Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,16
“IMs, music library, electronic library, class stuff, yadda. You can reserve physical stuff at the bricks-and-mortar library from here if it’s not on the server. Some Oakhurst weirdness. This is the gateway to the real Internet, but don’t get your hopes up: we’re not allowed to have Facebook or LiveJournal or a Hotmail account or anything like that. If they find out about it—and they will—it’ll get nuked and your ass will be grass.”
Spirit blinked at that. “But—why?”
“Because they’re fascist pigs,” Muirin said.
“It’s a school rule,” Addie said, shrugging. “Murr-cat knows perfectly well there are a lot worse rules Oakhurst could have.”
“They made me cut my hair,” Muirin said darkly.
“It was blue,” Addie explained to Spirit. “And it looked really awful. They did their best with it, but it was cooked—you know darn well it was, darling Murr, don’t glare at me—and the Code says you can’t have dyed hair or extensions. So all they could do was cut it really short and keep cutting it until they got all the dyed bits out. I don’t see why you ever dyed it, really. It’s such a gorgeous color.”
“Easy for you to say,” Muirin said sulkily. “Anyway, Addie’s going to say we should give you the tour now, so let’s go.” She bounced to her feet and strode toward the door. “Well, come on! What are you waiting for?”
Spirit shrugged. Addie had already gotten to her feet, so Spirit followed the two of them out into the hall, and found herself whisked around a tour of the grounds and school buildings.
Behind the original mansion—she’d thought it was part of it until Addie said it was an addition—was the classroom building. While on the outside it was the same architecture, on the inside it was completely modern. Clearly no expense had been spared. Spirit wondered why they’d gone inside at all—Muirin and even Addie didn’t strike her as being the type to go into raptures over homework. Then they reached the end of the hall, and instead of going up, they went down.
“All the good stuff is down,” Muirin said, and laughed.
One side of the basement had doors just like on the floor above (except that these didn’t have panes of glass in them so you could see what was inside); but the other had doors spaced much closer together, as if the rooms were much smaller. Each of those doors had little lights above them, and about half of those lights were glowing red.
“These are the magic practice rooms,” Addie explained. “People aren’t always good at control.” A muffled thud from inside one of the rooms emphasized what she had just said. Spirit felt her eyes widening.
The rest of the tour included what she had seen from the train—the gym, the theater, the indoor pool, the stables, the tennis courts, the athletics field. It also included something she hadn’t seen from the train—an indoor and outdoor shooting range. That also made her eyes widen a little. She thought of Loch’s opinion of guns and hoped that shooting wasn’t mandatory.
“Why all the sports stuff?” she asked, as they headed back to the main building.
“Well, it’s not like we have the usual sort of teams that play against other schools,” Muirin replied with a smirk. “That’s partly because we’re kind of too isolated to play any other private schools, and I think the public school over in Radial doesn’t want to play against us. Doctor Ambrosius is serious about being fit and about encouraging competition though, so we play against ourselves.”
Spirit could well imagine why the Radial public school wouldn’t want to play against a school like Oakhurst. Oakhurst even taught fencing! There’d been four people in white outfits and disturbingly android-looking masks fighting in there when they’d passed the door. It was the first time Spirit had ever seen a fencer in person.
In between bits of explanation, Addie and Muirin filled her in on most of the rules. Except in the worst winter weather, uniforms were mandatory during school hours except for sports. For sports you either wore the special gear—like fencing stuff, or riding stuff—or sweats in Oakhurst colors. For most classes, skirts and blazer were required for girls, but there were several different styles and colors of skirts—including the plaid-with-pleats that Addie was wearing—and if you were doing something where you might end up rolling around on the floor or getting dirty, you wore trousers. On any day you were studying Grammery, you wore trousers.