“Yeah, Ferrith said as much, but he never told me what that actually means.”

“That is not surprising. Most rissians do not understand what we do. Heretical, they call it!” She huffed a breath, letting me know what she thought of that. “We simply strive to better understand the rules of the magic our world depends on to function. The church turns their nose up at what we do, but they still travel by Porter like everyone else.”

“Oh?” I said. “So you make stuff like those tree Doorways I used to get here?”

“No. That would be the Construct College. I am a member of the Shaping College. That is why I wear a blue streak in my hair.”

That explained why such an uptight person would put color in her hair at all. “So what does this ‘Shaping’ have to do with me?” I asked. “I mean, you did bring me here so you could study me, right?”

“Only with your consent, Mr. Koutz. You can leave at any time and we will supply you with a ticket through the Porter’s network to anywhere you wish to go. What we would like to understand is the nature of your life; what experiences you’ve had, what desires motivate you. Mine is a new field of study in which we try to understand the relationship between one’s upbringing and the Skill they eventually manifest, with the goal of manipulating the process towards specific abilities. Unlike my colleagues, my focus is on intelligent creatures from other worlds. By making comparisons to the vast collection of observations on rissians, I have built several new theories. Outworlders like you are the only ones we can be sure gained their Skills with no cultural knowledge of what Skills are.”

Clarice led me around a corner and a tall, oddly shaped building came into view. It sort of looked like five or six interconnected buildings. A central, circular tower was the tallest, with others branching off almost like the arms of an octopus. The multi-faceted tower had windows where I could see brief blips of movement from people working under artificial light, even at this late hour. Each arm of the metaphorical octopus appeared to be painted a different color—black, white, blue, red, yellow—though I could only see parts of the structure where light shone out from the windows.

“So, am I basically a control group?” I asked Clarice. She turned her head slightly to look at me.

Clarice raised a single, precisely manicured eyebrow at my statement. “You know of control groups?” she asked. “Define them.”

“What? You don’t think I know what that is? You’re studying how knowing certain things can affect the Skill someone develops, right? So I didn’t know anything. That means you can make what you learn about me a sort of baseline for whatever you do to other people.”

“A crude analogy, but not entirely inaccurate. Where did you learn these principles?”

“That’s a pretty basic part of the scientific method. That’s right up there with the placebo effect for things that are just common knowledge. I think I probably learned about it in high school.”

“Interesting,” Clarice said. “You remind me of Brookie. I think I will enjoy conducting your interview tomorrow.”

“Who’s Brookie?”

“The only other ogre Mr. Gaze has brought us who was able to string together more than a single coherent sentence. I will tell him about you. But that will come tomorrow. We have reached the campus and I would like to get you settled in the room you will be staying in. We will be in the blue wing.” The buildings of the city came to an abrupt end as we passed under an archway. Smooth concrete became a well-worn dirt footpath through a lawn of trimmed yellow grass. The main path we entered the campus on continued straight to the central tower. Clarice turned us onto a branching path that led right, towards the base of one of the attached L-shaped arms of the enormous building. The bits of the building I could see were painted blue.

Clarice led me to an outbuilding. It was tucked up against the back side of the blue branch of the university’s tower. It almost looked to me like a disused tool shed.

“Here we are,” Clarice said, stopping before it. “I had these quarters specially made to accommodate ogres. They will be… large for you.”

“Looks that way,” I said, looking up at the door. It was practically just a hinge that pulled away the entire face of the building.

“Some ogres are taller than others. You are the smallest we’ve had, by some measure. Brookie was the smallest before you. I will be interested to see what correlations we can draw from your size.”

“How many ogres have you studied from Ferrith?” I asked, mostly out of curiosity.

“You will be the ninth,” Clarice said. “Though you will only be the seventh we’ll be able to gather useful data from.”

“How come?” I asked. “What was wrong with the other two?” The way she said it made me wonder if I should be worried for my safety—like maybe they had died from one of her experiments.

Instead of answering, Clarice pushed past me to pull open the door to the oversized concrete shack. Inside was the more enormous bed I’d ever seen. It was easily bigger than my entire room had been back at home. “Go on,” she said. “You can sleep here for the night. I will send someone to get you breakfast in the morning, so if you get hungry, don’t eat the grass. The groundskeepers are getting very impatient about that.”

“Is that what happened to the two ogres you couldn’t study?” I asked, knowing it wasn’t true, but hoping to provoke her into correcting me. “They ate some grass, and you had to send them away?”

Clarice stared at me for a second before answering. She didn’t sigh or hum to herself, or look me up and down. She just stood as still as a statue while she thought about something for a second. “I see,” she said. “You think you are clever? Very well, I will tell you what happened to them. They came to us too traumatized to be of any use.”

“Traumatized?” I repeated. “Traumatized from what?”

“From experiences they suffered before arriving here,” Clarice said. “We had nothing to do with it and would not condone it if we did. The problem has been corrected. You are safe here.”

I narrowed my eyes at the taller woman. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” I said. “I’ve dealt with enough of that since I got to this world. Out with it. Or I won’t agree to work on your stupid study.”

“Hmm,” she hummed. “I am surprised you do not already suspect.”

“Suspect what? Obviously, if I did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“It is Mr. Gaze. You traveled with him; did anything about him seem… off?”

“I’m not playing twenty questions. Just tell me what this has to do with a couple of traumatized ogres.”

“I can try to tell you, but you might not have a word for it in your language. Do you know what a psychopath is?”

My jaw dropped. “He’s a psychopath!?”

“He is,” Clarice confirmed, “which is why I make sure to pay him an obscene amount of money to deliver intelligent ogres to me unharmed. Otherwise, he will torture them for fun. Often to death.”

I blinked. “Oh. Are you sure about that? He seemed nice to me. He even helped me one time when he didn’t have to.” Even as I spoke the words, I realized they rang false when accounting for the new information about Ferrith getting paid to deliver me to Clarice. Maybe to him saving me from execution had just been about cashing in on a payday.

“I am as certain of Mr. Gaze’s condition as I am about the doubt you are currently feeling. My Skill allows me to sense the emotions of others. He pretends frighteningly well, but to him, it is only an act. Inside there is nothing.”