The next day, Emmet woke up late. However, ‘late’ was relative. No one had bothered to tell him that class was at seven in the morning. Thus, when he awoke with a start at 6:30, the four students had already dressed and were ready to head out. They didn’t think of awakening the squires. After all, why would they need to go to classes?

Emmet had to hurriedly brush his teeth and throw on some clothes before chasing the boys out. However, the boys were cutting it close too and traveled quickly, so it was hard to close the long gap. Halfway there, after Tauruk split off into some small alley, Emmet lost him. Although he spotted a trace of him a few minutes later way far in the distance, after that, he was completely left behind. Not knowing his way around the school, only some vague name of a building he couldn’t read, Emmet had to weave through dizzyingly winding alleyways for more than a mile, getting lost numerous times, before he finally found the place. At this point, he was more than an hour late.

The hallway was silent when he stepped into the corridor of the large academic building. Clearly, everyone had already found their classes and thus, no one was left roaming through the halls. Finding the door to the lecture hall, labeled with “Fundamentals of Formations,” Emmet took a deep breath and then quickly pushed open the door.

“...and as you’ve probably learned from your previous studies, this fatal flaw is why we largely design using Alivarian-style microcircuits today.”

Creaaaakkk…

The door loudly creaked open to a massive lecture hall with over three hundred students. Right in front of Emmet was the professor, who stopped his lecture and turned to stare at him.

The room turned silent as everyone followed the professor’s gaze and scrutinized the new arrival. The silence was deafening.

“Ah… ah…” Emmet gulped, scurrying to the side and hurrying to find an empty seat. Unfortunately, the entrance was in the front side of the room, right next to where the professor was speaking, causing him to become the center of attention. Furthermore, the door creak had been so loud that it had interrupted the entire class, so virtually everyone was staring toward him.

Emmet walked past four filled rows of note-taking students before finally finding an empty seat and hurriedly sitting down, completely out a breath. What a way to make an entrance!

“Mr. Late arrival, now that you’ve so rudely interrupted me, care to answer the question?” The professor’s harsh voice rang out.

Emmet looked around for a moment before realizing the request was targeted toward him. He quickly stood in attention. “Ah… huh?” He stuttered out, his face turning red. “Qu… question?”

The professor clearly wasn’t pleased, his eyebrows furrowing. The tone of his voice turned impatient. “My question was: what is the fatal flaw of Coriander’s recursive threading design that caused the collective switch to Alivarian-style microcircuits?”

Emmet’s face was totally blank. His heartbeat grew quicker and heavier, the thuds slamming against his heart like a hammer. Cordiander… recursive threading… Alivarian-style microcircuits... He had never heard any of those words before! What the hell was he talking about?

After a few moments of silence, the professor repeated his question. “I said, what is the fatal flaw of Coriander’s recursive threading design? Do you know the answer? This is formations 101. If you don’t know the answer to something as simple as this, you honestly shouldn’t be at this school.”

Emmet could only lower his head in shame. “...I’m sorry, I don’t know.”

The professor rolled his eyes and turned toward back to the board. “In the past, Coriander’s recursive threading design was largely sufficient for most designs, but in truth, was able to achieve only amortized constant time, instead of true constant time. While with a sufficiently sophisticated hash function, it was able to achieve constant time with over a 99.5% certainly, no hash function is perfect. When an already hashed mana bucket is inevitably hashed to again, a collision occurs, creating significant delay. However, with Alivaria’s design, through the use of dynamically allocated multi-layered pockets, although there is significantly greater overhead, we are able to achieve true constant time without the use of imperfect hashing. This is superior for the vast majority of applications.”

The professor continued on with his lecture on the details of Alivaria’s microcircuit design for another two hours before finally assigning the homework and ending for the day. The clock struck time and all the students all stood and packed their stuff.

But Emmet still sat there, a blank look in his eyes. He didn’t understand anything.

Coriander… Alivaria… recursive threading… multi-layered pockets…?

In one lecture, Emmet didn’t learn a single thing. Not one thing. Not about Coriander recursive threading design, not on Alivaria’s ingenious multi layered pocketing, not about any of it! The words just went in one ear and left the other. If he couldn’t understand even half the words, how could he even begin to get a grasp of it?

And these were apparently the very basics. These were things that a formations student would learn in their very first year they were introduced to the material. All of this was just review.

In truth, Emmet was just a simple farm boy. He had never had a proper education. Before this, he had spent all of his time either doing farmwork, beating up animals, or tackling problems in his book. How could he possibly recognize what the professor was talking about? Just three months ago, he hadn’t even known what the word ‘formations’ was, for pete’s sake!

Emmet was so engrossed in his thoughts that he didn’t see a slightly frowning Tauruk exit the room.

It was only a minute later that Emmet looked around that realized that most of the students had already left. Scanning around the room and realizing Tauruk was gone too (earlier, Emmet had spotted him among the students), he hurriedly stood and rushed out the door. However, even after scanning up and down the block, he couldn’t see where Tauruk had gone.

“...ugh…” His heart sunk. He didn’t know the way back! Now that Tauruk left without him, he would have to navigate on his own.

For a moment, he was tempted to take a shuttle. However, he quickly shook his head. He was already a squire, and only had 200 points. It was barely enough for food! If he started splurging now, he might even starve later in the year. If that happened, he had doubts Tauruk would bother to lend him any if he needed it.

Funneling out of the lecture hall and out into the street, Emmet looked left and right, his confusion growing deeper. It all looked the same! What direction did he come from, again? That morning, he had been so flustered from being late that he had failed to put the path into his memory.

Luckily, there was a campus map on the corner of the street and he quickly walked over to examine it. After five minutes, however, his hopes were dashed. This campus map was just as confusing as the lectures. Nothing was intuitive - the labeling, the language, the diagrams. Emmet suspected that this might be yet another test to hone students’ skills. Or maybe, it was because he had virtually no experience with maps, so he wasn’t familiar with the structure and couldn’t interpret it at first glance.

After spending another ten minutes just standing there in front of the map, Emmet began to feel weird so he resolutely picked a direction and began to walk. Although he wasn’t fully confident it was the right direction, things around him seemed kind of familiar from the walk over that morning, so he continued to walk.

Time passed, and Emmet grew more and more confused. How come things had seemed familiar just a block ago, but now it seemed completely foreign? But when he would backtrack in the other direction, it would seem just as foreign.

Any time he saw a map by the side of the road, he would stop and check. However, all of the maps were confusing to read, and all of the buildings looked similar, so it was hard to tell if he was really heading in the right direction.

Half an hour soon passed. Emmet began to sweat.

Even when he thought he was going the right direction, he was disoriented. There were few markers showing the direction, and even when there were, Emmet could never be sure that they were what he was looking for. At the core, he was just a simple farm boy. What experience did he have with navigating a cityscape? He couldn’t even read, and could only just guess from the diagrams on maps he would see.

For a long time, Emmet roamed down streets in seemingly random directions according to various street maps. However, he would frequently end up in the same place, or in some place completely wrong. Eventually, he went farther and farther away, until he barely recognized any of the buildings anymore...

Two hours later, Emmet looked up into the sky and accepted his fate. He was lost.

Even though the map was confusing, after some interpretation, he had thought he knew the way. One building on the map had a shiny red 3C on top of it, so Emmet had assumed that was his dorm building. Yet, when Emmet reached it, or when he thought he reached it, he saw no such building. Thus, he tried to turn and navigate to another promising large building, which turned out to be some kind of training facility and not his dorm. He repeated this process over and over, his hope and energy fading slowly. It was five plausible destinations later when Emmet realized that his initial navigation was faulty, and he had not actually reached that building labeled ‘3C’ the first time around. From there, his direction got worse and worse, until he was completely out of place.

Now, there weren’t even any street corners with maps. The buildings were smaller and sparsely spaced out, and there was large amounts of open fields grasslands. He didn’t know if he was even on the school campus anymore.

Emmet couldn’t help but become more and more frazzled. He looked around and everything seemed dizzily larger, more maze-like. The buildings were tall, the spirit lamps unidentifiable-y identical, and the streets frantically winding.

Suddenly, everything hit him at once. He paused his step, and the world revolved staggeringly around him. A panicked realization reached him.

He was stranded, completely alone. He was 5000 miles away from home in some massive foreign city with no friends and no family. The only person he knew, Tauruk, pretended not to know him. Further, he just wasn’t smart enough for this school. He didn’t even know how to read, and couldn’t understand a single thing from class. Now, in a foreign campus even bigger than the biggest town near his home tribe, he was completely and utterly lost, and there would be no one to help him.

All at once, he wanted to give up. He just wanted to go home - this was all a mistake! Tauruk was right - he was just a fluke, and had one lucky break. It didn’t mean he was actually talented, or had actual potential. What did Torhah possibly see in him? It was clear he didn’t belong to this world, he was just a dumb farm boy. This ‘formations’ stuff was way over his head. A ‘genius’? What a laugh!

But it was too late. He was already so far away from home. If he wanted to leave by himself, he would have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than gathering the funds for the trip.

Loneliness. Emmet felt a loneliness beyond words. He put his hands to his head and looked down, rocking back and forth.