Casa finally stood before the tall iron bars of the gates of the School of Library and Information Magic.

“Are you lost?” the guard, clad in plate armor, asked.

He was leaning in. Casa was very small.

“No,” she smiled, “I’ve found what I was looking for.”

“Ah, you must be here for the enrollment exam, then!”

“Enrollment… exam?!”

She crumpled to her knees, and the gates opened before her. An exam?! Nobody told me there was going to be an exam!

“What’s the matter, miss?” the guard asked.

“…am…”

“Sorry?”

“An exam?!” she cried, suddenly springing up and clutching the guard by the collar with tears in her eyes.

The guard replied with a nervous laugh.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry! The written test is just a diagnostic, but the real admission grade’s from the talent test!”

“Talent test?”

“Yeah! Just show ’em your best magic!”

“My best… magic…”

She pulled away and puffed out her chest in the direction of the gate.

“I’ll do my best!” she proclaimed, a challenger’s smile on her face. The guard clapped.

She had quite some confidence. After all, Casa was a mage.

After the guard gave her some instructions to find her way, she proceeded down the brick road through the gate. Behind her, the gate clanged closed.

The scenery was lush with trees and well-paved footpaths that branched out from the main brick road. Ahead, a fountain came into view, a well-sculpted artwork of marble and granite.

Finally, she arrived at the examination center — probably.

“Huh? Is this… Am I really in the right place?”

She looked up at the citadel. Its entrance was still quite a way away, but the structure itself was so imposing that she might as well have been standing right in front of it.

“This is a library?! N- No?!”

A couple of passersby took notice of her. “Hey!” a girl called out, “Are you taking the exam, too?”

Casa turned to look, and with the girl, there were two others with her. The girl herself had shiny blonde hair, and her smile was so bright that the lens flare made it difficult to discern any other feature. The other girl with her had dark hair and brownish complexion, and shyly directed her attention away from the embarrassment that was her friend. They were also with a guy, taller than the other two, with silver hair and circles for eyes — ah, glasses? He seemed to be mentally and spiritually not there.

Casa instinctively waved back and said “Yep! Are you?”, which delighted the shining girl.

Next thing Casa knew, she was being tugged along by this person. Though she was surprised — I guess it’s alright, since we’re all taking the exam?

“So, um, what’s your name?” Casa asked.

“I’m Larissa!” the shining girl said, smiling, and thereafter further blinding Casa. She pointed towards her two companions. “The shy one’s Miki, and the cloudy-boy is Zanderfon!”

“C- Cloudy boy?!”

Larissa leaned in. “His hair’s like a cloud, don’t you think? And his brain’s just—”

She took a moment to poke Zanderfon in the face, to which there was no distinct reaction.

“He’s transcended this reality,” Larissa continued.

Casa eyed Zanderfon. Though mentally absent, he was somehow still closely following the group. How?

“W-well, I’m Casa!” she said.

Larissa smiled, blinding Casa once more.

.

After a bit of walking, they reached the entrance of the library. The entrance was a huge gate of lacquered wood and iron reinforcements, but there was a smaller door at the foot of it, through which normal foot traffic comes through. Two guards stood on either side of the door.

“Halt!” one guard shouted as they neared. The guards tapped their halberds on the stone floor and crossed them, blocking the door.

“Before you proceed, you must first answer this riddle!” the other guard said. The first guard looked at the second guard.

“Oi, Daniel, that’s not—”

“One head only tells the truth—”

“Daniel—”

“While the other only tells lies—”

“Daniel! I said I was sorry!”

The second guard turned away from the desperate first guard. The first guard sighed and faced the group.

“Look, I’m really sorry about this. This was just a custom and Daniel was supposed to say ‘State your business!’ but it seems that we have some unfinished business ourselves, after all, so… Please, just head straight and take a left on the first turn.”

The guard ushered them in, and as they entered and left the gate behind them, there was a tiny “I really didn’t mean it!” behind them.

“I hope they get along…”

“Yeah…”

Larissa and Casa solemnly agreed.

They followed the guard’s instructions and found themselves in front of a door with a runic nameplate.

“Can you read it?” Casa asked.

“N— Mmmm… Nah,” Larissa replied.

“…ing… m…”

Casa and Larissa turned around to Miki’s mumbling.

“Oh, Miki! What was it?” Larissa asked.

“Testing… Room…” she replied.

To those words, the nameplate glowed and the door opened. The three peeked inside, and the examiner was looking at them, surprised.

“It’s been a while since a student’s invoked the automaton plate! Come in, come in!” the lady said, enthusiasm swimming in her voice.

The three went in, Zanderfon trailing closely behind. The door slammed shut

“Ah, maximum occupancy,” the examiner remarked, “Don’t worry about the dramatic door shutting, though! The guy who wrote the schema for the nameplate was really into horror novels.”

“Oh! Horror novels!” Larissa exclaimed. The examiner giggled at her enthusiasm, but they weren’t there for gossip. She leaned in.

“We’ll speak about this after you pass the test, okay?” she whispered. Larissa nodded like a child being promised candy.

.

The examiner explained the setup. The Testing Room was a magical room that could manipulate the items in its internal space, and per testing purposes, they had the room spread out items to simulate a realistic library environment — noisy, messy, and half the time, navigating the place was as much a challenge as doing the actual work. They made it this way, cranking the room up to the hardest difficulty every year, because it was a free-for-all.

Just like the examiner said, “Find a nail you can hit with your hammer!” — so they spread out as many nails as possible around here: dishelved books, unfiled documents, missing index cards, and shelves at over-capacity. There was even a book on a lectern with torn-up pages! Poor book…

“That said, you’ll be taking the test one at a time. The rest will just watch, okay? Okay!”

Of course, the first one to go was Larissa. Her hand shot straight up, and she did so with a laser-beaming smile, blinding the examiner.

“Casa, Casa! Watch me!” she said, smiling, blinding Casa and everyone else.

Casa’s vision returned to normal, and the moment she opened her eyes, she closed them again. There was a yellow light, and maybe — maybe Larissa’s still smiling, and she’d be subjected to that eye-opening photonic barrage once again!

Hey, it’s not… as bright? She slowly opened her eyes, and she saw Larissa there, standing over the lectern. The light wasn’t coming from her smile, but from her hand! Wait— both her hands? She squinted at what was going on. Larissa’s left hand was hovering and going over the tattered book, while her right hand was copying the same motion, but over a different book — a blank book?

Are those words materializing on the blank book?

The light went out, and the examiner went over to check on Larissa’s work.

“Splendid! A word-for-word copy, and on a fresh book! Miss, what’s your name?!”

Wrong move. Larissa smiled proudly, blinding the examiner.

“Larissa! Larissa O’dulie!” she beamed, very literally.

.

With Larissa done, Miki went next. The examiner was wearing a welding mask this time.

“Hello! And what’s your name?” the examiner asked. It was clear that this batch of enrollees was special, and who knows — maybe they all had light beaming out of their teeth, and she’d like to retain her 20/20 vision for at least another 10 years.

“M-my name is Miki,” the girl said.

“Okay, Miki! Go do your thing!” the examiner announced.

Certainly, Miki did go around the room. However, nothing was happening. She was just looking at things and poking at them sometimes. She was poking at the shelves, too. Maybe she’s just looking for the perfect demonstration of her ability? — the examiner thought.

But after 10 minutes of this, still, nothing was happening.

Was this one a dud? Was Miss O’dulie a one-off deviation after all?

Just as the examiner thought that, Miki went to the middle of the room and raised her hand. Soft blue light gathered around it. It was calming, very unlike Larissa’s sight-reducing magic.

With the snap of a finger, holographic lines traced across the air of the room, all connecting to the central node that was her hand. She brought her hand down onto a sheet of paper in her other hand. Though her hand stopped an inch away from the surface, she continued pushing her hands together, almost as if she was cramming all that light into the paper.

The light disappeared as her hands softly connected, sandwiching the paper. She approached the dazed examiner and handed her the paper. Casa and Larissa looked over the examiner’s shoulder, and they saw that there was a neat table of records on it.

“W-wow,” the examiner muttered, “Is this some kind of Record Magic?”

Miki moved a book from one shelf to the next. Movement caught Casa’s eye, and she noticed that a record had changed.

“No way!” Casa exclaimed, “It’s like those Index cards!”

“You know about Index cards?!” the examiner exclaimed, flustered that Miki was effectively an Index card machine, and that someone else here knew a fine detail about the profession. She shook her head — I feel like I’ve experienced 24 hours in 20 minutes.

“Miki, huh?” the examiner said, “It’s— it’s so wonderful… I’ve never seen Index Magic in my life, but this…”

She faced Miki.

“Are you, perhaps, a child of the Zotelo Family?”

Miki quietly nodded.

“That explains a lot… Thank you for that brilliant demonstration.”

.

After the examiner wiped the tears from her eyes, she called for the next one. Meanwhile, Zanderfon was yet to budge.

“Is he okay?” the examiner asked.

“Ah, wait a moment,” Larissa replied. She stood in front of Zanderfon and smiled.

He screamed and promptly stumbled backwards, falling on his butt.

“What?! Where am I?!” he said.

“That’s what you get for using Autopilot Magic!” Larissa laughed.

“Whuh?! I’m gonna be late for the exam!” Zanderfon panickedly exclaimed.

Larissa smiled again. Optic pain.

“Stop that!” he complained, covering his eyes.

“You’re already here, dumb-dumb!”

After taking the time to be reoriented as to what had happened in the past 30 minutes, Zanderfon bowed his head and earnestly shook the examiner’s hands.

“Please forgive me and my inexcusable behavior, Ms. Dale. My name is Zanderfon of the Calculis Family. So as not to waste your and the others’ times, shall I promptly begin?”

Ohhoh, what a bigshot — Larissa thought.

Oh my god, a bigshot — the examiner panicked — And how does he know my name?!

Casa knew nothing about Family this, Family that. Well, they did dress pretty fancy, though I thought that was just a lifestyle choice…

.

The examiner’s composure faltered as if she’d just shook the hand of a celebrity. Zanderfon left her to her devices and promptly walked up to the overflowing shelves. A mountain of books piled upon a mountain of books — even where a shelf was filled up, books were even squeezed into the gaps between the tops of books and the ceiling of the shelf.

Over the next five minutes, he laid out the overflowing books on a table. After cleaning out a bookshelf, he pulled out a metal stylus and drew sigils on either end of the bookshelf. He stepped back, held his hand up, and a red aura flowed between him and the two sigils, forming a triangle. The bridge of aura between the two sigils crackled with minute sparks and, after a violent fountain of sparks, the aura solidified into a beam of red.

While the aura connection between him and the sigils still held, he walked over to the table of books and touched them all. Each book he touched gained a residual aura of its own, connected to the two sigils. Once he had touched the last book, he suddenly yanked on the thin tendril of aura left connected to his hand, and it broke like a cable.

The books levitated and flew to the front of the bookshelf. The space around it started to warp. After a while, a rumbling noise came and went, then all the books were sucked into the bookshelf at once!

The red light turned green. The examiner walked over and peered into the bookshelf.

“What is this? Some kind of illusion?”

Shifting her body left and right, viewing the bookshelf from a different angle gave a completely different, even if somewhat-warped, view of the contents. Even light itself was bent to accommodate so many books.

All the books, on every shelf, was now contained in this single bookshelf.

“Tsch,” Zanderfon muttered, “The SHELF sigil still needs some tuning, after all…”

“Sir Calculis—”

“Please, just call me Zanderfon,” he corrected the examiner.

“Ah, well, Sir Zanderfon, if I may— Is this some kind of Archive Magic? I’ve certainly seen such magics to facilitate the most efficient storage configurations, but never have I seen one that incorporates Spatial Magic like this!”

“‘Archive Magic’, you say? Well, I suppose that’s what it does…”

“However, Sir, is it safe to take items from the magic archive?”

“Ah, no, that’s impossible.”

“Something terrible happens to you if you do!” Larissa cheerfully explained. The examiner quickly stepped away from the glowing archive.

Zanderfon summoned a small bead of water and shot it at Larissa, splashing her face.

“W-why?!”

“You’re scaring Ms. Dale!”

He faced the examiner. “Don’t worry, Ms. Dale, it’s perfectly safe. Rather, no reasonable human being can understand how the space inside a magic archive works, and so it is impossible to navigate from the outside.”

“Ah!” Casa exclaimed, “So that means you can’t add new items in, either?”

Though surprised, a smile formed on Zanderfon’s face. “That’s right, Miss Casa.”

“W-well, anyhow!” the examiner continued, “Your name’s Casa, right? Let’s wrap this up!”

.

I wonder which one I should do — she thought. The only stations left were messes: unfiled documents, missing index cards, a cart full of unordered books. Well, I guess I should keep this simple, then!

Casa approached the cart of books.

This one seems like the most ordinary of the three — the examiner thought — She’s probably a commoner, but wasn’t she also the one who gleefully compared Ms. Zotelo’s Index Magic to Index cards? How could she know about those?

Casa picked up a few of the books and browsed them. There were quite a few about the history of Library Magic, and then some stuff about magical accessory engraving techniques. For some reason, there’s a few romance novels thrown in, and… a mag-fi series?

.

What a messed up collection — so she thought. She looked around the nearby bookshelves and realized that they weren’t any better, either. Beads of sweat rolled down her back. Why is this place so disorganized?!

She hurried between bookshelves, and saw that they were all similarly chaotic — This isn’t a library! This is a storage closet!

“Miss Casa?” the examiner asked, “Are you okay?”

There was a slow exhale. She faced the examiner, smiling. “I’m okay!” she said.

But it was not okay.

Order must be brought to this world.

“Okay, I’m doing it now!” she announced. For now, let’s work on just this one shelf!

She approached the cart of books. She raised both her hands and started tracing down the air, as if the air in front of her was a canvas. Her purple magic traced nodes and lines to connect them, and like this, she drew a map like the roots of a tree, waterfalling down in a cascade of branching lines.

In this case, she just drew a simple map, with maybe just seven nodes. There weren’t a lot of categories, anyway.

“Casa, that isn’t a circle, you know?” Larissa remarked with a giggle.

No way — the examiner thought. She was covering her mouth keep her jaw from falling off.

Mages used circular sigils and symbolic formations to stabilize their magic. Magics that didn’t use circular formations were inherently unstable, though this was often by design.

The station that Casa was attempting was designed as a classification problem. At the least, examinees were expected to do it manually — if they at least had a sense of classification, then learning the magic to help along would be trivial afterward. At best, examinees were expected to use some type of Classification Magic, which, though somewhat tricky, was possible to learn through sheer effort, and there was no shortage of examinees who could perform basic Classification Magic.

It’s just that — Modern Classification Magic always used circular formations.

This girl wasn’t using circular formations. In fact, she was using a freestyle formation — and one of the most unstable formations of them all, the Tree Diagram!

Certainly, you can gain finer control over the spell by dealing with it at its deepest, lowest levels, but how the heck was she dealing with the mental strain of keeping all of those nodes from running amok?!

The examiner was ready to jump in, in case Casa lost control. Even with just seven nodes, if any of the lines crossed over, the resulting explosion could hurt Casa.

Meanwhile, Casa gleefully played a childhood game of connecting the dots. “Whoop, that one’s done!” she announced.

“Done? Casa, you jest! Nothing’s happened!” Larissa remarked.

“Just wait!” Casa replied.

... and started on her second Tree Diagram.

Beads of sweat rolled down the examiner’s face. In truth, even Zanderfon was nervous. He had tangential knowledge of these things, and he knew, because of the examiner’s reactions, that Casa was in serious danger. It all came down to her confidence and expertise, in the end—something that the enrollment exam was also supposed to judge.

She finished the second Tree Diagram, and then, just when things couldn’t be more tense, she started connecting the two Diagrams together.

The examiner crumpled down on the floor and covered her face, peeking between her fingers.

“And— done!” Casa exclaimed. The moment she did, the purple lights of her cross-connected Tree Diagrams flashed and turned into a solid white.

The books in the cart and the bookshelves started sorting themselves. Books from the cart flew into slots in the bookshelves, and books from the shelves traded places with books from the cart, or they reslotted into different shelves.

After a minute, the last book slotted itself into position, and Casa struck a pose.

“Ta-dah!”

Larissa and Miki clapped, while tension left Zanderfon. The examiner shakily stood up.

“W-w… n… m…” the examiner mumbled.

“Huh? Miss?” Casa asked.

“Y-your name? F-full name?”

“Ah!” she said, “Casa Ley!”

The name broke the examiner’s mind — Casa… Ley? Ley? The Fallen Family? The one betrayed 200 years ago, and killed at the hands of the Premiums? That they survive until now, and with unwithered power, that’s— Master must know! But, still— my god, did she just use two Tree Diagrams and cross-link them?! That would’ve immediately exploded in anyone else’s hands! Moreover, for just simple Classification Magic? Isn’t that overkill?!

“Ms. Dale?” Zanderfon spoke up.

“Ah! Silly me!” the examiner replied, “Needless to say, I’m g-giving you all a special grade!”

“Oh! A special grade?” Larissa exclaimed.

“R-right! Normally, you would still have to go through more processing, but in special circumstances, as in exceptional ability, I have the right to give you a special grade that grants immediate and effective admission into the school!”

She handed all four of them grade cards. Their names were already filled out.

“P-Please fill out the rest of the form and tap your citizen plate against the card. Your, uh, grade will appear after.”

She led them out of the Testing Room and offered them seats outside. She excused herself, and while the four were merrily filling out their forms and becoming friends, she sought shelter around the corner.

“OH MY GOD,” she finally lost it, “I can’t believe all that happened— it actually HAPPENED!”

She had lived for too long, probably.

“That’s it, I need to contact Master soon! We can’t let this opportunity pass by…”

.

And thus, Casa and her friends’ life in the School of Library and Information Magic began.