THE ALIEN LANDS

Cordelia had a situation she was contemplating. The situation involved half of her class. This had been happening ever since she came to Arcadia Academy. She wasn’t the only one. Everyone was wondering the same thing. The basic facts were common knowledge among the students: every year in September, half of the Fourth-Years swiftly and silently vanish from the House overnight. No explanation, no reason why, they just up and left. The students never discuss their absence and if they did, Cordelia never heard it in the entire time she had been at Arcadia Academy. It was considered social bad luck for anyone at the Academy to talk about the sacrifices that they made. However, a miracle happened, the Fourth-Years that vanished back in September of last year back at the end of April.

Now that the first semester of Cordelia’s Fourth-Year was almost over, Cordelia was not any closer to finding out what happened to her fellow students during the last three and a half years. The secret of where they went and what they did there or more importantly, why they went there in the first place. Even students who took nothing else seriously at Arcadia were deadly serious about one point: “Girl, I don’t know why you are tripping, but understand one thing, don’t ever ask me about what happened there, ever.”

The disaster that was the Black Queen had thrown off the previous year’s schedule. The regular compliment of Fourth-Years had departed for the first semester --- they were gone when it happened --- however, the second-semester group, which included, Cordelia, Damien, Sandy, Christina, Billy and Raleigh had finished out the year at Arcadia Academy as usual. In that context, they had referred to themselves as “the left Outs.” Apparently, whatever the staff had in store for them was nasty enough that it was done without the threat of an assault from an interdimensional woman hell bent on destroying planets.

Thankfully, it was back to business as usual at the academy. This year, half of the Fourth-Years departed on schedule, along with a hand full of the Fifth-Years: the ten who were left behind had been split up between the two semesters, five by five. Whether by accident or by design, the Comedy Clique would all be shipping out together in January.

It was now a regular topic of conversation around the play station four that Cordelia brought last year.

“You know what I think?” Billy said, one Sunday afternoon in December. They were treating themselves to Sonic which they do every month after a grim time at school with their studies. “I bet they are going to kick us all out of here and make us go to a regular university. Just some random school where we must read A Mid-Summer Night’s dream and debate politics like we’re all destined to run for office. And like the second day, Damien going to be crying begging for his sugar daddy to fuck the living day lights out of him so he could get a role in a B-movie role.”

“You might as well confess it Billy, you totally are gay for Damien. You want to fuck him.” Sandy said.

“I have it on good authority that Damien and one of the campus police officers tried getting it on a couple of weeks ago. They got all hot and bothered down by the lake. Damien was on all fours servicing the guy when a bunch of kids caught them.” Billy was trying so hard not to laugh at Damien. “on good days, you need to have a little sexual fun. I don’t blame you on that. But seriously though, something goes on with students during the Fourth-Years. I think what’s going on is Ashman has a project so demanding, so rough that the ones who go, work on this project to the point where they either can’t handle it or they get shipped to the island of Barbuda.”

“Yea except Barbuda is an independent nation you goof ball.” Damien snickered, “Besides, who I choose to sleep with is really none of your business. Lay off me about my damn sexuality or do you want me to go open the book of Failed relationships by Billy Doorchester.”

“Knock it off!” Sandy commanded. “We’ve got bigger problems to worry about.”

“I’ve seen the pictures of the people who were chosen and when I look at them now, it makes me wonder just what the hell were they doing all this time?” Cordelia asked. Sandy and Raleigh were playing, the rest of them were taking it easy on the sofas and couches. The room was big enough that they did not worry about bouncing into each other.

“That’s all from the nice fat vacation they were on.” Raleigh said.

“Blah, blah, blah,” said Sandy.

“Cordelia should be good at skinny-dipping. I’d pay money to see that,” Billy added

“Your behind needs to work out more. Some exercise may help you lose weight.” Raleigh teased.

“I don’t know if I want to go,” Christina said, “I mean we don’t know what they are doing to these students. And I certainly don’t want three more years of my life gone like that. I mean who knows what Director Ashman has planned. I can’t be the only one who is worried, am I?”

“Oh, no girlfriend, you aren’t.” Damien added. If Damien was joking, he was not showing it. He continued to play against Sandy on the play station and was losing badly. He took his defeat in strive. “Everyone thinks because I’m a tall, good-looking, in shape black guy that I’m strong. Sure, I lift weights, love the way my pecks look but I don’t know a damn thing about fighting or whatever it is that Ashman has them doing.”

“Don’t worry, my big strong black stallion,” Sandy said. She finished up the game as it said YOU WIN on the screen, “We all know you are a lover, not a fighter.”

They came for Cordelia one night in January.

Cordelia knew it would happen --- she was expecting it. It was always at breakfast that they would notice that the Fourth-Years were gone. It must have been three or maybe four in the morning, but she woke up when Professor Cole knocked on her door. Cordelia knew what was going on. The sound of her New York like voice in the darkness reminded her of her first night at Arcadia Academy, when she put her to bed after her audition.

“It’s time, Cordelia,” she called. “We’re going up to the roof. Do not bring anything.”

Cordelia for some strange reason that night decided not to change into her sleeping attire. She didn’t know if it was on purpose, but she was in her clothes when she joined the other students as they stood on the stairs.

Nobody spoke as Professor Cole led them through a door near a wall that Cordelia could have sworn was not there the day before. The door was between two paintings, one of Professor Branch that had recently been done and Professor Rickman. The stairs they were now walking on were dark. Cordelia was the only one out of place with her school uniform on. Everyone else were in their sleeping clothes. So naturally people wondered if she changed when she wasn’t supposed to. Up ahead of Professor Cole, they encountered the door to the roof of the building. She tapped on it four times. On the fourth tap, the trap door was opened. They all piled on to the roof.

It was an awkward long, narrow, strip with a single drop that led all the way to the ground level for any unlucky soul that wondered too close. A red iron fence ran along the edge. That was the only thing that was keeping people from falling off the building. Cordelia silently was praying that she should have grabbed her coat. She thought she saw on the weather that it was going to be fifteen degrees that night and she couldn’t help but notice that the clouds was increasing. There was a twenty-percent chance of a light snow shower in the morning.

Cordelia hugged herself. She was not built for cold. She also noticed that no one said a word. People were not even looking at each other. It was as if she was in a silent horror movie where something terrible was about to come. Even the other Comedy Cliques were like strangers to her.

“Everyone, take off your clothes,” Professor Cole called out.

Much to her surprise, everyone completed. Even Cordelia took off all her clothes. It would make perfect sense that they would all get naked in front of each other without a hint of worry or doubt. Afterwards, Raleigh put his hand on her bare shoulder to steady himself as she climbed out of her clothes. Soon they were naked and shivering, their bare back and buttocks pale in the moonlight, the bright campus rolling away from them, with the dark trees of the forest beyond.

The students understandably were scared. They were thinking this was going to help them once they graduated and go out into the world and be famous in whatever fields they chosen. They held on to their clothes until Professor Cole instructed them to drop everything. Cordelia couldn’t believe her school uniform was met with a guest of wind that blew her clothes over the ledge. She silently cursed under her breath. It didn’t matter. Professor Cole moved down the line and placed a strange right dot on each student’s forehead. When she was done, she walked back the other way, checking to make sure the dot was in place. Finally, she called out a strange word that no one ever heard of.

Then it hit her, the word Professor Cole said. It was a Colonial word design to transform humans into any shape the person who called the word said. Oh shit, she’s going to change us into animals. But why? Cordelia asked herself unless it was to send them to another location. A blue beam of light surrounded all the students, one by one Cordelia couldn’t protest and she really wanted to protest. Cordelia now was terrified, she knew what the blue beam was, it was a transformation beam. As her form was being changed she remembered stories from her planet of people going through the process. Getting to experience life as a different life form. She was feeling terrified as her form and the form of the students began to change. The whole terrifying process took about twenty seconds and boom, she was no longer human.

The light was gone. She squatted on the roof, breathing hard. To her shock, she was not cold any more. She looked at Raleigh and Christina and they looked back at her. But it wasn’t Raleigh and Christina, they had become birds of prey.

Professor Cole walked down the line, grabbed each student and threw them off the roof. They all, in spite of the shock, or the fear or maybe a combination of both knew what to do, they spread out of their wings and right away knew they were flying.

Cordelia squealed in protest. She didn’t want to go. But, Professor Cole’s hands were like the hand of God, reaching out from the sky to take her to her death. She was trying to resist her in panic, but as soon as Professor Cole threw her off the roof, she spread her wings and beat her way up into the sky, she was flying, she couldn’t believe it. She was a bird, flying on her own. What the hell kind of acting school transforms you into a bird?

Cordelia’s new bird-of-pray brain was now fully formed, it was not much giving her reflection. She only had her bird like senses to rely on now but she knew enough to join the rest of the students who were flying in the air. Cordelia had heard stories of this happening to her friends back on the Colonial home world but she did not think not for one instant that she would go through this herself.

They were high in the air flying, she and her classmates fell into formation, with a Fourth-Year named Joy at the head. Joy was the daughter of a Los Angeles county Sheriff’s department and her mother was a local superior court judge. Like most parents, they wanted Joy to go to a good school. The family made a huge fuss when Joy decided she wanted to do something out of the box and work in the entertainment industry --- when she made her mind up she was coming, her family tried to have her committed. Thanks to Ashman’s technological influence to convince her parents that the school was good for her. Joy’s dream was to become a famous screenwriter and that was the Discipline that she chooses with a concentration in communications. She always kept her hair cut short, she had a posture, but there was another trait that got her into the academy, she had an unnatural ability to take charge.

As the students, now as birds-of-prey were any indication; any one of them could have led. Cordelia was vaguely aware of that, although she lost her human instincts while in this transformation state, but in this new form she picked up some new senses. One had to do with the air: she could literary feel here the warmer temperatures were as clear as people looking for clear air to breathe when trapped in building flooding with water. The sky now appeared different to her. She could make out various currents of energy flowing all over the planet. Instantly she knew the cold currents needed to be avoided. She also felt the electrical charges in the air and her sense of direction changed, it sharpened, to the point where she could be anywhere on the planet and never get lost. On some level, she thought that was cool as hell.

She could feel the Earth’s magnetic poles going in various directions off in the black distance. And it was along one of those lines that Joy was leading them. She was taking them south. By dawn, they were a mile and a half up and doing sixty-five miles an hour, over the cars on the Atlanta highway below them.

They passed Macon, Georgia dealing with the smoke and the bad exhaust fumes from cars that really needed a service call. They flew all day, following the coast, past Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, Port St. Lucie, West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Miami, and eventually over the ocean. It felt great. Cordelia did not want to stop. She felt free for the first time in her life. She couldn’t believe how strong she was, how many times she flapped her wings. She had to talk about it.

“Beak.” She yelled. “Beak, beak, beak, beak, beak.”

Her classmates agreed.

Cordelia was shuffled up and down in an orderly fashion, in the same way that players on a football team would serve. Sometimes they flew down and rested or fed in a badly drained spot. The students also frequently shared places with other birds-of-prey who had no clue that these were transformed humans thanks to alien technology, they considered them outsiders before flying on.

How long they flew, Cordelia couldn’t have said. Occasionally they caught sight of a land mass that she deduced was Cuba. She never was good at word problems. She could handle direct calculations. Ingle and Lisa were the Math pros in school, if it was not for them helping her make sense of the word problems she would have totally flunked Space Calculus and then earth based Calculus. Their brains couldn’t hold the amount of information needed to do proper math in their heads which was a shame because Cordelia got the sense they had been flying for days if not weeks.

They had gone far enough south that the weather was warmer, and then they went farther still. They saw Jamaica, they already passed the Florida Keys. When they all spotted a school of fish swimming in the ocean, they all dived down and grabbed the poor victims and fed on the Fish. For raw fish, Cordelia thought the fish was good eating. Cordelia spotted a group of bird watchers who had strange looks. They all knew this was unusual seeing birds this far south. Cordelia didn’t care. She flew on with the rest of her class.

No one in the class knew how much time passed. It could have been days, could have been weeks, they did not know and to be honest they did not care. Cordelia was not lost for the second time in her life, she found peace. That was what she was wanting to experience. She forgotten about her human past, about the Colonial home world that she was born on. The destruction of the Colonial home world. Her arrival on Earth, about Arcadia Academy and about Chicago, about Lisa and Ingle and Stewart and Director Ashman. Why hang onto forgotten memories? She had no name anymore. She barely had an identity, and she didn’t want one. In fact, she wanted nothing to do with humanity. Her job was to stick with her flock and fly where Joy, their unofficial leader led. She had the instinct to fly south, past the coast of Peru and then noticing the Pacific Ocean. She had been so very happy.

Though it was getting harder, they set down in very remote, almost exotic locations, widely spaced out of the way places that must have been picked for them in advance. She had been cruising along a mile, it had been seven hours since they all ate and the aching in her stomach was starting to distract her from the flying. Secretly she had hope for something, anything to kill the hunger growing inside of her when a hundred miles later, they saw a nice little river that contained the fish she was craving floor. The class all dived down and grabbed a fish. If Cordelia did not know better, she was under the impression that spots like this had been planted there intentionally to help them.

It was getting colder again, after their long trip, they were now in Chile. They were a lean flock of birds, the fat on their bodies melting away like butter, but no one turned aside or complain as Joy led them south from the tip of the Drake Passage. The invisible highway guided them along.

There was no inter-flock beaking now. Cordelia glanced over to the other branch of students to see Sandy’s button burning with determination opposite her. They spotted a boat adrift deep in water loaded with all kinds of tasty food for them to feast. The gray dense shore of Antarctica was fast approaching, they regarded it not with relief but with a little fear. This was no vacation spot. There were no bird names for this place because birds-of-pray didn’t come this far south. She could see magnetic tracks and rails converging here and that’s where Joy was leading them. They all flew high; the wrinkled grey skies clear below them revealing two miles of dry air.

Instead of a beach filled with fish as far as the eye could see, they saw bizarre, unspeakable penguins walking by, then a sea of blank white ice, the frozen land of Earth where very few humans ever dare to go. Cordelia was tired. The cold began to attack her thin feathery body. She no longer could figure out why Joy was bringing them out this way. If any of them dropped, she would know and given how a dead corpse would look, she would have no problems eating them.

The rail they were following dipped down. It angled towards the planet. Like kids chasing after candy, they slipped and followed it towards the planet, accepting the loss of altitude for a burst of speed and the relief in trying to use their body to keep flying on when all of them secretly wanted to stop. Cordelia could see there was a house made of some unusual brick they were heading towards. It was a place for humans, and ordinarily Cordelia would have crapped on it just for pleasure.

But no, there was no question, Joy was heading for the house and so was everyone else. The mountain top was high and the house was hidden at the top. They were close enough now that Cordelia could see an overweight black man wearing glasses, holding a similar device that Professor Cole held the night they got changed into birds-of-pray. The urge to fly in front of him was fun, but the exhaustion and the magnetic lock was stronger.

At the last second, he followed Joy and stiffened her wings and they caught the air, gathering up the last of their energy which was breaking their fall. They all landed on the snow-covered roof and struggling to breathe. Her eyes went dull. The human was standing there, looking pretty or at least trying to. She wondered what the man was going to do. Cordelia didn’t care anymore if she could sleep. Her wings were hurting her so bad

The man took out a device, like the one Professor Cole had and drew a strange symbol with his beakless lips and pressed a button on it. Twenty pale, naked human teenagers lay in the snow under the polar sun.

Cordelia woke up in a bare yellow bedroom. She could not have guessed to the nearest twenty-four hours how long she had been asleep. She was in pain and her back ached like hell. She looked at her brown featherless fingers. She brought them up to touch her fac. She sighed and smiled at being a woman again, a human. She screamed and said yes and silently danced around for a moment.

The bedroom was nothing to write home about, all of it was a dull yellow: the bedclothes, the walls, the sleeping clothes she wore, the yellow-painted bedframe. She noticed yellow slippers waiting for her on the floor. Cordelia could tell that she was on the eighth floor. Her view showed an ice lake not too far from her room. By the Lords of the Colonial, what has she gotten herself into?

Cordelia snaked out into the hallway, still in her new sleeping clothes and a very thick robe she found hanging inside a closet. She found her way downstairs into a dry hallway with a vaulted ceiling; it was identical to the dining room at Arcadia Academy, but the feeling in the room was off. It felt like a vacation resort almost. Three large and long tables ran most of the length of the room.

Cordelia sat down. A man sat alone at one end of the table, enjoying a nice freshly squeezed glass of orange juice and staring anxiously at the picked-over remains of some impressive homemade pancakes. He was black-haired, tall, and had a motorcycle gang member look, tall and round-shouldered, a strong chin and was someone you don’t want to piss off. His clothing was like the clothes worn at Arcadia Academy. His eyes were jet black.

“I let you sleep,” he said in his Irish accent. “Most of the others are already up.

“Thanks.” Cordelia shifted positions to the bench to sit next to him. She scoured through the left-over plates and dishes for a clean fork.

“You are at Arcadia South.” Cordelia thought she heard an Irish accent, but now that she was right up on him, she knew that’s what she had heard, and he didn’t look at Cordelia when they talked. “We are about eight hundred miles from the South Pole. You flew a long way from Chile, over to a region called Noman’s Land.

He took a sip of orange juice.

“Where is everyone?” Cordelia asked. There didn’t seem to be any sense in being formal. They were wearing sleeping clothes. And the Cold hash browns and pancakes were better than at Arcadia Academy. She had not realized how hungry she was.

“I gave them the morning.” He waived in no direction. “Classes begin in the afternoons here.”

Cordelia nodded, her mouth full.

“What kind of classes,” the Irish man repeated. “Here at Arcadia Academy South you will begin learning not only about the true art of acting, the true art of writing, the true art of directing, but you will also learn the true art of leadership. I suppose you thought that was what you were doing with Director Ashman?”

Questions like that always confused Cordelia, she had to be honest with the man.

“Yes, I did think that. I hope you don’t mind but I tend to ask a lot of questions.”

“Good,” the Irish man said, “you are here to take your acting lessons to the next level. You think” --- his accent made it theenk --- “that you had been studying acting. You have received a few and you know your applications, what are the different forms of acting?”

“Drama, Comedy, horror, and of course method.”

“Very good,” he said sarcastically. “Out bloody standing, you are a genius.”

Without effort, Cordelia swallowed her bruised feelings. She was still enjoying the afterthought of having been transformed to a bird-of-pray. Not to mention her hash browns.

“Thank you.”

“You have been studying acting the way a drug dealer studies chemistry. You were reciting it like you were forced to sign the Pledge of Allegiance, but you do not yet understand it.”

“You all make acting sound like it’s a life or death battle.”

“For what is coming from you, you need to learn to be able to act your way out of life or death situations. Acting is not just signing up for a movie or a television series, or working on some drama or theater production,” the man said. This was clearly his favorite speech to give to new comers. “You can’t study acting. You can’t learn it. You must live, breathe and eat acting. It must fill your soul, you must make love to acting.”

Cordelia couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“When an actor or actress transforms herself or himself into another person, you have to become the person the scene is calling for. You must not just simply review what the texts of the last three years have taught you. You must dig deep into the human soul to become the person that you are supposed to be portraying. When you are the antagonist, you must know the character and transform into that person.”

“You are not going on some kind of acting adventure here, Cordelia. This process will be long, painful, humiliating and very, very” --- and he practically shouted the word --- “dull. You are not going to be making any movies here, writing anything. You are free to imagine that in your heads. No, my girl, for what you have to do, you need silence and isolation. That is the reason why you are here. You will not like it here at Arcadia South. I do not encourage you to try either.”

Cordelia was already not feeling this man. She made up her mind that she did not like him, not all, he treated her not like a woman, like what most Earth men she had met up to now do. She put it out of her mind and focused on cramming as much into her body.

“Are you telling me that the acting I’m going to learn here is going to be Acting two point zero?” Cordelia mumbled. “It sounds like you’re going to work us like slaves.”

“The acting here will force you to access parts of the human heart that ordinary humans don’t know they have.”

“Right, so what happens if I can’t?”

“Nothing, you go back to Arcadia. You graduate. You spend your life as a second-rate actress. A B listers as the humans here on Earth call it. Many do not speak of their experiences.”

Cordelia had no intention of letting that happen to her, though it occurred to her that probably nobody sets to have that happen to them, and, knowing the way the universe worked. If it did happen to anyone, chances are it would be her. When that realization settled in, suddenly the food did not look so good to her.

“Ashman tells me you are really good with accessing your emotions,” the black-haired man said, fidgeting a little. He put a paper on the table. “Read that scene and perform it for me, right now.”

Cordelia’s fingers were still stiff and sore from having served as wings, but she knew this was another audition. She studied the scene for a moment. It was a small speech that a young teenage girl had to give while at the same time facing the barrel of a gun. Cordelia knew fear, she transformed into the girl and read the scene. The Irish man felt her fear and on some level wondered if Cordelia had multiple personality syndrome once she finished the scene she put the paper down on the desk.

Cordelia’s breakfast companion smiled. Something he rarely does. He looked her directly in her eye, sizing her up, trying to figure out what to tell her.

“You take a lot of risk,” the man said coldly. “I like that, for what we have in store for you, you may be just what this planet needs. Go on and join your friends. I believe you will find them on the roof of the East tower.” He pointed to a doorway. “We begin this afternoon, you don’t have a lot of time.”

Okay, Mr. Furrywag, Cordelia thought. You the boss. She stood up, the stranger stood up, too, and shuffled off in the opposite direction. Cordelia got the sensation that he was disappointed in her.

Cordelia had a few hours to explore her new surroundings before classes began. Brick for brick, panel for panel, board for board, Arcadia Academy South was the same house as the main campus. That made Cordelia feel better. Which was reassuring, but in a way as the main house looked a little modern, this house reminded her of a nineteenth century boarding house. The first question Cordelia had was, why was a house part of an acting academy all the way down here, at the bottom of the world? The roof of the East Tower was round and had some impressive cheating, a glass wall allowed an impressive view of the mountain the house was resting on, but energy shield protected it from the prying eyes of the rest of the world. The air was tepid, but the floor, and the furniture were warm to the touch. There were some computer glass screens attached to the desks. It was like being in a greenhouse in the dead of winter.

As said, the rest of the Arcadia class was up there, standing dazed in groups of three, sometimes groups of fours, looking out, taking in their new scenery, gossiping like people going out for a Debbie Allen production, the light was even different as very few humans get to see what they are seeing. They all looked different. Their waist lines were slimmer, their shoulders and chest had lost some mass. Many have lost fat and put on a little muscle even Billy had lost a little bit of weight and for the first time in his life was under the three-hundred-pound club. Billy was happy. Raleigh had toned down a little and looked sharp and handsome and Christina had lost a little weight as well.

“Bleak, bleak, bleak, bleak, bleak.” Sandy said when she saw Cordelia. Everyone laughed, though Cordelia had the impression that they been laughing about her for hours.

“Hey girl,” Billy said trying to sound all amazed and what not, “This is a seriously fucked up situation we’re in don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” Cordelia said, “What time is jumping in the lake class start around here?”

“I will never make fun of anyone who is overweight ever again,” Damien said and that shocked the gathered folks when he confessed that, “We all got naked, together. All of us.”

They were all wearing identical yellow sleeping clothes. Cordelia felt like an inmate at a local human jail. She had seen pictures of men and women dressed in orange jump suits. She wondered if Damien was missing his secret lover now, whoever that might be.

“I ran into Nurse Irish McCreep downstairs,” Cordelia said. The sleeping clothes had no pockets, and Cordelia kept looking for somewhere to put her hands, “He treated me like I was a Colonial punching bad and how I’m not a good student. He’s going to so make my life hell here.”

“You slept through our let’s meet our new teachers. That’s Professor McShane.”

“McShane, like Director McShane?”

“He’s the son,” Damien said. “Director McShane was the last director when I was a First Year, now we got Ashman at the main campus. He left suddenly and no one knew why, now we know.”

The original director of Arcadia academy was Paul McShane, he had been the most respected actor in the history of the academy. He had three hundred credits to his name by the time he was tapped to become Director of Arcadia Academy in the 1950’s and 1960’s. It wasn’t until he took over that Arcadia Academy opened an American branch and choose Eastern Georgia for its location. Before he took over, Arcadia Academy was an exclusive all white school where the rich, well-connected students could go to, but Director McShane saw something in students of color, that they too had a chance to impress people, though many of the staff members were against it, with some pushing and some sweet talking McShane convinced them to admit students of color, one of the first students of color that was admitted was Professor Natalie Cole who went on to have a highly successful career in the Entertainment Industry.

“You have to do something mighty rough to get sent all the way down here,” Billy mused.

“He might have requested the assignment,” Cordelia said, “on my planet, when someone was tired of being around people, sometimes they would ask to be assigned to the sixth planet in the system. Only six hundred people lived there at the time and that was as remote as you could get.”

“You might be right, I think if anyone is going to crack here first,” Damien said, as if he was having a different conversation. “It would be me,” he let out a depressing sigh, “I don’t know there’s something about this place that gives me the creeps.”

Sandy rubbed Damien’s arm playfully. “Look, you survived Florida, you’ll be okay. How could this be worse than Florida?”

“Maybe if we asked nicely he’ll transform us back into birds-of-prey.”

A group of students laughed at the thought of being transformed back into birds-of-pray. All except Christina.

“Dear Jesus Christ!” said Christina. “I will never do that again. Do you all realize we ate worms? We at motherfucking worms!”

“I will tell you what I liked about being a bird-of-prey?” Billy said. “Being able to shit on things in public and not get yelled at. I kept thinking mom, how you like me now as I went to town.”

“I don’t think I will go back,” Damien said as he threw a white rock into the darkness, no one could see the rock but herd it when it hit the ground. “I would like to fly to Cuba or Jamaica. I would love it if a nice couple would adopt me and make me their pet. That would be an ideal life. Free of the pressures of being human, not having to worry about paying bills. That would be the life.”

“Maybe Professor McShane could turn you into an Eagle, since you are all about the bird life,” Billy said helpfully.

“Eagle birds are okay but they are an endangered species. Plus, I would have a big ass target on me thanks to hunters.”

“I will say this,” Raleigh added, “Professor McShane strikes me as a hard ass teacher who isn’t going to go easy on us.”

“I don’t know how anyone like that can spend all that time alone.” Sandy added.

“I agree” Cordelia said.

It was then that Sandy decided to add some more teasing towards Cordelia when she said, “Bleak, bleak, bleak, bleak, bleak.”

No one had their smartphones on them, their watches, there were not even clocks around. They could not figure out what time it was, even the night sky was not giving them an indication. It made Cordelia think of Cal’s insane plot to steal time and mold it into a weapon. Cal would love it here.

That first morning, the students talked and socialized on the roof of the East Tower for what seemed like hours, trying to stay warm and encourage each other as they adapted to their new surroundings. Nobody wanted to go back downstairs, not even after they got tired of talking about anything, eventually they stood against the stone wall and just looked out into the endless sea of ice and finally smiled when it started to snow.

Cordelia leaned her back against the cool stone and closed her eyes. She felt Raleigh move over and put his arm around her shoulder. If nothing else, Raleigh could hang on to her. Whatever was going on, she always felt comfortable around Raleigh. They rested.

“What do you think about our crazy situation?” asked Raleigh.

“If you would have told me six years ago that I would end up on a planet, find some crazy secret school that trains you on how to be an actress, I would have laughed at you.”

“And now that you are part of this crazy secret school?”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“What do you want out of life Cordelia?”

“I have a plan. I want to spend ten years acting on television shows, movies, I’m not picky if I have steady work. Then I want to spend the rest of my career producing and finally when I get in my mid-fifties, I want I want to come back to Arcadia, to be a professor here.”

“You want to be a professor, here at this school?” Raleigh asked.

“Yes, what’s wrong with giving back?” Cordelia asked.

“There’s nothing wrong with it. I just want to know how I will be fitting into this life of yours?”

“Well, I figured we marry as soon as we figure out where in the United States we want to work.”

“I was thinking New York City,” Raleigh said, “I have lots of family in New York.”

“You want to be where your family is,” Cordelia said, “I get that, on the Colonial home world, traditions are important to our people and we always follow traditions.”

After they had their talk, they both fell asleep. Later, it might have been hours, minutes, or days, no one knew, she finally opened her eyes. She tried to speak, but discovered that she couldn’t talk.

Some of the others were on their feet. Moving around, dazed and confused. Professor McShane had appeared at the head of the stars, his yellow sleeping attire covered his gut. He cleared his throat.

“Using Colonial technology so generously given to us by Ms. Alldice people I have removed your ability to speak,” he said. He tapped his Adam’s apple. “We will be studying an ancient form of acting known as the silent method. For the first three months, you will not be allowed to speak, you may use our internal network to communicate via the computer, please follow me.”

The class stared at him. McShane seemed to be more comfortable now that no one could talk.

“Come,” he clapped his hands and smiled, “it’s time for your first lesson.”

One thing had always confused Cordelia about the acting she read about in books: it wasn’t that hard to do. There were lots of text and thick books and long articles written about acting over the years, but when it just comes down to it, acting is all about personality, memorizing your lines, and transforming yourself into the character the writer wants you to transform yourself into. Depending on the type of production you were doing, you would only be that person for a few hours, or in the case of a television show, you would be that person for eight hours a day for a period of six to eight months or in the case of a movie person, you would be that person for that same period and be done with it and you move on to the next role. It took some time and effort, like doing calculus or space chemistry, it just took time. Any Joe Carson off the street could do acting, if they were willing to put in the time and the patience.

Cordelia had been relieved when she learned there had been entire schools built around acting and schools that took acting seriously and treated it like a respected profession. Acting was part talent, part determination, and part passion. When you get a scene just right and you see the audience reaction, you go away satisfied and that’s how Cordelia felt most days. Acting was also work, challenging work, rivers of it. Every scene had to be adjusted, memorized, rehearsed, hundreds of times until you can see the words in your sleep and according to the Arcadia method, circumstances adorned the word with a Capital letter at Arcadia. Having an Arcadia education means you know your craft backwards and forwards.

As much as it was like anything else, acting was like language. And like a language, textbooks and teaches treated it as a system for the purposes of teaching it, but it was complex and chaotic and only a handful of people have what it takes to be well at it. It obeyed the rules only to the extent that the timing like in comedy was right for the people trying to get into the business in the first place, but one type of acting no one had studied yet was silent acting. Cordelia had never seen a silent film since she arrived on Earth. She had heard about them, read about them on the internet but didn’t think silent film would be part of her education.

It was McShane’s intention to learn and become experts of the silent film method, not only to watch every silent film ever made but read the scripts and know how to write a silent film. The very best actors had talent, he told his captive and silence class, but they also had the mental discipline to pull off any type of movie they got cast in. It didn’t matter if it was a comedy, a horror movie, or a drama. They could do the scene, convey the emotion the writer was calling for and do in a way that left audiences satisfied.

That first afternoon, Cordelia expected a lecture, but instead, when McShane was done manipulating their bodies, he showed each of them to look like what was a jail cell, a small stone room with a television set and a DVD player hooked up to it. A shelf of movies was resting on shelves attached to one wall. The room was cleaned and dust free.

“Sit,” McShane Said.

Cordelia sat. The professor placed in front of her, one by one, like a man setting up a chess board, a portable computer glass slide and a small book titled The Art of Silent Film Acting. The computer screen that Cordelia was sitting in front of turned itself on. On the screen, the following flashed and a graphic appeared that said ARCADIA ACADEMY SILENT FILM SCRIPT COLLECTION TEXT BOOK. Cordelia also noticed a recording camera beside the television.

“On the computer screen, I’m going to put up a scene, I want you to read the scene and mimic what you see.”

Cordelia was in uncharted territory now. Right up until now she met every challenge with accuracy. But silent acting was something she was unfamiliar with. Cordelia read the scene, it was a short two minuet scene where she had to stare down at someone pointing a gun and plead with them not to shoot. She stood up, got on her knees and right away her face transformed and McShane saw the fear that the scene was calling for. Cordelia felt awkward as she tried to act out the scene. Once she was done, she sat down at her seat and on the computer screen asked, how did I do?

“Not bad,” McShane was not impressed with what he saw but he was impressed enough to say, “you have potential. Out of all the students I see here, you have potential. You will watch every silent film on that wall, at least twice. After every two films, you will then in between each film, act out the scene that is flashed on your computer screen. When you are finished, I will come and check on you later.”

McShane’s Irish accent was getting thicker as the day wore on. His speech was not difficult to understand, Cordelia was not used to hearing someone talk that way. It was about six hours into her lesson when Cordelia noticed something on the wall in the room that said IF I HAVE TO STAY HERE ONE MORE FUCKING DAY I’M GOING TO KILL MYSELF. Cordelia wondered if McShane knew the statement was on the wall and wondered why he did not have it taken down.

Soon, Cordelia began to get good at silent acting better than she could dream possible. Page by page, she could get into a scene and perform it, it didn’t matter if it was a comedy, a drama, slap stick, horror, she could act out the scene and get it down pack. She could perform a scene on command at noon and at midnight, in summer and the winter, on the mountaintop and a thousand yards under the Earth surface. Once Cordelia had to act in an evening during a blizzard which almost never happened. Even her classmates were amazed at how fast Cordelia picked up silent acting. She even had to perform a scene pretending to be a man, something that really made her feel uncomfortable.

When that task was completed, Cordelia’s mouth was dry. Her fingertips had no feeling in it. She was so tired she had a demanding time trying to get her body to move in the direction she wanted them to move in. She had become an expert at the type of acting that she was being trained to do. Without realizing what was going on, she was told one day that she had learned the art of sign language. She was exhausted.

When she was finished, McShane slapped Cordelia hard across the face.

“That was not believing you could do silent acting,” McShane said, “I knew you could do it. You needed a little motivation.”

Cordelia was stunned. She couldn’t believe that this man had hit her. If she was back home in Chicago and one of her dad’s staffers had done that, not only would the staffer be fired, but the Chicago Police would be called in to arrest the man who hit her. Out here, she had no power, the man with all the power was the same one who struck her.

McShane made the computer go back to the first scene. He then grabbed the first DVD and inserted it into the DVV player.

“Begin again, please.”

Clap on, clap off.

When McShane was gone, Cordelia stood up and stretched. Both of her knees were in pain. Instead of beginning again, she walked over to the tiny window looking out into the endless sea of ice. The long landscape was beginning to make her see things that were not there. The sun, which was barely coming up, had not moved at all.

That was how Cordelia’s first month at Arcadia Academy South went. The scenes changed, the circumstances were different, but the room was always the same: empty, relentless, crazy, wrist-slitting waste world of reputation. McShane’s terrifying warnings had been justified and underestimated. Even during her worst moments at Arcadia, Cordelia always felt like she was being tested for something greater, something inside of her was being punished, but she wondered if they were ever going to get rewarded with something. She even wished she could be back at Arcadia working on a film or something.

For the first time in her life, she understood why they were being sent there. What McShane was asking of them was impossible. The human brain can only handle so much information. She wondered if Ashman tried to do this would the students be able to handle it, she concluded a hell fucking no to that question.

Cordelia could not tell how the others were holding up. They all met at mealtimes, passed each other in the hallways, but because of the technology against conversation, they all just looked at each other. Cordelia noticed that Damien was not his happy-go-lucky self. Even Sandy’s controlling tone and posture was set and frozen. No one even tried to sign conversations to each other, either by choice or because people were just too tired.

Cordelia was losing interest in communicating anyway. She would have been happy if there was twenty-four hour a day isolation from anyone, but instead she felt herself falling away from the others, deeper inside herself, farther than she’s ever gone before. She felt like a prisoner going from the dining room to the solitary classroom, down the stone corridors, under the glaze of the white sun. Once, she wondered up to the roof of the East Tower and found one of the others, a criminally looking dude name Sam, putting on a mime show for a non-existent audience, but it wasn’t worth the effort to try and figure out what was going on.

Professor McShane was expecting this, as if he had been through this with other students before. After the first three weeks, he announced that he turned off the technology which was keeping all the students from talking. McShane was not surprised that none of the students wanted to talk.

McShane began to vary the routine. Most days were still devoted to grinding through the silent movie scenes and their never-ending scenes of silence that the kids had to perform, but to spice things up, he would introduce other exercises. In an empty hall, he used the Colonial technology to build an impressive stage in which the students would come on stage and practice their scenes together. If anyone talked or spoke a word, the stage would send a nice little shock to the person who spoke.

Later still, they would do scenes where they would pretend to be animals, they had some experience doing this. They would pretend to be cats, dogs, bears in total silence, feeling envy once they get the scene right and anger when they got the scene wrong. McShane was dividing students against each other on purpose. Sandy, who would normally pick up scenes just like that, was struggling, she tends to produce too little emotion in her scenes. McShane, stoned face, would demand that she start over. This could and did go on for hours. No one could leave the hall before everyone completed the exercise. They slept there more than once.

As the weeks went by, and still no one spoke, they dived deeper and deeper into areas of Acting Cordelia never thought she’d have the guts to try, they get deeper and deeper into the study of acting that Cordelia had never thought would be possible. They practice every scene, learn to dissect and memorize the scenes with precision, eventually McShane gave them their own transformation devices and told them to begin working on various scenes as animals, as the opposite sex. They spent one funny ass afternoon as penguins. It was a funny scene watching them try to act out a scene as penguins around the snow. Their small bodies felt weird as they were flapping around acting out a scene in Shakespeare. Secretly, McShane got a chuckle from watching the students do that.

Nobody liked him, but it soon became clear that McShane knew what the hell he was doing. He could do things that Cordelia had never seen or even imagine would be happen at the

Arcadia main campus, she had herd of things like this happening on other planets but for acting.

One afternoon, Cordelia had to learn a scene that deal with healing. A glass was smashed and then she had to react to the broken pieces that were on the floor. She treated the broken pieces as if they were small babies that had been broken off from her mother. Cordelia let out a cry that would send a grown man to go to the local ABC store to pick up a pint of wine and come back and get drunk after viewing her performance.

One day, about three months into the semester, McShane took the master transformer control and announce that he would be transforming the class into albatrosses for the afternoon. It was a strange choice --- they’d already done a few animals but it wasn’t that strange. Why an Albatross many of them wondered but once they did that, it was a hell a lot of fun. As soon as the change was in effect, Cordelia was the first to soar into the clouds. Her little bird body was so fast and light, that it was like racing a high-performance vehicle that could reach speeds of well over one hundred mph. She was flying over them, she dived at them, nearly impacted their heads, even smacked Billy in his face who decided he was going to try and chase her, but Billy for all his attempts could not keep up with her.

For the second time in her life, Cordelia felt the joy and the freedom from being free. Cordelia had forgotten that she could feel that emotion, maybe it was the five years she had spent in space learning how to be afraid all the time, it was just plain cruel that she had to live that. They chased one another, on the ground, in the air, and in the water which Cordelia felt was the most fun. She saw Damien, with the all black body. The one with the blue and white formation was Billy. The one with the large beak was Sandy. And the one who kept chasing and landing on her back was Christina.

Somewhere in the goofing off portion of being an albatross, a game began. It had something to do with seeing how often you could dive at the water and pick up a fish and then drop it back into the water without splashing into the water. Beyond that tough, the game was not clear, they continued that for hours, no clear rules they were just having plain fun.

An Albatross eyes weren’t easy to look at, but their noses were strong. Cordelia’s noses allowed her to lock onto a target and go after it with uncanny accuracy. Even in the middle of all this craziness, she could pick out who was who. She picked out Raleigh by his strong scent. She felt like she was high on spice with a combination of maybe weed. But there was one scent that caught her attention, she couldn’t figure out what it was but every couple of minutes as she flew around she would catch it but then it will disagree.

Something was happening to the game. It was losing its focus. Cordelia was still playing and fewer of her fellow albatross were playing with her. Damien lit out in a streak towards the snow dunes. The pack dwindled to ten, then seven. Where were they going? Cordelia’s albatross brain squeaked out. And that was unbelievable. She beaked out what the hell is that smell? No one would say anything but she kept smelling it. This time she tracked the source of the smell because of the course that she had tracked, what she was smelling was Raleigh.

Cordelia had been a rule breaker all her life. Sure, as a member of a royal family she was expected to follow the rules. However, from time to time, she would break them and not think twice about it. The others were playing and making up their own sets of rules as the game went on, they were not trying to grab fishes, but each other and Cordelia decided to go after Raleigh. Their instincts were taking over, mankind, nothing was left of her human mind.

She locked her feet in the tuck of his neck. It didn’t seem to hurt him or anything, not in the least, this was more of a game of pleasure. Something crazy and serious was going on, there was no way to stop it, why would you? Was this some version of sexual fun? None of them wanted to hurt the other, but they could not stop this impulse of wanting to dig into each other.

She thought a glimpse of Raleigh’s wild beak and eyes rolling around in terror with pleasure. Their tiny breaths puffed in the air and then disappeared. His blue albatross fur was smooth at the same time it was strong and he smelled like butt cracked every time he pushed himself inside of her. Cordelia was not wanting to stop, were they having sexual intercourse? As Albatrosses.

The snow was starting to melt. As the sexual act increased, the heat was increasing. They were in the depths of true passion.

To an outsider who did not know what life was like at Arcadia Academy, the next day would not have looked any different. Everyone huddled together in their loose-fitting, all-yellow Arcadia South uniforms, even though they could speak, many of them choose not to speak to each other, and ate what was put in front of them. However, Cordelia felt like she was walking on the moon. Giant, slow-motion, law and order like steps, ringing silence, she also felt like she was floating in space, a televisions audience of billions. She didn’t want to look at anyone, least of all Raleigh.

Cordelia was sitting across the table and three people down from him, impassive and focused on her bowl of Frosted Flakes. She wanted to know badly what Raleigh was thinking. Though she knew what was on her mind, she wondered if anyone else had picked up on what they had done. She was sure they all knew what happened. They were right out in the open, right out in the motherfucking open, for the whole god-damn world to see and that terrified her. But she also wondered if everyone else was doing that too. Her face felt hot, she didn’t even know if she was a virgin anymore. She was not sure if she was still one because her memory was playing tricks on her.

Cordelia came from a traditional Colonial family. In a traditional Colonial family, it was expected that you would marry after you have secured your education and have selected a career for you to go in. In her case, she was next in line to ascend to the thrown when her parents retired which, if she had her way would be in another fifty years. But the underlying question remained, was Cordelia Alldice in love with Raleigh? She tried to compare what she felt for him with her remembered feelings for Ingle, but the two emotions were worlds apart. Things were getting out of control, that’s all. It wasn’t them, it was their albatross bodies. No one had to take it seriously. She hoped.

McShane sat at the head of the table, enjoying himself. He had known this was going to happen, Cordelia thought to herself. The anger rising in her body, stabbing at her cheese eggs with a fork. A bunch of teenagers cooped up hundreds of miles from civilization for two months, then stuck in the bodies of some horny animals wanting to get their freak on. Of course, they are going to go crazy, who wouldn’t.

Was this going to be porn for animals, porn for adults? Cordelia made a promise to herself that she was going to reapply herself to her acting studies with laser like focus of a person desperate to find out that through no fault of their own that they would fail at what they really wanted out of life, but as the days marched on, she couldn’t reconcile her feelings about Raleigh, and who it was that had sex with him out on thin ice, was it her or the albatross. Fuck that, Alldice, get back to the grind, pound your way through these silent Scenes, the collections of the DVD, become the best damn silent actress the Earth has ever seen.

Everyone, including Cordelia, fell into a trance of some kind. The depleted air of the Antarctic world made them focus. The shifting snows outside briefly revealed the sun rising into the daylight, the only feature in this world of ice and snow they now found themselves in. The World Beyond the Walls, she hadn’t thought about Mount Arm-Joy for ages. Cordelia wondered if the rest of the world, her life before this, had been a dream and that she was high on spice. When she pictured the world now, she only cared about one part of it, Antarctica, a whole new world for her to explore and to fall in love with.

She went a little insane. They all did, though took their insanity in diverse ways. Some began a sex party. Their higher function was nullified when they became animals, desperate for any kind of contact. They didn’t ask for permission, they just fucked each other when the feeling came over them. Sexual orgies were now the order of the day. Cordelia and Raleigh came upon them once or twice in the evenings --- they would gather in the open, in interesting combinations, in an empty classroom, bedroom, even the hallway was fair game, their yellow uniforms half or all the way off, their eyes had no passion, no emotion as they stroked and pumped each other, always in silence. She saw Sandy take part once. The display was for other people as for themselves, Cordelia was never into three ways, or in some cases four ways that she saw some of the students doing. Mostly when she was not a multiple lover kind of gal. She was relieved that she never saw Raleigh participating. She was really starting to have an attraction towards him but was wondering if he felt the same.

Time passed, or at least in theory it did, Cordelia speculated, it pretty much had to be passing although she couldn’t detect it. Time worked differently at the South Pole it seemed. Though she started to laugh when she realized that her male classmates including Raleigh was growing moustaches and beards. She silently said to herself that she thought Raleigh was sexy with his beard. However, as much she ate and she tried, she got thinner and thinner. Her state of mind also changed, she was no longer the rumbling, intelligence bright young woman she was when she started. She started seeing things when she knew she never did an ounce of drugs in her whole life. She also noticed her senses had become enhanced much in the same way a blind person’s senses become enhanced. She could pick out smells, and sometimes body odor from certain people. She could tell who bathed and who did not. Once, she thought she saw a man who was part man, part ogre walking by her.

Then, just like that, one morning over breakfast, McShane announced that there were two weeks remaining in the semester, and that they needed to think about their final exam. The final exam would be simply this, each of them must write a thirty minuet play where they would not speak, where they would reflect on their journey and experiences that they had here at Arcadia South. They would be free to perform any type of play they wanted. He did not care, but what he wanted was a play filled with emotions. The play was not mandatory but it would aid in their understanding of the human heart.

Two weeks wasn’t quite long enough to prepare, but it was more than enough for to go back over the materials they had learned about silent acting. Yes or no, in or out? McShane stressed that emotion was the key to a successful completion of the play.

There was a lot to study up on. Cordelia spent her remaining days trying to figure out what kind of play she wanted to do. She could write something and perform about her experiences she went through ever since she arrived on Earth. She also had a terrible thought, what would happen if they failed? Would they be stuck here, never to go back to civilization again?

The students were starting to pair off with people. Cordelia secretly hoped that she and Raleigh would pair up together. She had made her mind that she was going to do something about the fear that her people experienced on the way to the Earth solar system. She just needed a partner she could trust to help her deal with the painful memories of the trip.

Cordelia was looking for inspiration as she walked all around Arcadia South and that’s when something compelled her to walk downstairs. When she reached the bottom, that’s when she saw him.

Raleigh was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs.

“I want you to be straight up honest with me,” Raleigh said, his voice crisp with strength. “Are you in love with me? It’s okay if you aren’t, I just want to know.”

He almost made it to the finish line, but something was holding him back. She wondered if he was being serious.

Raleigh hadn’t met her eyes since the afternoon they been albatrosses together. Almost a month. Now, they stood together on the smooth, damn near freezing stone floor, now human. How could someone who had not taken a shower in five months still be so handsome? Raleigh was thinking, you haven’t had a bath in five months but you still were as pretty as the first day I met you.

“I don’t know if I’m ready to answer that,” Cordelia said. Her voice was weak from lack of using it. She was afraid to confess something she would have to commit to as per Colonial traditions. When you fall in love with someone on the Colonial home world, you commit to them for live and Cordelia wasn’t sure she was ready to do that just yet.

She tried to make her tone light, conversational, non-confrontational, but her body felt different. The floor was moving at a pace that both were approaching each other. At that moment, when she could have sworn that she was not on drugs, she didn’t know if she was lying or telling the truth. With all the time she had spent studying at the Academy, had she not recognized a good thing when it was standing right in front of her? She was not being truthful to herself and she knew that deep down, she wanted Raleigh, but she couldn’t bring herself to admit it.

“It’s okay,” Raleigh said, with a quick little smile that made Cordelia feel even worse than she was already feeling. “I was more worried about you lying to me, but your response told me everything that I was wondering about you,” he held her hand, “you do have feelings for me, don’t you?”

Cordelia felt lost, “I didn’t want to lie. I’m not sure how much you know about my people’s traditions.”

They continued to walk until they saw a nearby bench and sat down on it. She needed to explain some things to Raleigh and prayed that he was ready, would be willing to accept things.

“I know a little bit. Listen, it was nice, I mean I went into you. I didn’t think I had the balls to do that, I don’t want you to be mad at me or anything.”

Cordelia saved him from having to answer by standing up and planting another kiss on his lips. He in return, grabbed her behind and returned the kiss.

“I have to go and work on my play, can you come and find me later, I may want you as my partner.”

He smiled and laughed a little, “I like the sound of that.”

She punched him on his right arm, “my partner in the play, silly.”

“Right, partner in the play.” He then got serious, “Got you.”

“Come find me at the end of the week.”

She patted his butt cheek and disappeared down the stairs. There was no telling where she was heading for.

After that ordeal, the test was almost an afterthought. Each student was called in to do their scenes. Cordelia and Raleigh had met a week earlier and began to practice their scene. Cordelia had written a moving piece of the struggle to survive that chronicled what happened as their ship left the Colonial system. She recalled every painful detail, remembered every emotion she felt the day they left until the day they arrived on Earth to settle down.

Raleigh felt like this had the makings of a series of films or a television show. The journey Cordelia’s people took was not as quiet as Raleigh was led to believe from watching hours of television. On the news, the people of Earth had been told that their five-year journey was dull, boring and not full of anything exciting, but as Cordelia began to write her play which came out to be sixty pages, it soon became important that something more happened during the five-year journey to reach Earth.

Raleigh was playing the role of Drozen, someone Cordelia had known since she was three years old. Drozen was her body guard and for many years had protected her. Cordelia still had her diary and wrote that she secretly had a crush on Drozen, but would not dare tell him about her feelings. When Raleigh read the play, he realized that Cordelia wrote this silent play as her way of saying good bye to the people she left behind on her home world.

Once or twice a day, sometimes more, Cordelia broke down crying as she was writing this play. She had struggled to remember certain conversations she had with Drozen as they left. The talk they had the day they left orbit as he held her in his arms to comfort her. The training sessions when he was teaching her how to defend herself. The leadership lessons she was being taught by him for the eventual day when she had to learn about being a leader to the day that he died on some unnamed moon hundreds of light years from the Colonial home world.

Even as her physical emotions drained, Raleigh out performed himself on the stage showing the raw emotion he knew that death was going to be powerful, emotional, and exhausting. Cordelia was giving it her all as she silently showed the class what it was like for her traveling millions of miles through space not knowing what it was going to be like to either live or die without being with the people she loved. When she signed, I love you to Raleigh as he pretended to die, Raleigh wondered if she was signing that to Drozen or to him.

Some period later, Cordelia blinked. She had watched the other students perform similar scenes some just as powerful as students wrote about their personal fears, their personal failures, their greatest accomplishments, their most humiliating days. Cordelia would find herself crying as McShane walked over to her and said, “You made an old man cry Cordelia. Your play was like a knife piercing though my heart. You passed, so did Raleigh, you are both going home.”

There was something strange about McShane’s voice. The disrespect was gone, the rudeness she sensed from him was gone, but she saw a side of him she thought she never see, an emotional man, a real human. Did her eyes also play tricks on her? She saw the Irish man smile, soon, Cordelia was beamed with the transporter technology.

Cordelia staggered and fell into a flood of emotions that assaulted her so violently that at first, she didn’t recognize that it was the rear terrace of Arcadia Academy on a sizzling summer day. After the blankness and endless sea of polar ice. She screamed in pleasure out the top of her lungs. She was back on American soil and happy as a sailor about to get it on with a lady of the evening on his first liberty after boot camp.

Cordelia slowly rolled over on her back, the stone was hot but she did not care, it was a refreshing change of pace. Birds were singing and their singing was so loud that it hurt her ears. She opened her eyes. A sight even stranger than the grass met them: Cordelia saw the transporter beam manipulated in such a way that she could still see her teacher standing there, Antarctica in the background. Snow blowing all around him. He looked still for a moment, at peace as the ice fragments was flying. But the beam was starting to break up. McShane must be getting ready to go back to the house, Cordelia felt sad for the man but understood what his purpose was and had a new-found sense of respect for him. She was now looking at the Maze and the rest of Arcadia’s campus. The feeling of happiness made her feel alive for the third time in her life.

Then the beam vanished. It was all over. It was late May, and the air reminded her of the one thing she hated since arriving on Earth, pollen. After being in Antarctica for months, the air was starting to burn her skin, but she didn’t care. She sneezed, three times.

They were all waiting for her, or almost all: Damien and Billy and Sandy, at least were wearing their old-school uniforms, looking fat and happy and relaxed and none the worse for wear, they done nothing for the past six months but sit on their asses and eat some good old fashioned southern food.

“Welcome back,” Damien said. He was munching on a freshly picked peach. “They only told us about fifteen minutes ago that you might be arriving.”

“Jesus girl,” Billy’s eyes went wide, “Girl, you seriously lost some weight. Home girl over here needs food badly.” Then he took a sniff and covered his nose, “And maybe a nice long bath too. You smell like shit.”

Cordelia knew she only had less than a minute maybe three before she started laughing, then crying and then passing out. She still had the Arcadia South sleeping cloths on. She looked down, her body did indeed look different.

She liked lying on the hot stone for some reason, she never thought she would miss the heat as much as she missed it now. She knew she should probably get up, for the sake of being back in civilization. She wanted to will her body to get up but she didn’t want to.

“Seriously girlfriend,” Billy said, “Are you all right? What was it like?”

“Christina kicked your sorry ass,” Sandy said, “She got back five days ago. She already went home. Raleigh got back three days ago, he’s already gone too.”

“You took your sweet time getting back,” Damien said, “We were worried about you.

Why did they keep talking? Cordelia looked at all of them in silence. She was just happy to be back, she wanted to go to sleep. They all helped her on to her feet. A hot warm bath feel with all kinds of herbs was waiting for her. She got inside of it, and soaked her body for a good hour. Once that was done, she was taken to the dining hall where they had a feast fit for a King. Cordelia was never so happy to be back at this place.

“Guys,” Sandy said as she finished a burger, “Think we should tell then about what you and Raleigh were doing ---- we got eyes and we’re not stupid?”

Cordelia just placed her head down on the table and banged it, repeatedly, “I am so fucked.”

“It won’t be so bad” Damien said, “Come on, details, let’s have some details.”