19: Academy

Looking at the papers in front of her, Eliza slowly smiled.

She got the gist of it, though it wasn’t like a school principal job like on Earth.

A job where instead of having to teach hundreds of children, she’d teach the teachers to teach those children?

Her schedule would basically be doing constant paperwork, yes, but she’d have much less work to do than she was dealing with now.

After all, right now, she was handling both teaching and paperwork. Reducing that down to just paperwork? 

Eliza looked up at Rin, and smiled.

“Yes. Genuinely, yes.” Eliza, upon realizing what this would entail… felt free.

She would have to train teachers, teaching them how to teach others… But once she did that, she would only need to do paperwork for the rest of the year.

And once that was done? She still would get paid. Even if there was no work to be done, she would still get paid the same rate as she made now.

Eliza began laughing, almost with pure joy.

“But… I don’t think I’m the most qualified, am I?”

Rin nodded.

“Well, Grant said the headmaster would need a certain level of prestige. Whether you know it or not, people do respect you, especially after you helped with the situation half a year back.” she said.

“Then… why didn’t he ask you? You helped slay it too, Rin.” Eliza asked curiously.

Rin almost looked at Eliza like she was an idiot, but she laughed it off.

“I’m not a teacher, obviously. Look, Eliza, you’re a good teacher. You’ve taught over a hundred students to read and write in a year’s time.”

Eliza nodded.

“Yeah. I’m not too worried about it… But it’s gonna be new. It’s something I’ve never even thought about doing, so I’ll need to think a lot about what to do in the future.”

Eliza skimmed through the paper, looking at the location.

“The outer district… What I’m seeing here… There isn’t much land allocated, is there?” Eliza asked.

Rin shook her head.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t informed about the details. I only know where it is… They haven’t started building yet, though.”

Eliza and Rin went to Grant’s office, only to find him missing. In his place was the receptionist, Leora. She clearly was tired, and had clearly been drinking a bit.

Eliza now knew that most of her drinking was caused by stress, when she was forced to take over Grant’s work whenever he was ‘busy’ or on official duties.

Seeing Eliza smile when she saw the receptionist, Rin felt strange. She wasn’t sure if she was annoyed, but with one of the tasks that Grant had asked her to take care of… she certainly wasn’t pleased, to be certain.

“Do you want to check it out?” Rin asked. Internally, even if she didn’t know it, she was wanting to get Eliza away from the receptionist.

Eliza nodded.

“Yeah. The papers say that if I accept, I have a say in the final design of the place, so it’d be better for me to show up at least once, right?”

And… there was something she wanted to fix. If she could. As it stood, each of the teachers would just move into the main room to teach the class, and rotate out when needed.

But… Eliza felt like the kids would learn a lot better in a space completely devoted to the subject they were learning from.

She planned to bring this up with Rin and Grant, later, but for now, she left the guild with Rin and exited to the main street.

On their way to the outer district, Eliza thought about the way she wanted to construct the new school. She had to have at least three rooms for teaching in, with each hopefully being able to have at least 30 students inside.

“So… They’ve already approved a 500 gold arrow building, huh?” She murmured. “A lot of money for such a small amount of land.”

Rin nodded, noting that it was a little odd. She felt it was an inevitability for jobs like this to have someone trying to line their pockets, so it being so odd... Wasn't really odd at all, for government work.

As they walked down the street, occasionally chatting, Eliza sighed.

“You know, it’s so weird how quickly life goes back to normal after major events. Like… People might have died a few months ago, and the city was in ruins, yet we’re already back up and working like normal.”

Rin seemed to understand, and was about to respond… when she noticed a strong presence approaching her. They were heavy footsteps, from a very strong man.

“Hello there, Eliza. Rin.” Grant, from behind the two girls approached, patting Eliza on the shoulder.

“Going to see the new school? I should go with you. It’ll be good for me to examine the site where the school will be built.” Grant said jovially.

“As if…” Eliza muttered. “I bet you’re just ‘examining the site’ so you can pass off the paperwork to Leora.” she said, thinking of the receptionist.

Grant coughed twice, putting his hand up to his mouth.

“Well, we’re going there anyways, so why don’t we take a look?”

Eliza rolled her eyes.

It didn’t take long for them to reach the plot, where Eliza began observing the future school’s location in detail.

It was on a mostly flat area, though there were large rocks. But she could easily remove things like that herself, even if there were no construction crew doing most of the work for her.

It was only 10 meters by 20 meters, making her feel a bit worried about just how many students she could actually fit in such a space.

It was a bit irritating, in fact.

“Hm. If I buy the land around here, can we make it larger?” Eliza asked. “It’s a little… small. I’d like to have at least three rooms for students to learn in, a room for them to eat in, and an outdoor area for recess, or maybe training.”

Grant shook his head.

“Probably not. That’s a lot of land, you’re asking for. Plus, it’s been designated as a future commercial district, so the land is going to be expensive and require payment to keep up.”

Eliza tilted her head, thinking about it.

“So… Probably can’t be more than the 500 gold coins to buy the land, or rent it, I guess, and 500 coins to build a second part of the academy… I could do that.”

Rin slowly blinked her eyes. She showed an expression of confusion… and then an expression of horror.

“Are you actually going to spend a thousand gold arrows on this? You wouldn’t get paid any more or anything.” She asked, a bit worried for Eliza.

“I am. With the money I got from the drake, my funds practically doubled, so I could go for it if I wanted. I think it would be nice for it to be a lot larger. Right now… It could hold maybe 50 students if we cram them in there… But the way I see it, we could have 3 classes, each holding 30 students, all running at the same time. That way, each teacher would have a designated classroom, rather than each teacher going into the room to teach. Like… if a teacher was teaching the alphabet, for example, we could have a banner across the walls with each letter of the alphabet. That way instead of having the teacher write it down every time they explain it, they can just show off the letter on the banner.”

Although, all Eliza was doing was essentially just explaining how her own school that she attended worked on Earth to Rin and Grant, she felt like she got the point across.

“Not a bad plan. If you’re willing to pay for it, I’ve got no problems with it. The senate wouldn’t disapprove of it, either.”

This was Eliza’s first time actually hearing about the government system within The Shelf, even if it was just a passing mention.

“The Senate?” She asked.

Grant nodded.

“Yes. Every decade, the city comes together on the new year’s festival and does a vote. It’s a little more serious than the other festivals, and there’s not as much fun and merriment going on, but you can still buy funnel cake.”

Eliza blushed at his words, knowing that Grant had likely seen her face when she eyed the funnel cake stand like it was divine ambrosia.

“Anyways, the top eight voted get into the senate. They have the chance to suggest people in other government positions, such as clerks, contractors, and the works.”

Eliza nodded approvingly. It was the most democratic method that anyone had ever used in this world, from what she had seen. She liked that.

“Though…” Grant continued. “The same people almost always get elected every time. It’s… Well, whoever can advertise the most tends to win. It’s not exactly the worst situation for us, since those rich bastards tend to want The Shelf to do well… And of course, the guildmaster keeps them in check from doing anything too corrupt.” Grant said, strutting as if he was proud of himself.

Eliza seemed a bit curious at that.

“I hope somehow, this school inspires people to think a lot more about bigger things, like the senate. If the people here become more educated, hopefully that will be good for our future. Maybe educated voters would be less likely to fall for rich conmen, if they try to run into the senate to make a quick buck.”

Eliza… was extremely passionate about this, Rin thought. Though… it was good for a teacher to care about teaching students, like Eliza was.

She was always passionate about things that she cared about, whether it was adventuring, her daughter, or this new school being built.

Rin tried to avoid thinking about Eliza, but couldn’t help it, especially with the conversation she had had with Grant just a few days prior.

He told her that Eliza might be the next swordsmaster on the Tiola continent. And… if she could, she should try to form a deeper connection with Eliza.

Rin wasn’t an idiot. She knew about Eliza’s romantic interests, and how troubled she had been in that way. And she also knew that experiencing something big like romance after becoming a sword expert would help improve her skills greatly.

She knew that Grant wanted Rin to enter a relationship with Eliza.

But… Rin had never viewed romance that way.

She had seduced many young men and women as an assassin, but that was solely to get closer to them, whether to kill them or just for information. Not to enjoy the time spent with another person’s company.

She knew it would be easy to get Eliza to be romantically interested in her, but… She didn’t want to do that.

Eliza was one of the few genuine human connections that she had.

And moreover… She truthfully didn’t know if she would even feel anything for her romantically. Rin brushed off the ideas.

She didn’t know how she felt right now… And looking at Eliza now, she felt like it was okay to not know.

She had time to understand her emotions.

The talk between Eliza and Grant continued, mostly beginning with Eliza asking about potential future teachers for her idea, as well as Grant giving suggestions for how the school should be built.

Construction started quickly, and soon the school’s layout was confirmed. Luckily, the government judged to not enforce rent payment upon Eliza, due to the school not being her property, but the property of the government.

She was quite happy when that occurred, feeling like the government in the union was much better than the government back on Earth. 

Ignoring that, she focused on the three, technically four classes that were on offer.

The first was simply for young children, age 3 to 9, that don’t know how to read yet, don’t know how to write, and also don’t know how to do math. This would be the basics.

The second was a slightly more advanced class that would teach the history of The Shelf, information of the world at large, such as the war, other continents, and more.

The third was for practical life advice, for any age to attend, whether they were children or an adult. It wasn’t quite as comprehensive as it could have been, but these three alone would quite improve the average education of The Shelf in a decade.

And lastly, the fourth, was less of a class, and more of a suggestion. There was an open grounds, that Eliza specifically requested be left for children to play in. But… she left training dummies, a track, and other things there.

There might occasionally be self defense courses taught there in the future, Eliza thought. She could even hire adventurers from the guild to teach techniques…

Though, she’d obviously have to be careful which adventurers she hired. Most were good people, but there were occasionally the odd drunkard, or flirt mixed up into the group.

In a matter of days, Eliza was handling paperwork. Not at the guild, but instead at a small tent up near the school that was being constructed.

Lily and Mary were running around, trying to be helpful to the people working on construction, one of whom was Lucas, cutting wooden planks into shape. Though, they weren’t actually helping very much, except to help pick up lost tools and bring them to Lucas.

Mary had recently turned seven years old and was growing up to be quite a bit less shy than she used to be. Even though she still seemed a bit worried whenever she was speaking to someone she didn’t know very well, she was opening up quite a bit.

Luckily, construction hadn’t advanced to the point where it would be a danger for the two children, though Lucas did make sure they didn’t get too close to anywhere he deemed dangerous.

Rin, alongside Eliza, was helping her look through the papers and sort them out. Future applicants surprisingly came from all over the city, before the academy had even opened yet.

“How are there already two hundred?” Eliza asked. “How many families are in The Shelf?”

Rin smiled.

“At least a thousand. It’s not a small city by any means, Eliza.” Rin said, picking up a paper.

She read through the paper, and soon wrote ‘APPROVED’ on the front.

“It’s gonna be quite hard to fit them all… How much are we charging for people to be able to afford to come here?”

Rin paused, not sure.

“I think it’s about 10 flints per child, per class?”

Eliza thought about that, and felt like it made sense.

“That’s still a bit expensive… But it’s not surprising that people want in, even at that price.”

Education was a valuable commoddity in this world. It was normally something only the extraordinarily rich could afford, so it made sense that with a comparatively cheaper school available, people would send their children there if they had the money.

Eliza thumbed through the next paper, and then she saw it. One of the applications to the adventurer’s academy.

Astram Erast.

The fourth prince of the kingdom himself applied to attend her academy.

She blinked.

Then rubbed her eyes. As if somehow clearing her vision would change the results of what she was seeing.

At this point, she had mostly gotten over her own sense of inferiority to the prince. He no longer had the same circumstances of his birth, so he and Eliza’s own children were likely on even footing. But still…

“Why… Why is this happening to me?” She asked, almost wanting to scream.

Rin, by her side, seemed to tense up upon seeing the paper with the prince’s name and details on it.

For the both of them, things were going to change.