Whatever Jasmine meant, she naturally does not clarify, and instead they arrive at the reception area of a small office, where a functionary is doing paperwork with ink and a brush at a desk. It is much like any other office in every way that matters, right down to the poster with motivational text on the wall. (Well, motivational abstract painting of a foggy mountain with calligraphy reading "knowing others is intelligence, knowing yourself is wisdom, mastering others is strength, mastering yourself is true power".) 

The functionary will ask why they have come here, and in response Orichalch will summarise the situation thus far. The functionary will ask if Orichalch is sponsoring Kedri, and Orichalch will respond "yes, but I'll be seeking compensation from the higher-ups for it." This is apparently good enough, and they're given two identical sheafs of paperwork to read and sign before being signed in. 

(Jasmine doesn't know what was up with the sponsorship, but she supposes it must have something to do with how people get in if they're noble-born or related to members of the sect, rather than by passing exams or being adopted in like she was.) 

The paperwork they receive is as follows: 

- a text version of the oath they will swear to be signed and returned, which effectively summarises to attesting that they've read and agree to the contents of all this paperwork, accepting a binding oath to follow the Bank infosec policy, and a non-binding oath to follow sect rules and to serve the sect loyally until such a time as they part from the sect amiably. 

- a text copy to be kept, of the Bank infosec policy, which is a couple of pages long and outlines a few levels of security, a compartmentalisation policy, who to contact if you have a problem or breach, and some examples of what sort of information typically is classified at what rating. 

- a text copy to be kept, of the Bank rules for outer disciples, which come down to "don't break the law, don't damage our reputation, go to your classes, orientation for classes is at a date and time Jasmine will specify to be tomorrow morning". A strong emphasis is placed on the "no intra-sect violence (outside training, etc)" rule. It is in very large font, specified that it is explictly not the sort of rule that was added to the list to teach students subtlety, and that people who break it will be punished as needed. The oath calls out this rule specifically in the affirmation that you have read and understand the rules.

- a text copy to be kept, of the Bank responsibilities and rights for outer disciples, outlining the quantity of sect contribution points they need to earn (none for the first year, and then scaling points thereafter, capping out at a quantity that Jasmine will say it is possible to earn with menial labour alone, albeit quite a lot of it), the size of the stipend they will receive (not very much by cultivator standards, but enough to live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle even at the inflated prices of the fortress), the cultivation techniques they will be granted (one "middle grade" basic technique - they will have to earn, buy, or find any others they use), and the way to earn more money, contribution points and miscellaneous other useful things (go to the work hall to receive tasks to complete, or get them as an award for various achievements and benchmarks, or they're free to work or adventure outside the sect's systems if they feel like it.).

- a form to be filled and returned in duplicate, of the most normal sort, for specifying all your personal information, identity and contact details, species, etc, for the records. 

Jasmine is already quite familiar with all this. 

It feels a little silly to give them two copies of the reading material when they have one set of eyes. She supposes they already had the bundles lying around.

She'd gathered that this was a very competitive and conflict-prone society, but it's still unnerving to see that they feel the need to place this much emphasis--at an apprenticeship program where the minimum age is 22--on how beating people up is a bad move.

(She also files away that "not the sort of rule that was added to the list to teach students subtlety" implies that there are other rules where you are actively expected to figure out loopholes in them.)

She's glad to hear there are floor jobs, though. That's always a good thing to have access to.

How awkward is it to fill out the paperwork as someone whose name doesn't match the local format, for whom the idea of "how many years after the ascension of the Divine Emperor were you born" is at best questionably meaningful, etcetera?

She's also concerned about the logistics of each of them needing to sign, given that last they checked they were having trouble switching.

Jasmine will give it another shot but yeah she still hasn't figured out how to leave the front. Fortunately, this form was designed with, not this use case in particular in mind, but with the use case "someone found a talking wolf in a forest and decided to enroll it as a student" and thus the form has "don't know" and "not applicable" options for nearly everything and the option of being signed by a witness attesting to the form's correctness if e.g. the form-filler does not have hands. It's highly recommended that you fill in the "what you would like the teachers to call you" section in something in good honest imperial language even if you do record your full name as "n/a" or in a non-imperial script. 

Well, it's true that she does not at this exact moment have hands.

She notes the option for non-imperial script, but it doesn't seem worth talking Jasmine through drawing an unfamiliar sequence of curves and lines and dots. She gives her full name in imperial characters as "Oak, child of Precision and Lake", and spells out "Kedri" phonetically in the section on what to call her.

Great! And with all the mundane paperwork sorted out, are they ready to swear the oaths of membership? (And have Orichalch add a binding for the one oath that needs it). 

Jasmine is, of course. 

Here she goes, then. Here they both go.

"Yes."

The swearing takes some time, and lacks a certain solemnity for being done in an office with a bored bureaucrat looking on rather than one's peers and family, but it is done. Orichalch seals the infosec portion of the oath, and a second golden necklace joins the first.

"Great, I'm off then! I expect great things from you girls!" says Orichalch, and he's out the door before they have time to respond. 

The functionary will look slightly put upon, and retrieve from a desk drawer, a pair of medallions of a sturdy and imperishable gold alloy, each pierced through the center by a leather band, allowing them to be worn as a necklace or similar.

"These will serve as identification and to track your current quantity of sect contribution points. I'd tell you not to lose them, but once they're bonded to your spirit, you'd have to go to quite some trouble to do so. I assume you will not require additional living quarters to be arranged?" 

Presumably before long she'll have some possessions that belong specifically to her (indeed, with the reading materials and the medallion she has some already), but a separate living space does sound like overkill.

"I don't think that will be necessary, no. Thank you for your help."

"Excellent. Thank you, and good luck with your studies." With his work here done, the functionary returns to his paperwork. 

And Jasmine will take them to her apartment! She has a single room with a shared common room and kitchen in a tower set aside for older orphans and students. She will politely greet some dormmates who are drinking celebratorially in the common area, and then she will disappear into her room. 

Her room is simply appointed and kept clean and tidy, with a small window to allow daylight, a bed, a desk, a wardrobe and a chest for storage. 

Jasmine will go over to the bed and scream into a pillow for a bit. 

That is extremely fair.

Kedri--who had much more opportunity in advance to come to terms with the fact that she would soon be sharing a body with a stranger from another world, and who has much less ability to take on emotional debts that then need to be repaid--is feeling...not zero urge to scream into a pillow, but substantially less. She politely pretends she's not there. She'll have to see about building a headspace or something at some point, arranging for some proper privacy.

Eventually screaming into a pillow will lose its appeal as an activity and Jasmine will start actually thinking. 

"Okay, so. We have privacy from fucking 5th realms who can kill us more easily than we can breathe and we have my notebook and notes and such, orientation for classes is tomorrow, do you want to do the strategy meeting where I rethink my entire planned life trajectory now or do you think we should sleep first and try to do it first thing right before orientation?" 

She winces internally at the rethinking-Jasmine's-entire-life-trajectory bit. Jasmine is really taking this pretty well all things considered, especially given that she's from a world where this almost never happens, but it's still always rough to have such a massive curveball thrown into your life.

"I think probably we should at least get started on the strategising now, rather than leaving it hanging over us. Depending on what your sleep schedule looks like, we may end up needing to pause."

"My sleep schedule is adequate to being delayed to the last moment that will leave me sufficient morning prep time. Let's have the meeting now, then." 

"So, agenda for the strategy meeting - basic explanation of cultivation for you, an explanation of what's theoretically and in practice expected of us, an explanation of my life plan and why we're definitely not doing that now, and then forming a new working plan that will keep us moving for the next month or two. Anything else important we need to cover?" 

"It'll also be important for me to start getting a sense of what...I'm not sure how to put this...everyday affordances there are here. Like, do you have air cooling in the summer or do you rely on fans, how do you obtain drinking water, if you wanted to send a letter a thousand miles cheaply how long would it take to get there and how much faster would it be if you did it expensively, how big of a threat is plague and what measures do you take to reduce that threat, that sort of thing.

The souls that wash up on *my* world are almost always from worlds with much worse technology than ours. We don't know if that's because worlds with heat pumps and efficient air-to-waters and light-based communication networks and a deep understanding of sanitation are *rare*, or if maybe there's some means of letting departed souls stay on their homeworld that we haven't quite figured out yet and so we never *see* people from worlds that understand more than we do, but...in any case, my people taught me what they could about what we'd learned with an eye to letting me teach a host culture if necessary, but I have no idea whether any of it would actually be useful to you or if it's all stuff your people either know already or have obviated with magic."

"A lot of that stuff varies hugely throughout the empire, because of variation in access to good techniques for doing things at scale, and because variation in background qi interferes with a lot of high-performance or microscopic technologies. So what someone here has vs. what someone in the Iron City has vs. what a peasant 200 miles from here has are going to be totally different. Outside the empire things are generally a lot worse, but there's a lot of variation." 

"For those examples - a peasant probably endures the heat, draws water from a well or irrigation system, sends letters through weekly or monthly postal relays or hires a courier if it's urgent, and probably doesn't worry about plague because plague is one of those things you handle with huge noble techniques. Disease prevention is one of the effects a noble can spread over thier entire domain reasonably cheaply, so nasty plagues tend to imply several layered failures or bad actors. They do happen. I think mortals usually have access to some amount of medical alchemy in general, if they're not particularly impoverished. Here in this fortress, the buildings have plumbing and have been designed for magically effective climate control - much like the magically effective daylighting, the postal system has much more investment in infrastructure but probably still takes days unless you hire a really strong courier or use a technique or item for it. In the Iron City, I hear they have electric fans and instantaneous communication technology and stuff like that, but it's a very long way away. I think they have water contamination problems, maybe?" 

So, a mix of "obviated by magic" (disease-wards very much do exist), "prevented by magic", and "the tech exists but hasn't finished filtering out to everybody". None of those really seem like things she can help with.

And it sounds like her own living situation will be pretty decent: a bit of a downgrade in at least some respects, but one well worth taking for magic powers.

"Sounds like things are coming along pretty well on the invention front, then. And I don't have any particular advantage on helping with adoption.

I think that brings us to basics of cultivation?"

"Right! So - broad summary of cultivation, the nine realms, the seven aspects. Oh, and Ways, you should know what a Way is."

She breaths in as though to start a long lecture, even though she's communicating by thought. 

"So. Cultivation is, at a high level, the art of ingesting qi from your environment and using it to improve your soul and body, and also using it to power techniques of various sorts, ultimately pursuing the goal of true immortality. There are nine realms, denoting progress markers resulting in qualitative transformations and increases in your power and capacities. There are seven aspects, denoting classes of spiritual infrastructure and techniques which it makes sense to bundle together on a metaphysical level as a specialty. While cultivating, you will find and pursue a Way, which is a sort of - ideal that you cleave to as your story of self. Cultivation is a process of becoming - your way is what you're making yourself into. You don't need to have one now, at this stage, but at the end of the 4th realm, you have to commit to one, even if you don't perfectly understand it or what it will mean for you, so it's something to think about long in advance. Contradicting your Way is very bad, possibly lethally so. Living a soldier's life will result in a soldier's Way. Ways are very mysterious and not groking them, now or ever, is to be expected." 

"The nine realms. First, you work to gain any control over your qi, and enter the first realm:Cultivation of the Foundation, where you work to make your body into a suitable vessel for your practice. Then you enter the second realm: Cultivation of Mastery, where you work to gain the literal and metaphorical tools to perform the greater work of cultivation. Then there's the third realm: Cultivation of Spirit, where you forge your blank soul-core and integrate it with your existing spiritual infrastructure, becoming a true cultivator. The fourth realm: Crucible of Ideals, involves exploring your new capabilities and ends when you commit to a Way that will forever more define you. The fifth realm: Crucible of Endeavor involves stretching yourself to your limits to prove your self and Way in a trial by fire and ambition. The sixth realm: Crucible of Justification involves taking a step back and reflecting on your way and the person you've become and if what you've made can withstand becoming divine and if that's even something you want. Lots of sixth realms retire to run sects and build a legacy rather than ascending beyond mortality. Ascending to the seventh realm: Essence Chrysalis, means turning your soul in on itself so that it's a self-sustaining world in and of itself, and involves retreating into that world to do... something, I don't know. The 8th realm: Essence Rampant, involves being able to freely step in and out of your soulbody, having forged yourself into a divine force who shakes the world with every step. Mostly they don't actually do that, but they could. The 9th realm: Essence Principle, involves a sort of diffusion, where you come to represent and command your way throughout the entire universe. If there's more beyond that, I don't know what it is and I've never met anyone who did - but they say even those gods are still climbing."

"Finally, the seven aspects. Martial, Noble, Beautiful, Hidden, Virtuous, Academic, Arcane. Martial techniques relate to enhancing the body, doing violence, and enacting gross physical changes upon reality. Centrally, they're for violence. Noble techniques relate to rulership, formal relationships, loyalty and duty. Centrally on a metaphysical level, using and controlling formal relationships and obligations. Beautiful techniques relate to artistry, creativity, self-transformation, and intense emotion. Centrally, the creation of beauty in all its myriad forms. Hidden techniques relate to stealth, obfuscation, and perception. Perception is non-central. Virtuous techniques relate to taking an ideal, like justice or loyalty but also weirder things like travel or gluttony, and embracing it, allowing you to better attain that ideal and ensuring you are rewarded for cleaving to it and punished for deviating. Academic techniques relate to cognition, skill, knowledge, learning, and divination. Finally, Arcane techniques relate to the esoteric, the mystical, and that which defies understanding. Often strange techniques which totally change the rules are Arcane. Crafting and in particular, formation work, butchery, and alchemy are Arcane. Metamagic is Arcane. A good rule of thumb is that you can practice at most three aspects and greater specialization leads to greater results, but also to crucial weakness because every aspect gives essential strengths."

"Any questions?" 

"Hmm..."

She thinks about this for a bit.

(Like most modern people, Kedri has deliberately avoided becoming more skilled at violence because it's easier to refrain from inappropriately attacking people the less confident you are that you'll win. Violence is a specialised skillset requiring a lot of high-grade marshmallow-tests. She supposes that outright avoidance isn't as feasible here, but that doesn't mean she should actively focus on it as part of her limited number of aspects.

She doesn't want rulership.

She likes beauty a normal amount, which is to say not enough to want to focus her magical powers on it.

Hidden sounds intriguing.

Virtuous: maybe, she'd have to think about what virtue.

Academic has some promise to it, and it sounds like it includes a lot of the things she scanned as having a good aptitude for (what is a "clan trait", anyway, she'll have to look into that).

Arcane...maybe? She'd rather like there to be rules again, but Arcane will exist even if she doesn't practise it and it sounds potentially quite interesting.)

(Becoming a force of nature rather than a person is strictly optional, so that's a good sign. Although...)

"Do people tend to experience substantial personality changes when entering the 4th or 5th realms?

Also, what's a clan trait? Orichalch said I had one."

"Those realms were not in particular called out as having worrying personality changes in my classes but the focus was not on things centuries in the future that most people would never reach. Based on reading histories, I did not notice a greater than normal tendency to change how you relate to the world, but - the growth and self modification and internalisation of insights and transformation in what resources you need and constraints you're under mean that cultivators undergo what can look from the outside like pretty radical personality changes under many circumstances." 

"A clan trait is - so, you know families are going to want to ensure their kids do well even if they're sort of useless - noble clans want their kids to be cultivators because they're cultivators and they need to remain strong through the generations. But they can't give their kids an early start cultivating, because that's a bad idea, so instead, they form a family specialisation, some set of arts that they have the best versions of and they know best how to get value out of, and while kids are young and still growing, they - ensure they'll come out in a way that makes them best suited to use those familial arts, at the cost of making some other things harder. Some of it is bloodline, some of it is family culture, but a lot of it is deliberate shaping and exposure to environmental energies. So, uh, if you have a clan trait, it probably means something in your past or childhood has been messing with your soul?" 

So the mental changes are primarily a learning/situational thing, different inputs into the same mind giving different outputs. That's reassuring.

The next answer is...not reassuring.

She's--

--no, that can't be right, even if it's true that that's how changelings come to be she's not a changeling, changelings know what they are even if they may hide it from other people and anyway if she were a changeling she'd have woken up in the fae realm and not here--

...did her parents...bargain with the fae, for a child more to their liking?

If they did, it didn't even work.

"...there are...spirits back home that *might* be capable of that. I don't know why they *would*, though."

(Dreams, and planning, and precognition...

She remembers thinking that it spoke well of the Bank that they focused on farsightedness. She wonders how much of that thought was hers.)

"Spirits may appear to be people but you must always remember that they are at best really really weird people and their motives don't always make sense, especially not on surface examination." 

"... I'm sorry, that must not seem terribly comforting."