14. Rain, Umbrellas, and Uniforms

Agatha's whole existence could be summarized by one word.

Drenched.

The caravan had stopped at the outskirts of the capital, and whilst riding the carts was one thing, no one would pay for an inn stay for her. Every time that they stopped at an inn for whatever reason she either stayed at the stables or in the cart. Which was more than fair. She was already thankful enough for their assistance; there was no need to spend money on unnecessary lodging.

But it was a downpour outside.

Between having to sleep again on a stable – which was also bound to be drenched if just by the humidity alone – or weathering the rain and making it to her promised cozy academy dormitory, Agatha took the latter gladly.

She had a coat to protect herself against the elements, but the wind and the rain were quite strong, so she got pelted by thousands of cold and angry drops of water as she rushed to the Skyscraper Academy.

At least this whole situation had the advantage that her destination was trivially easy to find. Unfortunately, she couldn't take in the sights of the flying structure as Mother Nature was hellbent on making the journey miserable till the end.

Agatha skittered across the empty and flooding streets of Knight's Ascent with her sapphire blasting the Light command as it hung from her neck. Never before had she been this thankful for Mister Krugger's necklace.

Being wet was bad, but the worst of all was the cold. She was trembling hard, and because the streets were dark with all these storm clouds, she couldn't command her agate to heat herself, otherwise she might die from a broken neck before dying from hypothermia. Never before had she felt so badly the limitations of a single agate.

The girl thought of sliding on the streets as they slightly slopped downwards but quickly thought against it for many reasons. A wet ass was one of them, but she was more preoccupied with the massive stream of water that had formed on the road, and she was fearful that she might fall from the sidewalk if she were to do such a stupid enterprise.

Her suffering was mercifully cut short, or at least it certainly felt like it after many weeks of slow and grueling travel, as she found herself before an expansive and tall wall. Agatha had never seen ramparts before, but the concept of such a structure was so simple from a design and utility perspective that any being could comprehend its concept instinctually, as if it were a latent idea that rested inside of everyone.

I might also have a fever, the soggy girl mused to herself as she already felt she was losing it.

The ramparts didn't have a door – well, they did, but they were made out of stone, and she wasn't sure how that was supposed to open – so Agatha decided that her best alternative was to shout.

"Hey! Is there someone there!" She shouted with all her might, but the rain drowned her voice as it threatened to do with her lungs.

There was someone out there, though, as she saw a light filtering from one of the windows of the ramparts, but they didn't seem to hear her. So Agatha took the next logical decision and unlatched her glowing sapphire before throwing it upwards near the illuminated window.

Whilst the cold light from her agate wasn't exactly the most visible kind of light in such dark weather, it was still distinctive with its blue tinges and especially powerful. The caravan had been using it for weeks now to dispel the night, after all.

Nothing seemed to happen with the first throw, but with the second one she believed she saw a shadow moving through the small window, though she couldn't be sure, so she continued to throw her agate. She caught it easily the first two times, but with the third one she slightly lost her balance. Thankfully, she recovered easily and didn't fall down, but her agate spluttered on the mud. An annoyance only as she summoned again the little sapphire on her hand without any of the mud and gave it the Light command again, but an annoyance, nonetheless.

And she was already very annoyed today.

By the fifth throw, she heard a noise. By the sixth, something moved on the periphery of her vision. It was a dark metal door that she had failed to notice before by virtue of the atmospheric darkness.

"What are you doing, girl?" A man with a uniform explained. If the uniform hadn't already betrayed his position as a soldier, the agate that floated in front of him and simultaneously emitted light was more than enough.

He also boasted another one on top of him that had been shaped widely and thinly so it acted like an umbrella, though that was less impressive. The only reason the girl wasn't doing it was because, well, she was limited to her shining agate.

"Finally, someone!" Agatha let out a sigh of relief. Exhaustion overruled any possible nervousness at the idea of having to talk to a soldier. "I want to enter."

The man frowned. "I don't think you are aware that this is a military installation, girl."

"First, I have a name. Agatha, by the way, not 'girl'. And second, yeah, I was aware. Isn't this the Skyscraper Academy?"

"Indeed."

"Then let me pass," Agatha stated with her crossed arms.

"So you are saying that you are a student?" The soldier looked at her from head to toe and frowned.

"Future student, but yes."

He sighed. "Get inside to dry a bit, and then I'll check about your claim." Then he entered back through the door he had come from.

Gladly, Agatha rushed behind him. The insides of the ramparts were a claustrophobic mess with walls barely a meter apart from each other, but it was well cozier than the outside. Relatively speaking, of course. The soldier guided her to a set of even more narrow stairs and, slowly and hesitatingly, they made their way upward.

What awaited them on the top was some sort of room that sat in the halfway point between a beacon and a watchman's post. It hosted only a table, a coat hanger, and a handful of stools, but it was better than nothing. And it was dry, which was the most important aspect by far.

"Take a seat," the soldier offered.

Agatha complied, though not before removing her drenched coat and hanging it near the room's entrance. The girl cradled her wet and cold hands together as she exhaled on top of them to heat them.

Then, suddenly, warmth.

The blond girl frowned at the change of temperature and looked around in confusion. In response, the soldier chuckled.

"You've never seen an agate vein?" He said as his eyes pointed at a part of the ground that wasn't made out of stone, but rather a very dark green big agate.

"Can't say I have," Agatha admitted. "That's what is heating up the room?"

"Yup," the soldier affirmed and took a stool for himself. "So, a future student of the Skyscraper Academy?"

"Yup," the girl answered in kind.

"Can I have your special summon? You have it, right?"

"Yeah," Agatha grabbed her travel backpack and went to grab her, but stopped midway as she was rummaging through the contents and looked at the soldier. "Wait. How do you know I got a special summon specifically?"

The man squinted and sighed with his eyes, if that was even possible. "Care to take a guess?"

"Fair 'nof." That was enough of an answer for Agatha. The girl continued to rummage through her bag, and she was grateful that nothing got soaked inside. After some finagling, she managed to get the special summon out. "Here."

"Hmm," the soldier hummed as he read the letter. "Agatha?"

"That'd be me," she nodded.

He hummed twice more as she read before handing her the letter back. "I have confirmed that this letter is genuine, but…" he took a look at the outside through the small windows of the watchpoint. "Wouldn't you like to wait for the rain to stop?"

"What I want to do right now is get assigned to one of those famed academy dormitories and instantly fall asleep the moment my head hits the pillow."

"Fair 'nof," the soldier answered in kind.

He scratched the back of his neck and groaned, then took an agate out of his pocket. That got a squint out of Agatha as she had never seen a person reach for an agate. After all, why do so when you could just summon it?

The soldier tapped on the agate before talking to it. "Got a new student here. Have someone take the lift down." Then he stored the agate back into the coat of his uniform, though she swore she saw the stored agate vibrate a little.

"What was that?" Agatha asked in a mixture of curiosity and perplexity. Seeing someone speak to an agate wasn't common, and if it happened, it was normally an indication of insanity.

"Nothing fancy," the man chuckled. "You'll learn about it at the academy. And talking about it, let's get ready. Someone will be coming to get you in a matter of minutes."

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With a groan, the soldier stood up and motioned Agatha to follow him. She was a bit unsure, maybe because she had been allowed to take a breather and now the whole magnitude of the situation was processed by her rested mind, but she also stood up and grabbed her bag and coat.

The loss of the warmth of that small room was regrettable and swiftly felt as they descended the cramped stairs, but this time she wouldn't need to get soaked in the rain as the soldier left the ramparts first and put multiple agates on top of them with the shape of a disk. Shaping an agate thinly enough to create an umbrella was possible, just tricky to do so as it required a good understanding of the Shape command and enough mass.

Agatha stepped outside and was glad to find out that the floating agate disk followed her movements.

"Whoa…" She muttered softly. Even with her single agate, it was tricky to use the Control command, yet the soldier was handling multiple of these agates without breaking a sweat. Well, I guess he's a soldier for something.

Both she and the man trudged through the mud now from the inner side of the wall until they reached the crater where the Skyscraper Academy had once rested in. The water violently rushed into the crater, and whilst the rain didn't have the most pleasant smells in the city, the odor was especially foul next to the crater.

"So," Agatha started whilst they waited for the rain, "what are we waiting for?"

"Right, you can't see it with the rain and the agate," the soldier scratched the back of his head. "Mmm, look upwards?" He expressed a distinctive lack of confidence.

Not fearing a few drops of rain – especially considering she was drenched already – Agatha took her head outside of the lithic umbrella hovering over her head and peered into the darkness. Can't see shit, Agatha mused with all the decorum she could muster in her mind before summoning her agate on her hand and aiming it upwards. That was when she saw some kind of silhouette slowly descending to their location, but she couldn't make out any details.

"Whazzat?" The girl asked, and only then did she notice how thick her accent sounded compared to the soldier's.

"The lift," he responded with his hands grasped behind his back. "It will take an actual class to explain what it is, so to summarize, it's the system that we use to move things up and down to and from the academy. Just a glorified big stone platform, really."

The soldier's explanation proved to be spot on as the platform appeared on their line of sight. It was, by all accounts, just a big slab of stone. Circular at that. Agatha couldn't see anything fancy beyond the small inscriptions and reliefs that she was mostly sure were plainly decorative as they were mostly floral in design instead of holding some sort of arcane functionality that she was too inexperienced to comprehend.

On top of the platform, another soldier waited who used the same agate umbrella trick to protect himself.

"This is the new student?" The newcomer asked.

"Yeah," the soldier next to her said. "Come on, girl. Step into the lift."

Agatha turned to face the soldier who had welcomed her, but instead of walking away, she squinted at the man with a half-pout and her feet rooted in place.

It took the man a handful of seconds before he noticed the origin of the girl's frustration. He first sighed, then scratched the back of his head before he admitted defeat.

"Agatha, could you step into the lift?"

"Gladly!" She said with an overenthusiastic and bubbly tone.

The soldier's disk followed her as she walked to the platform; her steps went from splotching messes of wet noises to powerful thuds.

"We'll see later," the soldier on the platform alongside her said to the other, then they started moving.

The sudden movement unsettled Agatha, but compared to the rickety movement of some carts during some rather poorly maintained sections of road, this was nothing.

"If I were you, I would stand away from that umbrella," the soldier said.

"Why?" She instantly got her answer as the agate umbrella was recalled, and she was slapped by a continuous film of water that had been gathering atop of it.

"Because of that," the man responded plainly, though there was a hint of a laugh on the corner of his lips.

Agatha didn't say anything; she just brooded on the rain. She hadn't worn her coat back as she thought that the umbrella would protect her the whole journey. She had been wrong. And now she was truly soaked.

"Don't stay in the rain," he stood closer to her and covered Agatha with his floating disk.

"Why?" The girl said defeatedly. "I'm already drenched."

"Oh well, the rain still seeps one's temperature away. Better not to tempt destiny."

"You could have made an umbrella for me before that happened."

"Couldn't," he corrected and Agatha squinted at him. "What? Umbrellas are expensive agate-wise, and I need to keep some agates free by regulation."

"Fractures," Agatha cursed as her eyes lingered on the horizon. They were going up, she could tell that with the pressure that the platform exerted on her knees, but it was so dark and rainy that she couldn't see much.

"Couldn't you make an umbrella yourself?" The soldier added. It was obviously a poor attempt at conversation.

"Couldn't," she reiterated as if it was the only word they knew how to say. Agatha summoned her sapphire and gave it the Heat command after she had placed it on her necklace. Considering that her sapphire got hot enough to boil water, cradling it in her hands wasn't an option. "I don't have enough agates to do so."

"I see," and he didn't pry any further, but she doubted the man thought she had a single one.

Wait, you need free agates by regulation? Agatha panicked in her mind. What if I have… only one? She didn't ask the soldier that question; she was too embarrassed to admit that, even if her whole life's mission was to make everyone see how it wasn't the quantity of agates that mattered.

The first change in the landscape Agatha saw was when their whole line of sight was covered by a massive dirt and bedrock wall. Though that sight lasted only a handful of seconds as they promptly reached their destination of the academy grounds.

Unlike the city of Knight's Ascent, which was mostly shrouded in darkness, the Skyscraper Academy boasted as much light as day. There were many agate lamps in the outdoor of the academy grounds, and from what she was seeing, they weren't made out of personal agates like it would be the case back on Malachite, but instead these agate veins.

The soldier started walking, and she followed behind, lest she wanted to be left exposed to the rain again. It was hard to make out the silhouette of the academy with all the rain and stormy clouds, but every single window of the academy shone with lights of many colors. As agates commonly produced light equal to their base coloration, that meant the academy was splashed by a myriad of colored lights, making it quite a colorful sight. Blue, orange, green, red… many were the colors that the Skyscraper Academy boasted.

Soon they reached the entrance of the academy, and whilst before everything was hidden by the darkness, Agatha's eyes almost popped out of their sockets once the door opened.

The indoors of the academy were so opulent, so opulent… that… Okay, she was literally speechless. Thoughtless, at that. There were no comparisons, no analogies, no descriptions that came to her. Just sheer, raw amazement as she was greeted by the whitest of stones and the fluffiest of carpets. She could even feel them through the toughness of her boots!

But it wasn't the architectural luxury that dumbfounded Agatha, but the human luxury.

"She needs to get her uniform and be guided to the dormitory," the soldier said to a woman.

A maid!

Yes, there was nothing special to a maid when compared to a princess, for example, yet Agatha felt more thrilled for the former. Why was that? Because the maid was serving her, of course!

As someone who had lived as close to poverty as one could be whilst having a decent life, Agatha was ecstatic about having another human being serving her, even if it wasn't her maid and just one of the employees of the academy.

The maid nodded to the man, and the soldier retreated back into the rain, leaving the girl and the woman alone.

"May I know your name, miss?"

"A-Agatha," the soaked girl stuttered as she snapped out of her fantasies.

"Understood, Miss Agatha," the maid slightly bowed. "Mine is Solventa. Please, follow me. But before that, here," the woman handed her a towel. "Could you dry yourself as we walk?"

"O-of course!" Whilst it wasn't the best maid-like behavior – it should have been the woman that dried her for her fantasies to be true – Agatha was too shy to state otherwise. A soldier might not intimidate her, but a middle-aged woman who kept her composure certainly did the trick.

Agatha was astonished by both the searing whiteness of the towel and its fluffiness. They didn't have towels back at home, only rags.

"I am afraid it is a bit late for a tour," the maid said as she walked across the impossibly luxurious corridors. "So I recommend asking a fellow student about directions. We will make our way to the tailor's quarters to get you a temporary uniform, and then I will guide you to your assigned room," she then turned back to look at Agatha. "Would you require a bath?"

"No, I'm not that soaked," she was. "I'll do fine with the towel."

"Understood," the maid nodded. "Though I recommend you use a more formal language here in the academy."

"U-understood," the woman's voice had been soft and mellow, yet the girl sheepishly trembled at that suggestion.

The tailoring room ended up being on their way to the dormitories, and even at these late hours – it wasn't that late, it was just the day that was dark today – a tailor was manning the place.

The male tailor made her remove the backpack, and even though she took her sizes over her clothes and she was used to having her sizes taken as her mother was a seamstress, Agatha couldn't help but blush. Even if the man was professional about it, this was the first time a man had touched her. At least this closely.

"Yes, this attire should be of your comfort," the tailor said after picking one navy blue uniform. "Do you want to change already? I do not recommend staying in these drenched clothes for long."

"I…" Agatha turned her head to face the maid to ask for her consent. She nodded. "Yes, I would love so."

"There are dressing rooms here," the tailor pointed with his extended palm at a wooden door.

True to his word, it was a dressing room. Like, bigger than her house's living room. And that was considering the living room was also the hall and the kitchen. Agatha wasn't unfamiliar with the concept of a dressing room as her mother had one in the house for guests, but that was a repurposed closet the size of an outhouse, not an actual, fractured room.

Hastily, Agatha slipped out of her clothes and took advantage of her nakedness to dry her body more thoroughly with the towel, which was still whiter than any piece of cloth she had ever laid her hands on.

"Uhm…" Agatha mused aloud. "Miss Solventa… are you there?"

"Yes, Miss Agatha?" A female voice said over the door.

"I know you have just given me the uniform and all, but could I ask for… undergarments?"

"At once," the maid announced before Agatha could make up any excuses, which was an earthsend as she knew that she would have said something very embarrassing out of her nervousness.

It wasn't that she had soiled them or anything. But she had been forced to wear them over many continuous days now, and they were also drenched.

"I have left them at the entrance," the maid said a while later, then she audibly walked away.

With shame burning her entire being, Agatha clutched the towel and pressed it against her chest before opening the door of the dressing room. There was, of course, no one outside. On the ground rested a pile of white clothes and a pair of black leather shoes that shone more than her little sapphire. The girl snatched them and hastily closed the door behind them.

The pile contained a camisole, panties, and a pair of long socks. All of them were white and silky. As a seamstress-in-training, Agatha melted when she touched the elaborate and expensive fabric. As a woman, she melted when she wore them.

"Ah," she let out a soft, innocent moan. "I don't think I will be able to go back to linen after this."

Not wanting to make the maid wait more, Agatha quickly donned the uniform. Whilst the skirt was too long for her liking, the outfit was overall very cute and easy to wear. She especially loved the frills on the chest area, sleeves, and hem of the skirt. They were just lovely!

Though truth be told, any fabric becomes lovely when one has sewn frills into it.

Whilst the uniform was soft as a cat's fur, the moccasins she had been given were at a completely different level. Malachite didn't have a cobbler as such, so any footwear was either fixed through guesswork or by people at the nearest village, which was why she felt like the moccasins felt soft as a cloud to her. Her boots were at death's door too, and that didn't help in the slightest.

Agatha stuffed her cloak into her bag so it wouldn't soak her new uniform, and she stepped outside the dressing room.

"Are you done?" The maid asked as a formality, because she already saw that Agatha had changed. "Here's another set of undergarments in case you need them," and the woman handed her another pile of white clothing.

"Thank you so much," Agatha slightly bowed in gratitude. Even if she was made out of the academy the next day, these undergarments alone already made the journey worth it.

And she could also probably sell them at a high price if things went south.

The maid didn't verbally respond, but she gave her a warm smile. "Let us make haste to your assigned room before it gets too late."