We didn't get any more housemates on move-in week, and when Sesjer rolled around, the doorchime rang, announcing a visitor.

"Chry! Clothes!"

As soon as the dwarf girl scurried down the ladder, donned her dress, and stashed the ladder in the shower room, I opened the outer door. The visitor was Spence, the resident assistant. Nell wandered out from her cell to see what was going on.

"Hi, it's me again. Spence, the R.A. I just came 'round to tell you that burrow assignments are now permanent for the term. Not to say that nobody can move, but it isn't going to be because the Residency needs to move you. Oof.  Where's all your furniture? There are supposed to be couches and chairs and tables and whatnot in here.... Also, I am now officially your R.A. I'm in DOB-02, in the Gaystacks. If I'm not in, you can ask Anisa or check DOB-01 for Dack or Seline, the other resident gay-ssistants. I'm going to check on where your furniture is supposed to be, unless you have any questions?"

"Not now, but thanks for telling us, Spence."

The dwarf boy waved and smiled, then closed the door on his way out. Chry was naked again before the echo of the latch clicking bounced off the back wall.  Moments later, the ladder was back in place, and she was once again up on the moss.

By this point, we had all been around campus together once, and they had collected their class texts from the library. A little nagging bit of false memory made me think it odd that students could just collect their books for free from the college library instead of buying them from some sort of specialty book merchant, but I immediately dismissed the ephemeral notion as a temporary madness, in comparison to the reality of just using the library for its intended purpose. To do otherwise was as ridiculous and nonsensical as making a child or young adult pay money--or worse, incur debts--in order to become a better-functioning member of society. Perhaps the Hegum Unus people might do something like that, but not here.

The doorchime rang again.

"Chry! Clothes!"

I don't know how she could possibly be so diligent in her routine. But then again, I don't notice my clothes when I was wearing them, either. I imagine that if it was like constantly being alight with a low-intensity flame, I might take every opportunity to cast them off, too.

Once everyone was ready, I opened up again. This time, it was another dwarf male, with his beard bound tightly in military braids, and zinc beard rings in a no-nonsense orthogonal crisscross motif.

"I'm looking for Ravenna Asterian."

"That's me."

"You're enrolled in reserve officer 101. Aside from the scheduled meetings, there is also an exercise requirement. The Lieutenant-Colonel has written up a set of schedules. Please follow the one appropriate for your race and morphism."

He shoved a paper booklet from a stack into my hands.

"See you Dojer. Do not be late."

He left without further comment. I closed the door. The booklet was entitled "Physical Fitness Training Routines for the Common Races of the Republic". The inside was rather basic, compared to what Mom and Dad made us do for fight training. Even the orc routine looked easy. As expected, nothing for alflins.  I ditched the thing with my classroom materials. If I can stand in broadback straddle stance for two hours while my younger siblings beat on me with sticks, I can handle "calisthenics", or whatever they want to call simple exercises.

The next visitor had better be worth interrupting me again.

It was not. The next three chimes were all Residency maintenance staff, coming in and out. On the upside, they brought in our missing furniture. On the downside, they removed all the loose tools and locked us out of the unfinished cells. Including the ladder. I could tell Chry was upset, but couldn't tell you how I knew that to save my own life. Her face was a mask of stone as she looked up at the iron-railed edge of the sky-portal.

That was a shit that had been waiting to plop for a few days, and like an idiot I hadn't done anything about it proactively.

"Hey, ladies. I want to head off campus and hit up a hardware store. Who's with me?"

"Hardware store? What for?"

I mimed ladder climbing at Nellis. She put understanding over her face and nodded.

"Chry? You coming?"

"No."

That was as much as we'd get from her, so Nellis and I set off. As neither of us were local to the Cairns, it took a while to find the sort of shop we needed, selling tools, machine parts, and other assorted shaped metal bits.

Two words: goblin paradise.

They had entire aisles solely for gunsmithing and trapmaking. Tools made of solid goblin blacksteel. Calipers good down to 0.01 mm. Springs in every size. Damn it all, I was going to have to figure out how much my allowance was worth in here.

"Hey, can I check the balance on my ethercrypt?"

The goblin shop clerk, a male, keyed the function on his sale terminal, I touched the customer pad with my crypt and pushed ether, then the flipcard display spun over to @100000 before spinning back to blank.

"Can I help you find anything, madam? May I ask if your clan has any association with Burrow Rathling?"

"My uncles Reknin and Cavrex."

He checked a gridded notepad.

"So you're Freyaling, then?"

"Asterian. Freyaling on my Dad's side. Gammon Freyaling."

"The Gammon Asterian?" He placed quite a bit of emphasis on the definite article of that sentence fragment.

"Yeah, that's my Dad."

"Well... ah... your family gets 8% off list price here, then. Unless it's for the factory. That's only 5%."

"No, just shopping for myself today. Where's the factory? From here, I mean.  Directions. I have totally been there before; I just don't know the tunnels too well."

The shop clerk rattled off a set of turns that any earth-dweller could follow.

"Thanks. I need to replenish my trap kit. And some kind of flexible ladder?"

"Traps are aisle 4. Fixed ladders are aisle 15 all the way at the end.  Monkeypoles are to the left end of 15. Grapplehooks and ropes are aisle 5, if you like loop ladders."

"Thanks." I wondered whether Chry had any experience with, to put it bluntly, was vertical movement technology for the chronically impoverished. Dwarves seemed like the type to carve stairs with a pickaxe before scaling slack lines.  With that in mind, I grabbed a collapsible monkeypole. When compacted, the treads and pole sections nested together, in a form that would fit in a pack, but when extended and locked, it would easily be long enough to make a route up onto our surface garden.

"So, you're pretty handy with all this stuff? Is that racist to think all goblins know mechanics?"

"Ah... maybe? I only know my own family, but all of us can capture small game and kill large game with traps. And build or repair guns. I guess my siblings and I are pretty good with ethermachines, too. Not so much the cousins; they're more pure mechanicals and lower-speed ethercranks, like in carriages and tractors. It wouldn't be any worse than assuming all trolls build bridges instead of practicing medicine.  That's a Lazarist thing, right?"

"Yeah. He said build strong bridges between all nations. Not sure it was supposed to be literal. But there we are, living under the bridges we built.  Until our moms throw us out on the street, anyway. And its not so bad since the Extortionate Tolls Act got passed. We're more like infrastructure stewards than stone-piling maniacs looking to find exploitable transportation bottlenecks, now."

"That was what? Three thousand years ago? I'm surprised you even know anything he really said or did."

"He was the hero of the third demon's run, and the common ancestor of all trolls. Even without the religion, there'd still be the genealogy and history aspect."

By this time, I had, without thinking, collected all the parts I needed to refill my trap kit, add additional door security for Nell and Chry, and assemble a spring-loaded slingshot-cum-dartthrower for on-campus emergencies.  I checked out at the clerk's terminal. With my discount, it was about @8000.

Yeah, I'm coming back here. Often.

And two minutes after leaving the place, purple blood splashed across my face.