15. Dormitory Dispute

"I refuse to accept this!"

Christie was taken out of her reading session as a shout echoed through the walls. She decided to read a bit as it was the perfect environment with the raging rain outside, and it wasn't like she had much else to do considering that tomorrow's classes would finally start. These weeks at the academy had been rather dull, so all the nervousness in her system had long been flushed and now substituted with expectation.

"Oh, my," the girl who spoke was Shayla, her roommate, who was currently writing on the desk. "I wonder what is happening," she said with a hand pressed against her cheek.

Shayla came from a family of Intaksolfani traders, and it really showed on her darkened skin tone – though it was a bronze so light it looked like a tan under most lighting – but she had been born and raised here at Crocheta, so she wasn't a real foreigner. Most people disagreed, though. That was a concept that Christie had learned after arriving at the academy: racism. What a stupid set of ideas and beliefs.

"And why should I even care about your opinion!" Another voice shouted.

"Should we investigate?" Shayla looked at her with her citrine eyes.

"We might as well," Christie left her book on the sofa and stood up at the same time as her dark-skinned roommate.

"Your opinion matters not in the first place!" The voice that had shouted the first time replied. Christie now noticed both were female and young, though that was to be expected on this wing of the dormitories.

The conversation – if it could be called so with that much shouting – was so loud that it had garnered the attention of more fellow female students who now peeked through their doors like Shayla and Christie.

Christie couldn't see both of the girls who were shouting as one blocked the sight of the other. She recognized the back that covered the other from her height and long black hair. Veronica Alfargar. She was the oldest daughter of a rather sizeable noble family that hosted a barony. There were even rumors of a future duchy, but considering they had been spoken by Veronica herself, Christie wasn't sure whether to believe them.

There was yet another person in the corridor alongside the screaming girls. A maid. Christie recognized her as Miss Solventa, one of the caretakers of the first-year students.

"Being forced to share a room with a commoner is already an insult enough, but I adamantly refuse to be the one with the worse bed!" Veronica shouted.

"How do you even know I am a commoner?"

"You have the pitiful gait of one, of course!" The black-haired girl responded. "Considering you exude such mundanity, you should not have the better bed."

"And why should I care about that? I am not the one who assigned the beds!" The other girl protested. "And if the other bed is so important, then why hasn't a girl of your pedigree gotten it, huh? Maybe your scores weren't that good!"

"Oh!" The noble girl recoiled as if she had been slapped. Which she might as well have, just not on her face. "How dare you? You are only a rat that has made it through the cracks! You do not even deserve to be here!"

"I don't deserve to be here…?" The voice of the other girl weakened, and Christie saw her hand spasm and turn into a fist.

Oh dear, Christie thought. Will this devolve into violence?

"Miss Solventa," the hidden girl referred to the maid, albeit in a calmer manner. "I came to this academy under the assumption that all students were equal under its embrace. Am I wrong?"

"No, you are not wrong, Miss Agatha," the maid neutrally answered. "There are no benefits here by virtue of birth or class. Nobles do not possess benefits, nor commoners possess disadvantages."

Anyone with a modicum of thought would answer otherwise to that statement for many reasons, yet Christie's thoughts lingered on a previous sentence. Agatha? Out of curiosity, Christie found herself fully stepping out of her room's door. Some of the girls from the other bedrooms looked at her as if she were crazy, and maybe she was, but she needed to ascertain something.

"Then it matters not if I stay in this room and take the nicer bedroom, right?" Christie approached the congregation.

"Correct," Miss Solventa nodded.

"There we have it. Problem solved," the girl clapped without a care in the world, and Christie finally saw it. That victorious smug, that blond hair, but most importantly, that blue agate hanging from her neck.

Oh, crown in the heavens! It is her! Christie recalled that beautiful spectacle during the statal examination that now felt like ages ago. The girl who had been both a ray of sunshine and a refreshing breeze that took her breath and gaze by completing the Agatecraft examination with a single agate.

"No!" Veronica slapped the doorframe of their room. "It is, in fact, not solved!"

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How marvelous it is to find her again! I wonder if I… Christie unconsciously stepped forward a bit too much, and now the focus of the congregation was directed to her. Oops.

"Do you have something to add, Miss Valasela?" It was Miss Solventa who spoke.

Whilst the maid's interjection wasn't much of a lifeline, Christie didn't panic – or tried against so with all her might – as all the gazes now lingered on top of her. She had to make use of the maid's comment to survive being swallowed. Eat the world, she found comfort in her dearest father's words.

"I do agree that the problem is solved, but I doubt this conclusion will be satisfactory to either party," the redhead calmly stated. She even surprised herself with her composure!

"How so?" The maid inquired.

"Miss Agatha here is in her right to claim the bed for herself, and that fact is undisputable, but there will be too much friction if the status quo were to be preserved."

"Preserve the status quo?" Agatha spoke out. "I will not give out my bed if that is what you intend to do… so?" Her blue eyes seemed to finally recognize the girl in front of her, and Christie couldn't be happier about it. "You are that girl from the examination," she accused with a confused visage.

Christie didn't answer, mostly because she feared the commoner girl would lose footing in the conversation if she were to change the topic, so she simply smiled at her before continuing.

"As our fellow classmates can attest to," some girls had the decency of blushing after being referred to, "the walls of the rooms are rather thin, so if Miss Agatha and Miss Alfargar were to be left together, they would not be the only ones who would suffer, but also the rest of us."

"So, what do you propose?" Miss Solventa continued.

"There is nothing against the change of beds or rooms if both parties agree to the exchange, so I propose switching myself with Miss Alfargar."

Some of the girls spectating the conversation and the maid shot their eyes wide open, and the black-haired noble gasped.

"Maybe the Intaksolfani is better than this backwater commoner, but…" Christie's eye twitched at 'backwater' as the noble girl talked. Considering she and Miss Agatha had taken the examination in the same location, that meant they lived nearby, therefore making her a backwater… something. "Wait," Veronica snapped for their attention. "Do you have the nice bed?"

Christie pinched the bridge of her nose as she couldn't believe the audacity of the girl. "…Yes."

"I then gladly accept the deal!" Miss Alfargar responded with no shame at all. Actually, if there was a concept such as negative shame, the noble girl might be holding a demonstration for them at this exact moment. Truly breathtaking. "I will start moving at once!"

As the shameless noble rushed to her former room to gather her belongings, Shayla walked up to Christie and gave her the most exhausted gaze to have ever been gazed as she placed a hand on her shoulder. Such a gesture would not have been done in Crocheta between women – for it was too immodest – but at the same time, Shayla might have been raised as a Crochetan, but her soul lingered in Intak Solfan.

"You know, I would appreciate a warning, maybe even a talk between roommates before deciding such an abrupt change."

Christie closed in on Shayla and she whispered in her ear. "Sorry, I kind of panicked there."

"Yeah, I saw," the dark-skinned girl responded with an all-knowing and satisfied smirk. Also a charming one as she boasted a rather masculine portent. "Oh, well. You spoke the truth there, better to have her shameless ass as a roommate than hearing her screams as a neighbor."

The redhead girl gasped at that use of a word, but she didn't say anything else and gracefully accepted Shayla's mercy. She was at fault, after all.

"Having said so," Shayla redirected Christie's shoulders and her gaze to look at Miss Agatha. "You will regret being the one to move," and she pointed out the blond girl's sole bag of belongings.

Quakes and faults! Christie cursed herself as she realized that she would now have to move all her belongings. And she had way more than… well, most girls here. Courtesy of her dearest father. Even though she couldn't see Shayla's visage from her current posture, she could feel the dark-skinned girl's oozing smugness that rejoiced in her suffering.

With a small push, Shayla left her alone as she returned to her room. Christie's gaze was then again redirected to Miss Agatha, who had been exchanging words with Miss Solventa until now.

"Now that everything is fixed, I will take my leave," the maid added at the end before vanishing down the corridor.

""Uhm…"" Both Miss Agatha and Christie found themselves groaning uncomfortably before one another, both unable to come up with words.

"Thank you for defusing the situation?" The blond commoner rubbed the blue agate that hung by her neck, and she slightly and slowly twirled the thread of the pendant, the gesture demonstrating as much uncertainty as her words.

"You are… welcome?" Truth be told, Christie wasn't doing much better.

"So…" Miss Agatha lingered the 'o' for a while, almost not wanting to let it go. "You are that girl from the statal examination."

"And you are that girl from the statal examination," Christie stated likewise.

Both girls squinted at each other. Christie turned her head downwards as she was taller, whilst Miss Agatha turned it upward. They slowly squinted their eyes more and more, their gazes penetrating into each other as they became more violent as the eyelids closed more by the second. Until both of the girls' eyes became completely shut.

They burst out laughing the next moment.

Christie's laugh was a drowned exhalation, too scared of being too loud; whilst Miss Agatha's was the opposite, as she giggled with all her might, not scared to be heard but instead incentivizing people to hear her.

"Christina Valasela," the redhead presented herself with a Crocheta high-class bow as she placed a palm on the opposite shoulder and lifted the hem of her skirt with the other.

Miss Agatha blinked twice in a mixture of confusion and ponderation before she repeated Christie's gesture. "Agatha of Malachite."

"I already knew that, Miss Agatha," Christie said with a smile.

"So did I," Agatha upped the game by also smiling with her sapphire eyes.

"Well, but you did not know that my friends call me Christie," the redhead riposted.

"Well, that I did not know…" The blond girl accepted the point with grace. "Though I would prefer if you dropped the 'Miss'. It makes me… uncomfortable."

"Of course, Agatha," Christie clapped her hands next to her hands with glee.

She had feared that she wouldn't be able to make friends in the academy; she hadn't ever had ones beyond François – if that even counted – but she was surprised to find it was rather… simple. Things so far had worked well with Shayla – even if the Intaksolfani had been lukewarm at best and her company had been... minimal – and now Agatha; for if two people of the same age range were to share a laugh together, what could they be but friends? At least that was what Christie liked to believe.

And she had managed all of that friend-making without the school year even having begun!

"Though," the redhead now fidgeted her fingers before her crotch as a blush gathered on her visage, "might I ask for a bit of help?"