Listen, WriterGreenReads, Arya's list is a STRATEGY list, and the strategy is "don't die." Another normal reading/posting time for both of us, too! And I would recommend renting/borrowing/whatever the manga rather than buying it outright at first, M1LK T3A, as you may or may not actually enjoy it and that's a lot of money to buy the whole series. As I mentioned in the last author's note, the style/tone kinda diverges markedly, even when it's the same series. And I am not only staying very healthy, but my device finally allowed me to see your new profile pic! It's very nice. Slowly but surely, I am gaining fanart for this series...who knows, I might actually draw some myself at some point. WriterGreenReads drew another piece recently as well!
Also apologies for anyone who wants to see, like, the actual canon characters, but they're almost all unanimously in EAT and Arya's in NOT, so that's gonna take. Um. A bit. I'm so sorry, she's not hogging the limelight I promise, it's just unrealistic for the main characters to pop up in a different class for like. No fucking reason.
December 30th, 2020
Arya's POV:
It was approximately 6.00 in the morning, with the sun already shining and laughing brightly over the desert floor and the city rising like a mountain above it. Enormous candles burned in their places within the DWMA exterior, and at the bottom of the white steps leading up to the school bolted a blonde teenager and her black-haired partner, recently-purchased bookbags flapping and bouncing at their hips and the blonde with a slice of toast in her mouth.
"Arya, seriously!" Rex panted behind me as we bounded up the steps. "You could've eaten that at any time on the bus ride to the school!"
"Hits fah fradifion!" I called back, chewing rapidly on the toast. "Nehxt hi hotta he late!"
"What?! You can't be late on purpose!" Rex cried. "You're a new student! You'll get in trouble!"
"Hits fah fradifion!" I repeated stubbornly, before managing to gulp down the last of my toast. "I gotta be late for anime school!"
"What!?"
Of course, neither of us could sustain this pace of bounding up the steps forever, and we slowed to a sort of skipping uphill jog as we cleared the normal skyline of the city, passing some of the slower and sleepier NOT students on our way. Rex, as I had noticed before, was surprisingly fit for being such a skinny dweeb, and moreover had been walking these steps for years, so he very possibly equaled EAT students in how fast he could climb them. As for myself, I'd been going through a quasi-combative training regimen for almost an entire year, which meant I was way ahead of the middle-school NOT students who were only just now getting into the idea of being at a combat school, and might very well not be attending the academy for the purposes of combat.
Anyways, one of my plans to better gel my transition into this school was playing to anime tropes. Hence, the run-to-school-late-with-toast-in-my-mouth, which would hopefully align the gears of this world in such a way as to make me seem normal, to make my attendance at this school have something of routine. It couldn't hurt, right?
A weekend full of signing up for after-school combat classes had left me a bit squirrely, especially when I remembered the level that Maka and the other EAT students had fought at, which had full-fledged anime acrobatics and other feats that I wasn't sure I was physically capable of mimicking, even after my near-year of semi-combative training and practice and current place within this world. I wasn't a native-born anime person. I couldn't do the bendy-bendy.
Eh. I had a buster sword for a partner. Agility didn't really need to be our MO.
In any case, after two days of hearing statistics and watching improbable feats of agility and strength from practicing teams, I was impressed with a sense of my own inexperience and mortality. I wanted to grease the wheels of the system, do anything I could to make things easier for me that I could. Playing to anime tropes was an easy and hopefully harmless way to do that. I didn't want to accidentally slot myself into a protagonist role, after all, since "unaware protagonist" was a common trope of harems and isekai stories, and this was a pervy anime to begin with. I needed to watch my step, lest I inadvertently plunge my foot into the messy pool of human entanglements that was harem shenanigans.
And since that also meant I would be actually living the embodiment of a fanfic, I was staying as far away from such a scenario as I possibly could. Fanfic logic shouldn't mesh with real-world logic, inasmuch as the world I was in was "real."
One should be able to notice when one was drooling out of their mouth, after all.
Anyways, I flicked my schedule out of my satchel for one last quick read-through as Rex and I jogged up the steps. It seemed like we'd start off with gym after morning check-in, which made sense, since Death City was in a desert and they probably wanted to get exercise out of the way as early or as late in the day as possible, either before the sun started to bake the ground or when it was setting and the arid air lost pretty much all of its daytime heat. Since official school let out sometime in the early afternoon, starting gym first thing in the morning was really our only feasible option. Today was a Day A schedule, too, which meant that I stayed later than Rex for Meister Studies.
More to the point, though, what with all the extra combat classes (well, combat preparation, but that was splitting hairs), I didn't really have…time to do all the meta research I wanted. My day was eaten up by school, and given the amount of physical activity in said school day, I'd probably be exhausted by the end of it. Forget about researching the general stuff outside of whatever studies Britain was doing, I'd probably be lucky to even get to the library.
I made a rueful face as I popped open a folder from my satchel and replaced the schedule sheet. Hooking up with the school might not have been my best plan…but then again, sometimes you just couldn't have a "best" plan. You could choose between better and worse, with the better (in my case) being a part of the dominant and ethical world organization, and the worse being an underling to someone who would at best case be ready to betray me at any second, and at worst case have intolerable fellow workers to deal with.
I remembered the Baba Yaga Castle infiltration mission in the manga. A disguised Maka had been assigned to clean Giriko's room (which apparently needed cleaning every half hour) and after refusing his arbitrary order to take off her mask when he realized she was a woman, Giriko had threatened to chop off her mask with her head still in it.
Working with that sort of person? No fucking thank you.
As Rex and I climbed the steps, I absently wondered why the hell I was more leery of Giriko than I was of his boss Arachne, since Arachne was exponentially more powerful (in intelligence, experience, and raw force) than either of us and could reduce me or Giriko to a bloody smear on the floor within seconds. Then again, that might actually be it –there was a teeny, tiny, pinprick-sized chance that even now, unused to being partnered with Rex, I had the reflexes and combat ability to at least survive and run away from Giriko, whereas with Arachne I was dead seventeen-thousand ways from Sunday no matter what I did.
There was a certain calm in accepting inevitability. It was like standing next to an about-to-detonate bomb with a mile-wide radius. There was no way in hell that I would survive, regardless of what I did, so why bother panicking or worrying about it?
That was the sort of feeling I got with Medusa and Arachne and Asura. They were so many leagues above me, in so many ways, that it was pretty much pointless to think that I'd survive a combative or competitive scenario with them, at least right now. It just wasn't going to happen. They outclassed me in the terms of counterintelligence, of raw combative power, of skill, of experience, of fucking everything.
Giriko, on the other hand, or Mosquito, or Mifune, or even Justin Law post-betrayal, I had (at least in theory) a chance of surviving and/or running away from them, which automatically ratcheted up the fear factor by an intensity of thousands. Giriko was a berserker and could thus be outsmarted, Mosquito was fanatically loyal to Arachne and could thus be distracted, Mifune never killed anyone unless he had to, and Justin had a one-track mind both pre and post Madness and could thus be just plain avoided. Sure, they outclassed me in multiple areas, but they all, in theory, had weaknesses I would be able to exploit. Arachne and the other top-level bad guys didn't have weaknesses as such, or if they did, they weren't things I could take advantage of.
That, amongst many other things, was why I was jogging up the stairs with Rex today. With his help over these next few semesters, I would hopefully get the learning and practice to turn myself into a full-fledged anime badass. Then I would be able to stand firmly toe-to-toe with some of the scariest motherfuckers to ever darken the doors of this world, and not have shivers of fear at the very idea. The idea had me grinning. I mean, okay, so maybe it was a bit geeky of me, but who wouldn't be excited about becoming the awesome kind of hero you saw in anime all the time?!
This was totally not related to my lowkey constant overwhelming fear of Oliver hunting me down across dimensions and ripping me apart. Yup.
Eh, anyways. The school psychologist said that I should only start worrying when I began to develop abnormal reactions to things, and being scared of an immortal who swore eternal vengeance upon you seemed perfectly normal to me. Getting proper combat training and experience would hopefully help, giving me the illusion that I'd be able to at least fight him off, should he ever come knocking again. And I mean, how much of an illusion would it be? I'd managed to thwart his plans when I was a gawky 16-year-old that had sort of tripped headfirst into the right solutions. I was almost 18 now, with what was almost a full year of experience and practice in not dying in a variety of very lethal situations, up to and including a lowkey zombie apocalypse. One guy, however diabolical and undying, was probably much less of a threat.
Probably.
I winced and rubbed my thumb over the fingernails of one hand. They were back at normal length again…finally. Hopefully, my combative training at the school would keep a painful nail-ripping from ever happening to me a second time. Hopefully, I wouldn't have to undergo any kind of torture like that ever again. Hopefully, my time at the DWMA would make me strong enough to prevent it.
This much unfounded hope wasn't my usual jam, so Rex was able to yank me into our homeroom classroom –apparently the 11th of the NOT classrooms– before I realized where we were in the winding mass of corridors. I might have to devote some of my incremental leisure time to wandering around the school with a map in hopes of fixing locations in my head…
The room was just like the EAT classroom shown in most of the series –a lecture hall with white and black checkered tile floor, tiers of conjoined desks and seats, two-step dais and teacher's podium on the center of the floor, blackboard behind it, wall sconces with candles, and circular windows looking out at the achingly bright desert sky. I felt myself relax a little, even though I was a bit peeved at Rex for ruining my anime-esque first day. This was a familiar setting even before last week: I'd seen this classroom, or one just like it, dozens of times over the course of the Soul Eater series. This was familiar, predictable, safe.
This was going to be my life for the next few months, apparently.
"So like, do we have assigned seats?" I asked, looking over at Rex, who was apparently relieved that I hadn't made myself late.
"Ah, uh, not really." he flustered, apparently caught off guard by my sudden question. "I mean, I have one that I have –this is the classroom I've been at for a while- so like I have a seat that I'm at, but they're not assigned-"
One of the things that I had rapidly discovered about Rex was the fact that when he felt on edge during a conversation, he tended to babble frantically, hopping from excuse to excuse under the logic that one of them had to stick eventually. It was somewhat endearing, in a "puppy falling flat on its face" sort of way.
I had also figured out pretty quickly that you needed to head Rex off before he gathered steam and just straight-up started bringing in anything and everything under the sun into his apologetic speech –my morbid curiosity during one such conversation had led to him eventually apologizing for the weather, the local harvest, the economy, and capitalism. I half-wondered if the reason he was so jumpy around partners was the fact that he was some kind of shrimpy elder god in disguise, and the whole faculty were worried about a potential partner blowing his cover.
"Behold for it is I, King of the Tempest, Lord of All Worlds! Tremble abject at my feet, pathetic mortals, for your world shall soon come to an end under my-"
Nope.
Not possible.
Not even a little.
He might dress a little edgy, but Rex was in no way even subtly cool enough to be an apocalyptic being in disguise. I knew the tropes, I knew what to look for, and even though I was now technically "in" the story, I could still see the patterns happening immediately around me. Rex's place in the classroom seemed to skew towards the "loner people might pick on/gossip about" end of the curve, which was going to change pretty damn rapidly if I had anything to say about it.
"So where's your seat?" I asked, cutting off his tirade.
"Oh, um-" Rex pointed, and before he could start apologizing again I grabbed his shoulders and steered him to it with gentle but implacable force.
"I can sit next to you, right?"
"W-well, yeah…"
Rex sat down on first aisle seat of the first row and I sat next to him on the second seat in, dropping our bookbags on the ground under the overhang of the desk. The satchels had been something the school offered during our trial week, and at this point in my life I was far past the point of refusing free stuff. It had proven to be a good extra bag to cart around my day-to-day stuff, like notebooks and folders and a pencil case for the school, and potentially my grimoire/journal and magic supplies in the future. The bookbag was a plain brown satchel just like all the others in every anime ever, but the buckle on the front was, of course, a silver Lord Death skull.
I swear the branding is worse than Disney's at this point.
The class already had some other students –not a lot, maybe a little less than half the class. Most of them were scattered in the tiers above us, and I gave Rex a sidelong look.
"So, uh, any reason we're front row center?" I asked him, tapping a single finger on the desk we were sat behind. The aisle seat (since there weren't any windows except behind the whole class) was a bit of a risky position, non-protagonist wise, though from my memory Maka and Soul were usually actually in the center of a row.
Rex blinked at me, apparently surprised by the question.
"It's the best place to learn." he said. "And since I keep coming back every year-"
He stopped and flushed, looking away to stare at the desk. I could fill in the blanks.
Since he keeps cycling through this class, he has first pick of the seats before anyone else gets here.
"Well, at least we've got the best seats in the house." I said pointedly, leaning back and folding my arms behind my head as I took on an exaggeratedly comfortable position, trying to nonverbally indicate that I was totally fine with this.
A hiss of sound caught my ears, and my gaze twitched to the side. Some of the students settling around the room were giggling quietly to themselves, glancing over at us and then looking away. My eyes narrowed at them, and at last, for the first time in over a week, I managed to catch one of the gossipers in the act of looking at us, locking eye contact with him before he could look away. It was someone I didn't recognize –some background nobody from the series, probably.
He smirked at me, and looked away, saying something to what I presumed to be his partner.
"So, is there any particular reason everybody's giving me/us weird looks all the time?" I asked, glancing over at Rex again as he set up his pencils and zippered case.
He jumped so badly he knocked his pencils off the side of the desk. The clatter had everyone glancing over at us for a second, and Rex quickly bent his head to pick them up, one arm bracing himself on the desk. I waited it out until he sat up again, and gave him a wordless look, raising one eyebrow.
"N-no. Not really." Rex stammered in what had to be the worst lie I had ever witnessed in my entire life.
I raised the other eyebrow.
Rex squirmed in his seat.
"Rex-"
"HI PROFESSOR SID!" Rex blurted loudly as Sid stepped into the room, clutching the desk with white-knuckled fingers. Sid looked over at us and raised an eyebrow of his own, before shrugging and stepping over to the podium.
"Morning, class. For those of you that are new NOT students, welcome to your first class –we're gonna kill it today. For everyone else, welcome back. Today we will…"
Rex eased out of his white-knuckled fear when I didn't keep nudging him under the cover of Sid's introductory speech as he laid out what we would be doing today and took attendance, but Rex's skating around his prior partner issues was rapidly graduating from a concern to something alarming. He didn't seem quite jumpy enough for it to be an issue of past trauma or an abusive partner…but if that was the case, then what the hell would make him so determined to avoid the subject?!
I was gonna drag it out of him eventually. We were partners.
I wasn't going to go to anyone else, either, since the gossip mill was hardly a good place to gather information and given anime school tropes, there was an exceedingly high chance that I would pull myself into a bully's shenanigans or have Rex overhear me asking around at exactly the worst time possible. Or both. Blackmail and miscommunication, a key developing factor in a lot of school drama. Whoo-hoo-hoo.
That was probably going to be a major source of irritation for the next few months of my life.
Stupid anime tropes.
Stupid anime.
Stupid spell.
Stupid world.
***Time Skip***
I adamantly refused the stupid weird swimsuit bottoms the school provided for our gym uniforms. There was no earthly reason why I needed to wear a tight quasi-speedo and nothing else for the bottom half of my uniform –and if there was, I had men's swimshorts.
Fucking suck it, you pervy anime.
In any case, wearing a white T-shirt with blue shoulders, the ubiquitous Lord Death skull on my left breast and NOT written underneath it, I was standing with all the other NOT students, ready for any exercise Naigus was going to throw at us. I wasn't the only one who had subtly rebelled against the Japanese-skewed exercise uniforms –since I remembered that this whole swimsuit thing was pretty omnipresent in school anime– and I was interested to note that even with this fairly basic uniform, there was a fair amount of customization. Some of what I presumed to be older students had patches or buttons in discreet places on their uniforms, or some extra embroidery, or baseball hats, or rolled-up and sometimes even torn-off sleeves, to say nothing of the pants, shorts, short-shorts, and in several cases skirts that some kids had claimed.
I made a mental note to stay away from the ones in skirts, since they would probably be either doing high-jumps or standing near convenient updrafts, though I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that some of the skirt-wearers were guys, or at least masculine-looking, and no one was giving them crap for it. In fact, nobody was even glancing at them more than a few times. Clearly, the DWMA did more than put its money where its mouth was as far as diversity and acceptance went. This was a nice change from the public schools I was used to.
Still, I had to admit that the exercise program was good, as far as my limited experienced went. After all, I had inadvertently ditched the whole educational life two out of four years into my high school, and my exercise ever since had been decidedly extracurricular, even if it had also been, in many cases, much more severe. Nothing like intense, life-threatening pressure to make you train your body a lot, after all.
Since the NOT class had an as-yet-unknown percentage of kids who were at the DWMA for political rather than combative reasons, our gym class was less intensive than I would've thought. Sure, it was a level or two above normal gym, with a focus on running and agility, but I figured that that meant they wanted to train even the noncombative students to be able to dodge and duck and run away, should the worst occur and they be targeted by a Kishin Egg or a Witch. They relied on the extracurricular lessons to teach students how to hack and bash and all the rest of it: this was to keep us nimble and in shape.
Despite the implied difficulty of wielding a buster sword as my partner, I was more than eager to get into the agility exercises. The way I saw it, even though Rex's mass and shape would drag me down in any confrontation we had, skimping out on my mobility would leave me in the metaphorical position of a tank, which was something that I, with my tendency to run away from any direct life-threatening situation, was ill suited for. Maybe being a little fast on my feet wasn't a lot, but it was sure as shit better than nothing.
And besides, who knew? Once we got this whole partnership thing in the bag, Rex would be super light in my hands and I could presumably move a heck of a lot faster, disregarding any air resistance from his large flat blade. Maybe I could be fast and have an impractically large weapon at the same time.
That was a discussion for the future, though. For now, I was content to run and jump and weave with the rest of the group, keeping an eye out for Rex when I had the breath and noticing that he was solidly in the middle of the pack, whereas I was slightly ahead, though still only in the upper middle. That fit –from what I remembered, Weapons weren't exactly intended for athleticism, though whether that was social or physical constraints I had no idea. Tsubaki could mimic Blackstar during a fight, and could clearly fight on her own as shown by the sequence between her and her brother, but Soul –despite attacking several opponents over the course of the series by using his arm transformed into the blade of his scythe– had never gotten a win to my memory. When fighting solo against Kid after a failed (temporary) partnership with Blackstar, he'd gotten his ass kicked. When he and Maka had been in the middle of an intense argument during their fight with Free, he had attacked and actually impaled Free right through the heart, but Free was immortal and had just plain ignored it. In the manga, when Maka was overcome by the Sloth chapter, Soul had attempted to fight Giriko on his own, and been thoroughly thrashed.
Granted, Liz and Patty switched out between each other and fought freely on their own, but they'd grown up as hoodlums on the streets of Brooklyn and had acted as each other's meisters for a long time before they'd met Kid. None of the others –not Jacklyn, not Fire or Thunder, not Harvar, not Tsugumi, nobody– really solo fought, except as a last-ditch effort when their meister was incapacitated. Given as most of the Death Scythes could fight on their own, to my memory, it might be an ability thing, it might be an experience thing, it might be a physical thing, or a combination of all three. When Sid had portal-ed the main cast to safety by opening coffin-shaped chutes under their feet at the anniversary party, all the meisters had landed on their feet, whereas all the Weapons had landed on their collective asses, which was a point to it being some weird genetic thing, rather than an ability most Weapons just neglected due to circumstance.
Eh. Maybe I was looking into it too much –sometimes Weapons trained to fight on their own, sometimes they didn't, and the limitations of their Weapon form and body probably indicated how good they would be at it when/if they tried. Rex could partially transform, using parts of his arm as a blade much like how Soul did, but Rex also didn't look like he was supremely athletic in any way, which meant that even with lightweight physics-cheating Weapon powers, he couldn't slug it out for any length of time. For a Weapon, physically fighting on their own –even partially transformed– was probably a lot like fisticuffs, and some people just didn't have the endurance for that.
Rex didn't, and to be honest I probably didn't either, at least as far as throwing punches and kicks and whatnot went –I'd learned to fight properly with weapons, not martial arts. If we got separated during a fight, we were probably screwed, due to the fact that I couldn't start throwing off magic and whatnot and I probably wouldn't be able to reach any guns or knives I was carrying in time to defend myself.
I made a mental note never to get separated from Rex during a combat scenario.
Or learn martial arts.
Or both.
Both sounded like good options.
In any case, the psychical education part of the morning went by pretty easily, and we went for a quick scrubdown in the school shower rooms, something that I was still a bit leery about, but far better an accidental flash to my fellow female students or a crowded bump somewhere salacious than marinating in the fumes of my own sweat all day.
Wet hair pinned up and wearing my shirt, shorts and jacket, I trotted out to meet up with Rex and follow him back to our classroom. The history course was something I was interested in, especially since I only knew the broad strokes of a very specific period in time –now, and 800 years before now. I knew nothing before, and very little in between, and even the specifics of what I knew would vary depending on whether this was the anime or the manga world. There was no way to tell that, either, not so far as I knew.
Unlike Black Butler, wherein there were characters and canon divergence very early on –the earliest I could think of was Lau's radically different behavior in the Curry Arc, and Miss Nina's existence– Soul Eater had almost identical characters and plotlines until almost halfway through the series. The earliest marked difference I knew started after the mission to rescue BREW, one of Eibon's creations on the Lost Island north of Alaska. That was weeks and weeks –no, months ahead. The DWMA anniversary, in which Asura was resurrected, happened sometime during either the first of April or the first of May, and it was just now the first week of September.
Subtly tapping my fingers on the desk to count it out as I listened to the lecture, that was eight months at least before I'd be able to tell which way this was all supposed to go. Sure, that'd give me a lot of wiggle room to plan for the manga route, should things go that way, but all the same…that was a heck of a lot of time. I wasn't sure that laying my plans out for the manga route, which was definitely the worser of the two timelines, would affect things badly should they turn out like the anime. Like, if I subtly installed some kind of memory-trigger in Crona so I could hopefully snap him out of it when he went full darkside, would that have a bad effect if he didn't go darkside? Would it make him hesitate at a crucial second if/when he decided to return to the DWMA as per the anime timeline?
I should probably stop worrying about future events and start focusing on the lessons. Catching me out on my complete lack of historical knowledge was one of the few surefire ways that just about anybody would be able to reveal my sketchy doings –and by sketchy, I meant just-plain-weird and highly suspicious. I mean, who wouldn't know basic historical facts? Somebody who had been raised far out of normal society, that's who. Who would be raised far out of normal society? Aside from a dimension-hopping confused teenager –which was probably the last explanation anyone would think of– the only reasonable alternative was someone who lived in a society of their own, separate from the rest of normal society.
Someone like, say, a Witch.
The way my life and experiences were matching up so perfectly to the expected profile of a Witch was starting to become somewhat alarming. Was I conforming already? Was I merging with the laws of this reality?!
Rex noticed my stiffened posture about halfway through a section on how the education of history was divvied up and gave me a concerned poke with his foot, glancing sideways. I offered him a tight smile, and he shrugged, looking back to the board as the instructor chalked out the difference between Prehistory to Renaissance and Renaissance & After. After all, what could be traumatic about history, or the learning thereof? Everybody had their quirks, but surely that couldn't be one of mine.
Eh. I had a phobia of poodles and cupcakes, both built upon horrific trauma. Rex didn't know everything yet.
Neither did I, though, and I glumly resigned myself to picking up yet more books at one of the local libraries to fill in the gaps of this lecture. Granted, this was the first day, so it was mostly taken up with the why and how of the class, but I was still going to need to pick up stuff fast if I wanted to approach "normal" history-knowing levels, never mind pass the course. I'd…actually probably have to do that for all my classes, and a gloom cloud briefly swirled around me as Rex jumped and flinched sideways in his seat.
For a brief second –just a brief second– I considered ditching the DWMA and working for someone, anyone else.
***Time Skip***
I was interested to note that while History and Social Studies were essentially the same class in my memory, the DWMA outlined the clear divisions: whereas History was, well, what it said on the tin, that being the study of past events, Social Studies was broader in scope and dealt more with politics and how people thought, acted, and formed governments within a society, and how societies worked in the first place. Given as the DWMA was an international school, understanding of multiple world governments was automatically high up on the ranking sheet, and combine that with the fact that we –or at least the EAT class– were essentially worldwide mercenaries, well…learning how governments and societies and cultures worked and interplayed was important, to say the least.
Sid had touched on this earlier, but if Rex and I aimed to be in the EAT class, we were going to have to become…rather cosmopolitan. In theory, a DWMA student sent out to hunt Kishin Eggs would know how to conduct themselves in any cultural environment or social group across the entire world, potentially to the point of being undetectable, but probably more usually to just not offend anyone and everyone within hearing range. Pissing off the people we were sent to help had a range of bad consequences, which started in the area of in-the-moment inconvenience and ended in the domain of mass political uproar and fatalities.
I wondered if Lord Death ever had to send a waiver out to anyone that Blackstar took a mission for. "We do not accept responsibility for damages, insults, fines, or catastrophes adjacent to this particular team's work. If any are suffered, please see the DWMA legal term for recompense. We're so sorry for whatever he's done now."
In any case, though I vaguely remembered Social Studies being a heck of a lot more boring back home, as with all things at the DWMA, this was a highly and in fact desperately practical class. People weren't here because it was a school: they were here for what was essentially one of three reasons. One, amass political clout. Two, become a fighter defending humanity from Kishin Eggs. Three, make obscene amounts of profit off of the two prior methods or the merit of being a DWMA graduate. The DWMA, of course, was geared entirely towards the first two paths, which meant that any class that studied how people thought or how societies worked was going to be given heavy practical focus. This wasn't the typical "learn-the-civil-war-nine-times-in-nine-years" American shtick, this was preparing politicians and what could technically be argued child soldiers for the front lines.
I wasn't really comfortable with term, as any sane person would be, but by dictionary definition, even though no one at the DWMA had been forced to attend, everyone aiming for or already in the EAT class was, by virtue of age, child soldiers. Maka was thirteen, I think, at the beginning of the series, or somewhere thereabouts, and she had already fought in 99 lethal combat scenarios and was aiming for 100. I didn't know how old Fire and Thunder were, but the both of them were probably under ten, and even though they were outliers to the best of my memory –and Weapons, who weren't directly exposed to harm in combat– the fact remained that they still put themselves in deadly dangerous scenarios multiple times over the course of the series alongside their partner.
The DWMA didn't seem to have any kind of age restrictions, but even so, it was a little odd that none of the students were, well, adults. I chalked that up to the fact that the relevant gene probably manifested in Weapons around puberty, at which point they obviously wasted no time in rushing to the DWMA to learn how to control it before they accidentally sliced someone's head off. Meisters probably flocked here because there were hopefully rules about partnering with someone far older than you, and/or they wanted to meet their partners and start their training in early.
Or maybe there was something age-related in the rules that I had missed due to focusing more on scanning for Witchly things to avoid doing. Either was equally possible.
Rex had managed to drag me halfway to the science labs before I suddenly panicked, realizing that there was absolutely no way that Stein would have let anyone else teach that class, before just as suddenly un-panicking, remembering that Stein wasn't hired yet and thus I didn't have to find an excuse to keep Rex between us at all times or something.
Except Stein would get hired eventually, and I'd need to find some kind of excuse then. Shit.
Valiantly, I tried to stay preoccupied and worried while the lady in charge was teaching us about the various ways we could identify gunpowder and other explosive elements, but I lost the uneven struggle as she dragged in an old-school movie projector and began playing clips of various explosion types and illustrating their differences on the whiteboard. Apparently, this was something we all needed to know, as whether political or EAT, we'd probably eventually run into a scenario where someone had blown something up, and our split-second recognition might save lives, or at least direct energies.
Apparently, if we moved onto EAT, this class would become Forensics, and that was definitely something Stein wouldn't allow anyone else teach. He'd probably duel this lady –or whoever else was currently in charge of it– for the honor, scalpel to ruler or some shit like that.
Heck, who was I kidding. Stein would loom ominously over the other candidate in the dead of night with a scalpel in hand and menacing cackle screwed firmly onto his face. Dude had an evil sense of humor.
Regardless, apparently this Science class was also strictly in practical terms, boiled down to as little firm knowledge as possible so that we could absorb the most in one sitting, as opposed to the schools I was used to, wherein everything was padded out to make sure you got it through your thick skull. Understandable either way –this method was to stuff as much into our collective heads as possible, the other one was to make sure everybody at various stages of understanding and mental acuity could memorize and regurgitate –er, learn what was on the test.
I had to say, I kind of respected the DWMA's increasingly obvious sink-or-swim mentality when it came to learning. If you couldn't keep up in class, you took extra time out of your day, you got tutors or study partners, you worked hard on your own: or you failed the fuck out of it. And since I think the DWMA also operated in a fuzzy area that was neither high school nor college/university, whatever grades you got didn't really matter in applying to another school, since you either wouldn't have to or the gloss of the attached DWMA prestige would shine right over a few failed or bad grades. The only real reason to be concerned as a student was if you were failing enough classes to risk expulsion, which was ruthlessly brilliant in a way, because this system was guaranteed to weed out slackers or people here for glory and no work. The classes were condensed but thick with meaning, and if you started slipping, getting lazy or not seeing the point, there was no one to catch you but yourself and your partner.
Me, despite the strain it would be putting on my now dubiously-existent free time, I was more than willing to put in the effort for every class. Sure, aside from busting my cover, the history of this world might not be relevant to my life as a whole, but it was A) interesting and B) possibly something that would help me someday in the field. Same for all my other classes, with the possible exception of mathematics. The DWMA taught them for a reason and I was going to blindly trust that the organization which had been working on teaching for 800 years knew what it was doing when it came to education.
Just a blind guess, obviously. It was somewhat helped by the fact that people could sense and see souls in this world, which cut out a lot of the usual bullshit and red tape that humans seemed to delight in surrounding themselves with. At the DWMA, people had a tendency to know what you were feeling like and what kind of a person you were, even if you tried to hide or deny it, which was apparently invaluable in creating a good education environment.
We got to explore the lab, with a promise that the next A Day we'd get to start mixing explosives –though in nonviable ways– before we all washed up and headed to lunch. Along the way, something occurred to me, and I made sure to mention it to Rex after we got our food and got settled.
"So like, how come you're in the same classes as me?" I asked, jabbing my spoon at him. I'd opted for some kind of cheesy rice thing that promised to be healthy (though not overly so), while Rex had contented himself with a humble burger that had a disgusting amount of leafy green things in it. "You've been in the NOT class for what, three years?"
"Five." Rex answered, munching contentedly.
"Right, yeah, five years, and I'm pretty sure I all but broke the test with how hard I failed some parts of it."
It hadn't escaped my notice that most of the other kids in my History course, at least, had been twinkly-eyed middle schoolers or younger.
"How come you're with me?"
"I've been studying hard." Rex explained, setting down his hamburger. "I, um…"
I grabbed his hand before he could grab his earring, giving him a wordless look as he blinked at me in surprise.
"You have ketchup on your hand, dude."
"O-oh, right…" Rex laughed sheepishly as I let go and he aborted his automatic nervous tic. "Uh, anyways, I'm eighteen, so technically speaking I've finished all the classes I'm supposed to have taken to fulfill a GED, which means I can shadow you through all your own classes and work on extra coursework in my own time if I want to."
I furrowed my eyebrows. "Remind me again what a GED is? I've like heard the term before, but not what it means."
"Graduate Equivalency Degree or General Education Diploma, kinda varies on where you are." Rex answered, picking up his hamburger again. "It basically means I have the equivalent learning of someone with a high school diploma."
"So if this was a regular school, you'd have graduated."
"Yup."
"Buuuut you haven't, because you need a partner."
Rex laughed nervously and didn't answer, averting his eyes. The corner of one of my own eyes twitched.
I'll drag this out of you eventually, Rayner. We're partners. You can't avoid me forever.
"So anyways, we start after-school combat training today." I said, changing the subject reluctantly. My knowledge of anime tropes –and human psychology– told me that trying to push Rex to tell me when he clearly didn't want to was doomed to failure. If I kept pressuring him, he'd feel defensive and on-edge, both inconducive to him spilling what I presumed to be an intimate secret of some kind –and that was intimate in the self of personal and private, not kinky.
I think.
After all, it wasn't like I knew what was going on with Rex.
In any case, while my admittedly-fuzzy knowledge of psychology told me that pushing someone who was on edge would only make them feel inclined to lash out, my knowledge of anime tropes told me that Rex would lash out, we'd have an explosive argument, and he'd either say something that shocked me to my core or I would inadvertently say something that cut him too close to the quick, and he would run off without communicating to me at all, starting off a long period of dramatic tension between us that would almost certainly eventually culminate in a life-threatening event in which one of us saved the other's life and everything Rex had hidden would come spilling out, affirming our bonds in a joyous rush of trust, personal exposure, and forgiveness.
And sure, doing that might've been the easier route in some ways, but I doubted I had the patience for that sort of long dramatic tension, not to mention I was leery of heading down any road with "potential death/life-threatening event" signposted on it. Enough things would probably be trying to kill me in the ensuing months without me going looking for more trouble.
Alas, that meant that I would have to find some other way of prying Rex's past out of him, preferably without engineering such a life-saving event on my own end so that he would end up spilling everything to me in a grateful rush. It was a brilliant plan, but also the sort of thing that would probably come back to bite me in a thousand different ways later, and that was just if I pulled it off successfully. Purposefully endangering my partner in order to force him to tell me his secrets would make some pretty tasty blackmail material for Medusa or Arachne, for instance.
Not today, you evil bitches. I'm smarter than that.
"You ever done that before? Like with your last partner or on your own time or whatever?" I asked, trying to sound neutral and not accusatory in any way. Rex had been here five years, and he obviously wanted to try for EAT. It wouldn't be odd for him to have taken extracurricular combat classes over that time.
"Uh, I did a little with my first partner." Rex said, and something flickered across his face…something like sadness or regret. I made note of the expression, but didn't call him out on it. "And I tried a bit afterwards, but I'm…n-not really suited for hand-to-hand combat."
"You are a bit of a weed." I said, deadpan, and Rex made an offended noise, wilting comedically.
"I-I'm not that skinny…"
He had a point there. Rex wasn't anything as sticklike as Crona, say: he just wasn't excessively muscular and was tall enough that his black suit seemed to emphasize rather than conceal his long limbs. I'd yet to see him shirtless –though I darkly suspected this universe would contrive to arrange it eventually– but so far as I knew, just looking at his food intake, Rex had a perfectly healthy amount of flesh on his bones.
It was just kinda fun to rag on him, and for lack of any other sufficiently superfluous insults, I was gently poking fun at his physical appearance.
"Eh, maybe not." I agreed amicably. "So, anything I should watch out for, be prepared for? Since you've done this before and all."
Rex hummed thoughtfully.
"Well, the important thing to remember is that you're learning how to survive, not how to look cool, so its best to focus on conserving energy and executing the move perfectly. A fluid, controlled movement will always be better and arrive faster than one you try to make look good…"
We continued this conversation into our after-lunch study hall, since this was the first day and even the DWMA didn't assign a whole lot of homework. I had a feeling this hour would fill up later, when I had ongoing projects to work on both inside and outside my school hours. For now, though, it was a nice opportunity to chat with Rex and learn more about the DWMA culture and way of doing things, which would hopefully contribute to me never getting lost inside the school. Apparently it was practically a rite of passage around here…
Math was, of course, boring as shit. Even the DWMA couldn't change the fact that it was just learning formulas and equations, although they did work on investing us a lot more by using practical applications, with promises of hands-on work that would hopefully help drive the relevant equations into our heads a lot better. Someday we might have to build a barricade or something to protect ourselves or others, or measure distances, and this was the class that would teach us to do it.
Still didn't change the fact that it was math, though.
As the clocks ticked over into 2.00 in the afternoon, Rex and I had to part ways for the last class of the day, since it was a meister-only class and he was, obviously, a Weapon. I'd be doing this every Monday and Wednesday, and a thought tickled in the back of my head as Rex left me on the threshold of the classroom. He'd presumably still have his Weapons course on Tuesdays and Thursdays…which gave me at least two hours every week in which to do whatever the hell I wanted, completely free from any kind of partner supervision. Rex would be held up at the school, which meant that I could do all sorts of things that I didn't want him knowing about.
Granted, I didn't really have any concrete plans on advancing my magic or thwarting canon yet, but the knowledge that I could plan without interruptions was certainly reassuring.
Sid took the helm of this class again, welcoming us all in as I cast my eyes over the various other students. I didn't recognize most of them, but I saw Meme and Anya here, as well as Ao a few rows down. I didn't see Akane, but given as he was powerful enough to be in EAT and some kind of special-ops program under Sid, I doubted that he needed to know the basics at this point.
"Hey, kids. I see you've all made it to the end of your first day." Sid said, and there was a muted ripple of laughter across the room. "This is Meister Studies, a lesser aspect of Phasmology."
He turned to write Phasmology on the board, underlining it with a swipe of chalk before continuing to write in what looked like Greek beneath it.
Phasmology
From φάσμα (phásma) and -λογία (-logía).
Phasma – From φαίνω (phaínō) and -μα (-ma)
"Phasma is an Ancient Greek word with two sections, phaínō, meaning 'to bring to light, to cause to appear,' and -ma, a nominal suffix: and -logía is of course -ology, 'the study of' a thing." Sid told the class, scratching it out on the board, then starting another list. "The word Phasma was used under five different definitions by the Greeks,"
1. Apparition, phantom.
2. Appearance, phenomenon.
3. Images or types of realities.
4. Sign from heaven, portent, omen.
5. Monster, prodigy.
"-and as you can see, Phasma is where we get the modern word 'phantom.' Looking at the board now, I'm sure you've all noticed that each of the five definitions have something to do with souls, species, Soul Wavelengths, and how people define them across various cultures. Phasmology is the scientific word for soul studies, and if you intend to advance to the EAT class as a combative partnership, it's going to become a huge part of your future."
We murmured agreement.
"Everyone in here is a meister, myself included, and the reason that we have separated you from any partners you might have for this class is because the way meisters and Weapons harness soul energy is very different." Sid continued to explain, tapping the chalk against the board. "You can think of a meister as the ignition for the whole system. Broadly speaking, anyone could become a meister –even members of another species."
I assumed he was making an oblique reference to Enrique, the meister for South America's Death Scythe, who just so happened to be a monkey. Like literally, an actual monkey.
"Your purpose is simply to send energy into the Weapon, who can convert and use it. This can be as simple as swinging your partner in an attack, or as complex as compressing your Wavelength into projectiles that they can fire, or even Resonating. Weapons are typically conducive to other people's Wavelengths and most other forms of energy, which is why they make for poor meisters themselves."
Sid turned back to face us and crossed his index fingers over each other.
"Its like two pieces of copper wire trying to conduct electricity with no flow. It can be done, but its tricky, and usually requires a stronger bond than normal –a bond formed by circumstance or by family. Similarly, a meister trying to wield two Weapons will generally need a much stronger soul, or Weapon partners who have that aforementioned bond."
"What about the Death Scythe in Western Europe?" someone called curiously from outside my line of sight.
"You would be referring to Justin Law, correct?" Sid replied. "He's an exception. You realize, what we learn about in this class are generalities. Some Weapons have large enough Wavelengths to fight on their own, whether they start out powerful or whether they've grown that way through hard work. There are even some meisters who are combat-capable enough to fight without a Weapon partner in the traditional sense. And you are all worth more than how compatible you are with your partner or how well the two of you fight together. If worst comes to worst, you can always kick your opponent in the head or something. Don't be too caught up in fancy moves."
Sid turned back to the board and started writing another list.
Type (Gun, Scythe, Knife, etc.)
Utility Meister
Assassination
Genius
"Meisters are generally defined by their type –what kind of Weapon they have learned to fight with. Some meisters can only wield one type of Weapon, and face rejection responses from all others even when their bond is steady. Others can multishift. Generally, though, you're known for the one type you are most comfortable with –a Knife Meister, a Scythemeister, a Spear Meister, etc. Following this,"
Sid tapped his chalk against the second line of words, standing aside and against the board so that everyone on all the tiers could see them.
"-a Utility Meister is someone comfortable with harnessing the abilities of multiple Weapons at the same time: in other words, someone who can dual-wield. This takes a lot of practice and skill, not to mention finding the right partners, so Utility Meisters are very rare. Less rare are the Assassination Meisters, those who have mastered more covert forms of weaponry and who are often skilled in areas and techniques that focus on the development of the five common senses rather than Soul Perception or anything similar. Assassination-type meisters are often defined by the fact that they don't need their Weapon to kill or incapacitate their opponents, even if they don't always follow the traditional route of covert operations skills."
Well, that certainly explained Blackstar, whose deafening loudmouth was rather at odds with his designation as an assassin. Sid himself probably counted in the same category, as a matter of fact, since he had given several skilled meisters trouble when wielding nothing but an ordinary stone cross that he had ripped up from the ground. He'd even been able to create anime-esque techniques with it, such as the "Living End" move wherein he jumped up and used his tombstone to essentially clothesline an entire person into the ground with a stylized flash of cross-like purple light.
"Lastly," Sid drew a circle around the final category. "There are what we would call Genius-type meisters. These are meisters with such powerful Wavelengths and control over said Wavelengths that they can essentially pick up and master any Weapon within a very short period of time. They are by far the rarest category of meister, and currently there is only one individual known in this division."
Awed whispers ghosted throughout the room, and I could almost sense ambitions to be the next Genius-type meister rising all around me. I didn't bother getting excited –I was almost one thousand percent sure Sid was referring to Stein, who was the strongest meister to graduate from the school in all of the DWMA's history, at least until Blackstar in the manga. That was more than a bit of an insurmountable achievement gap, not to mention the fact that I wasn't even from this world, so my ability to conduct Wavelengths and power my Weapon at all was kinda dubious, never mind becoming some kind of meister savant.
My only ambition was to get this all done as fast as possible, then go back home. Becoming the strongest or the most skilled or the most famous wasn't really on my radar.
Sid spent the rest of the lesson talking about the most famous examples in some of the categories, and I noted with interest that he didn't really talk about any of the modern equivalents. He didn't announce what type of meister he was, or talk about anyone in the EAT class or their abilities, or invite us to share what kind of training we'd had yet or what area we were starting to specialize in. This omission was a subtle reminder that the DWMA was a combative school with live missions, and even the abilities of my fellow students could be confidential, given the kind of covert operations they might be sent on. Obviously the school wasn't trying too hard, because students practiced in front of each other all the time and I was well aware of the presence of a healthy gossiping grapevine, but it was obvious that the teachers weren't going to make it as ridiculously easy as "just come to class" for anyone who might've infiltrated the school to gather information about certain pairs or people.
The DWMA seemed to be like that. There were areas you could go if you pushed and places you could get to if you dug, but they didn't just hand you all of the extra information. They gave you a baseline, and if you were content to coast along on the firm basics and become a steady, reliable cog in the machine, the more power to you. You had the framework and you had the positions set up for you for when you left the academy. If you wanted to be more, if you wanted to excel or grow in any specific field, they pointed you to the tools and left you to it, with or without the relevant instructions. You proved how much you wanted it and how far you'd go by how hard you worked at improving yourself with them, essentially earning the power that came after all of your struggles. It was all very shounen.
In any case, I took my first steps along that secondary path when I pulled out my makeshift map as the end-of-day bell rang, and headed down to meet Rex at the in-school dancer's studio where they'd be teaching us sword forms.
11.32 AM, USA Central Time