Gears

The room was quiet. None of the girls could find the will to speak with the threat of being sent home looming over their heads. The silence probably would have been awkward if it wasn't so oppressive, but as it stood, they all seemed to be pretending they were sitting here with no worries. Yin Xiu Lian tapped away at the controller of her gaming system, something like an old-world switch console modified to work with the new internet signal building used. Bugs was just staring up at the ceiling, kinda nodding off if the tilt of her head was anything to go by. Tip looked at her two roommates and did nothing, debated what would happen, but ultimately went back to writing her paper. Even if she was debated, which was highly unlikely considering, her thesis and ideas would get her through. They sat like that for 45 minutes, not a sound but Yin Xiu Lian's tapping and the scratching of Tip's pen as she worked on her next rough draft. The knock on the door stopped all noise, and when it opened by itself as Tip was getting up to open it, it brought all three girls, even the half-asleep Bugs, to attention. The monitor that had first come round stood in the door, and behind him stood General Amari Nike, the current director, and retired military. They saluted as they shot to their feet, the respect drilled into them coming to the surface as the legend of a woman stepped in, surveying what they had in and around the room. They were left to stand like that for a moment. " As you were. It has come to my attention that in our last power failure, Ms. Gehrig's paperwork was filed twice during a system failure, and so we have one extra Lomous than we do Luminoe. The way our system is set up, we enroll one Luminoe and one Lumous so we have the exact number we need, so this is an unusual but not unheard of occurrence. We'll re-enroll one of you next year, free of cost since this is our mistake, but we cannot keep a Lumous without a functional Lamp around, it is a liability during training missions." The two wanna-be pilots deflated at hearing this, so sure that they would be the ones going home, throwing in the towel before even putting up a fight. Tip repressed the urge to roll her eyes as she looked between the two and then back at the General. " Permission to speak, Ma'am?" " Granted." " If this is solely about function and repair, I can do those for both of them, but if this is about something else and I have overstepped, I apologize," this earned her a raised eyebrow from the vet across from Tip. Tip didn't back down, keeping eye contact as she let the General think over her words. " And what, girl, gives you such confidence?" " Was born and raised in Ivorbarrow, grew up in the mass labs, been fixin lamps since I was 7. I know the ins and outs of the models the school uses for training too, fixed a couple when I was 15 after a broken training exercise passed through. I can keep up with two lamps, all I need is the tools," General Nike seemed impressed, but something under her skin told Tip that she wasn't fully convinced. She pondered it for a minute before she looked Tip directly in the eye. " Prove it," The statement was solid, like a wall you could not pass through lest you follow every instruction given. Tip grinned wide at the opportunity to get her hands back into a Lamp earlier than she anticipated. " Your test for skipping the intro class had been postponed, but I think your skipping the intro class now rides on how well you can fix a Lamp, how fast the repairs are, and how good the after product looked. The test will be held tomorrow after lunch so I can get it all settled. This will be all, I hope you ladies rest well." And then she and the monitor were gone, clicking down the hallway loudly now that they were aware of her presence. Once they had faded, two heads whipped round to look at Tip, one with tears on the edge of her vision, and the other with shocked disbelief. Before she could even blink she was tackled onto Yin Xiu Lian's bed in a three-way hug, getting excessive praise and thanks. Tip's face scrunched up, even as she relaxed into the hug, grateful for the contact. " You don't have to thank me, but I will accept being hugged for a little longer." --... / -.. . --. .-. . . ... / -. --- .-. - .... Dinner was served that night in the form of a buffet, a thing they did at the start of every school year instead of lining MREs up on the bar and having students gamble which one has the candy they want in it. The girls of 407 sat in their room eating after coming back from the cafeteria. They didn't stick out there, at least not visually, but the feeling of being the only group not in pairs or in 4s was there, and it crept up each of their backs the longer they were there. At first, their meal was once again silent, but it was pleasant, the type of companionable silence that made eating with friends enjoyable. The silence was broken, however, when Lian, who had said they could call her that, got a high score on the game she was playing. She yelled out into the room, excitement filling her lungs so hard her arms made their way into the air. She turned to Bugs and yelled, then turned to Tip and yelled, then she showed them her game and they joined in on the yelling just to be excited with her. Bugs told a dumb joke in celebration, and they all laughed, then Tip told them a story about her dad from the workshop, the one about the only time she had seen him drop a hammer on his foot. He yelled so hard they had to replace a couple glasses. From there they dissolved into stories told and jokes exchanged. Closer to 2200, lights out, they started to wind down, prepare for bed, still cracking jokes. Once the lights were actually off though, it was quiet once again. " This is my third time applying since I graduated high school. I turned 20 this year so I did it as a little birthday gift to myself," Bugs's voice was soft, almost as if she expected the other two to be asleep, to be whispering her confession to only the open air. " This is my first time applying. I just turned 19 so I barely missed the deadline." " I thought you could apply at 18?" " Parents wouldn't let me, and I still needed to figure out my afterschool living arrangements, can't go back to their house," Lian's voice was normal volume, but dull, bad memories clogging up the usual happiness to be found there. Tip kept to herself, feeling this conversation was a bit out of her range. The last time she tried to have an emotional talk with anyone, they ended up crying so hard they dehydrated themselves, and not good tears either. The two fell silent after, no more words filled with the stars of their hopeful dreams, only the shuffling of their sheets as they settled in for the night.