After walking through the magical doors, Kason with Harper at his side, entered a red-carpeted foyer area. It was circular in shape and had many doors leading off from it, each with a sign above it. Many spherical shaped moon crystals, emitting golden light hung from the stone ceiling, maybe three meters up, on golden threads. Kason wondered whether or not he should be calling the golden moon crystals 'sun crystals'. He had had never come across them before coming to the college, though, and so was unsure. The guide walked to the centre of the room where a statue of a man wearing tight-fitting robes and a monocle was placed, he looked back at the children and saw them all inspecting the many doors packed onto the walls.

"These are all weak infinity doors." He gestured to the many doors leading off from the room and spoke in his slow voice, "Meaning that when you step into them, they will immediately take you to the room which they are connected to. These ones are not very powerful and can only be connected to one room, so they cannot really be called true infinity doors. Each door has a sign above it signifying where it will take you, we will be going through that one." He pointed to one of the doors on the left-hand wall, above which a sign read 'Registry Office'.

The guide then set off towards the door and stepped inside, the children all following behind him. Kason stepped through the door, expecting to experience something similar to his trip through the black hole. However, all he felt was a slight tugging at his clothes like a light breeze had brushed past him, and then he was in another room.

This room also had a red carpet and inside were several wooden desks, behind which several men and women sat, talking to each other. There were windows set high on the back wall and a silver chandelier set with golden moon crystals hung from the ceiling. When the guide entered the room, children in tow, they finished up their conversation and one called out to the guide.

"Are these new students Brian?" The man asked. He seemed quite young and had a face creased with a smile.

"Yeah," Brian drawled, "I picked up two extra on the way here, they say they lost their guide."

"That's fine, they must be Ashton's pair. He sent word over that his two had disappeared."

Kason inwardly felt indignant at being accused of disappearing, given that Ashton had run away from them first. Outwardly, however, he showed nothing, merely looking around the room that they were in.

"Well, I'll leave them all to you then." The guide called Brian said and, giving a lazy wave of his hand, he walked back through the infinity door. After he had, the man who had come forward to greet him turned to the children,

"The two who were with Ashton come with me, the other three, go to one of the people over there and they'll get you sorted."

Kason and Harper went over to the man and he looked down at them, smiling slightly. "My name's Brent, I received a message from Ashton saying that you two suddenly disappeared on him. New students aren't usually the type to run away from their guides, and I doubt that you could've lost Ashton if you tried. How did it actually go?"

Kason and Harper told their story and Brent listened, nodding.

"That sounds about right. Ashton did say that he'd gone to sort out something and then when he got back you two were gone." He indicated that they should follow him as he began to walk over to a desk, "You two shouldn't really have wandered off but then again, Ashton shouldn't have run off either, so I suppose you're even." He sighed and sat behind a desk and indicated two chairs for Kason and Harper to sit on that Kason would swear hadn't been there when they entered the room.

"It doesn't really matter, you're here now anyway. So, you both need your rings and pendants don't you."

Brent put on an ordinary looking brown leather glove and gave a wave of his hand which fluidly transformed into a grasping motion, which ended up looking like a bizarre kind of wave directed at Harper. Harper looked a little bit confused but almost immediately after, the surface of the desk rippled and two rings and sky-blue kite shaped pendants on silver chains rose up from within the desk.

Kason and Harper gasped at the sight and Brent chuckled, "This whole desk actually doubles as a storage device," he explained, "these things are yours." He pointed at the items on the desk, "Each of you needs a pendant and ring. The pendants are your identification for moving throughout the college. To activate them, just touch them to the green tokens you should have and they will transfer the information to the pendant. The tokens will then be useless so if you do it now, I'll take your tokens off you after you've finished."

Kason picked up both pendants from the desk and passed one to Harper. They then fished their tokens out from their pockets and touched them to the kite-shaped jewel on the pendant. They both glowed momentarily and then the green tokens began to turn grey, they both then passed their grey tokens to Brent.

"What information is on these pendants?" Harper asked, bringing his to eye level and looking at it intently.

"They have your name, year and hometown as well as any other info the college may add on if you take on special tasks, although you won't really be doing that for a while. They also have other purposes but you don't really need to know them just now." Brent replied, leaning back in his chair. He made a gesture with his gloved hand again and the rings on the table floated over to hover in front of Kason and Harper, who each reached out and took hold of one. "These rings have a long technical name that no one really remembers apart from the people who make them, the rest of us just call them utility rings. They start being really useful once you're able to control ether, however right now they will still be useful to you. For example, they can tell you the date and time, just look at the inscriptions around the edge."

Kason looked down at his ring and saw that metal was flowing as if it were liquid, indicating that it was just before eight in the evening. Further round the ring's circumference, another set of numbers indicated the date, that being the seventh day of the first month.

"The ring can also be used once to save you from most dangers if you ever get into any life-threatening situations, although it will break once that has been done." Brent continued, "It can also act as a light, and can be changed to any colour you like." He promptly turned his own ring, which he wore on his left hand, a bright shade of pink and made it light up, sending rays of pink light shining out from around his finger.

 

"To make it light up, rub clockwise once around the ring's circumference, and to change the colour, well," he frowned slightly, "you can't actually do that until you can control ether." He seemed genuinely saddened that they wouldn't be able to appreciate the joys of the colour changing rings.

Kason, who was secretly similarly disappointed at being deprived of an interesting new toy, felt that although he understood how Brent felt, he would appreciate it more if he could get a meal and a place to sleep, preferably as soon as possible. He raised his voice to break Brent out of his despondent reverie, "So, can it do anything else? Also, where will we stay tonight?"

Brent shook himself and, still looking slightly mournful, began to answer, "The ring has one last function and that is the map. If you rub counter-clockwise like so..." He rubbed around the circumference of his still pink ring, "A map will appear on the palm of the hand you're wearing the ring on." He turned his own ringed hand towards them, showing them that, shockingly, the lines on the surface of his palm had begun to dance around like they had developed minds of their own. They writhed about, contorting into the shapes of various buildings and other landforms, smaller lines swirled into a curly, cursive script to label each of the shapes that appeared.

"This map only shows the area roughly half a kilometre around your position and so is relatively useless if you ask me, but it's better than nothing. There're signs all over the place so by combining the two you can probably find your way around. Oh yeah, and you can also use this map outside the college as well. In fact, you can use it anywhere as long as nothing is interrupting the flow of ether around you!" He then paused and allowed them a few moments to take in everything he had said.

"Well that's all the stuff you need to pick up here," Brent said and stood up, "make sure you wear your pendant around the college. Otherwise, you won't be able to go anywhere and someone will be notified that there's an intruder lurking around to eliminate."

Kason shivered, not wanting to experience whatever means the college used to 'exterminate' intruders. Brent walked around his desk and towards the door that led back to the foyer area, "I'll take you to the place you two will be staying in for the next four years, follow me."

Once they were back in the foyer, they followed Brent through a set of double doors labelled 'Courtyard' at the opposite end from where they had entered. Through the door, and they were standing outside another set of double doors, facing a large rectangular flagstone courtyard, with various patterns and images inlaid into the floor. The courtyard was surrounded on all sides by large buildings in the same style, some having thin spires and others solid looking towers rising out of the top. They walked across the courtyard towards the building directly opposite.

"Unlike the senior dorms, the junior dorms are located next to the faculty, mainly because the juniors use the faculty buildings a lot more than the seniors do." Brent motioned towards the building they were walking towards as he said this, indicating that it was the junior dorms. When they reached the door, they noticed that there were grooves in the doors similar to those on the doors to the main building. "Hold your pendants in or near the grooves and the door will open," Brent instructed Kason and Harper.

After doing as he said, the doors opened to reveal a room similar to the foyer of the main building, except this one was carpeted with a rug of royal blue. There were infinity doors around the room, although not as many as in the main building, and above each one was a number instead of words.

"The numbers are floor numbers, for lack of a better description." Brent said, "Although with an infinite number of floors is it even worth numbering them?"

 

Kason and Harper remained silent, unsure of what to say, but it seemed that Brent didn't expect them to say anything anyway.

"You guys will be living on..." he paused for a second as if listening to something and then continued, "Floor seventeen." He pointed to a door on the left.

They walked towards it and Harper, who was frowning slightly, asked "How can there be infinite floors? I mean, if you kept on adding more, then you'd eventually run out of space, right?"

"Well that would make sense if this were a normal building," said Brent turning around to look at Harper, "but, you see, this whole building is actually one big infinity room."

Kason was the next to raise a question, "What's an infinity room?"

"I was going to explain that next," said Brent, "an infinity room is a room that can, hypothetically, go on forever. It just sort of, gets bigger when it needs to be. That means that whenever we need a new floor, we can build a new one without worrying about space. In fact, with this particular building, it will automatically make a new floor when all the rooms are full."

Soon they entered the corridor on which they were to live. Harper immediately walked over to the windows and let out an excited exclamation, "Look at this, surely this stuff isn't just outside the dorm?"

Kason ran over to join Harper by the window and promptly let out his own gasp of astonishment. Outside, there was a stretch of neatly cut grass reaching between twenty and thirty meters away from the base of the wall. Past that, rising out of the lawn like a wave from the sea, trees upreared their canopies of emerald leaves, getting progressively taller as they went deeper into the mass of trees.

"It goes on forever!" Harper breathed in awe, "Just look at the size of some of them."

There were indeed some behemoths deep in the forest, rising hundreds of meters into the sky, gnarled trunks twisting and turning in ways that no tree ought to. The whole place looked majestic, bathed in moonlight, shadowy shapes flitting about under the canopy and across the tops of the trees, glowing bugs rose slowly through the net of leaves, shifting erratically in the night breeze. Brent, who had been walking down the corridor, turned to look out of the windows when he heard the exclamations of the two.

He gave an appreciative sigh, "Looks like you guys got lucky with the view."

"What do you mean by lucky?" asked Harper, "Surely it's always like this."

"Ah, well, not always. You see, the floors sort of move around the building sometimes when the dorm is getting rid of rooms that it doesn't need. So, this means a floor facing the back one year, like yours, might end up facing the front the next year."

Harper nodded and, as Brent walked off down the corridor, came over to stand next to Kason who as still looking out the window, "He makes it sound like the house is alive." He shivered slightly.

"I think it's awesome!" Kason said excitedly, "just think, you can do all this stuff with magic! I can't wait to start."

"Same!" Harper replied with equal excitement, "But I still don't really like the feeling of living in some giant house monster's stomach."

 

At that moment, Brent called to them from the other end of the corridor and they ran to catch up with him.

He proceeded to assign them their rooms and give them the rest of the basic information they required, such as the times which they could go down to eat and when they could expect their uniform to arrive. He finished by telling them when the first lessons of the year were scheduled to start, then walked off down the corridor and through the door at the end.

"Well now that's over, I'm going to check out my room!" Harper pranced over to his door and tried to open it, but it wouldn't but budge.

"Umm, you need to touch your pendant to the grooves." Kason reminded.

Harper nodded his head and did so. His door swung open.

"Alright!"

He walked inside and the door closed behind him with a light thud.

Kason unlocked the door to his own room and walked inside, within there was a roughly seven by five-meter room with a small bed in the back left-hand corner and a wooden desk pushed flush to the wall in the middle of the right face, a chair floating in front of it. There were several empty shelves around the room and a rectangular window in the middle of the back wall, but apart from those items of furniture, the room was empty. Kason had the strange feeling that he was looking at a blank canvas like one might see on an artist's easel.

Light was being emitted by something, but Kason couldn't figure out what. Feeling tired he dumped his bags down in a corner and went over to lie down on his bed. As soon as he did so, whatever was lighting up the room, turned off and blackness rolled in to fill the absence of light, except for a patch of silver on the floor in the middle of the room which was illuminated by the moonlight streaming through the uncovered window.

Kason lay there and felt exhaustion overcome him. He was about to succumb to its assault when the door banged open and Harper's voice came from within the darkness.

"Woah, it's dark in here!" He looked around and spied Kason's limp form on the bed, "Come on Kason you can't sleep now, let's go get something to eat!"

Kason grunted and rolled off the bed, landing on the floor with a thump. The lights came back on. Harper walked over and heaved Kason up off the floor,

"Man, you can't just fall on the floor like that, come on! Food!" He said looking very serious.

Kason rubbed his eyes sleepily and nodded, following him out of the room.

"It looks like they lock themselves when there's nobody inside," Harper said as Kason turned to touch his pendant to the door. Kason abandoned his endeavour and followed Harper, who started complaining about how the dorm was feeling more and more like a living thing, down the corridor to the door leading back to the nexus.

They emerged from it and were walking across to the door signed dining hall when the sound of laughter at the entrance made them turn and look.

The three other children who they had arrived with had entered with one of the other people from the registry office. They now wore close-fitting white and blue robes, the two girls twirling around showing off to each other, evidently happy with their new clothes, the boy walking behind. The registry officer stopped them in the middle of the room and then, after a moment listening like Brent had, directed them to the door leading to floor seventeen.

"Looks like they'll be out floor-mates." Harper mused as they disappeared through the porthole, "And those robes are probably the uniforms, I wonder why they got theirs now?" Kason shrugged and they walked through the door to the dining hall.

The hall was spacious and very clean. Tables were arranged in rows around the hall and there were one or two people eating at a few of them. Kason and Harper stood awkwardly at the entrance, looking around for where they could get their food.

"Just sit down, there's a menu at each table." A female voice sounded in Kason's mind and he looked around confusedly for the voice. He saw Harper also looking around, seeming equally befuddled.

"Did you hear a woman's voice?" He asked Harper, still looking around.

"A woman's?" Harper stopped his searching and looked at Kason, "No, I heard a man. He said to sit down and something about there being menus at the tables."

Kason shrugged and motioned that he was going to sit down, Harper waited for a second and then followed him. They chose one of the tables and sat down, immediately the surface of the table rippled just like the desk in the registry office, and two pieces of paper emerged, one in front of Kason and the other in front of Harper. Kason picked the one in front of him up and scanned its contents, a minute later looked up at Harper with a confused look on his face.

"What are these things?"

Harper looked up from his examination of the menu, "What're what things?"

"The things on the menu, I've only heard of a few of them."

Harper set down his own menu and looked curiously at Kason, "Well I've not heard of a few of them but most things on here are usual meals," he chuckled, "what have you been eating all your life?"

"Well I lived in a village all my life and we didn't have any fancy things like these..." Kason mumbled feeling slightly embarrassed.

Harper looked at him for a second and then picked up his own menu and began to explain the items on it. "Well most of the items are pretty obvious, I mean it says what they are in the title like Lerran steak is steak made from Lerran meat and looks like it comes with various herbs and vegetables."

He continued to go through them until he came to the last three items on the list, "I don't know what these last three are and they don't provide any explanation so I suppose you've just got to try them out?" He shrugged.

Kason looked at the last three at the bottom of the menu, they were called Ropla Stew, Nagrack stir-fry and Evine salad. Kason had a sudden urge to try something new, "I guess I'll try the Rolpa stew then." he said out loud.

After he said it, the menu in his hand suddenly became heavier, like it was being pulled downwards towards the table. Kason let go of it and it sunk like a stone back through the rippling table, a few seconds later a steaming bowl emerged from where it had disappeared along with a spoon.

Inside the bowl, there was some kind of pale coloured broth in which floated chunks of some blue meat and a variety of vegetables.

"Looks nice." Harper commented with a grin, "But I think I'll go for a tamer option. I'll take the Halgrad finch." He copied Kason and said the name his dish and moments later, his menu disappeared to be replaced by a plate of meat and salad.

They were both very hungry and so were finished very quickly, Harper let out a satisfied sigh, "Now that I've eaten I feel like I could fall asleep easily." He yawned loudly stretching his arms as he did so. Kason also felt full, the Rolpa stew had been surprisingly delicious if a little spicy. He had gone red in the face after a couple of mouthfuls, causing Harper to laugh uproariously, but after that, he had learned to take his time and so had managed to avoid embarrassing himself further.

The sleepiness that had vanished when they entered the dining hall had begun to assault Kason once again so he suggested that they return to their rooms. Harper agreed and so they made their way out of the dining hall and back to the door to floor seventeen.

On the way to their rooms, they made plans to begin to explore the college the next day. They agreed to meet in the common room that Brent had told them about and then went their separate ways, Kason to his room and Harper to his.