Even Princesses Deal With Paperwork

Xun Zhen Lin

Somebody was burning a fire somewhere; Xun could feel it itching at his shoulder blades and up the nape of his neck. It was far enough away to be bearable but at the same time, he couldn't help but cringe every now and again as the flames licked right down through his skin and down to the bones. It was an illusion, or maybe that wasn't the best word for it. The pain wasn't an illusion at all.

After having sat there at the admissions desk for an hour or so, Xun gave in and reached for a bag of pills. Baby aspirin wasn't really the best painkiller to deal with this sort of a situation but it was easy, and he knew that he couldn't overdose on it. After two or three or, say, a dozen, he stopped being able to tell the difference between using it and leaving it off but the placebo effect was a funny circumstance to live by. It just made him feel better about everything, that was all.

In any case, he could at least greet new students with a slightly more polite smile now, and had just finished putting away the bag when a new girl walked into the office. It took him a moment to place her, however. The serious-faced men in suits around her were like waves crashing against the cliffs of an island. He could focus on her all he'd like but his attention would still be taken up by her protectors, to some extent.

Vaguely, a memory came up in the back of his mind. Maybe several, actually, but if that was the case, they had all blurred together. Xun was certain that in at least one previous life, he had assassinated somebody guarded just like this, right in broad daylight on a public street. It was hard but doable. Even more so now that guns existed, and that was only if the attacker was concerned with getting away alive.

Those were such awful things to think.

"Ah, new to the island, Miss?" Xun asked with a smile, even though he knew the answer. No matter who the person was, the bodyguards tended to melt away after staying on the island long enough. "Did the letter come for you or did you make an inquiry? If you contacted us ahead of time, we should already have a bit of information for your file."

Xun Zhen Lin

"Oh, no, it's quite all right. You wouldn't be the first." Although she received points for being one of the most intimidating. "If you would please give me a moment please?" Xun turned his attention back to the monitor in front of him, bringing up an alphabetical list of recent inquiries. Since she had mentioned family rather than parents, the man assumed that meant the inquiry would likely be for many siblings, not just herself. Cousins, too, perhaps.

He clicked on the columns a few times. Though the girl was obviously Southeast Asian, that hardly meant anything. The population in that area was massive so it was only logical that they also had quite a number of students from there as well. Still, most people wouldn't be able to afford guards like this. Now, what's a large supernatural family that's rich, Asian, and paranoid? The names rolled out before him: Gimhae Song, Hebei Li, Ishikawa, Saitou, Shaanxi Du, Xun, among others. Then, peeking out at the very end was a familiar name that Xun Zhen Lin had not seen in quite a long time.

"Would you be Zhujiang Xia or Zhujiang Bai?" The man guessed, glancing back at the girl. There were quite a few folders under that clan name, all of which were only sparsely filled at best. Some of them were simply empty. None of them had pictures. He tried to recall what little information he had retained about the Zhujiang over the lifetimes but all that really came up was merely from his current one. They were dragons. The Xun did not often communicate with them.

Xun Zhen Lin

"Ah, that would make us distantly related then," Xun remarked, mentally marking down yet another section of the family as having made landfall. "Xiajie" -because she was certainly older than he was, even if it didn't seem like it- "if you don't mind, I would need a picture for the records and then there's a bit of paperwork to get out of the way. Course selection, too, if you if you would like to start classes as soon as possible. Depending on your schooling, however, you may have to take a few placements to get everything sorted out correctly."

He laid out the forms on the counter as as he spoke, along with a pen. The questions on them were basic, things such as name, birth date, ethnicity, species, and home address and contact numbers. If she was already in college, then there were a few that asked after her prior courses and major selection. "Any language will do. The papers are spelled to automatically make every language comprehensible," Xun told her. And of course, if she reverted to Chinese, that was his native tongue.

"If you have any special circumstances that you would like us to know, that would be helpful as well." Such as the bodyguards. If she was going to bring them everywhere, it would be nice for her to write that down so everybody would have prior warning. "Though files for you and some of your family members exist, there is very little to be found on them besides your names."

Xun Zhen Lin

Xun Zhen Lin glanced over her filled sheet briefly, picking out the most important words. He dearly hoped that she would be all right on campus with those bodyguards following her around -not because of any danger to herself, though. As long as she stayed out of the forbidden forest, it was highly unlikely she would find any real trouble around the school. No, what he was worried about was that she would be very isolated from the rest of the student body. Even knowing that she was most likely much older than him, the fact that she still appeared young was something that he had difficulty getting over.

It would have been rude to start nit-picking on that, though. Probably. She probably knew better than him, which felt. Kind of sad, actually.

"Oh, you can take the picture right here," he said in Mandarin, fumbling for a moment with a stuck drawer. Getting it open and removing the small camera inside seemed to take an eternity. As if it would help him with his anxiety, he rambled, "We normally just take them against that wall over there. It's very quick."

Her question of whether or not she needed to provide anything more did stop him for a few panicked seconds. "For the school, I think that's everything I need from you now. I do have a course selection packet for you, though. We could hardly force you to decide your entire schedule right this moment but it would be nice to get it back by next week."

"Besides that-" Did he even dare ask? He had already started to in any case so he might as well. "I've been rather out of contact with my own family, let alone Zhujiang." That was a roundabout way of asking how things were.

Xun Zhen Lin

Taking the picture was a quick task, done almost mindlessly since he literally did this every day. Several times. There was a distant cousin who taught photography at that very school and sometimes, Xun Zhen Lin thought that he probably took more pictures in ten days than Kitasaki had in his entire life.

The general rule of working at the Academy was more or less this: "If nobody offers, don't ask." For information, anyways. So, sure, they were glossing over the question but nothing catastrophic happened and he still get a vague answer so Xun Zhen Lin was perfectly content with that.

"Oh, it's nice around here," he answered, handing her the packet as he did. "It's much more open than any of the magical communities on the mainland, I've found. Some of my distant relatives on the other side have somehow found their way here, too, but I've heard that it's actually pretty normal for some of us to just coincidentally meet up in random places. It's, well-" the man made a vague motion that was an aborted shrug "-it's nice, I suppose. Working at Admissions tends to put my schedule at odds with most people's, however."

In the Admissions Office, there was no such thing as a shift. You were on shift all the time. Breaks for food? A new, uncontacted species of alien has shown up and now you need to rush back to your desk to log it and make appropriate arrangements for the student(s) who inevitably attend. Sleeping? A species that solely exists in dreams comes to ask for help with class schedules.

Okay, that was probably an exaggeration. But it sure didn't feel like it.