The induction hall was exactly as Juno had imagined it—and nothing like he had imagined it at the same time. That was always how real things were after years spent building them in your head first.
The building itself was low and modern with reinforced materials. Like most Academy buildings, most of it was underground, with just a couple of floors above. Its white, pristine alloy walls and wide windows likely looked beautiful in the summer, contrasted against the surrounding greenery.
Exactly 112 young people filled the space, most carrying bags or other items from home. Most of them, the ones that weren't Legacies, were extremely excited to not only have survived their First Nightmare but also be in the halls of the NSQC Academy. The Legacies stood at the front with the composed readiness of people who had been preparing for this their entire lives. The wealthy scions clustered nearby, excited and only slightly nervous. The middle-class majority filled the rest of the space, tense and watchful. And at the edges, the outliers.
Standing side by side, Juno and Sunny said nothing for a moment.
"We look terrible," Sunny muttered, his gaze sweeping the room.
"We look interesting," Juno replied, correcting him. "There's actually not much of a difference."
Sunny gave him a look that suggested he disagreed but had decided not to pursue it.
They had approximately thirty seconds of standing peacefully before the Sleepers descended. Everyone wanted to talk. Everyone wanted to ask questions, be asked questions, and discuss nightmares, futures, and everything in between. Juno watched this happen with the comfortable awareness of someone who had been expecting it and found the reality more entertaining than the anticipation.
Sunny, as usual, began immediately and catastrophically making enemies.
'It's a real curiosity, how he does and says things identically as in the original novel. Either he is always the same no matter what, or Fate runs much deeper for him than I thought. Hm, I want to try to do research on that.'
Juno watched the first conversation unfold from about two meters away, appreciating something genuinely special. Sunny's Flaw did what it always did—delivered truths at the worst angle, in the worst wording, to the worst people. A girl in expensive clothes asked him about survival odds. Sunny told her, apparently with complete accuracy, what he thought her odds were. She did not take it well.
Juno waited until the girl had walked away and another Sleeper had approached, this one a broad-shouldered boy who was already midway through explaining his training background, before leaning over and asking pleasantly: "Sunny. Do you think his training is actually going to be useful in the Dream Realm?"
Sunny opened his mouth. The Flaw opened it wider.
The broad-shouldered boy's expression cycled through several emotions in rapid succession before landing on offense.
Juno stepped back, expression entirely innocent.
This continued for some time. Juno asked questions at precisely calculated intervals to catch Sunny mid-conversation with someone new, each question carefully chosen to elicit a maximally honest and maximally inadvisable response. It was, he reflected, the most fun he had experienced since waking up. The fact that Sunny clearly knew what he was doing and couldn't stop it made it significantly better.
'Ah, teenagers. How I didn't miss being one myself.'
By the time the hall had fully turned against Sunny and he had retreated to a corner, blood dripping from his nose and a quietly satisfied expression on his face, as if he had accomplished exactly what he set out to do through means he would never fully explain, Juno wandered over and stood beside him.
"Rough crowd," Juno said leisurely. It was an average afternoon stroll, basically.
"You little! Damnation, this is mostly your fault!"
"Hey, calm down there. It isn't my fault you, Flaw, are so funny."
Sunny went very still.
"What did you just say?" he asked, voice suddenly careful.
"Oh, what?" Juno said very calmly. "Well, it's really easy to figure it out, isn't it? By the second time you were answering questions promptly with the full truth, I knew it by then." He paused. "The breakfast thing was very informative."
The blood from Sunny's nose was still dripping. He appeared not to notice.
"How much do you know?" he pressed.
"Well, the whole thing, I guess? You have to answer all questions asked of you, and you can't lie at all. I would guess that if you work on it, there's lots of flexibility with the real truth." Juno regarded him a moment longer. "You're already better at managing it, which is impressive on day one. I personally still have no idea how my Flaw works."
Sunny regarded him with the careful assessment of someone deciding between several possible responses. "So, what are you going to do now?" he asked.
'Hm, what should I do right about now?' Juno had started this conversation hoping to get closer to Sunny, but now he saw that his social skills were woefully insufficient. Even his new brain couldn't help him with social interaction, it seemed.
'Oh. Yes, I suppose so.'
Grinning, Juno stopped rubbing his chin and looked back at Sunny. "Well, not anything in particular. But, I do have a proposition." Before Sunny could respond in any way, Juno interrupted him.
"To make this all fair, I'm going to tell you something. You know, information for information, since I didn't mean to sound like I am threatening or blackmailing you." Juno leaned back against the wall and started to pick at his fingernails, quickly forming exactly what he was about to say.
"My Aspect revolves around perception and senses — all of them, boosted significantly. I can manipulate my own senses to an extreme. I'm still working out the exact details, but that's where I am… Oh, also, I am smarter than I was before!"
Sunny processed this quietly. "That's not enough," he said. "Knowing someone's Flaw is one of the most dangerous pieces of information you can have. My knowing only a little of your Aspect is way too little to balance this out."
"You're right," Juno said. "It doesn't."
Sunny waited.
"I'll tell you more when we meet in the Dream Realm."
Sunny stared at him. "You do know we can be sent to completely different parts of the Dream Realm, right? What if we don't meet?" he challenged.
"It's how I'm doing it," Juno said cheerfully. "If I wanted to use your Flaw against you, I would have done it already. The breakfast thing was purely for entertainment."
Sunny said nothing. After a moment, he looked back at the room with the expression of someone filing something away under a category that hadn't fully been named yet.
Looking around, Juno noticed that the Awakened who was going to speak to them still hadn't appeared, so he informed Sunny of where he was going and quietly snuck off to the cafeteria.
…
The cafeteria made Juno genuinely happy.
He was from the twenty-first century and had an extremely high standard of food. Synthpaste did not meet his standards. After not eating for almost five days, he was extremely excited to get real food. He built a plate of considerable ambition, found a seat, and ate with the focused appreciation of someone taking the meal seriously.
After about half an hour, Sunny arrived with a tray loaded with the same focused intentionality and sat across from him without comment. They ate. The cafeteria ran through its evening noise around them, and neither of them paid it much attention.
"The meat," Juno said, at one point.
"I know," Sunny replied, mouth full and without looking up.
They finished at roughly the same time and sat in the comfortable aftermath of a good meal. The only reason Juno didn't finish earlier was that he had gotten not only a second serving, but also a third. It was his mentality that, when there was food around, if you were not pigging out, then you were doing a disservice to the chefs.
"What are you taking?" Sunny inquired.
"Only wilderness survival, like Jet said," Juno said. "You?"
Sunny looked up. A brief pause. "Same."
Juno smiled. "Good. She would be happy we are taking her advice."
Sunny studied him for a moment, sharp and quiet, then looked back at his empty tray.
"Sworn enemies yet?" Juno asked, nodding toward the rest of the room.
"Just enemies… so far."
"Efficient."
"I try," Sunny said, completely straight-faced, and Juno laughed.
…
The interview room was small, and the administrative worker was friendly, and the questions were phrased with the careful warmth of someone trying to make people comfortable sharing things they probably shouldn't.
Juno sat across from her and answered everything, not because he had to but because he had already decided to before sitting down.
"Would you like to share the type of Aspect you received?"
'Here goes nothing.'
"Uh, I got one to do with my senses."
Her pen didn't stop, continuing to write the circles she had before. She was, clearly, doodling.
"And your Appraisal result?"
"Glorious."
A long pause now.
"That's," she began.
"Pretty cool," Juno said pleasantly.
She set her pen down. Reached into her desk drawer and produced a small Memory — glass-like, humming faintly when she held it. She set it on the desk between them.
"This confirms the truth of statements made in its presence. Standard protocol for exceptional claims. Any objection?"
"None at all."
She picked up her pen. "Please repeat what you said before. Word for word."
"My Aspect has to do with my senses, and my Appraisal result was Glorious."
When the Memory didn't respond at all, the woman started writing furiously without speaking. After a while, Juno grew bored and decided to finish the rest of the interview himself.
"Yeah, I also got a True Name."
The Memory did not ring.
She stared at it. Then at Juno. Then at the Memory again, as though giving it a moment to reconsider.
It did not reconsider.
"It's Sun Chaser. That's my True Name. I can write the runes out, too."
She wrote something down with slow and careful movements, her brain clearly doing something else entirely in the background. Soon afterwards, Juno had to write out his True Name and answer a couple more questions. But before long, the interview finished, and he was free to leave. Right as he was about to exit the room, the lady suddenly stood up and saluted him.
"Thank you for this, Sir Sun Chaser. I am sure you will become an elite force of Humanity."
Without saying anything, Juno just waved at the lady and left.
…
The next morning, Juno and Sunny came down to the cafeteria together.
'The rankings board should be up about now. I wonder where I placed it.'
Juno clocked the room's energy before he saw the screen — a hundred people oriented toward the same point, the specific charge of a crowd sitting with surprising information. He followed it to the wall.
At the top: Nephis. Changing Star.
Below her, second place: Juno. Sun Chaser.
Below him, after a gap: Caster, Han Li clan, unnamed.
The cafeteria was loud about this.
"How… how can this be?!"
"I'm not seeing things, right?"
"Two of them? In the same batch?"
"What the hell is this!?"
"I heard he came in with the outskirts rat. The perverted fool."
"You're joking."
Two True Name bearers in the same batch, especially having them right after the First Nightmare, was completely unheard of. This meant that everyone in the room was looking at the screen, then around the room, trying to connect the second name to a face. Most of them hadn't yet landed on the red-haired boy with the horns who had just walked in and was loading his tray with single-minded focus.
To the right of Juno's portrait, two simple lines of text were displayed:
"Name: Juno"
"True Name: Sun Chaser"