“Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now travelling to the Outside.” This was it – they were going out into the mana wilds. They were going out with the monsters and the mutants, where danger presumably awaited them. They were going to become System-recognized adults (at age 14 or 15!) and take their first Classes and see what their preparations had earned them.

  The bus got in gear and pulled out of line, not waiting for bus four to precede them. “If you are sitting by a window, please lean back, as you are able, to allow others to see outside as well. This should go without saying, but we will not allow fighting or other foolishness on the bus.” The agent stood, swaying, as the bus maneuvered around a corner. Danielle would’ve been surprised that he didn’t try to sit down, except there was no place for him to sit. “If you have questions, you are free to ask them now, but I’m not free to answer most of them. The Sending Authority urgently requests that you spend some time reflecting on what Class and Skills you want to take at your Advancement, because normally we expect it to take – some time, but today we need you all to average three minutes or less in the Dome. Which is nuts. Plan as much as you are able now.”

  “Wait, we’re getting Skills?!” someone blurted; less a question and more an expression of shock.

  The agent sighed. “That is correct. The Sending Advancement token is more expensive than the standard Advancement token, and the reason is that it includes more. This is to give you a solid start to your time Outside, and especially to get your personal Systems in good shape to resist the higher mana concentrations of the Outside environment.”

  “What are our options?” someone called out.

  “That one I’m allowed to answer, because the answer is ‘we don’t know.’ Only you and the System can reliably guess what you have unlocked, before you Advance. It’ll be things the System has seen you trying to do, or which you’ve been learning to do and talking about a lot. The evidence of the last century is that the System has learned to pay extra attention to the actions people take between hearing the announcement that they are Sent, and arriving at the Access Point, so things from yesterday count extra. The only way to be absolutely sure of whether you’ve unlocked something, however, is to Advance and run the search for new unlocks. After that, it’ll be in your Interface.”

  There were a few minutes of reflective silence while everyone tried to imagine what their first unlocked Skills might be. Some people were looking out the windows, too, craning their necks for a last glance at some landmark or other. Then the bus turned a last corner, and the town was behind them.

  “The gate!” someone shouted. Danielle looked up through the window and saw that they were indeed approaching one of the great gates to the Outside. The road sign read, “Eruditio Cavernus Southwest Tunnel;” the sign over the tunnel entrance read, “Departing Eruditio Cavernus Sanctuary. Warning: Increased Mana Density Beyond This Point.” The gate itself was a solid metal wall, standing out sharply against the native stone of the cavern wall around it. Danielle had seen this spot a few dozen times, passing it on the cross street or in the train. She had never seen it open.

  “It is traditional to sing the Farewell To The Past at this stage of the journey,” the standing agent said. The driver reached over to toggle something on the dashboard, and the song started playing over the bus sound system – not the best-quality sound in the world, but it was a fine recording; a mass choir backed by a full orchestra. Danielle was only vaguely familiar with the song. It was terribly famous, something about saying goodbye to the pre-mana civilizations from which the modern world was descended. It featured in a famous opera on the same theme, though Danielle thought the song itself was older. It had a lot of big words in it; not that she was afraid of big words! It just wasn’t the sort of thing neighborhood-school music teachers taught to their students, and Danielle had never been in choir in the residential schools.

  Nobody else seemed to really know the song either, and it was hard to concentrate on it as the bus driver presented credentials to the gate guards and the bold red turnpikes rose. The standing agent was the only one in the bus actually singing (he had a pretty good voice, Danielle noted absently). “We leave the past behind, unchained from it; not forgetting yet not carrying its weight,” he sang, as the gates began to open. It was immediately clear that gates, plural, was the correct term; as the metal wall Danielle had seen before pivoted ponderously aside (why didn’t it just slide?), a second panel a few feet down the tunnel was pivoting the other direction (why the big gap? Or why such a small gap, if a big gap was wanted?) until they had created an arched gap big enough for the school bus, or for a cargo truck.

  “We leave behind the ancestors who birthed us! May they rest peacefully as we build anew!” Why was it traditional to sing such a depressing song? Danielle didn’t want to think about leaving people behind right now. The bus was between the two panels, and Danielle could look up between them, but it was just a stone archway with two slots. Whatever moved the gate was hidden from the roadway. Ahead of her, a few hundred feet of road ended in a red stoplight and another gate. She turned to look backward as the first two panels of the gate closed, the passageway to the Inside shrinking away moment by moment.

  The two panels fell shut behind them with a deep and resounding thud, and Danielle turned forward again just in time to see the light go yellow, and the second gate begin to open. In the background, somehow seeming further away than the gates, the music was saying something about rising up with the System in both hands; odd turn of phrase. The second gate also had two leaves, and they also had the curved bottom edges that became the sides of the archway; the light turned green and the bus drove through. Again, they found themselves in a relatively short passage, and again the gates closed ponderously behind them, coming home to their fully closed positions with a sound that echoed with finality. A sign read, “If your cargo requires mana-reduction systems, CONFIRM THEM NOW.”

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Beside her, Anna whispered, “We do. We require mana reduction systems.”

  “That’s what the System is for, isn’t it?” Danielle asked. “It’s the most personal mana reduction system there is. It protects you at the level of you; you can’t accidentally turn it off or walk away from it. We’re about to upgrade it, too.”

  “Upgrade the System?” Anna asked, confused.

  “Our personal Instances of the System,” Danielle corrected quietly. The agent was still singing with the recording. Outside the bus, the third set of gates swung slowly open. Beyond them, the tunnel was long, but not so long that Danielle couldn’t see the bright patch at the end.

  “I guess,” Anna said. “I don’t know what I want to get, though. I like art, but I don’t think I can paint my way back Inside from being Sent.”

  The third gate closed, and a moment later the song ended. Silence fell on the bus. Everyone seemed to be staring forward, trying to see what was ahead. “Haven’t any of you been camping?” the agent asked quietly.

  Danielle had been camping, yes. Twice, with Akari’s family. She supposed she must have been through this tunnel, but Akari’s family had never come through alone, always with a whole traffic jam of other break-time campers; and they’d never made a big deal about the tunnel, instead distracting each other with little games to relieve the boredom of sitting in stop-and-go traffic. Danielle had never paid attention before; and it had never been a one-way trip before.

  A few other people on the bus actually said “No!” and “I’m the oldest kid in my family, and I’m not in highschool yet! Why would we go camping?!” Yet others pointed out, “We’re not going to the protected campground, we’re going to the Access Point. Is it even the same exit?” Still others voiced Danielle’s thoughts, more or less: “It’s different when you can’t come back Inside!”

  The gate on the far end of the tunnel was just a portcullis, and it was open before they even got to it. The bus driver slowed down enough for the standing agent to lift something and hold it up to the window for the guard at the turnstile, and up it went, not even requiring the bus to fully stop. Thinking back, Danielle was reasonably sure that this was the same exit; there were only two turnoffs in the tunnel, and anyway, she didn’t think the route to the campgrounds had any major turns between the gates. Probably. She hadn’t been paying attention, so it was hard to be really certain.

  She was certain the path to the protected campgrounds didn’t involve turning right moments after passing the last gate, though, if only because she’d seen maps. She vaguely remembered the maps showing a stub of a turnoff with an arrow labeled “To Ranger HQ.” She definitely didn’t remember ever getting into easy viewing distance of the massive ‘fence’ that made the protected campgrounds protected; 20 feet tall if it was an inch, and topped with some wire apparatus she didn’t know what to make of, it stretched out of sight behind the trees as the bus pulled into a massive gravel parking lot and took up position over a painted number five. The road continued right up to the fence, which had its own massive sliding gate, currently closed.

  Between the parking lot and the fence, a wide field stretched. On the far side of the field, a couple of bus-lengths from the fence to its west and the road to its north, sat a large stone dome. Danielle immediately recognized the sort of pseudo-natural yet mathematically perfect construction that System abilities could produce. A dim archway faced east towards the parking lot. “Well, there it is; the Dome of Decision,” the agent said. “Inside the four chambers of that dome are the pillars of the Access Point where you will all Advance.”

  A few other busses were there, each parked over a specific painted number. There were also a pair of box trucks on the road next to the field, with people in brown uniforms unloading boxes next to a series of folding tables. Someone in a brown uniform approached the bus; Danielle didn’t catch where he’d come from, somehow. The agent opened the door, and he climbed two stairs and looked back, scanning the Sent.

  “How are you all doing, Agent?” the new person asked.

  “You might know more than I do, Ranger. This busload is doing OK, anyway,” the agent said.

  The Ranger nodded. “The good news is, they tell us all the busses are moving, just barely on schedule. The bad news is, the commissioner is on his way, and has demanded a podium and sound system.”

  The agent groaned. “I don’t suppose you happen to lack those things?”

  “We have eight copies, we can’t pretend they’re all out of service for repairs,” the Ranger said dryly.

  “Well. There goes the schedule.”

  “We’re being told it will only take fifteen or twenty minutes,” the Ranger said. He wasn’t even trying to disguise the fact that he didn’t believe it.

  “Suggest to your boss that he make the commissioner promise to stay and work until the last Advancement is done,” the SA agent proposed. “Maybe if he knows the consequences will hit him, too, he’ll actually keep it short.”

  “Ha! I’ll tell the commander,” the Ranger said. “Get your ki-, ah, Youths out and on their marks please. Your room crews are on the way too, but they need to have a clue who’s coming in what order.”

  The agent nodded and turned to the Sent. “All right, the plan is to send people to the Dome in alphabetical order, within school and year groups. Don’t ask me who that made sense to, but like the Ranger said, it’s the plan we have and now other plans depend on it happening that way, so we’re going to go find the Tree of Knowledge eighth grade section, and put you on the bus five mark. I’m going to ask you to stay there once you get there, because otherwise you might get to your room and find the beds unmade – as in, bedding not yet in the room – and that would just be annoying for everyone.”

  https://discord.gg/u5dtzpShv2