Lillian lived at the Academy, where she was herded around by a caretaker who watched over her dorm. In theory, the caretakers were supposed to be sort of like unofficial parents, watching over their charges and keeping them safe. Freshlings were supposed to be accompanied by caretakers all the time (or at least whenever there wasn’t a teacher to watch over them). However, depending on your caretaker, there was a possibility to slip out of their sight. Lillian had learned this a couple years ago when she had hesitantly asked her caretaker for permission to visit her friend Evelyn, who lived with her family off-campus. To her surprise, the caretaker had agreed. The first time asking for permission had been hard enough, but the second time was even harder. Once again, the caretaker surprised her, adding a smile and saying something about “glad to see you making friends.” After that, Lillian was no longer afraid to ask them for permission, and so they spent many happy weekends hanging out with Evelyn, Talya, and Evelyn’s parent, Guereda. They went to parks, they went to movies, they sometimes just went on walks. Today they were going to a museum. The local natural history museum had a free day for Society students once a month, so they took the opportunity to learn about their local environment.Lillian had taken science classes before, of course—every student was required to take science. But she’d never been to a natural history museum before. She’d never seen so many subjects laid out before her. Well, okay, they had been laid out before her, but only as drawings on posters. Seeing slabs of rock hung on the wall, bones and fossils arranged in a hall, seeing fake ferns and trees illustrating a scene of the deep forest with mounted animals arranged…now that was different. Enchanted by the life-sized diorama before her, Lillian closed her eyes. Someone had piped in a smell in here, the smell of earth and loam and pine needles. There was a cool, moist feeling in this room. And the sounds! They were playing the sound of bird calls and squirrel chitters on speakers artfully hidden in the trees. It was as if she was actually standing in the woods. Lillian had never seen something like this.
There was a sign nearby that explained what the scene was. She drank it in in an instant, then moved onto the next display. There were insects here, and plants, and even dioramas that depicted the beach, with the smell of brine and seaweeds, and sea gulls in the air, and—!
On their way home, Guereda asked them what they’d learned at the museum, probably out of some instinctive parental reflex. Lillian didn’t say much—not just because she didn’t like talking, but also because of how overwhelming it all was. Someday, she told herself, I’m going to study nature! And she knew it was true, because that night she dreamed of forests and waves and a million different types of plants, animals, and minerals.
