The Flatbread Cost Twenty Copper
King paid, received a folded piece of warm, slightly charred bread—dense, fermented base exactly as advertised, a thin spread of something savory on the inside—and took a bite while still facing the cart.
Oh, he thought. That's very good.
He turned around.
Sora Aizawa was standing beside him with her arms crossed and her notebook open against her forearm, writing something with the compact efficiency of someone who had trained herself to take notes without breaking eye contact with the subject she was observing. She was watching the central plaza over his shoulder.
He turned to look.
Behind them, the examination grounds had stopped working.
The replacement crystal team had arrived—six officials in reinforced grey coats carrying a containment crate between them—and were now standing at the edge of the pillar's ruins not touching anything. The presiding examiner, Shin Arakawa, was speaking rapidly to a second official who had produced a separate record book and was writing just as rapidly. Four examination guards had formed a loose perimeter around the pile of shattered crystal. The examinees who had been waiting in line were backed up to the plaza entrance, none of them moving forward, all of them watching.
The fragment nearest the contact point was still faintly luminous. Fading, but not gone.
"They've stopped the line," Sora said. Not worried. Noting it.
"They'll start again once the replacement is in place," King said. "They'll have a spare. An examination this large would require at least two backup pillars."
She glanced at him. "How do you know that?"
I know it because managing logistics for events of defined scale is obvious once you've—
"It's a reasonable assumption," he said.
She looked at him for one more second. Then she wrote something in the notebook.
He looked away. He ate more of the flatbread.
Don't speculate out loud, he reminded himself. Reasonable assumptions sound like knowledge. Knowledge sounds like—something else.
"What did it feel like?" Sora asked.
He turned back. "What?"
"When you touched the pillar." Her voice was precise. She wasn't asking to make conversation. She was asking because she wanted an accurate answer to write down. "What did you feel?"
King thought about it genuinely.
"Nothing unusual," he said.
She waited, clearly not satisfied with that.
"The crystal tried to measure something," he said, choosing words carefully. "I felt it looking. That was normal—everyone feels that, I assume."
"Yes. The scan pressure. Then the reading."
"The reading didn't happen," King said.
"Why not?"
He looked at the pile of fragments in the plaza. The luminous one had dimmed now to almost nothing. "I don't know," he said. Which was, in the specific and narrow sense he intended it, completely true. He didn't know what the crystal had found, because the crystal had found something it had no category for and had, apparently, expressed its confusion in the most dramatic way available to a twenty-foot measurement artifact.
I didn't intend that, he thought. I was being careful. I was thinking small thoughts.
Sora wrote in her notebook again.
"You're writing about me," King said.
"Yes."
"Why?"
She looked up. Something moved in her expression—not embarrassment, more like a person calculating how honest to be. She settled on: "Because you're an anomaly. And I study anomalies."
"Is that what you do."
"It's what I'm good at." She closed the notebook partially—not all the way, keeping her thumb in the pages. "Stillwind talent. Atmospheric analysis. I'm good at identifying when something doesn't fit the pattern it's supposed to fit."
"And I don't fit."
"You shattered the pattern and made a question mark out of it," she said. "No. You don't fit."
King ate the last of the flatbread.
"I'm just a student," he said. "F-rank. Unknown Variable." He folded the paper wrapper with the same small precision as the first bun, earlier. "Those are my classifications. I'm comfortable with them."
Sora looked at him steadily. "You said earlier that you don't know why the pillar didn't read you."
"Yes."
"But you're not bothered by that."
"No."
"Most people who get unexpected results from the exam are very bothered. Even good unexpected results." She tilted her head slightly. "You got the worst possible classification and you're standing here eating flatbread and calling yourself comfortable with it."
"It's good flatbread," he said.
A pause.
Despite herself—he could see it, the small involuntary motion at the corner of her mouth that she suppressed—she almost smiled.
She opened her notebook again. Wrote something. He caught one word before she angled the cover away: comfortable.
---
He was halfway through mentally ranking the morning's food options—meat bun from cart one versus spiced bun from cart two versus flatbread, the flatbread was winning—when a voice called from the examination grounds.
"Von Deluxh."
He turned.
One of the examination guards was standing at the plaza perimeter, looking directly at him. Not hostile. More the look of someone carrying a message they hadn't written and didn't fully understand.
"Chief Examiner Arakawa is requesting your return to the assessment tent," the guard said. "There is an administrative matter regarding your evaluation record."
King looked at the tent. Through the open flap he could see Arakawa inside, seated at a table now, a stack of record books in front of him and another official beside him who had the particular air of someone from a higher administrative tier—better coat, better posture, the expression of someone who was very accustomed to things making sense.
This is fine, King thought. It's administrative. They need a box filled in.
"Of course," he said.
He looked at Sora.
"I should—" he started.
"I'll come," she said. She said it like it wasn't a question.
He considered that for a moment. There was no reasonable objection. "All right," he said.
---
The assessment tent smelled like ink and stressed people.
Arakawa looked up when King entered. His expression was the face of a man who had composed himself and was determined to stay composed, and the effort of staying composed was visible just behind the eyes.
"Sit down, please," Arakawa said.
King sat. Sora stood two steps behind his chair, notebook closed, watching.
The official beside Arakawa—a woman with silver-threaded hair and a clipboard that had at least eight separate pages clipped to it—looked at King the way you looked at a problem you'd been handed and weren't sure was solvable.
"This is Senior Administrator Hane, from the National Registry office," Arakawa said. "She's here regarding the classification discrepancy."
"There's no discrepancy," King said. "F-Rank, Unknown Variable. Examiner Arakawa wrote it down."
"Yes," said Administrator Hane. "He did. The problem," she continued carefully, "is that F-Rank Unknown Variable is not a classification that currently exists in the Registry's official field codes."
King looked at her.
"F-Rank exists," she continued. "Unknown Variable exists as a notation. But the combination creates a record-keeping situation that the system is not designed to process." She flipped to a page on her clipboard. "When we attempted to enter it into the national database this morning, the system—"
"Crashed," said a junior administrator from the back of the tent, without looking up from his own table.
"Generated an error," Hane said, with the tone of someone who preferred accurate language. "It could not place the notation into any existing category. Labor Class designation requires a confirmed rank of F. Your rank is F, which would normally trigger automatic Labor Class assignment. But Unknown Variable means the rank itself is unconfirmed, which means the trigger point for Labor Class is technically not reached. The system doesn't know what to do with you."
King thought about this.
"Is that my problem," he asked, "or the system's?"
A pause.
"It's both," Hane said, with admirable honesty.
Arakawa cleared his throat. "The Academy of Avalon's enrollment window is still open. You submitted an application six days ago—I verified this. The Academy's charter allows for exemption from mandatory Labor Class assignment in cases where an application to an approved Magic Knights institution is under active review."
"So I can still enroll," King said.
"You can still apply to enroll," Arakawa said. "The Academy's own evaluation process would then constitute your classification record." He paused. "Provided they choose to accept you."
"With an F-rank Unknown Variable on my file," King said.
"Yes."
King considered the table surface for a moment. The wood had a small ink stain in the corner—old, dark, probably from a previous examination cycle's record-keeping. Someone had tried to sand it away once and not quite succeeded.
"All right," he said. "That works for me."
Arakawa looked at him carefully. "You understand this is an unusual situation. The Academy may choose not to accept an applicant whose classification they cannot verify."
"I understand," King said.
"And you're not concerned."
King thought about the morning. The vendor's fixed back. The fountain that had overflowed twelve feet away from him. The crystal that had broken into a question mark and then vibrated like it was apologizing.
"I'm going to try my best to be a good student," he said. "Whatever they decide about the classification."
Arakawa stared at him for a long moment.
Then he picked up his pen, wrote something in the open record book, and closed it.
"We'll forward your file to the Academy intake office today," he said. "You'll receive their response within ten days."
"Thank you," King said.
He stood. Nodded to Administrator Hane. Nodded to Arakawa, who was still looking at him with the expression of a man who had aged slightly during the last twenty minutes and hadn't decided yet how he felt about it.
King walked out of the tent.
---
Outside, Sora fell into step beside him.
She had her notebook open again. She wrote for three steps without looking up.
"You handled that very well," she said.
"There wasn't much to handle," King said. "They needed a box filled in. The box is being filled in."
"Most people in that situation would have been angry. Or scared. Or both." A pause. "You were polite and patient and the only thing you asked about was whether you could still enroll."
"That's all I wanted to know," he said.
She wrote again.
"Stop writing about me," he said.
"You said that before. I didn't stop then either."
He looked at her.
She looked back, pen still moving. "You are the single most interesting data point I've encountered in this examination ground today. Possibly this week. I'm a Stillwind analyst. Interesting data doesn't happen often and I don't let it walk away."
King thought about pointing out that he was a person, not a data point. He looked at her expression—focused, completely serious, but with the particular tension of someone trying not to find something funny—and decided this was not the moment.
"What are you going to do with the notes?" he asked.
"Figure out what you are," she said.
Good luck, he thought.
"I'm a student," he said.
"You keep saying that."
"It keeps being true."
She snapped the notebook shut. "Where are you going now?"
He looked down the boulevard. The examination line had reformed at the northern plaza entrance—the replacement pillar was in place, a temporary model, slightly smaller than the original, gleaming with the sharper brightness of newer enchantment. The line was moving again. Business as usual, except for the containment crate near the tents where six officials were carefully packaging the remains of a three-hundred-year-old measurement artifact that had asked a question it couldn't answer.
"I want to see the fountain district," King said. "The civic center ones. I read about them in the transit pamphlet."
Sora stared at him. "The exam crystal just shattered. The Registry system crashed. You have a pending enrollment review with an institution that has never accepted an F-rank student. And you want to see fountains."
"I want to see seventeen fountains," King said precisely. "Fed from different sections of the mountain aquifer. The largest is four hundred years old."
A silence.
Sora opened her notebook.
Wrote one word.
Closed it.
"I have no other plans today," she said, with the air of someone making a decision they would analyze later. "The examination is done. I don't get my results letter until tomorrow morning regardless."
"So you'll come," King said.
"I'm coming to observe," she said. "Not because fountains are interesting."
"Fountains are very interesting," King said.
"They're water features."
"Fed from distinct aquifer sections. The pressure differential between the seven northern fountains and the ten southern ones should create an audible tonal difference if you stand at equal distance from both clusters." He paused. "Probably."
Sora looked at him with an expression he was beginning to recognize—the one that meant she was trying to place him in a category and the category kept moving. She wrote something without looking down at the page.
"How do you know that," she said.
"It's a reasonable assumption," he said again.
She gave him a look that was flat and knowing and said clearly: we both know that is not what that is.
King said nothing.
She tucked the notebook under her arm.
"Lead the way," she said. "To the fountains."
He nodded and started walking.
---
Behind them, in the assessment tent, Shin Arakawa was still sitting at his table. He had the record book open. He was looking at the entry he'd written.
F-Rank — Unknown Variable.
He read it again.
He turned to a fresh page and began writing the incident report—the one that would go to the Registry, to the Academy's intake office, to the administrative record for examination cycle year four-twelve. He had written hundreds of incident reports. He wrote them the same way every time: factual, sequential, unemotional.
He got to the line that described the pillar's behavior post-contact and stopped.
He looked at the page.
He looked at the containment crate where his colleagues were working.
He looked at the blank page.
The pillar, he wrote slowly, attempted to render a classification. It was not able to. The resulting event cannot be attributed to any mechanism in the current assessment framework, and I am not qualified to speculate about causes outside that framework. The examinee, King Von Deluxh, appeared unaffected by the event and expressed no distress. He asked, upon completion of the paperwork, whether he was done.
He stopped writing.
He checked his shoe, he added, after a moment. I do not know what this means. I am including it because I believe accurate records are important.
He signed the report.
He sat back.
He looked at the fresh entry one more time: F-Rank — Unknown Variable.
He turned the page so he didn't have to look at it anymore.
It didn't help.