Diary of a Teenaged Mimic

Dear Diary,

I should have guessed doing Mana work would push me way more than physical exercise. While I'd never been a jock back at Eastside, my Phileo City body started out in pretty good shape, so Physical Training was tough, but not quite as brutal as it might have been. I mean, even back at Eastside I knew how to run. I didn't do it unless the cops were chasing me, but I knew how. Using Mana, on the other hand, wasn't something I'd ever done, and apparently my new body hadn't prepped for it either.

So I woke up to Saffron knocking to wake me up with my room absolutely reeking of Pumpkin Spice. My hangover went away some time overnight, so I hopped out of bed, skipped over to the door, and pulled it partway open to tell Saffron, "I'm up!"

She goggled and her face went red before her gaze snapped up to meet my eyes. "Really, Diaz?"

She sounded aggravated, but I noticed the tiniest touch of a smile at one corner of her mouth. "Hey, you're doing me a favor waking me up, I gotta return it somehow."

She rolled her eyes and walked off with a, "see you at breakfast," shaking her head as she went.

I pushed the door shut, pulled on a fresh uniform, dumped my stanky ones in the laundry chute, and headed down to the Dining Hall. I got there just as the serving crew let us in, and attacked the morning's offerings as was my wont. No idea why, but I downed like four pitchers of water and still felt a little thirsty.

In Geography Doc DeLeon gave us a pop quiz on the Phileo City region before diving into the day's lesson on New Amsterdam and its surrounding area. Much like New York City, New Amsterdam had spilled off the island of Manhattan, although here Newark was, like Camden Yards, a client state. We got a bit of history mixed in, as apparently the other boroughs originally had their own governments, but New Amsterdam more or less conquered them through a mix of diplomacy and economic warfare. Just like back home, Manhattan had mad stacks of cash to throw around; not only because of the port and trade, but the House of Orange from the Low Countries moved to New Amsterdam about three hundred years previously when the entire area got damn near burned to the ground by, get this, English Pirates.

Apparently in the here and now, the English never got around to conquering their neighbors, and instead focused entirely on a level of piratical raiding that put the Vikings to shame, hitting everywhere from Scandinavia to fuckin' Palestine. Three hundred years ago the House of Orange, who wanted to get their trade on, decided to sponsor a multi-national naval force to wipe the English out once and for all, but the English caught on and hit the ships and caravans carrying the money to the other City-States they'd wrangled into helping them.

I ferreted that out of DeLeon's lecture as well; apparently 'nations' weren't really a thing here. Ethnicities and all the racism that went with them, sure. Cultures, yeah. But the biggest governmental authorities seemed to be at the level of City-States, not unlike what I'd read about Classical Greece back at Eastside. Most of the North American First Peoples still got fucked over, but down in Central America the locals actually had things the Europeans saw as Cities rather than 'towns' or 'villages' or 'shit ripe for conquering'.

It meant that, at least in Phileo City, being a Hero wasn't the equivalent of being on the City Council, it was closer to being a fuckin' Senator, Supreme Court Justice, and General all wrapped into one. Power never really put my nethers in an uproar back at Eastside, so I assume that has something to do with my new body.

Then again, nobody from Camden ever really got close to real power, so maybe I'd always been like this.

Anyway, lunch was lunch, and during World Cultures DeLeon had us memorizing stats on the groups that lived in New Amsterdam. Apparently New Amsterdam and Phileo City had a whole frenemies thing going on; both big ports, both pretty cosmopolitan, each other's closest neighbor, yada, yada, yada. A thin line of 'unclaimed territory' ran between them, and apparently Heroes from both cities meeting in the middle and doing everything from boning like rabid weasels to killing each other on sight was pretty commonplace. They'd mostly given up on outright warfare, though, because just like back home when wars happened, the cannon fodder came from the cheap seats, and it turned out the folks from Camden Yards got along way too well with the folks from Newark to listen to the whole 'go kill those guys' commands. Apparently the last time they'd tried, marching both armies to the middle, meeting right between Princeton and New Brunswick? The armies all went AWOL the night before the battle to have a big assed party with hooch and food they'd stolen from the officer's messes on both sides.

The Powers That Be, both the House of Orange and the Phileo City Council, got the message loud and clear, and there hadn't been any outright warfare between the two since, but there was a sort of constant frequently lethal bickering between them. On the other hand, every time one of them got attacked by another City State, the other jumped in like they were ride-or-die crew. Sort of a 'nobody fucks with them but us' situation, which meant Phileo City had way more in common at a subconscious cultural level with Philly and Camden than I'd previously realized.

At one point, when DeLeon asked if we had any questions, I remembered something from the night before and my hand shot up.

"Yes, Cadet Diaz?"

"What's it mean when someone's Race is listed as 'Hybrid' on their Status?"

DeLeon looked a little scandalized at the question, but to his credit, he made a good show of answering it. "That means that the person in question is a child of two races."

"Or more?"

His face actually got a little flushed at that, but he gamely answered, "Yes, two or more, although frankly I don't recall hearing of that happening anywhere but on the Thames."

I couldn't just let it go, because I had another question for him, "So we went over Human and Dan and Bag last week, but where are the Vanir from?"

This time he looked a little startled, like I'd changed gears on him a little too quickly, but this question didn't mortify him for some reason. "The Vanir are one of the two deific races who preside over the majority of Scandinavia. As such, a substantial number of the inhabitants of the Scandinavian City-States identify as Vanir or Aesir, although much like those who identify as 'Dan' here in Phileo City, they are typically Humans with some Vanir or Aesir blood."

"Really? Cool." As I acknowledged his answer, another question popped into my head. "If the Vanir, Aesir, and Dan are all part deific, what are the Bag?"

While we'd gone over what you might think of as 'race specific statistics' of the Bag last week, we hadn't really touched on their history. I hadn't really thought much of it at the time, because even though we did go over some Dan history, I just took it as more colonizers bragging about colonizer bullshittery, but now I'd gotten curious.

DeLeon looked like he'd just swallowed a bee, but he rallied once again, "Both the Dan and Bag originate in Eire, but both groups migrated in different directions during their histories before returning to the island. The Dan, as we studied last week, migrated northward, living for a while in the settlements of the Aesir." Here the teacher took a deep breath, like he wanted to get the rest out in one go. "The Bag, on the other hand, migrated south, then east along the coast of Europa. They travelled as far as Troy before feeling the call of their ancestral homeland and returning. Where the Dan may have cohabitated and intermingled their lines with the Aesir, the Bag primarily found themselves... involved... with the supernatural races in the locals they visited. Often showing a propensity for," at this point I shit you not he wiped a hand across his forehead, "more bestial races."

I couldn't let the poor guy hang there waiting for the other shoe to drop after he'd answered me without any of the bullshit like Trease would have given me. "Thank you sir, that answers my question."

It did, too.

The Bag weren't just Phileo City's Brown People.

They were, apparently, this world's Furries.