Charlotte Wick sat in her sturdy bamboo hut during one of their routine meditation hours and used a piece of charcoal to gently shade the arcing line on the page beneath her. She kept her breathing slow, careful not to upset her current project. Almost instantly, she frowned down at the paper and used her furry wrist to rub away some of the charcoal that wasn’t quite what she wanted. Then she began again, holding the piece of charcoal with only the tips of her claws, barely daring to blink as she tried to capture the perfect curve of Overseer Helen's cheekbones.

It was a fruitless venture, of course. Her dozens of failed attempts scattered across the floor of the hut would testify to that. But it was in seeking perfection that living beings could find meaning. This was one of the few things she had learned from her grandfather that she agreed with.

Most individuals seemed to assume that there was some perfectionist streak within the descendant of Commandant Wick that made her work so hard to create a secure house for herself. Others opined that she wasn’t as strong as she wanted them all to think and needed to hurry back to the enclosed hut in order to hide how nearly Charlotte was coming to pieces after each training session.

The point of the housing is a place of rest, Charlotte shook her head slightly as she tried to find a non-charcoally spot on her paws to rub away a stray stroke. Why should they care if I use the house for its intended purposes? The recruits should spend this extra energy training...

After five days of grueling work, despite how exactingly exhausting the training underneath Head Drill Sergeant Ghosthound was, most of the recruits were starting to force themselves to skip some of their 'meditation' time to network, gossip, and recruit. They played at being their ancestors, with enough influence and power that their connections and words mattered. They were children wearing formal suits and ballgowns several sizes too large.

To Charlotte, whose grandfather had long laid bare all she could ever be to him, they seemed so foolish and shortsighted. Of course, Charlotte was also wasting this time. Yet for whatever reason… she couldn’t bring herself to care. To Charlotte, nothing was as fulfilling as the act of drawing Overseer Helen.

Charlotte leaned back from her paper and chewed on her lip briefly. She was currently trying to capture the grace that Helen displayed while fighting. The sketch on the page was Helen spinning around, with that look of incendiary determination on her face that seemed to consume all of Charlotte's waking hours. Even now, with such an inferior copy sitting in front of her…

She licked her lips.

As someone who had never felt much of the slightest flutter from her heart while regarding the physical form of the opposite sex but had always been told the passion would come in time, this matter was profoundly disturbing to Charlotte. Not so disturbing that, once she had a secure home, that she hadn't spent all of her spare time sketching the... object of her obsession. But Charlotte did feel deeply scandalized that the woman who seemed to have infected her subconscious was largely hairless, like a newborn. It was... unnatural to Charlotte's people.

During coitus, Overseer Helen was undoubtedly sweaty and slick, like a fish or a slug. The thought made Charlotte Wick shudder. She licked her lips again.

Outside her hut, several groups of people were talking fiercely at one another, in a fierce debate over something pointless. There were brief flashes of emotion-laden with threat between the groups, but no actual fight broke out between the two sides. This forbearance was less because the Overseers cared at all if they fought; usually, they encouraged the competition and reward the victors. The real reason the recruits didn't fight was that they had no gas left in the tank. If they fought now, today's training would be a miserable marathon of physical fitness, image shaping underneath a suppression field, and sparring against the instructors.

With twenty long hours until their next break. That gulf kept them snarling but harmless.

Clicking her tongue, Charlotte regarded her most recent sketch critically. The great tragedy was that Charlotte had never been present when Overseer Helen had actually fought. She had seen the gorgeous Overseer walking around and lecturing, but that was the extent of their interaction-

Charlotte looked sharply up. A group was boldly approaching her hut. She quickly threw herself to her feet and stored away her charcoal and sketch paper within a rudimentary bamboo chest she had made. Meanwhile, she was internally lambasting these roving political press-gangs. How quickly you've forgotten that before the Fifth Cohort was invaded, you were nothing but trash to those with true power. Just like your parents and their parents before you, the true players in the Nexus would have praised you endlessly and rewarded you with crumbs, never allowing you the opportunity to become anywhere near as influential as you seem to think you are.

And now, for the first time in hundreds of years, we get the chance to be something. To train underneath someone who could give you control of your fate. And all you can think to do is mimick your oppressor...? Peh.

As the group arrived before her hut, Charlotte opened her door and walked out. It wasn't currently raining, but a low mist hung over the Eastern portion of the training grounds. After five days of nourishing energy, the ground was covered with a thick layer of grass. The transformation was jarring. With such heavy and isolating banks of fog rolling through the Rally Station and the consistently brutal training, Charlotte felt unmoored for the first time in her life. It was easy to forget what her life had been like to this point; the hard, moment to moment struggle of the training made everything else seem like a dream. As she stopped before the approaching group, the soft stalks of grass seemed to buoy her upward.

The bamboo forest rustled as an invisible wind leisurely swirled overhead.

The current Charlotte was even so bold as to tenderly draw Overseer Helen, the consequences of which... well, she tried not to think about it. Nevertheless, it was the freest she had ever felt in her life. Yet as she looked at the group of four that walked up to her hut, she was filled with an irrational anger.

Didn't they understand the opportunity they were now being given? So why...?

Why try and stamp out the otherness of this place and pollute it with the mundane?

"Is there a problem?" Charlotte said coolly as she weighed the group through narrowed eyes. She recognized the leader of the group, if only by reputation. After the first day, which seemed designed to give the Overseers a holistic understanding of the recruits, the training had drastically shifted. Currently, aside from the horrible physical fitness and image critiques, most of their training was being summarily beaten down by assistant overseers. However, it quickly became apparent that there was a hierarchy amongst the Overseers. Charlotte, for example, was part of the top group, that faced a rotating mixture of twenty or so Assistant Overseers that could rather casually suppress even the best recruits.

Meanwhile, Djark Quewn, the red-scaled draconian who strode confidently up to her hut, belonged in the second group. He was still incredibly capable, but not one of the truly elite individuals in the elite camp. Djark favored her with a wide smile, refusing to acknowledge her tone. "Hello, Miss Wick. I was wondering if you had made a commitment to a group for the wargames yet? I think you will find that no other group can support an individual of your caliber as well as my group can. Together-"

"I'm not interested," Charlotte said sharply. Then she walked past the group and toward the path. Generally, she found that a firm answer was the best way to deal with desperate individuals like this. Because there could be no other explanation for why Djark would try and rope her in with such a baseless promise than desperation.

Even he should know that she had no reason to waste her time with him.

As she walked past them, there was a slight stirring in the air: Djark's sharp fury radiated outward a few meters from his person with something close to a sharp temperature increase. One of the largest surprises in the Ghosthound's training regimen was the emphasis on emotions. But the results spoke for themselves; being conscious and purposeful about how emotions related to your image had paid dividends to many of the individuals in the training camp, Djark and Charlotte included.

But of course, the distribution of those harvests wasn't even.

Without much effort at all, Charlotte sensed that emotional outburst, located it in the surrounding Aether, and took great pleasure in smothering it. She continued walking away, leaving a fuming but helpless Djark Quewn behind her. There was already a stark divide between the first group and the second group in terms of capability that was growing by the day. The combination of intense training and rejuvenating mental energy helped those who were already the most powerful grow even more dominant. There were exceptions, but it was for that reason that Charlotte was so dismissive of Djark’s offer; even in his play-world, he didn’t possess the capital to sway Charlotte Wick.

But she refused to think deeply and waste further time. Instead, she resolved herself to go for a walk to organize the clutter of her thoughts. She didn't have a destination in mind, so Charlotte simply wandered through the housing and garden area and examined the surrounding growth. Even now, the whole experience was slightly surreal. Out of the already vibrant grass came an explosion of color, fruits, and vegetables in the designated garden plats. The juxtaposition of violence and gardening seemed like a strange combination, but one that attempted to balance out the horrible truth of being in the military.

Charlotte slowed down to examine a few bright magenta and burnt-orange daffodils that proudly thrust themselves up from an extremely well-maintained garden. But no sooner did she slow her speed to linger and delight in the bright eruptions of color than she sensed a vigilant individual within the nearby shelter lock onto her position. Being more adept with their new utilization of emotions than the occupant within, Charlotte could feel their worry and suspicion about her presence.

Perhaps for entirely different reasons that she, the resident was uneasy. Because in the pretend world that the recruits were partaking in, the individual within couldn’t resist an invite. If his political backing outside of the camp was weaker than the other party, he would have no choice but to agree to another’s demands.

We fracture so quickly. Like cold glass in abandoned windows.

With a small sigh, Charlotte wound her way forward through the eclectic mix of gardens; she felt no need to be a source of stress for a fellow recruit. But at the same time, she felt a persistent melancholy that there existed very little comradery between the various recruits. Part of it was play-acting that so many engaged in, but part of it was also the lack of cohesiveness that the Ghosthound forced upon them. They did physical training together, but they were generally split up to work on their individual images during the bulk of the training.

In their free time, each recruit had a shelter to erect and a garden to cultivate. There wasn’t any communal building, like a typical mess haul. It meant there was very little forced exposure, which might engender some sense of comradery. Most of Charlotte's information about her fellow recruits came from the few spars she had been able to witness.

Of course, that was supposed to change soon: the Overseers had already announced that wargames would start to occur as part of their daily training after the challenge against another Drill Sergeant's recruits at the end of the week. And the reason that individuals were approaching Charlotte was that Overseer Helen had hinted that construction would be a significant portion of the wargames.

As Charlotte remembered how close she had been standing to Overseer Helen when the perfect, near-hairless specimen had been delivering the news, she couldn't help but flush. Her leather armor had truly been so perfectly fitted to her body that Charlotte's imagination had easily been able to supply the likely elasticity of her bare skin. If Charlotte could someday draw her claws across Helen's-

BOOOOOOOOOOOM!

As one, all of the recruits who were currently on the rest part of their rotation raised their heads and looked toward the source of the large noise. A ripple ran through the lingering mist over the garden area. But when there was no announcement came from the Overseers, most recruits gradually settled back into their recovery time. By this point, solely using their image to move had become second nature to all the recruits, but they still relished the chance to simply exist for a while without straining their image. Very few were willing to tire themselves out unnecessarily to witness what was probably just a spar between a recruit and one of the assistant overseers.

Yet Charlotte was one of those individuals. After a brief hesitation, she started walking toward the central training area, despite the fact she had another hour of rest and meditation remaining. All image reverberations were completely muffled by the Ghosthound's influence on the surrounding area, but a noise that loud could not have been made casually. Likely someone already powerful had a breakthrough in their image and were now taking out five days of frustrations on their sparring partner.

Charlotte both wanted to know who it was… and to know how the Overseers would handle it.

BOOOOOM!

A smaller explosion echoed outward and Charlotte increased her pace. She waded forward through the thinning mist that radiated out of the bamboo forest and quickly arrived at the central training area. There, it was easier to sense the image reverberations that still remained in the air from the collision. And even more than that, a very familiar cackle echoed out through the space: the recruit who had experienced a breakthrough was DiOrtho Vant, the individual who was already the most capable of the recruits.

Vant's shirt had been completely blown away, revealed the dusky skin of his torso as he clearly struggled to breathe. Yet his face was warped with a triumphant expression beneath his curling ram’s horns. "Aha! Take that! I don't need your shit advice about my image anymore, you-"

Crunch.

Charlotte Wick's gaze could barely follow the movements in front of her. For a split second, her mind refused to believe what she was actually seeing. One minute DiOrtho Vant was leering with a wide smile on his face over a fallen Assistant Overseer and the next Helen was there, her fist brutalizing the fragile bones of his jaw. Vant flew backward, skidding across the ground like a stop across a still lake, and eventually slamming into one of the training spheres around the central bell. The Engravings of the sphere immediately flared to life, reinforcing the construction, so Vant was stopped dead.

His body bounced against the ground and rolled a few times until his momentum was completely dispersed.

Charlotte looked on with a thundering heart and sweaty palms as Helen folded her arms behind her back and walked over toward Vant. "We are here to teach you the capacity for violence, it is true. And your quick adaption is a testament to our talent as instructors. However... it is with great disappointment that I note you have continually ignored the lessons on respect that you have experienced. You are out of warnings, Mr. DiOrtho Vant. Today is a punishment."

"Hehe," The recruit forced himself to his feet. When he was standing, he wiped some blood away that was dripping from his lips. "What do I care if you beat me? I can survive it. Your Ghosthound puts up a tough act, but he wouldn't actually endanger any of our lives. As long as just one of us gets hurt… won’t the rest panic? He will lose his-"

Again, there was a stuttered juxtaposition of two moments in time that Charlotte's senses couldn't quite catch. Somehow, Overseer Helen had crossed the distance between them and her spear was sliding beneath Vant's breast bone with all the smooth surety of a spoon dipping into soup. His flesh didn't present even the slightest impediment to Overseer Helen's thrust.

Then Helen ripped the spear out then in a brutal movement that tore open Vant's chest and she spun around, bringing her heel toward his temple. Although Overseer Helen's speed was overwhelming, Vant managed to react in time to bring up his guard. Charlotte watched as his forearms cracked but didn't shatter from the kick. Vant stumbled several meters backward, but his expression hadn't changed.

“Keh, like I said- guhk?!”

Overseer Helen slid her spear into DiOrtho Vant’s heart. His eyes flared out widely.

At this point, Charlotte couldn’t deny that she was somewhat aroused. That look of recognition on Vant’s face as he realized that Overseer Helen could kill him any time she wanted...The fear and dread in his expression… Charlotte gripped her arms as tightly as she could, digging her claws into her own flesh. Yet somehow, she couldn’t tear her eyes away.

Charlotte wasn’t sure what would happen next. But then there was a soft pulse of an image from the Ghosthound’s tower. Something that Charlotte couldn’t quite identify began to seep outward into the surrounding air.

Instantly, the fear on Vant’s face vanished. His sneer came back just as quickly. “Aha! See? Stop, mad dog, before your master disciplines you-”

“Oh shut up,” Overseer Helen rolled her eyes and brought the butt of her spear around. She smashed Vant’s head into the ground with enough force that his scalp was ripped, revealing a cracked skull beneath. Then she gestured to a nearby Assistant Overseer as she skewered Vant with all the lazy indifference as if she was poking a cube of cheddar cheese with a toothpick. “Take him and throw him in the second training orb. I need to go figure out what Randidly is up to…”