A week in the training room changed Mary and Ai in ways that went far beyond etiquette drills and sales technique.
It was subtle at first — the kind of thing Ari only noticed because she happened to be watching for it, tucked into her usual corner of the sofa with a snack in hand while the two of them ran through their final lessons.
Mary no longer hesitated before speaking.
Her posture, always proper, had shifted into something that looked less like discipline and more like ease, the straight spine of someone who had simply stopped bracing for correction.
Ai, for her part, had softened in the opposite direction — less performance in her smile now, more warmth that seemed to come from somewhere real rather than somewhere rehearsed.
By the time the week ended, both of them carried themselves like entirely different women than the ones who had stumbled, disoriented, out of a gilded envelope seven days ago.
Ari gathered them both, along with Tsukasa, in the wide front hall of a building that hadn’t existed the day before — a second structure the System had raised alongside the mansion once training finished, meant to house reception and the beginnings of whatever entertainment operation Ai would eventually run.
It was clean and bright and largely empty, waiting for its first real use, and Ari walked them through it with the same unhurried pace she brought to everything.
“This is where you’ll actually be working,” she said, gesturing loosely at the space around them.
“Front desk, waiting area, whatever Ai ends up needing once there’s an entertainment wing worth the name.
Get familiar with it.” The three of them looked around, taking in the room that would soon hold whatever Void City became.
“Before you start,” Ari continued, settling against the doorframe with her arms loosely crossed, “there’s a few things I want you to actually understand, not just nod along to.” Mary straightened automatically.
Ai’s expression sharpened into something more attentive.
Even Tsukasa, who rarely needed reminding of anything, gave her his full attention.
“First,” Ari said.
“You don’t grovel to guests.
Ever.
I don’t care how important they think they are, or how important they actually are.
You’re not servants here.
You represent Void City, which means when someone walks through that gate, they’re dealing with my people, not with some staff they can order around.” She let that sit for a moment before continuing.
“Second — rude guests don’t get tolerated.
Not by me, and not by you having to just take it.
If someone crosses a line with you, you don’t have to smile through it.
I’ll deal with it.” There was nothing dramatic in the way she said it, no rising heat, just the same flat certainty she might have used to explain a work schedule.
Somehow that made it land harder than if she’d shouted it.
“Third.” Her gaze moved slowly across all three of them.
“Guests come and go.
That’s the nature of this place — people pass through, they trade, they leave.
You three are different.
You’re employees.
You stay, for as long as you want to, unless you decide to quit.
This isn’t a temporary posting for me.
You’re not interchangeable.” Mary’s throat tightened slightly at that, though she said nothing.
Ai’s smile, when it came, was quieter than her usual one — less polish, more feeling.
Tsukasa simply nodded once, the way a man nods when a term of employment has finally been stated in terms he actually respects.
“That’s the code,” Ari finished.
“Simple enough.
Don’t grovel, don’t tolerate disrespect, and remember you’re not disposable here.” She pushed off from the doorframe.
“Now — you’ve all been here a week.
Which means you’ve been gone about seven hours, back home.
I’m giving you the day.
Go handle whatever needs handling.
Explain yourselves if you want to, don’t if you don’t.
Come back whenever you’re ready.” • • Mary stepped back into Longbourn looking, to anyone who had known her a week ago, like an entirely different young woman.
The transformation wasn’t loud.
It was in the way she carried herself now — the brisk, unhurried confidence of someone who had stopped waiting to be told her opinion mattered, an elegance that no longer needed a book of sermons clutched to her chest to justify itself.
Her spectacles were simply gone; she hadn’t needed them in Void City and found, once the week was through, that she didn’t need them here either.
She spoke smoothly, without the clipped, over-careful rhythm she’d always used when she was afraid of being thought foolish, and without any of the rush that fear used to put into her voice.
The house was in an uproar the moment she walked through the door.
“Mary!” Her mother’s voice cracked with something between fury and relief as she rushed into the hall, and behind her came the rest of the household in a tangle of raised voices — Mr.
Bennet unusually pale, Jane’s hand pressed to her own chest, Elizabeth already halfway across the room before Mary had even fully stepped inside.
Seven hours, Mary would come to understand later, had been more than enough time for an entire household to convince itself of the worst.
“Where in heaven’s name have you been?” her mother demanded.
“We searched everywhere — Elizabeth said you simply vanished from the parlor—” “I did,” Mary said, and the calm, level way she said it only seemed to alarm her mother further.
What followed was, predictably, disbelief.
Explanations of gilded envelopes and cities suspended among the stars sounded, when spoken aloud in her family’s front hall, exactly as absurd as Mary had known they would.
Her mother wavered between tears and accusations of some fevered delusion.
Her father watched her with the careful, searching look of a man deciding whether his daughter had lost her wits.
Mary didn’t argue with any of it.
She simply reached for the small, quiet function she’d learned to use in her first week of training, and let a neat leather-bound ledger — one she had absolutely no memory of owning before this moment — appear in her open palm out of nothing at all, before letting it vanish again just as easily.
The room went silent.
“I told you,” Mary said, “I’ve been somewhere rather extraordinary.” Belief, when it finally arrived, came slowly and unevenly, but it came.
By the time she left again, her family’s fear had settled into something closer to bewildered acceptance, and Mary found, walking back toward the gate that only she could see, that she didn’t much mind leaving them uncertain.
It was, she thought, rather nice to be the one who finally had answers nobody else did.
• • Ai’s return home was a good deal calmer, if only because the people waiting for her were considerably harder to startle.
She found Ichigo Saitou pacing the small guesthouse sitting room when she arrived, phone in hand, clearly midway through composing some cover story to explain her absence to the handful of people who might have noticed it.
Miyako sat nearby with one twin balanced against her shoulder, looking less panicked than simply, thoroughly exhausted — though the moment Ai appeared in the doorway, that exhaustion sharpened instantly into alarm.
“Ai!
Where have you—” “I’m fine,” Ai said quickly, crossing the room to take the baby gently from Miyako’s arms before either of them could work themselves into a real state.
“I’m sorry.
I should have said something before I left, but there wasn’t exactly time.” She told them everything — the envelope, the city among the stars, the job she’d more or less already accepted before fully understanding what it was.
Ichigo listened with the particular stillness of a man calculating scandal-risk in real time, and Miyako listened with the flat, weary skepticism of someone who had spent years managing an idol’s secrets and had, by this point, heard nearly every excuse in existence.
“An hour,” Ai said, when the questions turned practical.
“That’s how much time actually passed here.
A week there is an hour here.
I can go, and come back, and barely lose any time with the twins at all.” That, more than anything else she said, was what finally settled Miyako’s suspicion into something like grudging interest.
An extra pair of trustworthy hands willing to disappear for hours and return having lost none of the time that mattered — properly considered, that was less a scandal and more a convenience.
Ai left the guesthouse an hour later with her manager’s cautious blessing and a promise to check in regularly, feeling lighter than she had in weeks.
• • Tsukasa’s return was, characteristically, the quietest of the three, and also the one he deliberated over longest.
He stood outside the academy’s main hall for a long while after arriving back, turning the question over with the same exacting care he gave to a difficult dish.
Senzaemon Nakiri, as headmaster, was owed a certain degree of honesty from the First Seat of the Elite Ten — that much Tsukasa understood clearly.
But honesty, he reasoned, was not the same as disclosure, and there was nothing in his position that strictly required him to explain every hour of his time, so long as none of it interfered with his duties.
He decided, in the end, against telling anyone at all.
It wasn’t a decision he made lightly.
It simply made the most sense.
He remained, for now, the head of the Elite Ten Council, with all the responsibilities and scrutiny that came attached to the title, and a second position in a city that existed outside every known world was not the kind of thing that survived close questioning particularly well.
The arrangement he settled on instead was practical, if not especially restful: his academy duties by day, and whatever hours Void City required of him carved out late at night, once the kitchens had gone quiet and no one was left awake to notice a chef who kept unusual hours.
He allowed himself a small, private hope, standing there in the dark outside the academy halls, that no one would ask too many questions.
He was, after all, already rather good at not being asked questions he didn’t want to answer.