After some time passed, Raven turned his head toward Lyra.
"This is as far as I can go," she said, looking at the walls of the academy with a detached expression.
"I have notified them. A worker will come and fetch you in a while."
Raven nodded and said, "Anything else I need to know?"
Lyra gave him a disdainful look for a second and sighed. "Raven, nobody can survive in the Singularity Realm alone. So, be sure to get along with your peers, even if they give you a hard time for a bit; they might end up saving your life out there."
"Why does she sound like my mom telling me to socialize?" he thought as he nodded.
She patted his shoulder.
"You've done well surviving until now. Make sure to keep yourself alive in the future, too."
With that, she got back into the PTV and drove off.
"Her advice will help me a lot, but why did she raise a death flag at the end?" he thought.
Raven was standing in front of the Orbiter Academy's colossal gates, their reinforced steel rising like an impassable wall. Each towering slab bristled with a deadly array of heavy-caliber machine guns, an undeniable threat. Beyond them, the main building of the Academy itself dominated the skyline: a colossal spire of aged grey stone, buttressed by more modern, metallic additions. It didn't feel like an Academy; it felt like a cathedral dedicated to combat, ancient and untouchable. The machine-gun-defended gates were clearly just the outermost layer of a deep, impenetrable power structure.
"Why does this feel so familiar?" he thought, his gaze sweeping over the jagged lines and severe stone. "Like I've seen a building just like this in a movie back home."
The thought snapped short as a deep, grinding roar echoed through the air. The colossal gates, those seemingly impregnable slabs of steel, began to move. They groaned open, inch by slow inch, revealing a wide path of slate stone that led straight up toward the ominous main building.
Raven began to walk forward, his thoughts already far from the imposing architecture. He recalled the details of his recent trial—specifically what the Orbit had called the location: the Dream Desert. A crucial detail surfaced: he hadn't felt sleepy during the entire two days and one night of the ordeal.
'Maybe if I had slept, I would have entered an eternal slumber,' he thought, his own chilling guess as to why the desert earned its name.
Shaking his head, he focused on the next five weeks. The learning would be the easy part, considering his mental age of 38—eighteen extra years of life experience grafted onto his mind, courtesy of the memories he inherited from the original owner of his body; the socializing, however...
'Five weeks of dealing with hot-blooded teenagers, all chasing romance, bragging about status, and chasing trends,' he thought with a grimace. 'The trial was survival. This is probably gonna be harder than the trial.'
Raven continued walking, an idea forming to solve his social problem as he appreciated the towering view of the Academy building. 'What happened to the worker who was supposed to fetch me?' he thought.
Just then, the front entrance of the main building opened. A stranger wearing a white shirt with black trousers stepped out, spotted Raven, and began waving. Raven quickened his pace, arriving swiftly beside the man.
The worker, with brown hair and auburn eyes, wore a name tag reading "Sam" clipped to his shirt.
"Stargazer Raven, sorry for not fetching you earlier," Sam said, sounding genuinely apologetic.
Raven gave him a measured look. "It's okay."
"Follow me. I will get you registered."
He nodded, following Sam inside.
Sam moved quickly through a set of revolving steel doors that hissed open to admit them. The air inside felt pressurized and sterile. Raven found himself in a brightly lit corridor of polished grey composite, where the Academy's technology was on full display.
Digital displays, which scrolled propaganda and advertisements, lined the walls. The sheer scale was disorienting; the corridors were wide enough for vehicles. They passed several automated sentry platforms humming silently in alcoves before Sam signaled him to an elevator bay enclosed in thick, smoked glass.
'Some things are familiar to back home,' Raven thought as the elevator doors hissed shut and began to ascend. 'Like those ads, these lifts, and the phone like communicators.'
Sam smiled, attempting to make small talk. "The academy principal will be giving a speech tomorrow for the Stargazers. These speeches happen every month because of the unusual timing of people getting chosen by Orbits."
Raven nodded, then asked, "How many Stargazers usually get admitted to the Academy?"
"Seventy percent of Stargazers choose to get admitted to the Academy to prepare for their first visit to the Singularity Realm," Sam replied. "The other thirty percent prefer to prepare on their own."
The elevator stopped ascending and hissed open. Raven followed Sam out, arriving in a brightly lit office. Sam directed him to a chair beside a girl who, like Raven, was wearing a police-issued tracksuit.
The girl had black hair and striking red eyes, a slender build, and pale white skin. Raven instinctively didn't want to make small talk with a fellow student being admitted at the same time.
He found himself mesmerized by her appearance. 'She looks like a vampire from those horror movies,' he thought.
The girl, who held a detached expression while staring at the ceiling, noticed Raven's stare. She glanced at him and said simply, "Hello."
He hadn't wanted to make small talk, but now he had to respond in a way that wouldn't make him look like a creep for staring at her.
"Hey," he replied, giving a minimal, almost-grunt of acknowledgment.
She gave him a nod, then looked toward the table in the middle of the office where a worker was making tapping sounds. "Iris."
'A fellow introvert, huh,' he thought, returning the introduction. "Raven."
The brief interaction snapped short as Sam called out to him. Raven stood and walked to the table where Sam stood, holding a huge black box marked with the OA logo.
"You've been registered in the database," Sam said. "Everything you need is in here."
Sam then handed him a card with flashy patterns and the number 08 printed on it. "This is your room key. The rooms are on the fifth floor; you can take the elevator there."
Raven nodded, took the box and the key, and walked out of the office.