Notes:

+ started writing down some headcanons about Sybil and...welp

+ in case anyone's wondering, this is the "same Sybil" of my other fic, "start()"

+ hope you enjoy~

The first time Sybil was let out into their new classroom, she was as excited as everyone else.

"It might take you a couple days to find it," warned the Instructor, but no one paid them any attention. Everyone was too busy descending on everything: papers, canvas, paint, charcoal, protractors, terminals, books, child-sized pianos and beakers and ovens.

She spent the whole first day on the microphone, heart soaring, cells alight with images of glittering lights and everyone leaning in to hear her, everyone carrying her words with them. At show-and-tell she belted out her heart. Afterward she expected applause but heard instead, to her confusion, snickering from a group in the back of the room.

She blinked at the Instructor, whose hand was over their mouth.

"U-um," they managed, face carefully composed, "maybe not Music, Sybil."

All the strength left her body. She had nothing left to hold the microphone with, and none left to hold in her tears, and both fell loudly as the Instructor swooped in to comfort her.

"Oh, Sybil," they cooed, "poor Sybil. Don't worry, no one finds their Selection on their first try," but then the second try came, and the third, and soon there were more tries than she could count.

Her sketches were inaccurate, incoherent. Her math and chemistry and physics formulas were fine, but uninspired, and went no further than anything already been written. Her writing was flawless, but no more dimensional than anything she wrote on. Eventually the Instructor stopped coddling her and just tossed over encouraging words as they typed notes into their terminal.

"It can take a couple days to find your Selection, right?" Sybil asked.

"Yes! Maybe even weeks," the Instructor told her encouragingly.

"Or months," the Instructor said when she next asked.

And then, later: "I wouldn't be surprised if it even took a year or so."

Sybil watched, feeling ill, as the Instructor continued tapping out their endless notes. "Don't worry, Sybil," they said idly, "don't rush it. Your Selection will be one of the most important things in your life. So wait until you find something that speaks to you completely. You know, plenty of students have problems Selecting."

But if anyone else was having trouble, they were good at keeping it secret. Students were forming easy friendships around their blooming talents. At loss, she wandered around from person to person.

"Want to play with me?" she asked, but the answer was always the same, always came after hesitation and forced smiles and quick glances that shared words she couldn't hear.

"No thanks, Sybil. We're already busy."

"Then can I play with you?"

"Sure," they agreed, but it was inevitable: once she missed the ball, it never came her way again. Once she tripped, no one waited for her to catch up.

One time, when Sybil asked, a girl perched in front of an easel responded, "Doing what?"

"Anything," Sybil offered, straightening excitedly.

The girl regarded her. She was all colors, the mahogany of her skin freckled with cobalt and magenta, her fingertips splattered with gold and green. Sybil herself reddened, slightly.

"Can you paint?" the girl asked.

"Yeah," Sybil said, and she pulled up an easel, dragged it beside the girl, glancing over curiously as she smattered colors on her palette. The girl was painting a bowl of fruit, so clearly that looked like it was going to render right off the canvas.

Sometime later, Sybil saw the girl looking over, and Sybil cringed. All she had managed are lumpy blotches. Sybil didn't ask for an opinion and doesn't get one, but the next time she asked to paint with the girl, she received the suggestion: "Maybe you should be spending time with something that you — um — like better."

"I like painting!" Sybil protested.

"I'm sure you do," the girl said quickly. "But maybe — there's something — else. That you'd like, and be good at too. I mean — it's — sort of a waste otherwise, right?"

"Yeah," Sybil agreed, after a moment, and too strongly. "You're right. It's just a waste."

She retreated back to the sandbox.

:::

They exchanged names and pronouns and then he gestured at the chair across from his desk. Sybil sat, arranging her skirt around the seat, trying not to fidget.

There was a terminal propped open on the desk, facing him. He thumbed up and down, scanning through what Sybil could only assume were all the notes and grades and reports that Sybil's Instructor had compiled on her progress.

"So," he began finally.

Sybil jumped. "Y-yes?"

"I understand you had a hard time deciding on your Selections."

"I am having a hard time," Sybil corrected, looking down at the floor. She reached up impulsively to tug at her hair and then stopped herself and crammed her hands beneath her thighs to keep them still.

"You still don't know what you want to do?" the man said, brows lifting. Sybil's legs crossed and fidgeted.

"It's just..." She risked a glance up at the man, who was looking back at her. She thought she read benevolence in his gaze — but when had she ever been right? She finished in a mumble.

"It's just that nothing I do seems...perfect."

:::

There wasn't a rule about how early someone should have a Selection — but there was an expectation, unspoken, and heavier than anything that could have been written. Students were splitting up into groups of Architects, Dancers, Biologists — all things that Sybil tried, gamely, before people's forced smiles cued that it was time for her to move on, and stop wasting her energy on something hopeless.

Claims were made, territory staked. Chemists and Chefs split the toy kitchen, Menagerists and Biologists the field lot. Civil Planners, the largest if most general group, had run of the rest.

No one wanted the sandbox and Sybil kept it for herself. She spent her free periods lounging on the warm satin of it, idly organizing out the larger stones into small piles: smooth coral orbs, irregular shards of turquoise, prickly dabs of gold and pearl and brown. Save for a rough gray rock that she had found near the sandbox's bottom, she could sort everything in neat piles. Everything with those that looked like them, with friends.

Perfect.

Sand was so boring and dirty from a distance, but close up it was all crystals and brightness and beauty: an endless universe she used to distract her from herself, and the pressure of finding a Selection. Sometimes trees cast shadows across her own and she imagined it was the shadow of a person coming by to see her.

"How are you, Sybil? Nervous? Oh, don't worry, you'll be fine," her theoretical anyone would say, soothingly, hand on her back. "You'll find something. In fact, you look like you'd be great at what I do. Why don't you join me?"

Alright, Sybil would respond, not too shyly and not too eagerly, and she'd reach up — toward the hand extended her — and allow herself to be pulled to her feet.

The conversation always went perfectly in her head, and when a group of Civil Planners encroached on Sybil's sandbox, she couldn't help herself — her hopes perked, so high and hard that she felt dizzy.

Until she realized they didn't want to share with her; they wanted to evict.

"Come on, Sybil, get out!"

"No," Sybil said, scooting herself deeper into the sand.

"Sybil," one of them growled. Sybil remembered his name and pronoun from class introductions: West Ableton, the leader of their group. "Come on. More people can use it if you stop squatting around in there all day. You're being selfish."

"What do you want to do with sand anyway?" she demanded, glaring. "There's hardly any sand in Cloudbank. Just go argue for part of the field at the next vote. That makes much more sense."

"There's way more of them than there are of you," another protested. "They need the space."

As if Sybil herself didn't deserve space? She grit her teeth, and turned her back to them so they couldn't see her furious tears. Why were people always asking her to go away? If people didn't want her around, couldn't she at least have one place where they left her alone?

She took a deep breath, tried to measure out her voice in cool, even words.

"The next vote is going to expand into some of the forest area," Sybil managed. "Why don't you just take that space?"

One of them narrowed their eyes. "How do you know we're going to get more land?"

Sybil shifted in the sand, piled it around her thighs. "One of the Instructors said it." Not to her, technically. But the Instructors always discussed their plans in the same room, and it had been easy enough to sneak into the adjacent corridor and hang out in the shadows of a nearby shelf. So far they hadn't yet discussed expelling her into the Country for her lack of talent, but she wasn't yet convinced that it wasn't a possibility.

"The fielders already have some forest," West said. "I don't know why they'd want more."

Someone else sighed in exasperation. "I'm so tired of the field. When are they going to let us work with more? My sister said it took them another year before they could vote on having anything else."

Another year? Sybil tapped her cheek, thinking.

"What stopped them from voting earlier?" she asked.

"It just wasn't an option on the ballots, I think."

"But the ballots are always on the terminals. There has to be a way to add blanks," Sybil realized.

"What? Why? How?"

"That's just how terminals always work. Remember how they showed us last week in class? They wouldn't change that part of it just for the vote." The Planners looked skeptical, but her pulse was picking up. She smoothed out a patch of sand and dragged her finger across it, drawing.

"Alright, this is what you do — tell the fielders that they can take the new forest, and then vote for some of it to be pond or marsh. I bet once they realize that, they won't even want the field anymore. And then you can take it." She looked up at them excitedly. "And you can vote for a stream or woods or something — maybe a park — whatever you like!"

They grimaced at her.

"Just…vote to have it in? Isn't that against the rules?"

"If it is, I haven't seen it," Sybil said. "And I've looked at all the rules."

It was in part to see if she might be good at Politics, but it had taken her days to go through it all and she had fallen asleep on it three times.

The Planners still hesitated, and Sybil tried again.

"I'm positive that's how it works. Our classrooms are supposed to help us get ready for the real world, right? This is how Cloudbank really works. With voting." She leaned back, pleased. She had figured it out.

"And if you can vote for anything," she concluded, "why do you need my sandbox?"

The Planners exchanged glances, and Sybil sighed in relief as they finally nodded and left.

When the class assembled for the next vote, she saw the Planners and fielders nodding at each other excitedly over the terminals, and she smiled to herself. She know the field students had been wanting access to a water feature for a while — something else she'd overheard from her casual wandering. Finally they'd get what they want, and the Planners would have never known they could vote for new things at all if it wasn't for her.

Even if she didn't share a Selection with them — or anyone, yet — she could contribute something.

After the votes were tallied, she watched with the rest as the Instructor drew out their class's new boundaries. With some delight, she noted that her suggestions had been followed: their classroom boundaries now included both marshland and a copse of oak around a park. She didn't suspect anything, didn't even realize what happened until the diagram was finished and everyone began chattering excitedly about the new space.

"Where's the sandbox?" Sybil blurted. Her voice was loud with shock; everyone quieted, and beneath their stares a mortified flush rose on her cheeks. She realized, belatedly, that she was standing.

The Instructor spelled it out, slow, like she was still a child. "No one voted for the sandbox, Sybil."

"But — but that's my spot," Sybil cried, and this time she couldn't stop her voice from cracking. The students looked at each other, communicating, as always, something that she just couldn't parse.

"What is it?" she demanded. "What?"

"Come on, Sybil," one of the Planners called out from the back. "Everyone was done using it."

"I wasn't —"

"The sandbox was just for kids," someone else added — West Ableton, as if it had been his idea the whole time.

"But," Sybil started again, "it was the only — it was my only —"

What did she have left? Her nails dug into her palms; her eyes watered. She scanned the room, searching, impossibly, for allies. No one met her stare.

"Everyone voted, Sybil," the Instructor said gently. "The majority of your peers wanted space for other things. That's what's fair."

"It's not fair to me," Sybil shouted, but something — maybe the Instructor's words, maybe hers, maybe the combination — broke something in the air. The pity stiffening the silence began to melt.

"Don't be selfish, Sybil."

"It's not like your Selection is going to have anything to do with sand."

"Maybe now you'll find something better!"

"Our classroom is just like the real world," West continued sagely. "You can't hold on to things forever."

They were all nodding and glancing at each other, like it made sense. What made sense? She didn't get it. She held her head.

"Fine," she burst, "fine, but — but I need a little bit of space — in the new boundary — maybe if the field lot could only use the north and west parts of the marsh, then —"

"Sybil," West snapped, "what are you talking about? We haven't even gotten out there and you're already trying to tell people how to use it? Stop being so bossy!"

"I'm not bossy!" Sybil shrieked, and the room filled again with silence, with relentless stares. She looked at the Instructor and saw only that they were already typing out something on their terminal — more notes, more unknown details on her strangeness, her faulty and imperfect development. She turned and ran out before anyone could say anything else, and no one followed as she raced into the new woods, already rising in pillars of light out of the sand.

:::

"So that's 'Case 1?'" Sybil said, voice raising.

"That's how it's referred to in your compilation, yes."

Sybil hissed out a sigh. He stroked his beard, leaned forward.

"It disturbs you."

"Of course it does! I was just a kid. It was unfair. And then they just call it — Case 1?" She felt her eyes begin to prickle. Oh, no. She bowed her head and reached up to rub her brow as if she were having a headache.

She thought at the time that they just hadn't realized how badly it had hurt her. But they had known — her Instructor had known. They had known it had been formative enough to put in her compilation. And no one had done anything.

She swallowed and tipped her head back.

"Well," she said finally, with a humorless laugh, "what could I have expected them to do about it, anyway?"

It wasn't a kind thing to say about an Instructor. She glanced at him, waiting for judgment to fall, but he just sat back in his chair.

"Indeed," he said. "What could you have expected?"

"Anything," she grumbled. "Something."

But then, she had just been one whining girl. For the majority of the class, everything was fine.

End Note: when will I stop being obsessed with Sybil? idk. idk. Probably never ;w;