"I'm happy to be the first to welcome you all to Eclipse Duel Academy. I'm sure you've all had a long boat-ride, so I'll try to be brief. My name is Professor Burnett, I'm the head of Tachyon dorm. Since this is your first year here, you probably won't be having any classes with me since I teach most of the advanced Xyz courses. Even so, I'm here if you ever want to practice or need help with a class, so try to get a hold of me before your grades start slipping."
The girls had been packed into a wide, bare dining-hall along with a number of other students. The room was warmly lit and looked as if it were made of wood, and it seemed that some effort had been made to make everything seem homey and pleasant. Professor Burnett didn't look much like a professor, looking as if he had just entered his thirties with a scraggly hobo-beard and a black tanktop that had more than a few holes. A few students seemed unnerved by how casually he was dressed, as did Claudia when Lisa described him to her. Of the three, none looked more bored than Elise, who had gotten out her cards in the midst of the Professor's speech and started flipping through them. The Professor had carried on, either not seeing or not caring.
"For those of you who didn't read the pamphlets – and they were pretty boring, don't get me wrong – Eclipse Academy is divided into three dorms depending on your performance in the entrance exams. The ones who barely scraped by ended up in Photon Dorm, solid duelists like all of you are in Tachyon Dorm, and the highest-graded students are in Prime Dorm. At the end of the year, you'll have the opportunity to move up or down a dorm depending on your grades. Higher dorms give you access to more and more-advanced classes, which give you more credits toward graduation at the end of each semester. To sum it all up: the higher up your dorm is, the less time you're going to be stuck on this island. If you're a flake or lazy and start dropping dorms, you'll get less credit in the classes you can take. Drop below Photon standards, you're leaving this island without a diploma.
"Oh, one more thing: you can duel your professors. As long as neither of you have a class and it's not after-hours, you can challenge them to a duel. If you win, you'll get enough extra credit to at least get a passing grade if you show up every day. If you lose… well, that depends on the professor. Lights-out is at ten each night, wake-up calls are at nine in the morning. If you're going to be sneaking outside between those times, don't get caught." His beard lifted as he grinned at the students, some of whom chuckled nervously. Burnett was not so off-putting as the increasingly apparent fact that they were very, very far from home and surrounded by people they barely knew. Few of them had a clue how to handle it and some, like Claudia, were too set in their own ambitions to let the thought so much as cross their minds. "You've got a few hours to mingle before you get your room assignments. Get acquainted, you never know who you might end up rooming with."
Contrary to the Professor's advice, the students all seemed to congeal into clusters of those with whom they were most familiar. Old friends lucky enough to end up in the same dorm, people who'd shared a few words on the boat over, and the odd sibling couple. Claudia, Lisa, and Elise were left standing in the midst of so many tiny, murmuring crowds.
Elise was lost in thought, and had been since they had gotten off the boat. Her new friends were alright people, and Elise found herself surprised at how consistently tolerable they were, but Lisa utterly mystified her. Claudia, in her mind, was easy: a fish out of water, and Elise guessed she'd never even been around so many people. She looked small, somehow, even next to the much-shorter Lisa. It was Lisa herself who mystified her, her style vibrant and strange as it was. Her hair had been parted neatly to sit close on either side of her face, one side dyed red and the other blue. Her eyes, too, seemed to have been fitted with contact lenses to give them the same opposing coplors. Combined with an eye-searingly bright wardrobe and seemingly limitless energy, Elise didn't know what to make of her.
Claudia spoke first, "Lisa, I just realized something."
"Huh?" Lisa sounded like she'd just been woken up. Claudia wondered if she'd been the only one paying attention.
"You said you won your duel in three turns, right?"
"Yepperoo!" Claudia hoped she'd never hear Lisa say 'yepperoo' again.
"But you're only in Tachyon dorm."
"Looks like it!" Lisa's tone hadn't changed.
"...And you're not seeing the problem with that."
Elise, who'd apparently stopped looking at her cards, cut in with an irritated grumble. "She's saying that the kids in Prime dorm must be some kind of geniuses, because if you're stuck in the middle with us, what does it take to get to the top?" She tucked her cards back in her pocket. "I'll bet they're all rich brats who paid their way there. Maybe some of the teachers' kids too, fuckin'-"
"Elise, if that's true, why aren't I in Prime?" Elise's theory might've held some water with Claudia if Kim hadn't been insistent in blowing as much of her prize money on this academy as possible.
"I dunno, maybe your sister doesn't like you that much."
Claudia stayed quiet.
Lisa quickly changed the subject, "Hey! Wouldn't it be cool if we all got the same dorm room?"
"I mean, you guys seem alright," said Elise.
"We could tell ghost stories and have duels and trade cards and..." Lisa's list of activities went on for several minutes while the others took stock of the place. If nothing else, all three could agree that it would be easier to end up together than to gamble on the rest of their dorm being so tolerable.
"Well, look who it is!" The three turned to face the new voice, unfamiliar to all except the now-scowling Elise.
"Oh, great. I thought I smelled something rotten in here," Elise spat. Claudia turned her head up toward Elise, but said nothing. Whoever had gotten Elise so angry sounded unbearably smug, that much Claudia knew. Lisa looked between the two – in sharp contrast to Elise's vicious biker look and neon green Mohawk, the girl now staring her down was clad in a sharp pantsuit and had her hair in a neat bun. Lisa wondered if the two had somehow split apart from a normally-dressed person in some strange form of mitosis.
"Is that how you talk to old friends, Ellie? Oh, I see – you've made friends with the champion's little sister, and now we're not good enough for you?" There was a knowing, smarmy sort of sarcasm in the girl's voice.
"How about you fuck off before I break you over my knee, Rochelle?" Neither of Elise's friends had any trouble telling how Rochelle was getting to her. Claudia instinctively wound her arms around one of Elise's – she'd been beside her older sister in similar situations, and had developed a sort of protective instinct when a fight was brewing. Elise shook her off with enough force to send her stumbling away.
"Hey, now," Professor Burnett called, tilting his head back to be heard and seen over the sea of students. "Settle it in the dueling arena, you two. I don't have to tell you what happens if you get caught fighting on school grounds."
"See you at graduation day, drop-out girl!" Confident sarcasm had given way to false sweetness in Rochelle's voice, and she wiggled her fingers at the fuming Elise before striding away.
Lisa piped up first, "Who was that?" she turned her eyes up toward Elise, who was still glaring at the spot where Rochelle had been.
"Doesn't matter." Elise still sounded more than ready to explode.
Lisa surely would have pressed the issue if Professor Burnett hadn't called for the attention of the class, holding up a clipboard with a list of names.
"Room assignments," Claudia muttered, tapping Lisa and Elise on the shoulder and starting toward Burnett's voice.