based on contribution and final results. This was the only test in the whole semester that I did not fare too badly at, because all the partners I had received were quite decent, and the Starlight Project allowed you to choose any topic as long as it was considered "appropriate", so naturally I selected ones that I had a genuine interest in.

The thing about Magislight was that it had students from all over the United Empires, so naturally the students coming from politically conflicting countries – and by that, I mean Hearts and Spades – have antagonistic relationships with each other. The teachers knew this, so they were always careful with their pairings, most of the times matching students of the same nations together to avoid conflict. The same sense of self-preservation from the school may not last this year, the war having just ended, so everybody was prepared to be thrown into chaos with a few Hearts-Spades pairings. The school went a lot further than that.

They declared the pairings in the Natura building's main hall, adorned with wooden seats and vines crawling up the walls. It was considered Clovish territory, as the Clovers Kingdom had been the one to build Natura, that much was apparent. Whenever I stepped inside, I felt like I was in a woodland, and even a few birds would sing from the overhead pillars occasionally. It would always be the pixie professor, Sir Ustrofisic, to declare all the pairings and handle all other public speeches in the school, white hair and blue skin with a skinny frame, a member of the Daemia fairy race. Suddenly attentive to the professor's words, it wasn't even my own pairing that I was listening for anymore. I was gaping at the sixth pairing, as was everyone else around me, my ears ringing too loudly to listen for anything else.