Vox Mentis

You got really into reading.

See if anyone left some higher level books around. Let's pursue dangerous knowledge! Who knows, if you poke around in the right places you might even find another hidden library.

Go back to that library and try to figure out how it's organized

You begin to hatch plots to break into people's rooms, so you can learn something. You spend time with one of the few other students to stay over vacation, a doe-eyed girl with dark bangs and a permanent air of disdain. Earlier, you had disliked this girl quite a lot, because she's older and spent a lot of time around Jeremy. But now she's basically the only person here who can teach you anything. You cut your hair the same and adopt the girl's walk, which is a kind of drifting, as if you're being blown through corridors on the pages of a million mournful poems. This is not as successful as you had hoped, since the doe-eyed girl doesn't open up at all, so you're stuck with a dumb haircut for nothing. But you do discover that the girl swims for an hour every day. So you sneak into the locker room and steal her key.

The doe-eyed girl's room is like yours: a single bed, a wooden desk, a chair, and a window looking over the grounds. But her books are completely different. The girl has Persuasion in Middle Europe and Modern Psychographics and a small yellow book you've seen seniors carry around and always been intrigued by, titled Gutturals. That one, disappointingly, turns out to be full of word fragments with no explanation or context.

You decide to return the the old hidden library. It's dustier than your remember, like it's in some pocket universe where everything ages more rapidly. You carefully poke your way through the shelves. The disaster section seems to bleed into a section on history, which bleeds into sociology. Every book seems to be similar to what you'd see in a standard school, but with the persuasion twist on things. You pull down a tome with the alluring title of The Linguistics of Magic. It's a history lesson about how people had once believed in literal magic, in wizards and witches and spells. They wouldn't tell strangers their true name, in case the stranger was a sorcerer, because once a sorcerer knew you, he could put you under his power. You had to guard that information. And if you saw someone who looked like a sorcerer, you would avert your eyes and cover your ears before they could compel you. This was where words like charmed came from, and spellbound and fascinated and bewitched and enraptured and compelled.

This all seems quaint and amusing, but as the book moves through to the modern day, nothing changes. People still fall to the influence of persuasion techniques, especially when they broadcast information about themselves that allows identification of their personality type - their true name, basically - and the attack vectors for these techniques are primarily aural and visual. But no one thinks of this as magic. It's just falling for a good line or being distracted or clever marketing. Even the words are the same. People still get fascinated and charmed, spellbound and amazed, they forget themselves and are carried away. They just don't think there's anything magical about that anymore.

Do some soul-searching, by which I mean figure out what your type is then see if you can't start tweaking your visible responses to stimuli to appear to be a different type.

Try walking in those two hundred and twenty seven pairs of shoes.

~

You spend some time doing some self-examination to try and better hide your "true name". It's supposedly very difficult to accurately assess your own set. People are brimming over with cognitive biases, whether they think they are or not - and this goes double for assessing themselves. You'd like to think you can figure yourself out pretty good though. You're confident. Headstrong, even. You don't take shit. You're an extrovert, motivated by your need to control your situation. You trust your gut when you need to. You're pretty sure you're either seventy-seven or two-hundred and twenty. Most likely two-hundred and twenty. So if you can mask those traits, you can defend yourself better. You're used to lying anyway... this is just a different level of it.

~

Learn to juggle.

I also really hope you kept that post-it.

Juggling comes easily - you've always been good with flipping cards around, and juggling is just a round card, really. Within two weeks you're a natural.

You keep your post-it on your bedroom mirror. It's a nice little motivator in the mornings.

~

When classes resume, they begin to teach you words. No one says what these are for. Jane simply hands out envelopes. "Study these in private," Jane tells everyone. "They are not to be shared, ever, with anybody. Repeat them to yourself in front of a mirror, five times per word, every night."

"Until when?" asks Sasha, but Jane just puts on her fake smile, like this is an amusing question.

You take the envelope marked ELISE JACKSON and carry it to your room. Inside are three pieces of paper.





They're difficult to read; your brain keeps slipping in the wrong direction. They're too similar to real words, maybe.

What do you do with them?