Controlled Environment Three was a sterile, white walled room the size of a gymnasium, its floors and walls etched with absorption runes to contain mishaps. Commander Brys stood at the front like a monument to disapproval.
"Begin."
A symphony of concentration filled the room. All around Kael, spheres of water coalesced. They wobbled, they dribbled, some collapsed with a plop, but they were recognizably water.
Lisa, three rows over, simply raised a hand. A perfect immaculate orb of water appeared, so clear and still it looked like a piece of captured ocean suspended in air. Not a ripple. Not a tremor. She held it for a full minute, her expression one of mild boredom, before letting it dissipate into vapor. Commander Brys gave a single, grunting nod of approval.
Justin's sphere was robust and steady, if a bit lopsided. Ellora's was there, but tiny droplets kept breaking off and floating away like shy sprites. Dominic's looked less like a sphere and more like a blob of aggressively solid water that seemed offended by its own liquidity.
Sora was sweating, her hands shaking. A small flame kept trying to ignite in the center of her water sphere, creating a hissing cloud of steam, while the edges of the sphere warped space slightly, making it look like a fisheye lens.
Kael took a deep breath. Just water, Simple, calm, boring water.
He focused on the concept. Hydrogen, Oxygen, Bonding, Cohesion, Surface tension, His Sovereign affinity latched onto the fundamental truth of water.
A sphere began to form above his palm. For a glorious second, it was perfect clear and stable.
Then his understanding deepened. He didn't just see a water molecule; he saw all water, its place in the cycle, its memory of glaciers and clouds, its potential for life and flood.
The sphere transformed.
It was still clear, but inside, microscopic currents swirled in impossible, beautiful patterns. Tiny, perfect ice crystals formed and melted in a rhythmic dance at its core. A shimmer of prismatic light played across its surface, and if you listened closely which several nearby students did, to their horror, you could hear a faint, echoing sound like a distant, peaceful waterfall.
It was the most breathtaking, utterly failed exercise in the room.
Commander Brys stomped over. He stared at the mesmerizing, defiantly non simple sphere. His eye twitched.
"Osborn."
"Yes, sir?"
"What is that?"
"It's… water, sir?"
"Is it." It was not a question. "Does standard, assignment-following water contain internal meteorological events and ambient soundscapes?"
"It's… very enthusiastic water?"
A snort unmistakably Dominic's came from the side.
Brys's jaw worked. "The assignment was a sphere of water. Not a… self-contained ecosystem. Dissipate it."
Kael tried. He willed it to stop. The sphere, feeling his will, tried to comply. It didn't vanish. It condensed. It became a hyper dense, pea sized droplet of ultra pure water that fell with a ping sharp enough to chip the reinforced floor, before evaporating with a sigh that sounded vaguely disappointed.
Brys stared at the tiny chip in the floor, then at Kael. He pointed a thick finger at the door. "My office. One hour. Dismissed."
As Kael slunk out, the dam of tension broke. Snickers and whispers followed him. He heard a noble boy sneer, "Can't even do first year water…"
Dominic's voice, flat and clear, cut through. "Yeah? Your water looks like it's about to apologize for existing. At least his failed interestingly."
The rest of the class period was a mix of minor disasters and quiet victories. Ellora finally got a stable, quiet sphere by having her moss-turtle spirit sit on her head, which seemed to calm her nerves. Sora, after three more steam explosions, managed a lopsided but non flammable, non warping blob by sheer exhaustion.
The social aftershocks continued at mealtime. The Refectory was a caste system made visible. Gold & Purple veins ate on an elevated dais. Silver & Bronze had long tables in the center. Red & White veins and those without clear placement like Kael were relegated to the edges.
Their group, a walking violation of protocol, took a table squarely in the Silver Bronze zone. Justin's presence made it barely permissible, but the glares from Sophia's table on the dais could have frozen the soup.
It was there that the second wave of humor hit, born of sheer absurdity.
Ellora, trying to be helpful, asked her flame fox spirit to light the decorative and unlit central brazier on their table. The little fox zipped over, peered at the large iron bowl full of unburned logs, and with meticulous care, ignited a single, specific pine needle at the very edge. It flared for a second, then went out, leaving the rest of the brazier dark. The spirit zipped back to Ellora's shoulder, chirping proudly.
Ellora blinked. "Oh. Thank you, Spark. That's… very specific."
Justin, trying to smooth over a brewing argument at the next table between a Silver veined noble and a Bronze veined commoner over seat placement, launched into a painfully earnest speech about "shared space" and "mutual respect," using hand gestures he'd clearly read in a book. The two disputants stopped arguing to stare at him in unified bewersion, then simply swapped seats while he was still talking and ignored him.
And then there was the library.
Kael, Justin, and Ellora went to research basic mana form stability. Sora, desperate for any clue to control her space affinity, followed. They entered the Grand Athenaeum, a cavernous space of floating shelves and silent, stern librarians.
They had been there five minutes when the librarian at the central desk, an elderly man with glasses perched on his nose, frowned. A book on Elemental Theory floated off a shelf, then blinked and reappeared two sections over in Historical Architecture.
He adjusted his glasses. A moment later, a whole cluster of scrolls on Basic Spell Forms traded places with a treatise on Alpine Flora.
His head swiveled. His eyes locked on Sora, who was innocently peering at a shelf about "Spatial Mechanics," her fingers nervously tracing the air. With every anxious twitch of her fingers, books in a ten foot radius shuffled.
The librarian pointed a bony, accusatory finger. "You Out!!."
"I'm just looking!" Sora whispered, horrified.
"You are rearranging the Dewey Sigil System with your psychic static! Out! Before you shelve a cookbook in the restricted necromancy section!"
Flushing crimson, Sora fled. The books settled down with an audible sigh of relief.
That night, in the common room of their assigned and controversially mixed-vein dormitory wing, the exhaustion and the absurdity finally crested.
They were a sorry sight, Kael doomed to extra lessons
Sora, banned from the library;
Ellora, whose spirits kept trying to "help" in baffling ways;
Dominic, who had been issued a practice sword he called "a letter opener with pretensions"
Justin, whose idealism had run face first into institutional reality;
and Daniel, who was just silently there, a pool of calm shadow in the corner.
Dominic looked around at them all, then at the cold, dark brazier Ellora's spirit had failed to light.
"You know," he said, his voice the driest thing in the room. "When they said academy life would be an adventure, I didn't think the adventure would be mostly administrative disapproval and failing to make a proper campfire."
A laugh burst out of Kael, sudden, unexpected, and real. It was followed by Justin's warm chuckle, Ellora's giggle, and even a huff from Sora that was almost a laugh.
They hadn't conquered the academy. They were battered, confused, and in trouble.
But they were together. And for now, in the face of impossible magic and rigid hierarchy, laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of it all was the only spell that made perfect sense.