When they reached the Auditorium under the escorts of the maids, there was still no one there. Everybody was still looking around disgruntledly even as the maids retreated away. After they milled around near the podium for a couple of minutes, they started to find a place to sit one by one. Mari looked around and found a place where she could easily observe everybody in class without moving too much.

 

Everyone sat in a group of their own choosing and started to converse with their seatmates after making themselves comfortable. Close to where Mari had sat, there was Anna’s group of trendy girls. Their wardrobe hadn’t changed too much from what they usually wore whenever they hung around together outside school hour.

 

There were still a couple of people who hadn’t chosen where they wanted to sit. One of them was Rona, the punk girl who was now wearing an elaborate princess dress. She looked around for a while and finally sat near her usual seat-mate in class, a member of Anna’s group. Her arrival triggered a heated discussion, and Mari listened to their loud conversation to pass the time.

 

“Never thought you’ll be someone who loved wearing a princess dress.” Rona’s seatmate, Nasha said laughingly with a barely repressed smirk.

 

“Shut up… what I wear doesn’t concern you” Rona rolled her eyes and answered with a pouting glare.

 

“I thought you’re a punk kid, you know.” “Ahh what a disappointment” Two other girls, Lia, and Ellis piped up.

 

“So what? I like punk music, and that band I liked happened to have groovy t-shirt merchandise…” Rona replied defensively, gently pushing away Nasha’s wandering hand.

 

“What kind of princess are you then?” Ellis prodded curiously.

 

“A rebellious one who’s going to run away with the first rogue that came in through your window?” Nasha stated with a teasing tone.

 

“…You seem to have a good imagination.” Rona paused briefly before replying to Nasha with her own teasing, “Bet you’re the one waiting for a prince to spirit you away…”

 

“Hey, I’m not the one with a princess dress, really, a princess listening to punk music…”

 

“Do you think that I couldn’t like punk music? What do you think I should listen to? Kid’s cartoon soundtrack?”

 

“Nasha, Rona, enough! Stop bickering, you two!” When it looked like the two were going to do their usual back and forth, Anna interjected by waving her hand in between two arguing girls.

 

“…Do you think there would be a detergent or something like that around here?”Lia suddenly wondered aloud.

 

“Huh?”

 

“Detergent?”

 

“Why?”Rona, Ellis, and Nasha looked in surprise at Lia’s curious muttering, while Anna stepped back and become a listener again after she was done stopping Nasha and Rona from devolving to endless arguing.

 

“Well, I saw that there were so many laces, frills, and ruffles on your dress.” Lia stretched her hand through the gap between speaking people and rubbed Rona’s frilly skirt between two-finger. “It’s going to be hard to clean this when it eventually got dirtied…”

 

Mari turned to look at the dress which Rona wore. It was not a Victorian-era dress type with a crinoline under her skirt to make it very wide. It was a modern take of a princess dress, with many ruffles, frills, and lace. It was definitely something high maintenance.

 

“Didn’t this place kind of… medieval?” Ellis suddenly asked, finger tapping on her lips, contemplating.

 

“Wasn’t it? Why?” Nasha tilted her head and gazed at Ellis with a curious expression.

 

“What’s the relationship between the era and cleaning Rona’s clothing?”Lia also turned her head to look at Ellis, letting go of the ruffles she was examining.

 

“Well, people of this era love this kind of dress though?” Ellis gestured toward Rona’s frilly dress, moving her hand up and down. “Maybe they’d have something they can use to clean their clothes instead of throwing them away when it got dirty?”

 

“Weren’t medieval people the kind of people who rarely bathed?“ Rona looked at Ellis face with a dubious expression, continuing, ”I heard they forwent even something like washing their face in winter…”

 

“That sounds like an exaggeration… maybe you’re talking about the plebs instead of the upper-class people…” Nasha countered.

 

“I think it wouldn’t be a problem, girls” Rona mumbled in a bashful expression.

 

“Huh?”

 

“Hmm?”

 

“You see, I spilled a soup on my lap last night…” Rona began explaining.

 

“You spilled it on your dress?” Nasha cried in surprise.

 

“What a waste, a good dress ruined just like that…” Lia murmured in amazement.

 

“Hey, it’s fine! The stain was gone this morning…”

 

“Gone? Did you check it clearly?” Nasha demanded, hand shooting out to hold Rona’s skirt.

 

“Of course I did!” Rona retorted heatedly, “I even prepared myself to ask for those maids' help in salvaging it…”

 

“It’s good that the dress wasn’t ruined,” Ria stated neutrally. “Really, how could you be so careless that you spilled soup on it…”

 

“It’s the first time I have this kind of dress you know? I never needed to be careful with my usual wardrobe.”

 

“Tch” Nasha scoffed disdainfully.

 

“Haha, what’s with your attitude?” Ellis asked laughingly.

 

“You’re a clumsy person.” Nasha declared imperiously, “I wonder why you got a princess dress”

 

“Ha, so it’s like that!” Lia suddenly exclaimed in mirth, “You truly are the one with princess fantasy!”

 

“What kind of girl never had a princess fantasy?”Nasha asked rhetorically, before looking away with a scoff. “Humph!”

 

The conversation petered out before the topic changed around randomly from talking about their old world to talking about the mages they met yesterday. Mari tuned out their conversation in favor of silent contemplation.

 

‘Was it self-repair, or just auto-cleaning?’

 

‘Should I try it with my uniform?’

 

‘No. even the prospect of deliberately dirtying my uniform was so unpleasant.’

 

 

…[…]…

 

 

In the Auditorium, the mage apprentice Reyya was giving a lecture from the podium seriously. And whenever she had a difficulty in conveying the words she wanted to say, she would cast an illusion spell on the wall behind her. The illusions she made were simple stick images and colored shapes, but when it was added together with her explanation, it made the lecture easier to understand.

 

“Don’t be too disappointed if you didn’t find your innate skill yet. After all, most of the people found it by looking at their parent’s skill…”

 

 The summoned people listening to her were focusing their attention on her lecture earnestly. If there were something they didn’t understand, they would ask her to explain and expound it further. If it were not for her mage costume, the clothes they themselves wore, and the fantasy knowledge she discussed with them, the scene in the auditorium wouldn’t be something out of the norm in a place of learning like university or school.

 

 ‘Yesterday everything was still following a common sense.’

 

‘Even if the subject area and field of study was hard, there were still a lot of people I could ask help from.’

 

‘Now we were talking about magic and other unscientific subjects.’

 

‘How long until we were forced to go kill monsters or do all kind of tasks we were summoned to do?’

 

‘No matter how hard life back home, or how fierce the job competition, at least there was no possibility of death because of being killed by monsters…’

 

After a period of teaching the summoned people how to detect the flow of mana inside their bodies, Reyya moved on to instruct everyone to find what their skill was. The fact that all of them had succeeded in sensing their mana in less than half a day made the woman felt so joyful that she urged everyone to do the next exercise promptly.

 

The woman also looked relieved and sighed quietly when one by one everybody showed up that they could sense their inner reserve of energy. Mari wondered what was the curriculum of their magic studies.

 

“Looking at their parent skill?” Dan asked their lecturer Reyya, and she started to expound more on the topic.

 

“Yeah. No one knows what kind of innate skill they have until they could compare it with someone else.”

 

‘Compare it with someone else…’

 

‘Don’t they have a standardized test yet?’

 

‘How do we even know what kind of skill we had?’

 

Anna held her hand up and asked what Mari was curious about.“How do we determine what kind of skill we would have?”

 

“It’s inherited ability if both parents had an innate skill of movement variety, then the offspring would have a skill that was similar to either parent, or getting an altered version of their skill, or in the rarest cases, getting a combination of both of their skill”

 

“Does that mean that older families had a better skill and hold a monopoly and hegemony over everybody else?”

 

“Well, they exist,” Reyya paused for emphasis, ”But rare.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Altered version usually just a minuscule variant of the skill of their parent,” Reyya paused,” and combination of the parent skill doesn’t mean that the combined skill would be something stronger…” Reyya smiled sardonically,” sometimes the skill would come out wrong. Defective. A combination of the flaw from the skill of their parent. A combination that weakens the sum of its part…”

 

“How can you tell? Was there someone who had made a study about it?”

 

“There was no research about it just yet…” Reyya mused,” But everyone knows that seeking a life partner based on their skill usually explodes disastrously.” She smiled mischievously,” Some said that they got weaker because of the lack of love in their union, hehe.”

 

Mari focused her senses inward again, ignoring the question-and-answer session between Reyya and everyone else. She wanted to find her innate skill as soon as possible so that she could calm herself. In a place where there was a chance of being killed by monsters, walking at the pace of other people was dangerous.

 

There was no guarantee that they – as a champion summoned to fight for the mages – could abstain from fighting. Knowing the innate skill faster would mean there would be more time to train on how to use it as a safety net to ensure her survival.

 

Reyya had said that to find their innate skill, they should use the mana flowing in their veins and channel it together while using the ability and expertise they had learned one by one. Channeling the mana while writing, while drawing, and countless other things. The innate skill would be the ability that becomes unnaturally strengthened, changed, or augmented by a knowledge they never learned.

 

Meanwhile, as Mari turned her perception inward, she was also thinking about her magical make-up kit. When would be the soonest she tell everyone else about the kit while making sure any trouble wouldn’t suddenly come up to inconvenience her.

 

And when Reyya’s lectured finished and she started to pack away everything she bought, Mari had made a decision. She promptly stood up and barred the door to prevent anyone from separating and not knowing about what she wanted to say.

 

But she didn’t want to do it alone. She dragged Rio to the front and had him help her explain everything.