Knightly Qualification

A bunk and food too! After dining with the other knights, Zaida spent the remainder of the evening with Tivra and Edie as they handled the minutiae of adding her to the knights' roster. She went to bed in her newly claimed bunk in the barracks. The bed was delightfully plush compared to Zaida's previous one, but the sleep was disrupted now and then by the late-night returns of siblings in arms.

Rising the next morning, Zaida caught scents that suggested why exactly some of the knights had come back so late. She dismissed it and followed the others as they made for the dining hall to take their breakfast. Afterward, she was pulled aside by the two people that most closely resembled friends for her.

Tivra addressed the latest addition to their ranks. "Everyone else is off to perform their duties of training, guarding, and... uh..."

"Recruiting?" Zaida offered with a raised eyebrow.

"Yes," Edie answered before Tivra could stop her.

"AND other duties." Tivra shot her companion a look. "Before you can join any of them, we need to get an idea of where you stand skill-wise. Hence, you'll be spending the day performing aptitude examinations with our esteemed sergeant Ralli."

"You're handing her over to Ralli?" Edie asked incredulously.

"Why? What's wrong with Ralli?" Zaida inquired, catching Edie's concern.

"There is nothing wrong with Ralli," Tivra spoke through gritted teeth to her associate. "She just has a reputation for being... demanding of her pupils."

"More like bloodthirsty," Edie muttered, earning an elbow from Tivra.

To the training grounds they went. Walking the town, Zaida took in Merridian. It was a pretty enough place. She did not have an extensive history with cities to draw precedent from, but she got the feeling this was not on neither extreme as far as settlements went. The buildings were respectable in size and complexity, but nothing awe-inspiring. She noted that most of the structures there looked older than those found on the knights' campus.

Amidst the townsfolk were her fellow defenders of Merridian, as well those she took to be the disciples of this Geod her companions had spoken of. She had not heard of the deity before coming here, but it was plain that they were the most prominent higher power in this place.

Looking about, she began to understand how the town had come to its outlandish competition. The people here were generally good-looking - Zaida had yet to see a person there that she would tolerate being labelled ugly. The people of Geod and Dyna though...

Zaida thought she must have been a victim of coincidence. Most every nun, knight, monk, or squire she saw looked like they wielded some manner of beautifying magic. How could it be that the members of these two orders were so consistently dazzling? Did they make a point of hiding away their less remarkable constituents in forges or archives? She made a mental note to poke around later.

Tivra and Edie brought her to an arena in the training grounds. The high walls did some small job of dulling the ruckus spilling from within.

"Now understand that she can be a tad intimidating, but Sergeant Hellknox is a perfectly respectable knight," Tivra advised their novice. "If you don't give her a reason to knock you senseless, she won't."

"That's reassuring," Zaida rolled her eyes.

"Who knows? Maybe you'll even-"

"DUSTAINE. DID I PERMIT YOU TO CARRY YOUR SISTER'S WEIGHTS?" roared a voice that sounded like it would not be capable of pronouncing the word 'mercy'. The three women were halted by its ferocity at the gate to the arena's interior.

"No, ma'am!" sounded a response that seemed breathless but still made room for intimidation.

"Do I even have to guess which one is Ralli?" Zaida remarked.

In the middle of the arena stood an armour-clad figure that looked much further away than she sounded. Along the perimeter ran her pupils, each shouldering a rod that supported sandbags on both ends. Between their shaky strides and their stained tunics, there could be no doubt that they were in the middle of a relentless exercise.

"BALDWIN. IF I CATCH YOU WITH BOTH FEET ON THE GROUND AGAIN BEFORE I CALL TIME, I'LL RUN YOU THROUGH WITH A SPIT AND ROAST YOU FOR THE PIGS!"

"Yes, ma'am!"

The three women were not the subjects of the sergeant's ire, but they were nearly petrified all the same.

"Perhaps now... is not the best time?" Zaida proposed.

"Yes, I think that's right," Edie concurred. Together the trio slowly retreated from the arena.

"What if we just tested her ourselves?" Edie proposed to her fellow veteran after they had relocated to an adjacent arena.

"Hmm," Tivra tapped her chin. "That's not how this is supposed to work, but I don't see why not. I'll take the excuse to get out of the office for a day."

What followed was a gauntlet of trials for Zaida. They arranged the most rigorous exercises back to back with the aim of getting them all in before lunch. They tested her endurance with a distance run and a blocking exercise, her strength with weightlifting, and her agility with an obstacle course.

They took their midday meal in the mess with the other knights. Among their conversing, the knights from the office praised their new comrade's performance thus far. She had impressed them with her above-average strength and speed, but they were quieter about her agility. Zaida felt encumbered by her own limbs as she ate, but when she spied the trainees that had been with Hellknox, she decided that she preferred her own challenges to theirs.

With bellies filled, back to the arena she and her supervisors went. Instead of jumping back into physical examinations, Tivra and Edie quizzed her on seemingly random topics to decide whether or not she needed lessons to meet the knights' standards. She satisfied their expectations in the domains of science, letters, numbers, and strategy. However, she seemed lacking in knowledge of matters such as history, law, and geography.

"It may be wise to get her in the next available class," Tivra thought aloud as she reviewed marks for Zaida's performance that she had taken down on paper.

"Are you kidding me?" Edie scoffed. "She explained gene theory from memory. Also, she's literate."

Tivra pursed her lips. "We'll leave it up to her. What do you say, Zaida? Care to expand on your intellect?"

"Sure, why not?" the former-mercenary shrugged.

"Love the enthusiasm." Tivra made a note on the paper to arrange it later.

With the day winding to a close, the trio left the grounds. Zaida was somewhat weary from the physical tests, but she had had harder days.

"Well done," Tivra was saying. "It doesn't look as though there's anything stopping you from hooking up with the rest of the knights tomorrow."

"Did you mean joining up?"

"That too."

Dinner followed and Zaida enjoyed the company of the knights. In her first couple of days in Merridian, she had gotten a very positive impression of them; and not just Tivra and Edie. The whole of the order seemed like a pleasant bunch. She had been concerned when discovering the town's apparent sexual fixation, but much of that worry was alleviated by the time she spent among them. In the barracks she was often included in polite conversations occurring nearby, and every time she had arrived in the dining hall, she had had to turn down invitations to sit with knights that did not even know her name; opting to instead sit with her familiar duo. Indeed, they were a warm bunch with few reservations on how they extended their camaraderie.

Even so, the new knight appreciated time to herself and made a point of walking the town by herself that evening. Merridian retained its humble beauty after dark, with the orange light of torches and candles painting the stone walls and greenery. The town's heart continued to beat; folks of all sorts still out and about under the stars. Closer to the core of the town, festivities were held much like the night prior.

Zaida explored her way to an especially quiet corner of town and took an alleyway to keep from doubling back. She wanted to see as much of the town as she could that evening, and so resolved to avoid taking any road twice for as long as she could. Overhead, a hand towel had been poorly secured to its clothesline. It came free as Zaida passed and landed gently atop her hair.

The knight was mildly spooked by the disturbance and reached up to pluck the offending textile from its perch. It slipped clear before her hand arrived though. Instead of the towel, Zaida pulled free a garment that had not been there. An apparition headdress came away with her hand. She stared at it in puzzlement for an instant before realization hit her.

"Uh-oh."

From head to toe her body prickled with sorcerous energy. She grew - her parts stretching and thickening, and her bones reshaping. Her skin took on a tone that no human's should have been. The discolouration was swiftly hidden by the fur that sprouted from every hair follicle. Her feet became paws, her nails became claws, her hair became a mane, and her face became a snout. Her apparel transitioned from plain daywear to a full set of leather armour.

By the end of it, there was no human standing in that alleyway. Rather, a gnoll - towering at two and half metres - looked at her powerful, fur-covered arms in disbelief.

"No, no, no... Not here. Not now."

In a stroke of the universe's infamous sense of timing, she heard voices and hasteful footsteps approaching. Too quickly for her to have even pondered a reaction, a pair of children rushed into the alley. By their manner, they were in the midst of some game, and had likely chosen this back street as a hiding place from their friends.

Fun was cast from their minds though, as they stared agape at the furry monster half-turned toward them. Zaida avoided sudden movements for fear of disturbing them from their trance. Ever so slowly, she backed away from the children, hands raised to show she meant no harm.

"Easy now," she whispered.

Speaking was the wrong choice, as the moment they saw her pale, pointy teeth, they ran away screaming.

"Damnation!" she cursed her misfortune. The exposed demon retreated deeper into the alley, taking whatever streets branched from it to get as far away as she could.