The day after her introduction to the Weyr began the hardest work of Kylie's life. In the Pern clubs she'd belonged to, it was played in-context that everyone at the Weyr had a job, and had to do it. Yet when played, it seemed that all anyone did was bathe their dragons by the lake, or sit in the Dining Hall eating meatrolls and drinking klah, or generally just talking. The reality was an eye-opener.

Headwoman Joslin had started her off in the kitchens, doing the dishes. This did not mean dishes for a family of four plus the pet dog. No, these were dishes for over a thousand Weyr denizens. The washing never ended! Luckily she didn't have to go fetch the water - the Kitchens Overseer, Wyncia, had the male candidates doing the heavy work - hauling water, heating it, then pouring it into the basins which she was using to wash. Telgar Weyr did have a primitive but sweet plumbing system. There were pipes which ran from the kitchens out to the herb and vegetable gardens - though these gardens were more like small farms. When she drained the water, it passed through several levels of dirt and rock, irrigating the plants. At first she was alarmed about polluting the food they were eating with the soap which was used, but Haneset explained to her that the levels the water passed through filtered it. On another more intellectual level, Kylie realized that these soaps weren't made out of the potentially dangerous chemicals which were found on Earth.

By the end of her first day, Kylie was exhausted. Her hands were red, raw and shrivelled from being in the hot soapy water all day. The eight-hour workday of Earth was naught but a distant dream - they worked from sunup to sundown, with time for candidate classes worked in. Though there was also a night shift, the day shift did the bulk of the work. Yet they weren't worked mercilessly, either. Wyncia gave them several breaks during the day, plus an hour each for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Everyone - both the candidates and the permanent Weyr workers - took their breaks and meals in shifts so the kitchen was always bustling.

One of the perks of working the kitchen was being fed before the rest of the Weyr. Kylie still ate heartily but she felt she was working off every calorie ingested, and then some. A week. . . no, a sevenday later, this suspicion proved true. Kylie knew she'd lost several pounds by the looseness of the clothing she was wearing. Not much yet, but if this kept up she would be a normal size within the yea . . . erm, Turn. Her acne was clearing up also - possibly due to working over the water, but more likely eating nutritious meals without a lot of fat or additives. Snacking was difficult due to the workload, candy was reserved for special occasions and chocolate was only to be had if one was fabulously wealthy. Even the Weyrleaders found chocolate difficult to get, at least that's what Kylie gathered from the gossip in the kitchens. She, of course, had not been able to partake since there was no way she could afford it, but she did wonder about the origin of the cocoa bean on Pern. From what she remembered of the Dragon Lover's Guide to Pern, the cocoa bean never made it. Yet klah had a chocolatey-cinnamony taste, so maybe chocolate was somehow distilled from the klah tree or plant. Some day she'd find out.

The humans at the Weyr were not the only ones to be worked. Another fandom thing that proved to be true - no pets in the Weyr. If they didn't do any work, then they didn't belong. Outdoors firelizards and cats . . . rather, felines . . . kept the gardens and beast pens free of pests. Canines helped with the herding and keeping the larger pests at bay. Indoors it was the firelizards and felines again which handled pests. Kylie thought they were better than any exterminating company she'd ever heard of. Orkin be damned - since she'd gotten here she had yet to see anything resembling a cockroach or a spider. She still had no idea what a crawler looked like! Small canines and any felines or firelizards were encouraged to haunt the lesser-used tunnels to keep the tunnelsnake population at bay. There were even a few ferret-like creatures which were used to clear out the much smaller nests, but these creatures were few and far between.

Along with her candidate classes, Kylie had a class on training her firelizard for these various duties. The training also included delivering messages - not only to people known to the firelizards' owners, but also to people and places the winged animals had never been to before. There were a few dragons who liked to communicate with the firelizards, so were used as the destination providers. Kylie was the only one in the kitchens who needed to be in this class, since the rest of the candidates had older firelizards which had already been trained.

Kylie had more classes than any of the other candidates. Haneset, Mareena and her clique, and several of the others had either grown up in the Weyr or had been here for several months. Therefore, they didn't need to take these classes over again. Kylie and the other candidates Searched at the same time needed to start from the beginning. No matter how common dragons were on Pern, being a candidate involved many things non-Weyrfolk had no idea about. Yet the difference between reality and fandom was made once again - candidate classes did not last all day long every day. They were twice a sevenday for about two hours. No, candidates were encouraged to find their niche in the Weyr - just in case Impression took a long time to come, or just didn't.

Another thing discovered almost by accident was Kylie's illiteracy. She could not read nor write Pernese. There were letters and numbers which almost looked familiar to her, but not to the point which would allow her to send or receive her own messages. The Harper teaching her was perplexed - she knew the theory, but not her letters. Math was much the same - once Kylie got the hang of what the numbers looked like and could reproduce them, she was able to fly through those classes. One plus about being considered a nerd at her former school - Kylie was extremely good at math.

Between her candidate classes, Harper-taught classes, firelizard training and kitchen duty, Kylie had no time to miss her former life. She did worry about Mareena - other than a few pointed barbs at her, she hadn't done anything terrible. Kylie just knew she was biding her time before the hammer fell. Yet what could she do?