It was the crack of dawn, and Mirazhe was wide-awake. Somehow, she’d woken up an hour ago, and hadn’t been able to back to sleep from there, no matter how hard she tried. She’d tried counting sheep, clearing her mind of everything, rolling up into a ball and squeezing her eyes shut – and none of it had worked. The small room she had to herself seemed unusually stuffy, and her blanket was tangling around her legs, making her very uncomfortable. For some reason, she couldn’t seem to breathe right, and she felt oddly warm, warmer than usual. It was probably from the fact that she hadn’t gotten much sleep lately. One would think that Accepted would have more time to sleep and all that, but to her, it seemed like she never had any time to herself anymore. Perhaps it was the difficulty of her classes; she was expected to do more and learn harder, and the teachers always bombarded her with assignments on the same day. And her saidar lessons were no easy matter either. Sitting in a small classroom, doing the same thing over and over again for hours because her teacher wouldn’t accept anything that was ‘almost perfect’. Oh no.
Her ‘free time’ was a lie. She never had any time to herself anymore. What with training, classes, the chores she still had to do, and the research for the class she wanted to start soon, if she could find ten minutes to just sit in the gardens and do absolutely nothing, it would be a miracle. Really, the only thing she looked forward to was starting her class. Mirazhe wasn’t sure what it was going to be on yet – probably something about a different culture, Sea Folk maybe? – so she spent a lot of time sitting in the library, just looking through whatever books she could lay her hands on and find an interesting topic she could use. Because she went to the library so frequently, she knew all the Aes Sedai who acted as supervisors by name, and often chatted with them a bit. It wasn’t too bad, and she enjoyed it. It also gave her the almost certain knowledge that she was destined for the Brown Ajah. Where else could she go with her love of learning?
Anyway, that had all led to her becoming short on sleep, and now she was feeling funny because of it. Maybe a little breakfast would make her feel better. Even if she couldn’t eat right now, she was going to get hungry eventually and picking at her breakfast would at least get some food into her, which would go a long way to ensure that she wouldn’t starve when lunch rolled around. So Mirazhe got up, got dressed, and crept out of her room down the halls, completely devoid of any life except the occasional person scurrying here or there.
The kitchens were much in the same condition, with the only other people beside herself being a set of bleary looking novices. The poor girls didn’t deserve to be up at this hour, and were probably serving out some punishment for putting itching powder in the laundry, or some such prank. She went up to them, and kept her request light: a few pieces of toast, some eggs, some fruit and a glass of milk. The tray took a few minutes, and then she was making her way to one of the numerous empty tables and sitting down. For a few seconds, all she did was stare at her food, gauging whether she was hungry enough to eat a piece of dry toast and whether she was going to pay for it if she didn’t eat anything on her plate. A minute later, she sighed, and picked her fork, speared one of the eggs, and put in her mouth.
(OOC: sorry my bio isn’t up right now. I haven’t posted in a while so my bio got deleated. I’ll put it back up tonight when I get home from work though.)
Kaliendra woke up hours before her roommate. The sun hadn’t even begun to rise yet, but she was unable to sleep in late. Years of working on a farm had trained her body to wake up with the sun. It didn’t seem to do any good in the Tower though, Kali normally just sat around in her room for hours until she had chores or a class. Today though she was going to be cooking breakfast during the morning shift. Unlike all of the other novices she had knew, Kali was actually excited to be in the kitchen. Cooking was one of the few things Kaliendra enjoyed doing. It was relaxing to her, and she never understood while all of the other novices complained about how hard and tiring it was. ‘Hard’ was sitting in classes getting an endless amount of information thrown at you and being told you had to memorize it in a week. Cooking didn’t require thinking at all.
Ever since her first day here she had been requesting a cooking shift, and every time she had been denied. It was no surprise that Aes Sedai had repetitively told her “no”. The Aes Sedai didn’t trust her in the kitchen…there were knives in the kitchen. Aes Sedai didn’t trust her with anything. They thought she would repeat what she had done before arriving to the tower. Everywhere she went it seemed like an Aes Sedai or Accepted was watching her. The Mistress of Novices definitely wanted to keep a close eye on her. The most frustrating thing was that while everyone was watching her and denying her the ability to do anything – she still hadn’t even begun channeling lessons – she was constantly being told that when one joins the Tower they have to put there past behind, the past no longer exists.
Finally, last night, she was finally told that she could be allowed in the kitchen. Although she could only be there when the Mistress of the Kitchens would be there. She had told the Aes Sedai that she would be fine alone and had promised that she wouldn’t try to harm herself again, but she was still required to have supervision. Kaliendra wasn’t too upset over it, she was just happy that she could be in the kitchen.
After getting dressed and ready for the morning, it was still an hour before she was supposed to start in the kitchen. Anxious to go Kali left her room anyways and headed towards the kitchen. The Mistress of the Kitchens must get there early to prepare. Kali thought to herself trying to justify that it alright for her to go there early. Or…maybe no one else will be there yet, if it’s just me I can’t get in trouble…I just won’t go in the kitchen, then I won’t be breaking any rules.
Kaliendra walked into the mess hall and froze for a moment, half expecting an Aes Sedai to begin yelling at her. When no one said anything she let out a big sigh of relief. There were just a few novices sitting around a table and they looked like they were about to fall asleep.
“EEP!” she shouted in surprise when she looked around the rest of the room. There was an Accepted sitting down not but 5 feet away from her eating breakfast. Kaliendra quickly put her head down and stared at the floor, so the Accepted couldn’t see her. She didn’t want to know if the Accepted was mad at her. Hesitantly Kaliendra inched towards the Accepted and curtseyed. “He….Hello Accepted,” she said forcing her self to breath as she spoke. “I…I know I’m not supposed to be here…but I couldn’t sleep and I start my shift in the kitchen in a few hours.” Kaliendra paused for a moment remembering stores that novices had said about people being kicked out of the tower for not obeying the Aes Sedai. She also remembered and Aes Sedai saying that those who don’t have what it takes to make it to Aes Sedai get sent back home to there family. “Please Accepted, don’t send me home. I can’t…I just can’t go back to my family,” Kali said sounding like she was beginning to cry.
A sudden shriek made Mirazhe drop the fork with her eggs on it and look up in shock, fork clanging to the ground. The early morning time meant her brain was still in the process of waking up, and a loud scream didn’t really do much to get it going. Or rather, it got it going too much, since adrenaline started pumping though her body, which made her really edgy and the pathetic stirrings of hunger disappear. She groaned silently. Now she knew she was going to be starving by the time noon arrived. A normally trivial thing, but today, it was just one more thing that was quickly going wrong. She hadn’t been up for more than an hour, and already she was feeling cranky and miserable.
The shout had come from a blushing novice standing in front of her. Mirazhe didn’t recognize her, but then, she didn’t recognize half of the girls in the Tower though she tried to get to know the ones she bumped into. There were just too many girls and not enough hours in the day for her to sit down and have a one-to-one chit chat with all of the novices. Generally, she prided herself on being kind and friendly to all the novices, but today, she pitied the girl standing in front of her, because Mirazhe was in no mood to be nice and friendly. For some reason, she was feeling abnormally mean, probably a result of her lack of sleep. She didn’t want to be mean, but she found it difficult to conjure up the smile that usually came so easily to her.
And then, if the shout hadn’t been enough, the girl started babbling incoherently, stumbled words and phrases piling on top of each other. Mirazhe could only stare in utter confusion as the novice bobbed up and down and squeaked out some sentences about being early and her shift not starting yet and some other nonsense about Mirazhe sending her back home, half of which she didn’t understand because her brain was only starting to recover from the sudden shriek. To top it all off, the girl’s expression was so absolutely miserable that Mirazhe thought that if she even started to open her mouth, the girl would begin to cry.
The novice was probably – no, she was – new to the Tower, because no one else would be scared of being early for a shift. For the Light’s sake, no one was going to yell at you for being early! Sure, they might look at you funny, but they weren’t going to yell at you, and they definitely weren’t going to send you back home to your parents. Didn’t the girl have any common sense? Mirazhe realized she was being unfair, and reined her subconscious back in. She was really going to have to start going to bed on time, otherwise she was going to end up being the type of person she hated most, a crabby person that yelled at the smallest things.
With some effort, she forced herself to smile comfortingly at the trembling novice. As long as the girl didn’t cry, everything was going to be all right. In a soothing voice, she said, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to send you back to your family. No one’s going to do that to you. And who says you can’t be here? True, you should probably be back in your room, sleeping-”like a normal person “-but there’s no rule that says you can’t be up early eating breakfast, or working your shift or whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing. As long as you’re not sneaking into places where you shouldn’t be.” Mirazhe didn’t know if that had calmed the girl down any, though she really hoped it had. Oh, there was one more thing too…
“Could you do me a favor and get me another fork? I seemed to have dropped mine.”