"What's really funny," Meresinth Woodbine said, laughing with the other girl at her own joke of moments before, "is that I shouldn't really be here."

Here being at Miss Plazenby's Extremely Exclusive Seminary for Girls on Mount Syzywyg in the mild and beautiful land of Frangea. The girl sat with her on the bench in a garden full of late autumn blooms was her fellow dorm mate Sentimentalia Placidia Rosala, a mouthful of a name very quickly shortened by mostly everyone to Esper, which was just as well for she had an uncanny knack of anticipating the thoughts of others.

"There is a story you wish to tell?" she said knowingly as she continued to braid the long black hair of her friend. The sun was shining and lessons were done for the day, so the two girls had decided to seek a quiet spot to enjoy each others' company.

Meresinth had a reputation for being sharp-tongued, having more than once received a demerit mark for a less than respectful retort when criticised in class by a mistress. It was a habit that had been with her since childhood. Having turned eleven and now attending her first large school outside of her homeland, she found what were deemed clever remarks among her erstwhile peers, were often treated as impertinence by her new associates. It was a new world she found herself in and the difficulty of adjusting was also shadowed by a fear of adjusting too much, so that when she returned to be appraised by the community elders they would find a very strange being indeed stood before them. Not at all what they intended for all the sacrifice and investment pertaining to her scholarship at Miss Plazenby's.

"Where I come from no one could imagine private flitters carrying you from place to place in minutes, or fifteen types of shoulder bag that must be carried just so, countless shoes for every occasion or no occasion at all, even paper that renews itself into reusable blankness if you shake it in the sunshine a moment," Meresinth said, viewing herself in her tablet mirror after Esper knotted a final ribbon on a particularly long braid. "That's fantastic. Your fingers are as nimble as a spruce bug."

"Cleaner and less sticky I hope," came the reply with renewed laughter.

"Cleaner certainly," and Esper's eyes widened in mock outrage.

"Why might you have regrets at experiencing all this grandeur?" the girl then said, divining the restlessness within the Arbornica girl's soul. "From a land of plainness, does it not enrich your imagination to realise the profuse variety that makes up the world, and the people within it?"

"Plainness! I'm a plain girl then?"

"You would not be here if you were," was the quick and accurate response, and it was this which she knew was the crux of the matter. Meresinth Woodbine could not possibly be ordinary if she attended Miss Plazenby's. The exclusivity of the place had nothing to do with the expense as far as Esper was concerned. It was an exclusivity of talent. To be chosen was one thing, to be accepted was everything.

Meresinth stood and wandered the gravel walk a moment, touching an exquisite blue flower head that nodded nearby, then returning to sit again next the other girl.

"It's a mistake," she insisted more seriously. "It's not that I don't fit in," she added quickly, quelling a rising rejoinder she could see in Esper's eyes, "it's that I will fit in too well."

"Arbornica is your pride. Five years from now you will return. You fear your experiences here will change you so much that when you do return your family and your friends will not recognise you." Then she paused, reading the reaction of her subject, a reaction that suggested more. "Is it that you fear they have erred to the point of being ashamed of you?" she said, alarmed.

"Oh, Esper," came an emotional response and a hint of tearfulness. "They had no idea what the world is really like beyond the great forests, beyond the storm barriers. Winkel World is a mythical place to them, a place of wonders and they thought if they sent one of their children to such a place as this, a child with a particular talent for learning, that child would return full of the treasures of the outside world, to enrich the land of Arbornica. You cannot imagine how many people sacrified their savings and proferred their good wishes to the project. A child of Arbornica out there in the real world, imbibing knowledge that will bring blessings to the land, prosperity and well being. They had no idea where they were sending me."

"This is a burden no child should be expected to shoulder," Esper replied wisely, soothingly, for she could see the other trembling, holding back tears as she admitted her fears. "How have we gone so rapidly from harmless jokes on our chums and their funny ways to this portentious misery?"

"It's my fault. I was too quick as a baby, running with the other village children in the forest clearings. I got noticed."

"That hasn't changed," the other laughed, trying to lighten the mood. "Being who you are is everything, Merry."

"You called me Merry."

"And? Is not your name and your nature all bound together in one talented and delightful being who will blaze a trail across Frangea, Arbornica and beyond so that the very stars shall laugh with you for very joy?"

"Demerits do not feel like joy." Meresinth looked up at the golden twilight filling one half of the sky. Sunset in autumn was of course quite early in Frangea, especially among the hills around Mount Syzywyg.

"Not everyone gets you. Surely your tongue was a troublesome thing in your forest clearings too?"

"I would say so," came a measured reply, each word spoken slowly as a flood of memories that proved the assertion of her friend filled her inner mind in a jumble of conflicting images.

"What will change then? Your people sent Miss Meresinth Woodbine to Frangea and after five years they will get Miss Meresinth Woodbine back again."

"With a funny accent, and a habit of taking a quiz at something instead of a peek or finding matters a bit squiggly rather than puzzling."

"We shall squiggle this out together," Esper insisted, for her mind was as sharp as the other's when she wished it to be, but then she had no burden of a large community's hopes laid upon her that could bear no failures or disappointments in the years ahead. "What you bring to Miss Plazenby's is the thing of value here. What you take away will be a mixture of your own self and the valuable life lessons attending this school gives you. It is not just knowledge for its own sake but how that knowledge applies to every waking moment of our lives that is taught here. But wrapped up in all that, the soul that is Meresinth, remains untouched, unblemished, and no one from Arbornica will fail to recognise that when you return, unless you let the outer world destroy the person that is your true and unique self. Leave all that to the Perfecta girls and their kind."

"Ooh, nasty," Meresinth admitted, impressed at the sharp tongue of the other. "I think you're right though, not about the Perfectines perhaps. Dig deep enough and you will find a genuine heart even in those superficial dolls. No, I mean about not letting myself be beaten by the Plazenby way."

She stood up, energised by the words of her friend in a way that was not quite expected.

"Um, perhaps you misunderstood?" Esper replied hastily, hands fluttering with nervous concern, for she could read strange thoughts in the dark eyes of the other girl, as if an uncanny flame had been kindled there.

"No, not a bit of it," Meresinth declared, making a fist. "This school will teach me important lessons in life for certain, and I'll teach this school a lesson too." With that she marched off along the gravel path into the dusk, leaving the other girl sat alone upon the bench wondering if she might have inadvertently unleashed a monster upon the world, the genteel, learned world of an exclusive girl's school.