[B]Teàrlag Cirsium[/B]

The Vytal Festival. A biannual celebration of the ceasefire that ended the Great War seven decades ago. There's parades, food, cheap merchandise, and for some reason, a combat tournament, hence why I'm sitting here on a bench in the fairgrounds rather than in my dorm room back at Shade Academy. It's ironic how everybody's celebrating the end of a war with fighting of all things, but whoever came up with the idea sixty years ago must not have gotten the memo. And so here I am, representing Vacuo in some competition about unity or what-not so that glory, honour, fame and all that other meaningless stuff gets added to Shade's rep.

Not like it really matters. There's only like, what, four Huntsman academies anyway. Shade's never gonna face enrolment issues.

I didn't really want to be part of this entire competition thing, but the other three betrayed me. They sought to stand out and get good grades, nullifying my desire to just remain in Vacuo and laze about. Curse their ambition and motivation. I could have been avoiding all this instead of scoping out the competition. Not that I even know where the 'competition' is.

It's a big fairground. A big waste of money too.

At least it's reusable.

I sigh, leaning back against the wooden bench. Maybe I should get some food. Scoping out the competition's a pretty energy-intensive task, and I guess the real only good thing about this place is the Valic cooking. Noodles here are actually pretty great.

Not a lot of it in Vacuo.

And it's probably going to be overpriced stuff anyway. Have to feed off the wallets of the poor.