Ecneics woke like a careful machine: glass facades catching the dawn, transit ribbons whispering over canals, and research towers unclipping their morning lights one by one. The city fit into a single idea—science as domestic habit—where labs folded into shopping arcades and magnetically suspended trams skimmed between apartment blocks. The planet beneath was stubbornly human: gravity, weather, and slow sea-breathing like any ordinary world. Only a specific handful of people made it unusual.
At the heart of Ecneics sat a campus that everyone in the city knew by sight: a building the size of a district shaped, from above, like the familiar grid of the periodic table. Locals called it simply "The Table" It was a dormitory and a school both—118 apartments stacked along corridors named for groups and periods—each window a small claim staked by the girl who shared its element's name. Beyond the apartments, PEHS' public face was the Central Atrium: a vaulted, light-filled vestibule where students passed between scheduled lectures, study pods, and the café that served an astonishing number of caffeinated drinks. Behind that public veneer were the campus arteries: Elemental Labs—reinforced rooms tuned to each group's needs; Reaction Chambers—sealed environments for controlled interaction; and Containment Wings—safety zones for the most volatile or radioactive students. Everything had been built with the assumption that power could be education's companion, if handled properly.
118 students, one for every known chemical element, were human in every practical sense. Each carried a name that read like a label, exactly like the element they control. Each could generate, release, manipulate, and reabsorb matter composed of her own element in any physical state it occurred naturally. They're not made of metal or gas; their bodies were living interfaces of how each particular element interacted with the world.
The power that the girls at PEHS had was something that they were born with but it is not something that they could use forever. The school taught its students four things about what they could and could not do with their powers. First, they learned about conservation. No girl could create energy out of nothing. Using a lot of their power would make them tired, give them headaches, make their muscles weak or even cause them to faint.
Second, they learned about distance and awareness. They could control their powers well if they could see what they were doing, but if they were too far away, it was hard to be precise. It takes a lot of practice to be able to control their powers and do it with precision.
Third, they had to learn how to master their powers. Just because they had a power did not mean they knew how to use it. They had to practice and learn how to use their powers in different ways. This was why PEHS existed, to help the girls learn how to use their powers.
Fourth, they learned about reaction restriction. If two girls with powers interacted with each other it could be very bad. So the school had rules to prevent this from happening. The staff at PEHS do not have powers like the girls, although they are very smart and many times help the girls learn how to use their powers.
The school was designed to help the girls learn how to use their powers, as well to give them a normal education. There were devices that could stop the girls from using their abilities when they are not supposed to. The rules at the school were simple: the girls could only use them in certain areas or with permission from a teacher. They were not allowed to use them in a way that can hurt themselves or others.
The school uniform was also designed to be safe and resistant. It was dark blue and green with a pin that showed what class the girl was in.
PEHS offered a complete education: history, math, sports, art, ethics and social studies wrapped in an extraordinary curriculum that taught the physical sciences' most intimate lessons. In supervised labs they practice combination and containment; in lecture halls they discussed consent and consequence; in the apartments they argued about identity and ownership, sometimes in the small, domestic ways teenagers do. On official days university students arrived to observe or collaborate. The campus is a complete microcosm: a city's modernity reflected in its students' complex habits.
So the school was filled with lessons, safety drills practiced, and friendship forged under shared constraints. Ecneics had built a place where elemental nature can be studied without erasing the humanity of the girls. The promise was difficult, imperfect, and necessary: to teach girls how to secure their danger and how to be human at the same time.
Hydrogen would learn that the hardest reactions weren't the ones the Reaction Chambers could contain. They were actually the ones that began with a look across the Atrium and ended when someone's trust changed or broken by an irreversible choice. The institute taught her to be careful. Resting, bonding, hardship, and growth would be the work of a lifetime.