The Transfer (3)

by catsvrsdogscatswin

Arya still doesn't know why she keeps bouncing around from anime to anime, but she won't let that stop her from learning how. Luckily, the DWMA is there with an exceptionally large library to help her find the truth. Unluckily, the materials she needs are only accessible to "Death Scythes and certain high-ranking meisters," both of which she is not. But she can fix that...right?

3. Trial Week: Day 2

You slide by this time, WriterGreenReads, this time... Also, Rex's eventual character arc is gonna be SUPER fun for me to write. Probably less so for all you guys. *rubs hands ominously* Muahahaha… M1LK T3A, I'm glad I was able to cheer you up! Mitsuo the Universe jumper, I think you snuck in there without being answered last time, but if by "arc" you mean "fanfic in a separate world/another installment," then there will be THREE MORE, plus an unattached epilogue because reasons. The "Arya lands in water" thing is actually plot relevant, and will be explained in this fic!

Also, alas, the MN Renaissance Festival also got cancelled this year for safety reasons, which may or may not make me very sad, depending on whether or not I can get pics of our old site before we move. If I can sneak in and snap some pics this year or maybe if we don't move next year, I'll only be like mildly disappointed. If this was curtains and I never get access to our old site again, I may very well dwell on it for ages to come. On the other hand, though, I finished embroidering the skirt of my costume! This site removes links, but there's a complete link on my archiveofourown account (same username, fic, and chapter), and I posted it on my tumblr account (also same username. I'm a simple creature.)

I also deep-cleaned my room to procrastinate, and A) I hope I will never see/inhale that much dust again in my life, it was a centimeter deep in some places and turned my white carpet grey, and B) a lot of room seems to have opened up on my shelves now that I've removed the shiny/interesting rocks and put them in shiny/interesting vases. I also found jewelry and knickknacks from middle school, and a lot of other neat stuff that I forgot I had, and there was much rejoicing.

A note on the actual fic instead of news, the advancement of Soul Eater technology is staggeringly bizarre. Maka makes a quip about Blackstar hanging off of Soul's Weapon form like a phone charm, but Tsugumi talks about sending letters home or making an international call in NOT!, indicating that cell phones are not available. We also literally never see anyone use one: long-distance communication is mirrors only in the field, or landline phones with cords indoors. In the manga also, Kilik comments on the newness and strangeness of a wireless intercom communicator, which is stated to be a product of demon tools and is interfered with by Madness wavelengths. But TV exists. But Soul tells Liz he'll bring records to Kid's party, indicating that that's still something people commonly use, and most of the live music in Soul Eater seems to be jazz and ragtime. But Justin has headphones and some kind of Walkman. But Akane talks to Tsugumi about the " Great War," which is what WWI was called before WWII happened.

Honestly I've given up trying to pinpoint anything to one time period and decided that, as the author, what I say goes and Soul Eater history is skewed just a little bit backwards, but technology advanced faster in some cases because magic/demon tools/Eibon. The year is 1900-1910-ish with roughly 1950s technology and that's that on that.

---

September 14th, 2020

Arya's POV:

I'd had better mornings, and I'd had worse mornings. On the one hand, my perforated elbows and thighs didn't ache anymore, and nothing horrific had happened during the night, like my soul somehow spontaneously erupting with magic and bringing a dozen meisters down on my head under the assumption that I was a Witch doing nefarious shenaniganry, or a Kishin Egg kicking the door down and trying to devour as many future DWMA agents as possible. It was a bright shiny new day, and I had a plan of action and in theory nothing to oppose my advancement.

On the other hand, it was five in the AM with a proposed thousand-foot climb in my near future before breakfast.

I stared blearily into the mirror of the gym-like communal bathroom, moving my toothbrush with zombielike precision and speed as girls around me chattered with varying levels of drowsiness or silently gathered themselves to face the day –and DWMA stairs.

"New girl?"

Pausing mid-cycle of my toothbrush, I slowly turned my head to the girl next to me, who was blinking at me with an ingenuous expression. Fluffy brown hair and wide brown eyes, an incongruous tiny side-ponytail tied with a pink ribbon, I recognized Meme Tatane –pronounced mey-mey, unfortunately– from Soul Eater NOT!, Meme being one of Tsugumi Harudori's two meisters. She was wearing a white shirt and boyshorts rather than her usual loose cream-colored sweater and sea-green skirt.

"Mm?" I grunted around my toothbrush and foam. This may or may not be a good learning opportunity: Soul Eater NOT! focused on the shenanigans of Meme and her two friends as Tsugumi tried to chose between Anya and Meme for her official partner, since while dual-wielding meisters were a thing –albeit rare and skilled– a dual-wielded Weapon was absolutely unheard of. Tsugumi, Anya, and Meme were the first duo-meister-single-Weapon team ever, with no repeats as far as I knew, and I only knew of two dual-wielding meisters in the entire canon of this world, those being Death the Kid, who was a Grim Reaper, and Kilik Rung, who was eventually part of the Spartoi unit, aka the elite of the EAT class, who were the top 10% of the entire school to begin with. Kilik's partners, Fire and Thunder, were also both children, which may have something to do with how Kilik could dual-wield them, kids being more malleable and whatnot.

Come to think of it, all the dual-wielded Weapons I knew about were relatives. Fire and Thunder were near-identical twins (Fire was a boy and Thunder was a girl, but since neither of them had hit puberty yet they still looked fundamentally identical except for their outfits), and Liz and Patty were siblings. Was being a blood relative to the other Weapon a requirement for a meister to dual-wield you, or just a by-product of siblings not wanting to be separated?

Er, anyways, if Meme hadn't yet paired up with Tsugumi and Anya officially, I'd have an easier time of placing my, well, time in the Soul Eater canon. That'd be hard to figure out through conversation, but shortly before the trio got together, Meme's ditzy, amnesiac personality had been erased, due to the fact it was the result of brainwashing from a Witch, Shaula Gorgon.

Therefore, if she had the memory of a goldfish, I was still pre-ending of NOT!.

"Have you seen my ribbon?" Meme asked, and I slowly looked up to the top of her head, where said ribbon was bravely holding a chunk of hair out to the side. I pointed to the relevant spot on my own head, and she looked in the mirror, blinked, and grinned happily.

"Thank you~!"

Goldfish memory it is, I thought complacently, looking back into my own mirror as I continued to scrub my teeth.

Getting dressed required a certain amount of careful planning, the not least of which because this was a largely public bathroom and girls were dropping and donning clothes right in the open. I was personally squeamish enough that I wanted to do so under cover, and thus I had to wait for a stall to open before getting started.

Secondly, however oasis-like Death City was, however anime logic bent the rules of time, space, and meteorology, our school was still in the middle of one of the hottest deserts on earth, and I was expected to do a certain amount of strenuous physical activity today, outside of climbing the steps. I was from Virginia, and I'd spent nearly a year in England. I had no idea how to dress for a desert climate.

Thirdly, I wasn't yet sure if I was in the anime or the manga of the series, and the manga was…how to put this delicately…

Pervy.

Pervy as shit.

It was that whole shounen thing of catering to adolescent boys and thus including pages and pages of fanservice: there was a pantyshot every volume and a truly unnecessary amount of tight shirts, big boobs, and low cleavage. The anime sanitized a lot of that out, thankfully, but there was still a certain amount of disturbingly convenient skirt-flipping and chest-bouncing nonetheless. If Hetalia had taught me anything, it was that goofy anime logic seemed to apply to the "real" anime world as well as inadvertent dimension-hoppers into it (aka, me), and I didn't want to start, end, or include accidentally flashing someone in my school career, even if my bosom wasn't quite big enough to qualify for standard fanservice.

I definitely knew that there was at least a little bit of convergence between this reality and the series I knew in my reality, since for a bunch of girls that were supposedly in the rough range of 13 to 16, there were a lot of chicks with big boobs and scanty underwear, all of whom were far more okay with flaunting said underwear and curves than the girls in the changing rooms I had grown up in.

Grumbling to myself about anime fanservice and its unnecessity, I pulled a white T-shirt over my head and buckled the palest canvas shorts I had around my waist, before tying the arms of a dark hoodie above it. Light colors reflected sunlight and heat, minimal but still loose clothing kept less heat in, and a jacket would keep me from freezing in the possibly well-conditioned classrooms, as well as serve as emergency censorship if a milkshake or something somehow splashed me across the chest.

I didn't trust the anime logic of this place at all. Nope, nu-uh, no sir.

"Awareness, Balance, Clenched Fists, and Don't Fuck Your Sister." I mumbled determinedly, clenching my own fist in remembrance as I recited the ABCs bit from the How to Survive a Harem Anime episode of Public Service Anime.

Awareness! Maintain constant awareness of what's around you. Chances are it's a poorly-balanced hot chick.

Balance! This stops erotic entanglements from occurring when you inevitably stumble and accidentally trip.

Clenched Fists! You can't accidentally strip or grope someone if your hand is open. Although this will result in you punching a lot of tits.

Don't Fuck Your Sister! She's YOUR SISTER! Now, you may discover that your sister is adopted. She may actually be your stepsister or your cousin. In such special circumstances, STILL DON'T HAVE SEX WITH HER YOU DEGENERATE GARBAGE HUMAN BEING!

Luckily for me, I didn't have a sister, and Rex was probably the closest thing to "relative" I had in the world right now, and that was with us only being partners.

Hmm. In retrospect, I wondered if there actually was someone else with similar genes to mine in this world, or even an alternate self. That was an aspect of all this dimensional hopping that I hadn't considered, and thinking over it now, something I wasn't all that eager to pursue.

Whoever she might be, I wish her well, and also to stay the hell away from me.

Clicking the latch open again, I stepped out of the stall with my pajamas over my shoulder, looking at the watch on my wrist to make sure I was still good for time. The bus wasn't due for another ten minutes, which should give me more than enough time to stash my clothes in my dorm room and get back outside to the front gate, not to mention collect any papers I needed for the day, not that I had or needed any today. This was the time I needed to get up at in order to snag a quick morning snack, attend to morning hygiene, and get my things together to face the day. The last two were most important, given how crowded the communal bathroom was right now and how downright bitchy a few of the girls were being about snagging specific salon stations, towels, or personal products. I could kinda get the last one, what with them being purchased on our personal dime, after all…

Trying not to be rude and crowd anyone, I swung my foot a little too far forward without looking, nudging through the crowd. My foot landed on a bar of soap, my momentum made me slip forward, and I crashed into another chick and brought us both down to the group in an unidentifiable tangle of limbs and yelps.

Hooo, boy, that's a tone-setter. I thought glumly into the nameless girl's cleavage, before she shrieked in embarassment and kicked me off.

At least the nonexistent buttons of my shirt hadn't bust open to reveal my bra, or my nonexistent skirt hadn't flipped up to reveal my underwear. Apparently, living life in a slightly pervy anime was going to continue to take a lot of planning and forethought.

***Time Skip***

"I have a croissant if you're hungry." Rex said from beside me as the Deathbus 42 whummed patiently up the tilting, near-vertical hill of Death City. I looked over, blinking in surprise, to see that he did indeed have a croissant, and one that was still warm, even.

"Uh, thanks." I said as I took it. His slightly antsy expression brightened considerably, and I decided to nip this problem right in the bud before it could truly get started. If the worlds I went to did indeed conform to anime logic –and they did– I needed to pay careful attention to the kind of genre the anime belonged to, and thus what kind of tropes I could expect and needed to avoid.

Soul Eater was, as previously stated, a shounen anime, which meant it was geared towards teenage-ish boys. This meant awesome fights scenes, implausible acrobatics during said fight scenes, unnecessary skirt-flipping fanservice (yich), and a group of protagonists banding together and fighting for friendship and love and so on and gaining strength from said bonds. Soul Eater conformed to all of these, which I knew intimately, since the most powerful form of attack DWMA students could master was literally using the bond between themselves to fight someone else.

But of course, it also had the magic-anime-school tropes, which included but were not limited to: harem shenanigans, school shenanigans, rampant misunderstanding both comedic and dramatic, and at least one tournament arc.

I was more worried about the misunderstandings thing, and so it was that I somewhat recklessly plunged into the mires of drama while nomming on my croissant.

"So like," I began. "You don't have to pamper me like this, dude."

This was firm ground for me: none of the Weapons in the series had been nearly so bend-over-backwards in their efforts to please their meisters, though, granted, the beginnings of all said partnerships were not shown. In fact, Tsugumi, Meme, and Anya were the only partnership that was shown in development: everyone else was already established, with only the actual moment of partnership decision being shown, and even then, only for the main characters.

"I'm not gonna snap and like throw you off the bus or something if you don't anticipate my every need." I continued through mouthfuls of croissant. "We're partners, which means we're equals, and to be brutally frank its honestly kinda uncomfortable to have my equal partner acting like some kind of slavish pushover."

"Sorry." Rex mumbled, tugging on his stud earring again.

"Don't be sorry. Be confident. Have a spine. Tell me I'm wrong, if I'm wrong. Disagree with me." I told him. "I actively encourage it."

"I don't know…" Rex said, continuing to tug on his earring.

My eyes rolled towards the heavens. "What's your favorite color?" I asked patiently after a moment, looking away from the window.

"Eh?" He turned his head a little to blink at me. "Um, red."

"And mine's green." I said blandly. "Our disagreement is established."

"Wait, I-"

"Nope!" I held my hand over his mouth as Rex looked worried. "You can't change it. Seriously, dude, you're your own person. Have your own opinions. You're only an extension of me when we fight a bad guy, and at all other times, I fully expect you to have your own mind, thoughts, and wants, which should conflict with my own as needed, and also not change to accommodate me. You got it?"

His eyebrows furrowed, and he looked concerned over my hand. I decided to play dirty just a smidge, even though I wasn't entirely lying about this next bit.

"You keep trying to bend over backwards and become my yes man like this, I might have to find a different partner."

Sudden, surprisingly intense panic flashed across his face, and Rex nodded rapidly, this time apparently not caring that he might dislodge my hand.

"Excellent." I took my hand away and finished off the last of the warm, flaky croissant with a happy nom. "So, what've we got on the agenda for today?"

"Physical and placement tests." Rex said, eyeing me out of the corner of his eye and relaxing a little when I showed no signs of dropping him as a partner. That was drama that I was probably going to have to address someday, but that could be a problem for future me. I had a school to settle into. "We run the physical test in the morning before it gets too hot, and then you take the placement test before lunch. After there's an entrance ceremony for everyone who gets in."

I blinked. "How many do?"

"Most." Rex said complacently, fishing around in his jacket for another croissant. I couldn't imagine wearing multiple layers with black on top in a desert climate of all places, but then again, Maka ran around in a blouse underneath a sweater-vest underneath an ankle-length black trenchcoat that she frequently wore buttoned across her entire torso, leaving only her red plaid skirt and a slice of the yellow sweater-vest peeking out.

Maybe the kids that were raised here were just immune to heatstroke, the lucky bastards.

"The requirements and expectations for the tests are public, so anyone who wants to join the DWMA generally knows what they are beforehand and can train if they need to." Rex went on to explain. "Generally the people that fail didn't think it through all the way, or they showed up without knowing about the tests."

I raised an eyebrow. "That happen often?"

"Sometimes kids run away from home to try and become heroes." Rex said, hunching over his croissant with a sad and sheepish look. "They're young enough that they don't know that much about the entrance exams, if they know about them at all."

I winced with him. Ouch. It was bad enough to risk familial wrath to run away from home, but it would be infinitely worse to have your dreams smashed by cruel reality and then, presumably, packed off right back home.

Well, hopefully I'd do well enough on most portions of the test that my inevitable fudging on the history and other such aspects would be overlooked. I had the physical training part, at least, in the bag.

Since I was fairly sure my timing in the series right now was solidly in the middle of NOT!, that meant I had a little wiggle room to plan and think before Asura was released from beneath the school and everything went to hell in a handbasket. Then again, thinking it over…not much had specifically gone to hell. Sure, Stein said that there was the risk of countless evils awakening, being as the Kishin's Wavelength strengthened the wicked all across the world, but the only perceptible effect in the anime had been Arachne's revival, which may have happened regardless given as she'd been putting herself back together for 800 years and had also been spying through her spiders already anyways, and in the manga, well…

Okay, the Clowns had been a thing, and there was no telling how many people, aside from Justin, that they had seduced into Madness, not to mention how many they killed in their no doubt nefarious but undocumented and unmentioned rampages across the world. And because Justin had gone darkside, Joe Buttataki had died, but beyond that…

Fuck. Had that really been all the damage Asura ambiently caused by merely being resurrected?! From the way the characters panicked about it and all the threats they talked about it posing, you really got the feeling his Madness spreading across the world should've been more…problematic. Damaging. Catastrophic.

Instead you got a few new villains popping up and one filthy fucking traitor. Underwhelming.

Plans on what exactly I was gonna do about the anniversary night and the accompanying Kishin unleashment continued to keep me occupied throughout the gasping fatigue of climbing up the stairs and the pause in the changing rooms before our test, since ethically I didn't like keeping quiet, but realistically I knew I couldn't say anything. How could I? Why would Lord Death believe me? And even if he did, what then? Medusa's faction (with the notable exception of Free) would probably all be executed, which wasn't that much of a shame, but on the other hand, would that include Crona, who was mostly the victim in this? Would I be responsible for his death? Would he never get a chance at redemption?

On the flipside, people would die if I didn't try to avert the Kishin's revival. Thinking of whether or not I would actually succeed in warning Lord Death was moot –certain death one way, chance of survival another. It didn't matter how much of a chance it was, there was still a chance, whereas I would be condemning numerous people –which people changed depending on whether or not this was the anime or the manga– with absolute certainty if I decided to stay silent. Not saying anything was the coward's way out, and yet, like all isekai and time-traveling protagonists, I was leery of losing my meta knowledge by prompting the timeline to change.

So it was a decidedly more gloomy me that tromped out with the other prospective Weapons and meisters…well, actually just the meisters for now, since Weapons were accepted into the school regardless of skill and the test was, for them, a way to measure their athletic prowess rather than assess their skill levels.

Mira Naigus was the school staff member waiting for us at the edge of the track field at the rear of the school, instead of Sid, her partner. Said field was hemmed in by the black walls that served as the school's foundation, and was absolutely huge, encompassing not only a monstrously large track field but also several other pieces of equipment, including a field for shotputting, one of those hurdle-bar-thingies and pad for the high jump, and other such athletic equipment I didn't have the gym membership to accurately identify.

I was more focused on Naigus, who was waiting for us dressed in a pale tracksuit that stood out well against her dark skin, her dreadlocks tied back into a springy bun and prim glasses perched upon her nose. A stopwatch and a whistle were hung around her neck, and she held a clipboard and pen. She looked very professional, which really was to be expected, but I was caught up a little by the lack of mummylike wrappings covering her body.

Seeing her lack of mummy-wrapped bandages, I realized something else –Sid's death. Or rather, his lack of death, which was a prime indicator of where I was in the plotline, as good or better than Meme's ditzy memory. If I was remembering things correctly, Sid's death and zombie-revival was the first story arc of the main series, right after the introductory/prologue that dealt with Maka, Blackstar, and Kid in that respective order as they went on missions that served to exemplify how things were done in the show, and how they specifically did things.

Hence, Sid wasn't dead, because his partner hadn't started (involuntary or intentionally? The series had never covered it) mimicking his undead theme. Naigus looked nice and normal, and I had seen for myself yesterday that Sid was still alive. Ergo, this was definitely at least some time before the start of the main series.

My mood lifted a little at the good news, and so I stood placidly with the rest of the NOT group as she began outlying the rules.

"There's three parts of the test that future meisters have to pass before they can become DWMA students." she said in her warm, calm voice. "We'll start off with the push-ups. We expect you to be able to complete 13 standard push-ups within the two minutes given. If you can't, I'm sorry, but you will not be able to attend the academy at this time. However, there's nothing that says you can't try again next semester. Now, will the meisters take their places?"

"Do you mind if I cheer for you?" Rex asked tentatively, and I winced so hard it became a cringe.

"Uh, is anyone else going to be cheering?"

His eyes flicked over the milling crowd of meisters and Weapons, undoubtably looking for anyone he knew. "Um…no?"

"Then let's not make this awkward." I said, patting his shoulder heavily. "It's the thought that counts, and I know you'll be thinking of my success."

More importantly, there wasn't any reason to be worried about this, I thought complacently as I went over to take my place with the other meisters on the flat green grass. Sure, maybe a year or so ago I'd be quaking in my sneakers at the idea of even one push-up, but after Germany put me through thinly-disguised hell in an attempt to train me alongside my friends, I'd continued onwards with those kinds of exercises, and I put in twice this many push-ups every morning. Sure, they weren't timed, but the very fact I could complete that many lent me confidence on my success in being timed. Thirteen push-ups within two minutes wasn't easy, but it was also, in theory, something any civilian could be capable of with enough practice. They gave us a nice, achievable test to make sure we were all athletic enough to at least have a chance at defending ourselves/escaping, should the worst ever come.

The sit-ups and the run were in the same vein. They pushed the boundary of what ordinary school-age children could reasonably do without setting us an impossible goal. We needed to be good, not the best. That was reserved for the EAT class, and I wondered, as Naigus blew the whistle and we began, if there was a similar, more strenuous test to get into that juicy top 10%, or at least make sure you could survive once in.

Oh, well. That was a goal for after I'd gotten firmly established here and Rex and I actually had a working partnership. We were still in the awkwardly-dancing-around stage of getting to know one another, though with time and luck that should change.

As expected, since Naigus was watching us with a stopwatch, there wasn't anyone who tried to do a rapid set of micro-push-ups, and while I didn't take my time with it, I also didn't let confidence undo me. No, I kept my eyes focused on the bright, surprisingly lush green grass as I pushed myself up and down, biting my lip as I tried to measure out each push-up as exactly as I could. Since two minutes took 120 seconds, I could do three within the first twenty and then have a whole ten seconds for each new push-up, which was more than enough time if I did it smoothly and carefully and made sure to count in my head to make sure I didn't miss anything. I did not want to have to endure the embarrassment of failing the physical test and getting kicked out of the school before I had truly begun.

In isakei terms that was like failing before you met your exposition character.

Then again, Rex already kinda completed that role for me…

Eh, anyways. As expected, none of the prospective meisters dropped out, and Naigus congratulated us, giving everyone a moment to unwind our muscles and drink some water if needed as she beckoned the Weapons over to do their own test. Rex, unlike several of the other Weapons, seemed to have his DWMA track uniform already, which consisted of a black shorts and a white T-shirt with light blue sleeves and a tiny black Lord Death mask on the left side, under which was written "NOT."

Made sense, I guessed. Rex had been in NOT for a while, whereas most of the others were newcomers. Probably the only reason he was still here was because he hadn't found a partner…

I made a face over my water bottle. As mentioned, Rex's glaring lack of a partner after years at the academy was drama that was going to need to be addressed, sooner or later, but I wasn't looking forward to it. Rex's pliable desperation to keep me on as his current partner, plus the concerned looks Sid gave him, plus Misery's twitch at the mention of his name, all painted a fairly damning picture. I wasn't going to assume, because assumptions in this kind of scenario were a bad idea even without factoring in anime tropes, but the most logical pattern of events that garnered all these reactions was Rex maybe choosing a bad, or even abusive former partner, and the teachers were worried about him choosing another, and he was still perhaps adjusting out of the attitudes trained into him by his ex-meister.

Yeah. Not a discussion I wanted to have now, when our bond was pretty much nonexistent for being so new. Later maybe, when there was more mutual trust and respect between us.

Ugh.

Anyways, as I kept an eye on my new partner, Rex was doing well with the push-ups. For all the fact he looked like a twig underneath that suit, Rex was apparently still fit. That was good, but part of me wondered why he hadn't tried to be an independent Weapon like Justin Law, the current Death Scythe for…some part of Europe. (East or West, I couldn't remember.) In any case, Justin Law had never had a partner, and in theory there was nothing stopping any other Weapon from following in his footsteps.

Then again…the DWMA obviously didn't throw our lives away recklessly, so there was a decent chance there was some sort of aptitude test before you were allowed to go hunt evil as an EAT student. Rex was having no problem with these push-ups, but athleticism or not he still was a skinny twig of a person, and therefore lacking in both endurance and strength by simple physics. Both of these things were key to fighting independently, so it was possible Rex had applied to be an EAT student on his own and failed the test.

I winced again. Ouch. Maybe I should start pampering him.

After all, Justin was the only independent Weapon ever shown in the series aside from Giriko, who was not DWMA-trained. There were definitely some kind of safeguards or gatekeeping around that position, maybe social pressure or skill, or possibly simple chance and design. Weapons were meant to be wielded. That was how Arachne had made them, way back in the day 800 years ago. Perhaps partially transforming parts of their body instead of a full transformation was inherently difficult, or perhaps it was simply a skill that wasn't taught, as all Weapons were expected to find a meister. Perhaps there was a social stigma around being so misanthropic as to be unable to find your own meister. Perhaps most Weapons didn't want to be independent, since that meant not having a partner to Resonate with and therefore having no backup.

This was the sucky part of being a meta traveler. I didn't actually know, and asking would reveal my ignorance of possibly common knowledge. I only knew the results: Justin Law and Giriko were the only two Weapons that never used a meister in the entire series canon, and even then, Giriko allowed himself to be wielded by a golem of his own creation, once.

Thankfully, the entire rest of the physical test proceeded without incident: no one lagged behind and failed, and the sun's heat never got unbearable as it rose higher and higher in the sky and its slightly distracting laughter grew ever louder, a hum in the background like evening cicadas. Except, you know, the sun was actually making noise, and whenever I looked up during our run I could see it grinning and laughing in the heavens, toothy face agape.

That was going to take some getting used to.

"Congratulations." Naigus said with a pleased smile as the entire new NOT class stood before her after the marathon, panting and dripping with sweat. "You all pass."

She paused for a moment as some of the new students cheered, however weakly.

"You've got twenty minutes to head back inside and clean up. My partner, Sid, will be waiting outside the locker rooms to take you to the exam hall. I'll tell you right here and now," Her librarian's flashes flashed ominously as she pushed them up her nose with one finger. "Cheating will not be tolerated. Attempting to copy off another student's paper or use prior notes during the assessment exam will result in immediate expulsion. Am I clear?"

"Yes ma'am!" the class chorused, some of us gulping nervously. I wasn't too bothered, as I knew precisely dick about shit when it came to the history of this world beyond the fragments covered in the anime and manga, and was therefore guaranteed to bomb the test no matter what I did. Cheating wouldn't help me now.

Well, unless there was a section on the DWMA's history specifically…

***Time Skip***

Showering was a rather careful exercise, given my lack of trust in the physics of this world, but I rolled out fresh and clean with everyone else, and we all followed Sid to one of the large lecture halls that dotted the academy, a circular space with tiers of conjoined wooden desks rising towards the back, a black-and-white checkered floor, and a large two-step dais on the lecture floor, with a blackboard on the wall behind it and a teacher's desk circling the curved front of the dais. There was, of course, a gigantic Lord Death skull on the wall above the blackboard, at least twelve feet long and with the three black holes of eyes and nose tilted slightly upwards, given the curved surface of the round head. Circular windows lined the back wall behind the highest tier of desks, looking out into the bright daylight, and there was a pile of papers on the teacher's desk, alongside a cup of pencils.

"Please take your seats, with a seat between you and every other student." Sid said, waving us in, and I looked with interest at the lit candles at the end of every aisle as I moved up the red-carpeted stairs with the others, taking a guilty page out of anime tropes and sitting at the very end of an aisle. Interestingly enough, the curved bank of seats behind the desks were also conjoined, forming a long bench of padded red cushions. This took a moment of mental adjustment for some people, as the entire row was one whole "seat" and thus we couldn't separate ourselves out, before we all unanimously figured that one seat meant one cushion, and settled ourselves out accordingly.

Sid went to the central dais and stepped up behind the desk, picking up the papers and shuffling them into a neater stack before he addressed us, the presumably-test in hand.

"This is the placement test for all incoming DWMA students. Its goal is to assess your current level of schooling and where you should be placed in our curriculum, which is why it's so vital that none of you cheat. I follow the rules –that's the kind of man I am– but I can tell you right now that if I catch you cheating, you'll be out on your ear. It just isn't worth it."

He narrowed his eyes at us a little.

"Failing this test does not mean expulsion. In fact, we expect many of you to be unable to solve all the problems, as this test includes questions at age levels beyond your own. Everyone in here speaks English, but if you're having a problem with the test, come to me and I'll give you something in your easiest language. The test is comprehensive, covering all the subjects your last school should've been teaching you. There will be no time limit, but be aware that your lunch period starts at 11.10, and after that is the entrance ceremony. Again, don't try and force yourself to answer questions you don't understand: we value accuracy more than amount in this test. I'll be handing out the test now, so do your best, and when you're finished, come put your paper down on my desk here."

Suiting word to deed, Sid stepped over and began handing over individual packets to the first tier, who all grabbed one and passed the rest of the stack back. I took mine, then grabbed a pencil from the rubber-banded bundle being passed around a few moments later, opening my packet with some trepidation.

Reading

Writing

Math

Social Studies

History

Science

Art

Soft/Hard Skills

Curious about the last one, I paged to the back chunk of my packet and saw the questions with some relief.

1. Are you a meister or a Weapon?

2. If meister, which type (Utility, Genius, Assassination, Scythe, Knife, etc.)?

3. If Weapon, which type (What weapon do you transform into)?

4. Have you had any prior training as a meister/Weapon?

5. Have you had a job prior to attending the DWMA?

6. How would your friends and family describe you?

7. What is your strongest trait?

8. Are you multilingual? List all languages that apply.

9. What is your highest level of education? Specify country, i.e. "England, Year 9," "France, 3rd Grade," etc.

10. What is your motivation for attending the academy?

11. What are the greatest assets you bring to a project?

12. Have you been in a combat situation prior to entering or applying for the DWMA?

13. Do you have any mental/psychological conditions?

14. What would you describe as your strongest subject or subjects in school?

Though the questions seemed to be dispersed at random, likely to ease students into things, this was still stuff I could answer. I flipped back a little, to the art section, and saw it was mostly stuff on the Elements and Principles of Art, with a number of supplementary questions about technique and art philosophy, ranging from painting to sculpture to music.

Huh. Comprehensive indeed: some schools didn't even have "art" as a subject, never mind one they bothered to measure. I began to think I might like it here at the DWMA.

The familiar scritch-scratch of graphite pencils filled the large, echoing room, and I was caught in the familiar tense and yet oddly reminiscent atmosphere of test-taking. There was something nice about being in a school again: I thought it was something to do with the fact that I was here voluntarily and I'd been absentee for so long that the very sensation of being in an actual proper modern school was novel to me. It was like being a kid again, minus the fun finger-painting and snacktime.

…I think.

Glancing down the rows to see Rex as I steadily filled out my packet, I was less surprised than I was resigned to see that he was done when I was less than halfway through, wearing a slightly old-timey pair of headphones and idly tapping his fingers on the desk, face directed towards Sid's position at the front of the room. After all, Rex had been in the NOT class for quite a while, which meant he had probably taken this test any number of times. Actually, why was he even still taking it? Surely the DWMA staff knew his education level by now, having been directly responsible for it for like the past three years.

Oh well.

As I'd expected, the technical parts of the packet were hitting me hard. Reading exams really tested how good you were at critical reading –the actual material was irrelevant– so I was fairly confident with that section, but the math and science sections were a bit harder, since I –as mentioned– was only on my second year of high school when this whole mess occurred, and it'd been a year since I studied these things in the classroom, since the college I'd infiltrated was far more focused on grooming its nobility for other, more dated things. Writing was once again a bit of a doddle, since the way you structured the information and what you knew of language was more important than the prompts they gave you, and the art section was a bit harder once I got past the technical questions and into the philosophy and some of the techniques, since I wasn't musical and didn't play any instruments.

History and social studies, of course, were brutal.

I didn't know the history of this world beyond very broad strokes: Lord Death and the other Great Old Ones existed at some fucking point, had beef with the Witches, and various events happened to split them up, with the Great Old One of Knowledge, the Sorcerer Eibon, either isolating himself in the magnetic field on Lost Island or locking himself inside his most powerful magic tool, BREW (depending on whether it was the anime or the manga), and the Black Mass, the Great Old One of Power, confining itself to the Book of Eibon, and Excalibur, the Great Old One of Wrath, retired to a cave in Great Britain.

And what happened with Asura, the Great Old One of Fear, hardly needed explaining, save that he ate Vajra, his Weapon partner, and then began to eat innocent human souls, went mad with power, and was eventually skinned alive and stuffed inside a bag made of said skin underneath the DWMA.

Most of this had happened at a nebulous time around 800 years before the start of the series –it'd been a while since I consumed either the anime or the manga, so my timeline was fuzzy– and at the same time Weapons were first given shape by Eibon, Eibon being inspired by Excalibur, the first Weapon. Eibon being a mostly-decent scientist despite his particular brand of Madness, however, he stopped the project to create Weapons when he learned that they required Witch's souls, seeing it as inhumane.

Then came the Witch, Arachne Gorgon, older sister to Medusa Gorgon, who spied on Eibon (or worked with him, in the anime) and created Weapons off of Eibon's blueprints, murdering her own fellow Witches and using their souls to bind humans with inanimate objects. This branded her a heretic even by Witch standards, and so she was hunted both by them and by Lord Death, and dissolved her body into spiders that she spread throughout the globe while her organization, Arachnophobia, went to ground, and hid her soul in a golem that one of her followers, the enchanter Giriko, had made –the first golem ever made, incidentally.

Then came aforementioned ripping off of Asura's skin and sealing him inside a bag made of it, and Lord Death rooted his own soul as an anchor to prevent the Kishin from ever escaping, which was why Lord Death could no longer travel outside the confines of Death City and also why Asura hadn't just ripped through his own skin or something in the ensuing centuries between then and now.

All this was very fine, of course, but the problem was that even Kid, Lord Death's own son, had been surprised at the news that the original Kishin was imprisoned beneath the school, and in the series, to my memory, most people hadn't even referred to Asura by name before he was resurrected, just calling him "the Kishin," even continuing to refer to Asura like this as the series went on. In the manga, when the Great Old Ones were actually introduced, Kid again expressed initial dislike and eventual shock at learning of their mere existence, never mind the fact that they were on level with his father and had once worked together, arguing further that the mere existence of the Great Old Ones were a well-kept secret.

Hence, I was going to have a lot of explaining to do if I wrote anything about them down on the test, probably.

Also the test questions never addressed any of those things, asking very specific and technical questions of when things happened, things I didn't know about, and blending the history I knew about from my world in weird and confusing ways, which sort've made sense, given the existence of magic and gods and other such things here.

For one thing, my Nazi question was answered, as there were no references to anything like WW2, with only something called "the Great War," which to my memory was the dated name for WW1 –and I was talking dated as in "this is what they called it back when it was ongoing or just finished" dated. Confusing me even more, the way the questions and multiple-choice answers were phrased seemed to indicate that some of the fallout and consequences of said Great War seemed to mimic the aftermath of the second world war, in how countries were partitioned and given independence in a slightly more logical and deserved fashion, and how things like the EU and NATO and other such things were formed.

Further deepening the morass of my confusion, the actual current date was never named in Soul Eater, and the marker of wheneverthefuck the events of 800 years ago was exactly that: a statement that such-and-such happened "800 years ago." No dates, not even a specific year. I knew Excalibur had been around since at least the 12th century, since he stated that was when his legend had begun with King Arthur, and since he and the other Great Old Ones were pretty much of an age, I could at least assume they were all that old.

Except, I knew from long rants by my teacher Britain that the Arthurian mythos had actually begun with a very scanty written record in 900 AD, which said that in 516 AD Arthur won the Battle of Badon and in 537 AD Arthur and Mordred fell in the strife of Camlann, and all of Arthurian canon afterwards had been added on by medieval fanfic writers. If we were going by the gospel and assumed Excalibur was talking about his legend beginning when it was written down, which was indeed in the 1100s by Geoffrey of Monmouth and his Historia regem Britanniae, that meant that Excalibur and the other Great Old Ones were at least as old as the 500s, Common Era.

But since Lord Death had rooted his soul here 800 years ago, conclusively, and Arachne had "died" and Asura had gone bonkers slightly before, that meant the current year could be anything from the 1300s to the 1900s.

I could look at the current level of technology and tell that with a glance, obviously, but that was sort of a problem when the room we were in now was largely lit by candles and sunlight, but Rex had a fucking Walkman in right now. I remembered TV sets being a thing, but I also remembered Stein typing on an absolute boxy dinosaur of a computer and seemingly okay and normal with it. The range of technology seemed wildly disparate, and glancing around the room probably made it look like I was trying to cheat, so I stopped quickly.

In any case, not even knowing the current year meant that I was probably failing the history section miserably.

So it was with some amount of miserable trepidation that I finished and scooted along the row to hand in my paper, catching Rex's eye as I walked down to hand it in. Sid didn't seem displeased to see me, which was good, and hopefully indicative that I wasn't going to get the teacher equivalent of a shovel talk as Rex shuffled out of his own seat and started down to join us.

"Since you're both finished and Rex already knows the way to the cafeteria, you can head to lunch." Sid said in that quiet teacher undertone that was designed not to disturb the rest of the test-taking class. "Good job on your tests, the both of you. Once you've finished with lunch, wait in the cafeteria for us to come collect you."

"Okay."

"Yes, sir."

We both made our way quietly out of the room, and relaxed a little immediately once the door shut behind us, no longer having to pander to other people's concentration.

"So, whatcha listening to?" I asked, seeing Rex's headphones around his neck with the wire trailing down into the pocket of his suit jacket.

"Oh, um, Rigoletto." he said, still smiling a little nervously.

I blinked.

"It's an opera."

"Ohhhh…" I hummed, nodding wisely. "Okay then. You like opera?"

"Some." Rex said, rubbing his thumb over the rounded earpiece of his headphones. "They're good for ambient noise, like if you're doing something but want music but don't want to pay attention to the words. I, uh, don't speak Italian or German or French, so I mostly rely on memory to understand the lyrics."

"Which one's Rigoletto?" I asked curiously as we turned a corner, keeping a sharp lookout on how all these corridors fit together. The DWMA was infamously confusing in its layout, and I didn't want to have to rely on a guide for too long.

"Italian. It's the story of a hunchbacked court jester named Rigoletto, who works for a womanizing Duke and has a beautiful daughter that he keeps hidden away. When Rigoletto mocks a Count, Monterone, for being unable to avenge his own daughter's honor when she's seduced by the Duke, Monterone curse both Rigoletto and the Duke, which eventually ends up with the Duke seducing Rigoletto's daughter Gilda, and Gilda being killed by an assassin Rigoletto hires to kill the Duke."

"Sounds messy." I said with a wince.

"Operas usually are." Rex said with a wise, experienced nod. "Rigoletto's pretty typical, though the Duke's aria, La donna è mobile, is pretty famous for being a good showcase for tenors."

"Woman is fickle?" I repeated with a cocked eyebrow. "Ain't this guy the rampant womanizer?"

"You speak Italian?" Rex said as he blinked at me, his stride hitching a little.

"I mostly swear Italian, but the guy that taught me did include some actual language lessons, sometimes." I said with a reminiscent grin. "The name doesn't sound familiar though. Hum me the melody or something?"

Rex hummed, and sure enough, it did sound hauntingly familiar. How about that. It was one of those songs you knew but couldn't put a name to, something that got stuck as background music in a dozen different movies you couldn't properly remember, even when the tune still carried over.

Thoughts of music and navigating labyrinthine hallways came to a screeching halt as we turned a corner into the wide, echoing expanse of the cafeteria, filled with yet more NOT students –recognizable by their number and lack of age– chattering and chewing and filling the large hall with noise. It was ringed by over a dozen restaurant-like bars set in alcoves, with a shining silver shelf along the wall extending across the entire chain of food service stations, serving as a place to drag and slide your tray.

The Lord Death skull was emblazoned over the bulk of the wall above each station, of course, but I was amply distracted by the steam rising from various metal sinks and dishes laid underneath heating hoods, and the tempting promise of a certain cooler near the far end where all the cakes and confections were.

"-ya? Arya?"

"Huh? What?" I blinked, shaking my head a little and looking at Rex. He waved a finger by his chin, looking at me blankly.

"Um, you're drooling."

Holy shit, really?!

I quickly wiped my arm across my face, discovering to my horror that he was right, and a stream of anime drool had been leaking from my open mouth. My eyes had probably been twinkling, too, as I stared at the food.

"Uh, sorry." I said, flushing. "Haven't seen cooked foods like this in…a while."

Rex stared at me in silence for a moment, his grey eyes warming with sympathy. I could tell he was thinking of me poor, huddled, and alone, starving next to a suitably tiny fire with my hands and tattered shoes extended towards it, perhaps a lone cup of microwave soup with no spoon at my side. A homeless teenager fending for herself in the big cruel world, with no family to share loving company and cooked food with.

My reality was quite different: I just hadn't had access to modern technology for the past seven months, and no modern technology meant very plain, non-artificially-enhanced food by modern standards, no matter how hearty, large, or healthy my meals might've been. I'd been in transports of joy over iced tea yesterday: the promise of the wonderland of American junk food and fast food nearly had me drooling again anyways, despite how embarrassing it might be.

"So do we pay at like the beginning of the line or the end?" I asked hastily, trying to divert from my embarrassing slip into anime physics. "Or is it free?"

"We pay at the end." Rex said with confidence. "Its pretty cheap though, since we're supposed to have a little money left over every week if we budget correctly."

"Cool!" I said happily, grabbing a tray with him and starting down the line. As expected from an international school –and what I vaguely remembered from NOT!– the DWMA cafeteria had a wide variety of multicultural dishes available, so that its international students could have a taste of home no matter where their home had been. I couldn't even recognize some of what the workers were serving, Euro-centric traveler that I had been in my past year and homebody American for the rest of my life.

Even so, it was a struggle not to heap my tray with more food than I could actually eat at one sitting, remembering all the deliciousness I had been denied these past few months, and I eventually settled on some self-indulgent pizza slice, breadsticks, fries, and a fizzing soda, which while less greasy than what I remembered, was still heart-stoppingly clogging –in a literal sense– compared to what I'd been eating for months. I regarded my tray with glee as Rex and I sat down near one of the far walls after forking over a measly three dollars, trying hard to resist the urge to drool.

"N-not to tell you how to eat or anything, but is that what you're going to take every day?" Rex asked nervously, being occupied with such disgustingly healthy things as salad and steak. "I mean, we are trying to be a combative pair in the EAT class eventually, and those carbs aren't exactly…"

"Don't worry." I panted, definitely drooling again as my eyes shone like delighted fog-lamps down at the innocent food. "This is a one-time thing."

Rex made a reassured noise, but didn't attempt to engage in further conversation, which was good, as I fell upon my meal with all the finesse of a starving wolf. I suspected as I tore into it that whoever cooked in the DWMA kitchens had skimped on the grease and fat frying for this meal, which made sense, since like Rex said, this was a combative school, and it was better to remove or cut the temptation altogether from the impressionable minds of the young students. And that was fine, because after seven months without such things, my taste buds would probably be overwhelmed into sheer revolt if I put the real, properly greasy American fast food on my plate.

And I was paying attention to my food intake, less in a worrying-about-weight way and more in a what-will-this-do-to-my-muscle-mass-and-endurance way. Survival of the fittest began with the intake of proper fuel, after all, to build torn muscles up stronger and give energy for potential life-threatening situations.

And a life-threatening situation was going to happen. Eventually. I'd given up denying my bad luck/trouble magnetism ages ago, and instead decide to prepare for it as proactively as possible. Hence, this glorious grease-fest being indeed a one-time thing, or at least a rare treat. There were other, healthier foods I could use to give my poor neglected taste buds nirvana.

Once the rabid scarfing down of food had slowed to a more normal, savoring pace, I became aware of something untoward. My gaze occasionally lifting as I ate and drank, I could see heads turning in sly little shifts nearby, catch furtive-sounding whispers amongst the larger din of the crowd. People were talking about us.

I raised one eyebrow as I sucked on the soda straw, pausing a moment to shiver at the familiar glorious taste. In a cafeteria that had seen the hijinks of people like Blackstar, who ate like a school of ravenous Hollywood piranha fish, probably complete with errant liquids, me eagerly digging into my meal like this shouldn't be that weird.

My eyes flicked sideways, just a little, to see my partner. His back was to the room, and a trace thought rose to the forefront of my mind. Rex had been the one to take the lead over to our table, and it was against the wall. Out of the way. And unlike the justifiably jumpy me, he had parked himself with his back to the entire larger room, which seemed a hair odd in someone who was so very concerned with becoming one of the top tier students of this military-esque school. Situational awareness was important, I knew that much without even formal training. Being able to view the room you were in was part of that.

More drama, I thought, resigned. No use asking Rex –he'd probably deny it. And when I strained my ears, the people whispering and glancing back at us were too far away in this loud room to catch any specific words, only the tone, hushed and conspiratorial. The looks were unreadable, or at least in the sense of offering anything useful. There was the universal expression of someone who had just seen something that was surprising and going to offer juicy gossip, which was probably due to the fact Rex had a partner, as these were the current group of NOT students, not the incoming ones, and they'd been classmates of his for a while. There was an expression of delight as they passed that juicy gossip along. The reactions to said gossip were a bit more telling: startled looks, and to my concern, occasional smug or jeering looks. A few people were wincing and looking in our direction, then quickly looking away when they saw me looking back.

This lowkey mystery of Rex's past was starting to vex me.

"So, what happened to your last partner?" I asked after tugging my mouth away from the straw, which was an innocent enough starter.

Rex looked up from his food. "Oh, um…" His hand rose and began tugging on his stud earring again, which I was already starting to recognize as a not-so-good sign of fidgety awkwardness. "I-I wanted to try out for EAT."

"And?" I probed gently, not sensing any immediate danger in his voice or posture.

"He didn't." Rex said, then took a deep breath and shrugged his shoulders as a clear ender. "So we broke up."

I managed to keep my eyebrows from rising incredulously as I nodded and made a sympathetic sound. It was a plausible enough explanation, sure, save for the fact that Rex was very abrupt about it. Generally, when people told the whole truth, they didn't bite it off in as few words as possible, or include so little context and subsequent fallout about their decision.

So there was something about the whole partner situation that he was still not telling me. Which was fine –if there was some kind of deep-seated trauma there, I could hardly expect him to spill his heart out to someone who was nearly a complete stranger. Sooner or later I'd have the truth out of him.

***Time Skip***

Thankfully, I passed the placement test –though perhaps "passed" wasn't exactly the proper term, more like "did not do so abysmally that they kicked me out"– and thus was safe for another few days, taking my place with Rex at the entrance ceremony for new students. He was still a little tense during it, maybe fearing more questions about his sketchy partner history, and I resolved to soothe him by acting as incurious as I knew how, smiling every time he anxiously looked back and not acting like I wanted to start up another conversation.

The ceremony, to someone who knew a fair amount of meta information, was fairly nondescript. There were some new bits of fairly important information, like the fact our curriculum as NOT students could be adjusted after a while: we started with the basics to learn to control any power we might have as a matter of course, but the Weapons and meisters who wanted to angle for EAT were given a slightly different, more combative education than those who were merely here to harness their abilities to the point of being able to live normal lives. It was almost like there were two types of NOT students, the regular kids who happened to have powers and thus were required to come here as a matter of course, and the kids who came here with a fire in their eyes, determined to hunt evil.

As a matter of fact, the first group was not one I had experience with, even after my meta knowledge, and I asked Rex about it as we tromped down the stairs for the day.

"Learning how to transform into a weapon isn't instinctual." Rex said, sounding authoritative for once, hands clasped behind his head. To my annoyance, he was also several steps ahead of me, though I supposed that came with practice. It didn't matter if I was more athletic than he was: he'd been climbing these steps up and down for years, I had not. "If you don't learn to control your Weapon powers, you can hurt anyone, even yourself."

He took one hand away from his head, holding his arm out as its length shimmered and turned into the huge, chunky, cleaver-like blade of his sword form down to the elbow.

"Neat." I said by way of commentary.

"Sure, but what if I did it wrong?" Rex said, his arm whisking back to normal as he put his hand behind his head again. "I could've broken my arm, or if I was panicked I could transform parts of my body without realizing it and accidentally hurt someone. The Weapon gene can skip generations, so some people don't know until they get caught in an airport detector or something. If I panicked and lashed out, maybe hurting someone, that might be the first and only indication of Weapon powers I would've ever had."

I winced.

"The DWMA teaches us control, so that that will never happen." Rex continued firmly, obviously reciting a lesson he had learned by heart. "Once we learn the laws and fundamentals of being a Weapon here at the academy, we can live safe, normal lives, and society will accept and welcome us instead of fearing and discriminating against us."

"That happens?" I asked in surprise. It had never been covered in the anime or the manga, except maybe once, in passing mention, in a single white text box.

Rex turned his head slightly to give me a look. "You haven't met many Weapons, have you?"

"Nope." I said, holding on to the fact that this was absolutely true, if only because Weapons as they applied here hadn't existed for me until yesterday.

He blinked, then shrugged and turned around again. "Well, it happens. That's why a decent chunk of the NOT class are just here to learn to control themselves and then leave. Uh, NOT does get some wealthy influentials, too, on account of how much political clout a DWMA graduate gets all across the world. It's even a mandate for some countries, like Japan: the Prime Minister has to be a DWMA graduate, so there's a lot of more normal people from Japan at the academy, people that wouldn't ever try for EAT."

I made a face. Social climbers and politician kids. Great.

"So…" Rex said, getting fidgety again as we neared the bottom mile of the steps. "Do you wanna do something, um, now that school's out for the day?"

I hummed in thought, considering it. Since I'd already canvassed the libraries through an unknowing Rex, my nefarious plans for advancement towards EAT didn't really need working on right now. I was also sure of my general time in the actual series canon –either a little before or at the beginning of the main series– and even though I'd like a more concrete timer, there was no way I could obtain certain information, since the only certain information pre-Sid's death involved either a whole heck of a lot of drama, or personal missions from the EAT kids. Not exactly something I could look into right now.

Sweat dripped down my face. Despite my precautions, Death City was living up to its name in terms of heat, and I decided then and there that since my meta plans were not applicable to advance right now, I may as well spend the time ingratiating myself with my partner.

"Is there a place we ice cream we can hang out at?" I asked, and Rex brightened.

"Sure! Great! I know a place!" he said excitedly, and had the audacity to drop his arms and actually pick up the pace down the stairs as I groaned and stumbled after him, my legs aching.

I ended up deadpanning at the name of the store, which was 42 Icecream, but it was a charming little store in an elegantly Italian adobe building at the corner of two streets, one tucked inside a quaint arch. Rex and I both got our ice creams, though Rex did give me a slightly nervous look, probably because I had already forked over for my medical record exam (my bandaid-ed arms twinged at the reminder) and paid for lunch.

"Chill," I said as we strolled down the ally towards a shaded bench, licking at my scoop. "I've still got over half my weekly allowance left, and there's nothing else to spend it on, right? No more paperwork I mean, I'm not going to mooch off of you for food."

"Oh, um, no." Rex said, getting a dab of vanilla on his nose on his first lick. He blinked, going cross-eyed as he looked at it, before he licked it off. "The rest of the paperwork is stuff we can draw from other information, since you have medical records the school can access now. Its mostly signing the agreement and stuff like that. Also the psychological exam."

"Psyche exam?" I asked, feeling a twinge of nervousness.

Rex hummed. "We need to make sure people entering the school are of sound mind as well as sound body." he said, nodding wisely. "Those two things make a sound soul, after all."

I was viscerally and violently thrown back to the opening lines of every episode of the anime, which used that very phase: a sound soul dwells in a sound mind and a sound body.

"What if someone does have mental issues?" I asked with concern. The DWMA was knocking it out of the park so far as acceptance went: no apparent issues with those on the LGBTQ spectrum, obviously no problem at all for diversity and racial equality, but what about mental health? The Kishin Asura's "madness" was considered the main threat of the series, after all…it wouldn't be odd for people to discriminate on the basis of mental health.

"Depends." Rex said with another lick of his ice cream. "On how bad the issues are. If it's really bad, like something criminal, they might be refused, but I've never heard of that happening, not even once. Usually they just get counseling or medication, or an adjusted schedule. Or some mixture of all three. Apparently, some of the best meisters that ever graduated from the school had some pretty serious mental issues."

I liked to imagine that Doctor Stein sneezed at that very moment, wherever he was in the city right now. "Has issues" did not even begin to describe him, even accounting for anime eccentricity. He had surgically implanted a freaking screw in his skull. And not a little one either: a bolt as thick as an ear of corn that literally went all the way through his skull, with a huge flat head that he could grab and twist, and did grab and twist with alarming regularity, which is to say, at all. If there was something transfixing my brain, I wasn't going to touch it, ever.

"What about Witches?" I asked, sliding closer to dangerous territory now as we sat down. "They ever seriously apply to the DWMA? Or other creatures with magic?"

Rex barked out a depressingly incredulous laugh.

"Why would a Witch seriously apply to the DWMA?" he asked. "You mean like, applying like they wanted to be a student?"

"Yeah…?" I said slowly, wondering if I was going to have to backtrack soon.

"Yeah, no." Rex huffed. "That wouldn't happen."

"You sure they wouldn't come to the school innocently?"

"Witches and Sorcerers are evil." Rex said with slightly disturbing blind conviction. "They wield magic, and it corrupts them."

"Mm." I commented, giving a guilty lick to my cone, before tentatively prodding him again. "How so?"

"The magic power they have –in the cases of Witches at least– is a vast reserve of almost unlimited energy. In the end, though, the consequences of having large amounts of any energy always ends in the same thing: destruction." Rex said confidently. "Destruction is the pull of magic, and Witches and Sorcerers are dominated by that instinct."

"What about Monsters and Enchanters and other creatures that use magic?" I asked.

"Depends on the Monster, I guess." Rex hummed, swinging his legs idly. "How much magic they have and how it interacts with their soul. And Enchanters don't have magic themselves, they use tools to pull it from the surrounding environment and shape it into the things they make, so they aren't really affected by the pull of magic. Anyone or anything else that absorbs magic or uses it is just playing with forces they don't understand, and usually can't control."

Shit and fuck. There went my plans to tell Lord Death anything: I didn't fit on the scale of magical creature/magic-users in this world, and thus I'd be treated as either a freakish maverick or a liar. The best I could hope for at this point was the fact the magic in my soul wasn't strong enough for a meister to notice.

Note to self, stay away from Stein and Maka.

The problem was, I remembered Ox and Kim having a conversation in the manga about Witches and their abilities that amounted to something nearly identical to what Rex had just said, and Eruka Frog mentioning all Witches wanted to do was run wild using magic without Lord Death controlling them, and that she loved destroying things and was glad she was born a Witch. So alas, I had to take this conversation as gospel, which boded ill for my plans. Er, mostly gospel: Kim Diehl was a Witch in the manga, and she was good.

Then again, her magic was centered on regeneration, which meant she didn't live under the pull of magic…

Meh, I could argue this point later. The point now was the fact that Witches and other beings with inherent magical power were not regarded favorably unless they could prove their intentions were good, and since I couldn't prove anything right now, I would have to wait to reveal myself to Lord Death.

"How long does it take to make a Death Scythe?" I asked, giving another forlorn lick to my cone. "Like the quickest record?"

"Multiple months, I think." Rex said uncertainly.

I groaned into my ice cream.

10.07 PM, USA Central Time