Link knew just what kind of school he was about to attend by the immaculate, progressively adorned gym.
The first thing he saw as he walked in was the arched ceiling, unnecessarily but impressively high. Then his eyes lowered to the walls, which were decorated with banners advertising pictures of sports teams, not so much ostentatious as simply matter-of-fact, as well as the seats, which were arranged in a sort of postmodern oval that somehow worked with the rectangular basketball court. Last of all, he noticed the floor, which glistened under the bright industrial lighting.
Then he turned his attention to the various students, meandering like cattle in a field. Some clung together in tight groups of old friends and others were wandering by themselves, quietly observing like Link. However, most were forming nervous groups, tentative grasps at social interaction in a new place. Link didn't make any attempt to interact presently; he would let the waves of camaraderie take their natural course. They would eventually find him.
This continued for some fifteen minutes. Link, content on the outskirts of he crowd, was satisfied to simply observe. The majority were freshmen, of course, who occasionally gave Link, who was a junior, an intimidated glance or two. There were also many sophomores, but not as many juniors or seniors. The demographics of the room made a lot of sense, Link had to say.
Eventually, a wave of silence began to spread through the room as a woman in her thirties, wearing jaunty but neat clothes, strode confidently to the center of the room, and, with more energy than was called for, began directing students to the circular rows of seats. Link picked one at random, neither in front or in back, and sat down.
"Hi everybody!" the teacher called with a bright glance around at the students. It was a gesture that apparently took more energy than she had anticipated, seeing as she started what was intended to be a slight shift of direction and turned it into a clumsy spin to acknowledge the students who had sat themselves inconspicuously behind her. She waited for a discombobulated return of her greeting before politely saying, "Could everybody please scooch together a little bit? In front of me here? Just scooch a little bit?" Link chuckled at the way she crinkled her nose every time she said "scooch." Stereotypical teacher charisma.
Link stayed in his seat, having picked a good position that displayed neither belligerence nor superfluous enthusiasm, as other students filed in around him. "All right!" The teacher continued. "Let me introduce myself I'm Ms. Laura Hopkins I'm your principal." One sentence. There was no fluctuation in her voice to indicate a period. What a great way to be welcomed to a supposedly prestigious school. Link laughed out loud, then turned his head down, embarrassed. He thought he felt critical eyes on him. He waited a good ten seconds for the embarrassment to dissipate before sitting upright again.
"Welcome to Knight Academy, a school you will no doubt find both enjoyable, educational, and fun." Link wondered how many people were actually listening to this. "Now, as you probably have heard, this school has a slightly different philosophy about education then most, a more, uh, self-motivated philosophy, one might say in which students propel their own learning both individually, socially, and in groups. We're more discussion-based too so you might not be used to that, as I'm sure most of you are accustomed to writing on a tablet but here we have an emphasis on verbal eloquence, since society in Skyloft is trending toward verbal eloquence, I mean, more verbal communication, and not so much writing on a tablet." Verbal eloquence. Yeah.
"We also have a focus in the arts, if you're into that, which will be integrated into your everyday classroom. Expect to encounter both visual, auditory, and written art in your everyday classroom. But enough of that you'll find that out soon enough. Welcome to Knight Academy! Now I know you're all thinking that this is going to be a boring orientation, but I think that if we can learn to connect with each other starting now, the school year will fly by easily!" She made an extravagant sweeping movement with her arm. "You know, I'm just as new here as you are, having just been hired last summer, so don't be shy, or nervous or anything. You can be yourself here, we're all in the same boat." She must have been much more syntactically fluent in her job interview than she was now, Link thought, smiling sympathetically.
"Now just to warm up, I want you all to stand and stretch with your arms to the sky." She set an example, and the mass of students followed her lead with fifty times the people and half the enthusiasm. "And now touch your toes." The principal apparently found this a more daunting task than she had expected, and struggled to get her hamstrings to expand just a little bit farther. With great effort, she grasped her toes and latched on to them as if trying to hold on to the edge of a cliff. She let go and sprung upward, a smile still plastered to her face, rows of stark white teeth glaring at the students.
"And then stretch up again, leaning to one side and all the way to the shoulders of the person next to you, and give them a good back rub." Her fingers massaged the air, her hands looking like dogs snapping at holograms as students tried to figure out whether to go left or right, their arms bumping together awkwardly. Link blushed as he let his fingers float onto the shoulders of a girl, whose golden hair fell whimsically down her back. Link wished he had taken a look at her face earlier. As aware as he usually was, he had found himself so amused by the principal's antics that he forgot to do observe who was on either side of him.
Curious as to who was massaging him at the present moment, Link turned around to find a boy with the build of a football player, who gave him an indifferent glance and continued massaging him with thick fingers. Link turned his focus back to the girl. He kept his fingers light.
"Now lift your hands up again and stretch, and let them down on the other side, and give the person on your other side a nice massage." As Link worked the lean muscles of the football player, he felt the girl making chopping movements with her hands, running up and down his back. Link grinned at the unconventional switch of massage technique and turned back to look at her. She smiled shyly at him, blushing, and resigned to a simple back rub, though Link wouldn't have been surprised if the red in her face was just a reflection of the red in his. He laughed heartily, mostly at himself for being so immediately smitten.
"Okay, let's all sit down again," Ms. Hopkins said, her fingers still massaging an invisible partner. "Well, now that we're nice and warmed up, let's stand up and come to the floor of the gym, where we can play some games to get to know each other." The students complied, although most seemed to have gotten the gist that this principal was not the most experienced.
Grasping for a reason to talk to the girl beside him, Link decided to bring this up. "What do you think of this principal?" He scolded himself for being so prone to the regular hormonal ailments of teen life.
"Hm?" she asked, turning to him and drawing closer.
"The principal. What do you think of her?"
She laughed. "Well, she certainly has good intentions, that I can say."
"I know what you mean," Link said, smiling broadly.
Once everybody was in the middle of the gym, the principal started again. "Now, for this first activity, I'll have to ask you to get a partner." As well-acquainted students made a beeline for their comrades, she added, "Someone you don't know."
"I don't know you, do I?" the girl asked Link.
"No, I don't believe you do."
Once everybody had a partner, the principal, who had paired with some poor freshman who looked absolutely ashamed at being the odd one out, said, "Now I need you to, without speaking or writing, tell as much about yourself as you can to your partner. You can choose who goes first." She was about to start the game with the freshman when she froze. "And the choosing should be done non-verbally also," she improvised.
Link turned to the girl, who was looking at him expectantly. It seemed that she had made the executive decision that he was going first. "Um," he mused, scratching the back of his neck and glancing around. She continued to look at him with amused eyes. He thought hard. What could he tell with only motion, besides the fact that he was baffled?
After what seemed to Link a long while, but was in truth only about ten seconds, Link physically whacked himself in the head for missing the obvious answer, an action that provoked a giggle from the girl. Link put his hands out in front of him and wiggled his fingers, palms downward.
"Um, typing?" she asked, eyes narrowed inquisitively. Link shook his head. "Let me think. I feel like this should be fairly obvious. Um...playing piano! That's it!" Link nodded vigorously, then rubbed his hands together as he searched for something else. For a fleeting second, almost unconsciously, he wondered if there was a way to show the tragedies that had happened to him over the summer, but his mind quickly shoved the thought out of the way and he forgot about it.
He continued to scan his neurons for something he could use for this modified game of charades. He rapidly found something else to convey. He arranged his hands as though he were measuring himself, then moved them to one side and let the distance between them expand. "You're tall. Well, I don't think physical traits count in this game."
Link shook his head again, this time the dramatizing the way he moved his hands away from his own body and into the empty air. "You have a really, really tall clone," the girl wondered helpfully. Link started to spell the word out in the air with his fingers, but she jumped on the opportunity to reprimand him playfully. "No, you can't write anything," she chided, her finger moving back and forth in the air, like a metronome. Link stomped his foot and made a face, provoking another laugh. Well, even if he wasn't an effective actor, at least he was an effective clown. Or maybe that was a bad thing. He repeated his motion, doing so over and over as the hypothetical clone got taller and taller.
"Alrighty!" called the principal. "Switch partners!"
Link let his body sag dejectedly. "I was trying to say that I have an older brother," he said.
"Oh, so a really, really tall clone was almost right."
"Almost."
"Okay. Now, let's see..." The girl thought for a minute, eyes turned toward the ceiling. Then she got an idea. She held her left hand open, fingers outstretched, and put her right thumb and forefinger together. Link knew what she was doing before the imaginary stylus even touched the imaginary tablet.
"You write!" he said. She gave him an affirmative thumbs-up. Then she hunched over a bit, her face bent in a caricatured impression of anger. She pretended to hold something in her right hand and squinted as if she was trying to make out something through a dense fog. Then she made her left hand into a claw and widened her eyes, hissing nastily as she did so. "Poe," Link said, remembering newsflashes of the dreaded "ghost species" an unfortunate colony had fallen to a few years ago. The rumors had never subsided since then, perhaps for the sole reason that the lanterns they carried so unnervingly resembled the lanterns of ancient human fashion. But what did that have to do with her?
She outstretched her arms, looking reverently upward and spreading her limbs every which-way. "Oh...oh...octopus!" Link said, causing the both of them to explode in laughter. Once they had calmed down, she repeated the motion, her arms more stagnant this time. "Oh, it's a tree," Link said, his voice so flat that they couldn't help but fall in to a bottomless pit of laughter. Amidst the laughter, something occurred to Link. "Poetry!" he said, causing the girl to nod excitedly. "I was wondering what you could possibly have to do with Poes. You write poetry, I see. A pretty multifaceted-"
"Alrighty!" This principal was starting to bug Link in a very endearing way. "Now for your next activity, you need to get a partner." Silence ensued. "Um, a new partner, I mean!"
"Dang, we were having a lot of fun," the girl said, casting a glance of mock resentment towards Ms. Hopkins.
"Yeah. Well, see you around," Link said, reluctantly turning away.
"Wait, you can't just leave! You haven't even told me your name."
Link turned back around. She had her head cocked to one side, waiting for him to speak. She looked so cute, wisps of blond hair sailing among a smooth face and shining blue eyes, that he could hardly force his voice to work. "Link," he managed.
"Zelda." She gracefully extended her hand, which Link shook warmly.