Fall arrived, and the air grew cooler.

This semester, Maisy became less and less available. With the first half of the year passing, the end of year assessment became omnipresent. To Maisy, as a seventh year, her assessment would be the hardest and most important assessment of her entire life. While for the four boys of 427 and other first years, it was important but not life-defining, for Maisy, it meant a splintering of two possible paths. Out of the 250 people in her grade, 125 would advance and graduate, and 125 would get ruthlessly cut. Those 125 on top would become the most glorious future leaders of the entire world!

Thus, it was now a critical time. No longer as casual or carefree, she would frequently be seen during breaks with her nose stuck solemnly into an extremely complicated looking piece of text or research paper. Now that she was a seventh year, she was beyond simple textbooks and was more involved in the adult formations world. Likewise, the seventh year assessment would be less focused on fundamentals and would place more emphasis on current exciting developments from pioneering formations experts. This infinitely increased its scale and difficulty, forcing Maisy to get to work parsing through complicated publications.

Because of this, Emmet had stopped receiving literacy lessons. However, in truth, he had stopped needing them for a while now. Now that he had a solid base, he could be self sufficient and improve on his own. Even without guidance, he never stopped reading and studying his vocabulary.

Other than improving his reading and writing, he continued to debug formations with gusto, becoming even faster and even more skillful. At this point, he could debug a middle pile formation in at most two days, oftentimes in only one. One day, he even felt confident enough to dare touch an advanced formation in the rightmost pile, but with a big stop, realized he was over his head. There was an enormous difference between the middle pile and the small pile to the right. It was like going from a stick to a gun - they were two completely different things. All he could discern from the advanced formation he had happened to pick up was thousands and thousands of randomly intersecting circuits and locks, with structures completely foreign to him. Although he eventually found that many of the microcircuits were still the same, it was impossible to tell what their role was within the incredibly complex mechanism. Those who made the cut above fourth year were truly no joke!

He figured that for him, it would probably take a few years of studying and more advanced classes to be able to start debugging things of that caliber. Still, he stubbornly stared at that advanced formation for an entire day before figuring out nothing and going back to the middle pile ones. He decided he would revisit it sometime soon.

With his debugging starting to become a bit formulaic, Emmet turned his sights to other projects. He remembered he had over 5000 points sitting in his card, and couldn’t help but itch to use them. After some deliberation, he decided to build his own transportation vehicle. He had quickly grown sick of walking back and forth across the wide campus every day, and after six months, felt it was time for an upgrade.

He had a lot of confidence. These past months, he had only looked at other people’s constructions, and was itching to create his own. After fixing so many other people’s mistakes, he reckoned that he could create one on his own that was better. Thus, after a week of designing and planning, he took the trek to one of the four famed enormous formation construction centers on campus.

With one glance, could only pause to marvel. The construction center was enormous, as large as a stadium. Walking in, he saw that all throughout the complex were privates rooms for students to rent out and construct their projects. Paying ten points to rent out a room for the day, Emmet entered his own private room, a 20x20 foot space with an enormous plethora of tools racked on the wall, a twenty foot desk along the wall, and multiple slots to buy materials of all sorts of qualities and quantities. This was very much an upgrade from the workstations at Maisy’s place!

He smiled and plopped a big piece of paper onto the desk, spreading it out. It was a blueprint for a simple transportation vehicle - a sleek curved plank called a hoverboard. He had debugged a lot of them in the past few months, and so was very familiar with the structure. The concept was simple - it was basically a sleek plank of material with two basic formations within it - a floating formation to hover off the ground and a propellant formation to thrust forward. In fact, it was one of the cheapest forms of transportation available, and by far the most common. However, it was also limited - it could only hover, not fly, and if you went too fast, it was easy to fall. But Emmet didn’t plan to build just any old hoverboard. He had his own design, something with a few extra perks!

“Hehehe…” Emmet couldn’t help but chuckle lewdly to himself. He pulled out his card and walked over to the material purchasing slots. It was time to get to work!

Ten hours later, Emmet left the room, breathily carrying a brand new multicolor hoverboard. Although his face was tired, his eyes were bright. Four feet long, a foot wide, and four inches thick, it looked polished and modern, giving off a feeling of quickness. But this wasn’t just a regular hoverboard, it had been incredibly expensive! Somehow, Emmet had spent an entire 2000 points on just the materials for the thing!

For a mere hoverboard, that was unheard of! Normal quality hoverboards for retail on the market wouldn’t even be a third of that price.

The board wasn’t just arbitrarily expensive - Emmet had customized the hoverboard specifically for him, adding many extra personal features. One big aspect of that was having to compensate for his pitiful supply of mana. Any other student at the school who purchased or built a hoverboard was likely a noble, and innately had a mana pool at least ten or twenty times larger than Emmet’s. Thus, they were capable of sustaining the sizeable mana flow necessary to operate the two formations for long periods of time, and had no qualms building a barebones hoverboard that didn’t pay attention to mana costs. However, Emmet wasn’t so lucky. His mana pool was pitifully tiny. If he tried to design such a basic-style hoverboard for himself, he would likely only go two or three minutes before running completely dry out of mana and having to walk.

At this predicament, Emmet could only shake his head. Although he had at first held onto the hope that his mana was only a late bloomer, and would rapidly increase later, reality was crushing. Over the last six months, his innate supply of mana had only marginally increased by a little over ten percent. The truth was, he really had no inborn aptitude in this area. Thus, he didn’t have high hopes for his mana, and when designing his own formation, had to take in great consideration how to conserve his mana expenditure.

Over the months, this poor supply of mana had affected him in many ways - for one, when at his debugging job, he had to limit the amount of tests he did per formation. Since he had to input his mana into the formation socket to test if it worked, if he did it more than a few times in succession, he would quickly run dry of mana early in the work day. Thus, he was forced to rely on his intuition to accurately do most of the repair first, and then after he was satisfied with his work, do a test to see if it had done the trick. In some ways, this was good, because it forced him to think deeply about the nature of the repair and prohibited him from using a brainless step-by-step trial and error process, causing him to develop much better knowledge about the formations he was working with.

For this hoverboard, Emmet had taken some tips he had read about in the Introduction to Formations textbook to make modifications and accomodate his pitiful base amount of mana. Inside of his hoverboard construction were four egg-sized blue spheres, spaced out evenly along the inside of the board. These were called mana batteries, and even though they were only of the lowest grade available, they were the most expensive part of the formation, at 200 points each. They were remarkable little things - just as the name suggested, they were capable of holding backup mana storage to use as a power source inside the board, were the user to run out of mana. However, that wasn’t all - even more remarkably, they would naturally replenish themselves over time - left alone at night, they would be back to filled in the morning.

However, Emmet still wasn’t satisfied with just this, and installed a back-up plan - all along the top of the board was a clear, shiny veneer surface, looking like a layer of glass. This wasn’t a glass glaze, but in actuality was a layer of flat clear sun shingles, carefully affixed along the top surface of the board. As soon as Emmet had seen the option, his eyes had shined. He was used to using the power of the sun, and couldn’t help but be drawn to it! Similar in concept to the all too familiar sun stones Emmet had commonly used back on the farm, the sun shingles, when placed in sun light, would absorb the power of the sun to provide a power source.

However, compared to the plentiful cheap alternative that were sun stones, they were much more reliable, refined, durable, and in general of higher quality. While sun stones would oftentimes be inconsistent and would absorb sunlight at a meagerly rate, forcing Emmet to gaudily embed tens of them into his old formations, these specially crafted sun shingles would react immediately and quickly, absorbing sunlight at over ten times the rate of sunstones. These were the second most expensive part of the board, costing 100 points per square foot. Emmet had to buy four square feet for the entire top of the board. However, as long as there was sunlight, if they could constantly charge the mana batteries to full, weren’t they worth it?

These two aspects alone costed Emmet a small fortune. However, Emmet didn’t stop there. He was ambitious, and learning from Maisy, indiscriminately added several more interesting features into the board. Since he had the points, why not spend them?

As soon as Emmet had left the building, he excitedly looked down at his new hoverboard and placed his hand on it. A moment later, a meager supply of blue mana channeled into his hoverboard, and it lit up with a rainbow brilliance. Smiling, he dropped it to the ground, letting it float in midair about a foot off the ground, and then stepped onto the board. Taking a deep breath and smiling giddily, he felt adrenaline rush through his veins. He had always fantasized about doing this!

“Alright, go!” Emmet shouted out, placing both his feet evenly onto the board.

ZIP!

His hoverboard zoomed forward out from underneath him like a snake. Not expecting the sudden movement, he fell straight off and hit his tush. “OW!”

The hoverboard continued to rush forward and fell into a thick bush.

Emmet rubbed his tush and looked around embarrassedly, hoping no one had saw. He had lost his balance immediately! Why did it seem so much easier when other people did it? Was it really so hard to ride a hoverboard? He hurriedly got up and ran forward to retrieve it.

An hour later, after a great deal of practice, he finally got the hang of it. Standing crouched on top of the board and with his arms stretched out for balance, he smiled. Although still a bit shaky, he was slowly but steadily traveling along the sidewalk, the wind rustling through his hair!

“WOOOoo!!!!” He couldn’t help but shout out. It had taken a long time, and he had suffered a lot of sore falls, but he had finally gotten the gist of it! The key was to keep balance through momentum! Spotting a turn coming head, he readied himself, tilted his body, and elegantly arched the hoverboard toward the right! Whoosh... He slowly completed the turn, like an old man rounding a corner in a nursery home.

“HAHAHA!!!” Emmet cackled like a madman, enthusiastically pumping his fist. He had done it! He was riding!

“Now to test the features…” He smiled, and then slightly adjusted his flow of mana into the board.

Phuoosh! Two large wings suddenly popped out of the side of hoverboard, creating a large lift and pushing Emmet a few feet into the air. He slightly misdirected his mana once more and then the hoverboard suddenly accelerated! Emmet was lifted even higher on the flying hoverboard, so high that he was above some of the buildings!

“Whoaaa!! Ok, that’s enough,” Emmet let out a small yelp and then satisfiedly remarked, adjusting his mana flow back and causing the wings to shiver back into the sides of the hoverboard. With the lift gone, he began to dive back down. He eyes turned forward, where he saw a large fountain filled with water - there were several glorious fountains spread out across campus depicting the glorious old formations masters, and this was one of them, its pool of water stretching over a hundred meters.

Emmet approached closer and closer to the fountain water, not slowing down a bit!

Splash! The hoverboard hit the water, bobbing down for a moment, before Emmet further adjusted his mana and the hoverboard shifted into a boat shape. “Boat mode!”

PLUPLUPLUPLU! A little rudder appeared at the bottom of the hoverboard, directing the hoverboard’s direction forward, and a little mechanical propeller appeared and began to push the hoverboard forward.

“Beams, on!” Emmet yelled, and within moments, the hoverboard had lit up with a multicolor radiance and was shooting several beams up, shrouding him in nourishing light. Emmet couldn’t help but let out a sigh of satisfaction, feeling the invigorating rays flow through his veins. Any other person would have deemed putting array features into a hoverboard a tremendous waste of resources, but Emmet had decided to go all out an implement them in his. Although it took some complex circuiting to fit them all into this tiny board, it was worth it! Unknowingly, Maisy’s principles had wiped off on him.

“Nice!” Emmet was overjoyed. All of the features worked correctly!

Humming a happy tune, he exited the fountain and sped along back toward his dorm.