The Academy was basically a nuclear bunker.
There was no other way to put it. The Sleeper compound was relatively small, situated in the southern part of the Academy and surrounded on all sides by training fields and parks. A low, modern building constructed from reinforced materials, most of it hidden below ground with only a couple of floors visible above the surface, the architectural equivalent of an iceberg that had decided to be practical about it.
Inside it was spacious and well lit. Hermes, Sunny and Nephis were taken to a large hall where a hundred or so young men and women were already waiting for the induction ceremony to begin. The atmosphere had the particular quality of a room full of nervous people all pretending not to be nervous, tense and excited in equal measure, voices slightly too loud, laughter slightly too quick.
Everyone was well dressed. Everyone had luggage, suitcases, duffel bags, at minimum a backpack carrying personal belongings accumulated over a lifetime of preparation. They had come from homes. Sent off by families. Prepared.
Hermes, Sunny and Nephis had come in police-issued tracksuits carrying nothing.
He recognised the looks they were getting. Haughty. Disdainful. The specific expression of people who had decided what you were before you opened your mouth, the same expression he had spent nine years learning to navigate in a boarding school full of people whose parents had more money than sense.
Legacies. Great, he thought.
He took a breath.
You have to get along with all of them. Butter them up. Your survival depends on it.
The noise of a hundred simultaneous conversations pressed against him from all sides and he felt his thoughts begin to scatter at the edges. He had never been good at social events. He remembered a college party, one of the few he had attended, standing in a corner with his back against the wall and one leg propped up behind him, phone out, pretending to be nonchalant while everyone moved around him like pedestrians skirting a puddle, adjusting their steps without ever really noticing it.
AAAAAAH. The embarrassment of it landed fresh as ever. He wanted to bash his head against something.
Calm down, he told himself firmly. This is different. These people have a different mentality. Different stakes. Different priorities. You can do this.
He looked around the room.
Sunny had apparently decided to enact his social strategy from the novel. It was going well. Hermes caught a slap, a punch, and the word pervert delivered with considerable feeling from across the hall, and decided that whatever Sunny's approach was, it was not the approach for him.
Hermes's approach was simpler.
He found the nearest person who looked like they wanted to talk about themselves and let them.
"You were a military general in your trial? That's crazy, I was just a small child in a castle who ran away when the attack started. Your nightmare must have been genuinely brutal. You must be very strong."
They were eating it up before he finished the sentence.
He moved on.
"You defended an entire village from bandits? I'm not sure I could have done that. Honestly you're making me feel like a complete coward." A self deprecating laugh. "Haha."
Eaten up. Next.
"You fought a monster and lived? A real one? That's, I mean, honestly, that really puts things in perspective."
The trick was simple. His trial had been, by any reasonable measure, easy mode. Going to a wizarding school for three days and then escaping through a hole in the floor. Compared to what he was hearing from the people around him, genuine combat, genuine danger, genuine suffering, his experience was almost comedic.
Rather than hide that he leaned into it. Made himself small. Made them large. Let them feel the gap between their trials and his and enjoy it.
Everyone liked someone who made them feel impressive. It cost him nothing and it built goodwill he was going to need very badly in the Dream Realm.
Hopefully near a citadel, he thought, while nodding along to a story about a monster three times the size of a house. Not the Forgotten Shore. Please, anywhere but the Forgotten Shore.
At some point Sunny passed him, retreating from the social catastrophe he had engineered for himself, and Hermes fell into step beside him giving Sunny a thumbs up and said proudly, "I'm a big pervert too, you know."
Sunny gave him a look.
It was the look of someone who had witnessed the bondage joke, the body as payment offer, and the proud masochistic declaration, all within the span of a single morning, and had several thoughts about being told this as though it were new information.
I couldn't tell at all, the look said.
Hermes returned to his glazing.
—
Satisfied with his performance, Sunny retreated to a deserted corner of the hall, feeling the weight of eyes following him, mockery, contempt, pity, the full spectrum of reactions a person could receive without having done anything technically wrong. No one seemed willing to stay close to him. That was fine. He didn't particularly want to be bothered anyway.
Across the hall the guy he'd come with was still at it.
Sunny watched him work the room with the detached appreciation of someone who understood the strategy and could not employ it. The approach was sound, he would have done the same if his flaw hadn't made the whole thing impossible. Butter everyone up, build goodwill before the Dream Realm scattered them all to the winds.
He looked around at the people giving him a wide berth and felt mildly aggrieved.
Still. Were their reactions really necessary? It wasn't as though he was carrying an infectious disease.
Well. Except for the Spell. But that wasn't really a disease, which everyone here should have known already.
The proud pervert had made his way to the legacies now.
Sunny watched him talk, watched their expressions shift from polite tolerance to something warmer, watched them respond to whatever he was saying with the pleased self-satisfaction of people who had just been told something they already believed about themselves. He was good at it, Sunny had to admit. Genuinely good.
After he moved on the legacies watched him go and their expressions settled back into contempt and disdain.
Interesting, Sunny thought. They like the attention but not the person giving it.
He realised he didn't even know the guy's name. His overall impression was, unique, he would say. He had survived in the outskirts by selling his body, which Sunny had gathered from approximately the first thirty seconds of knowing him. Sunny himself had been offered money for his body before and had declined with considerable feeling. He wouldn't judge the guy for making a different choice. You did what you had to do to survive in the outskirts. He understood that better than most.
He extricated himself from his thoughts and focused on reaching the corner. For some reason, Sleepers were unwilling to approach it: currently, there was only one girl sitting quietly on the bench. Sunny gave her a look.