A few days after that mind-boggling first day, I had settled into Talunia Academy. Although I was unable to get that history class transfer, I still enjoyed my classes.

With about 400 students. Talunia Academy was pretty small, so thanks to Lydia, I could count the alphas, betas, and omegas in my classes. Of the 37 students in my math class, 11 were alphas, 16 were betas, 9 were omegas, and one was me. Lydia and I still had not figured out exactly what wolf I was.

Anyways, back to class. Class was going to start in a minute or two, so everyone was already at their desk, ready with papers out.

All of a sudden, the classroom door opened. Someone discreetly ran in, put a slip of paper on Mrs. Ariasta's desk, and quickly ran to the last empty desk in the classroom, which was next to me. Right then, the bell rang.

When Mrs. Ariasta walked in, she looked at the class in surprise. "So, we finally have our full class." She then looked at the slip on the desk. "Miss Sung, your estrous pass was signed, alright," Mrs. Ariasta.

Heat pass? I decided not to question it, but made a note to ask Lydia and Jess during lunch.

"Anyways, let's continue from yesterday. The triangle angle sum theorem, which you should remember from INT 1..."

Later during the period, I tapped on her shoulder. "Hey, do you want to borrow my notes, because you missed a week of school. I'm Kiara by the way."

The girl looked at me, scanning me almost nervously. Her ears were down, but the shape still matched the other omegas. She had long, black hair with straight bangs. Her eyes were brown and her tail fur was pretty long. Was she trying to style it? Back home, there was a short trend of having your tail fur grown out and curled, but it became increasingly inconvenient. That was the first and last time I tried following a trend.

The girl... Miss Sung, finally nodded.

I discreetly passed my math notebook to her. As I had finished the warm up, and today's work was on a worksheet, I was alright with it. Speaking of, I continued to work on the problems.

Reviewing triangle congruence was simple enough, and I finished with time to spare. There were about 10 minutes left of class. I looked down and spotted my math notebook placed on my backpack, along with a note. It read, 'thank you for helping me catch up. No beta has treated me like this. Sincerely, Amy Sung."

...

When I wrote down the notes about society last week, I had not expected how much the notebook would fill with societal stuff. While the first page still had my hastily jotted notes about alphas, betas, and omegas, the next few pages had all of my questions and all of Lydia and Jess's answers. My curiosity kept coming back as soon as I heard something new. Usually, Lydia and Jess answered, but sometimes they giggled at the question or turned flushed and refused to answer.

"Estrous pass? Actually, I'm not sure," Jess remarked.

We had gotten in the lunch line early, and managed to snag an empty table. I held my milk with my left hand and wrote in the notebook with my other hand. "Mmm-hmm," I replied with my mouth full of milk.

"I think it's an Omega thing. My dad sometimes mentions it," Lydia said. "I think it allows Omegas work or school leave if they're in heat."

I swallowed. "Heat? What's that?"

Jess and Lydia turned red. I barely heard Jess whisper, "Estrous means 'heat'?" and Lydia's response of, "Yeah."

I read the room and quickly replied, "Alright, alright. Sorry for asking?" The two of them nodded at me.

The rest of lunch was silent. I kept thinking about that girl in Math...

...

I sighed. Because I failed to get out of History class, I was now stuck being with a bigoted professor for an hour every day. My mood was down as I walked into the classroom. Luckily, Jess and I were in the same class, so it wasn't all horrible.

"Hey Kiara," Jess greeted.

Aside from lunch, History was the only class I had with Jess. Although we sat pretty far from each other, we had the time before the period started.

"Hey Jess,"

"Did you have a bad day?"

"No, it's just this class. You know..."

The bell rang. After quickly saying bye to Jess, I walked back to my desk and sat down. I pulled the homework that I barely managed to finish out of my backpack.

"Alright class, pass your homework to the person in front of you. Afterwards, get the textbook and turn it to page 12."

After passing my paper to the guy in front of me, I pulled out my textbook from under my chair.

"Let's continue our lesson from yesterday. As you should know, Alphas only rose to prevalence around 900 BCE, during the era of the ancient greeks. This was around the time that wolves began to be classified into different types..."

I zoned out, nonchalantly flipping the pages between my fingers. Something always felt off and I stopped paying attention to the bigoted words. Slip, slip, the paper on my fingertips along with the droning of Mr. Curro's biased lesson led to mind numbing monotony.

I stopped. I was on page 14 of the textbook, which talked about early alphas, betas, and omegas. However, there was something written on the page in pencil.

ζλͱω𐤉ο θυσπυλ μθω "ΑΒΩΛΙΣͰ" ͱυκ 𐤉σπ𐤉ρ θυ αολ ϝθζα ιφ "μɩͱɩ_νομεν_εστ_Εττɑ"

Was it written in greek? I don't know; while I can recognise some greek letters (such as the oh so prevalent αβω), I don't know greek.

Who wrote this? I checked the inside cover where check-out names were written, but the names didn't match the handwriting. Maybe they never owned the textbook. But then, why would they write in it?

For whatever reason, page 14 of my textbook had the weird message written in. Secretly taking my phone, I snapped a picture. Luckily no one noticed, especially Mr. Curro who was still lecturing about... actually I don't know anymore.

In fact, the bell rang just then. I had wasted the entire period just flipping the page of the textbook. I put the textbook back and picked up my backpack. Homework would be posted on the grading website anyways.

"Kiara, you ok? What were you doing with your phone?"

I turned to see Jess. Shoot, they saw me pull my phone out.

"Uh... I'll explain. Can you come to my dorm around 6?"

"Ok, which one?"

"124,"

...

At 5:56, when both Lydia and I had just finished homework, there was a knock on the door.

"I'll get it," I told Lydia.

I walked to the entrance and opened the door to see Jess there. "Hey Kiara. So, what did you want to tell me about?"

Lydia came over to the doorway. "You invited the green wolf?"

"Yeah, there was something weird I wanted to show them. You know what, Lydia, you might be interested too."

With the three of us sitting on the dorm carpet, I pulled up the photo of the message on my phone. "Do you guys know what this is? It was in my history textbook."

Both of them looked puzzled, until Lydia was the first to speak up. "Have you tried putting it in Poogle Translate?"

"Well... it didn't work. Poogle Translate said the message couldn't be translated."

I showed them my phone which still had Poogle Translate open. The input and output were the same, and the pronunciation part just had nonsense gibberish. We stared at the message for a bit longer.

Jess broke the silence. "I saw something similar in a tv show. They made a code and the viewers were able to figure it out for secret messages."

"So is this a code?" Lydia intercepted.

"Probably,"

I finally spoke up. "So, how do we decode it? Do we just replace greek letters with english letters?"

Jess suddenly lit up. They replied, "Of course, it's one of those! But why would someone write this stuff in a textbook?"

Lydia and I shrugged. "Maybe I should look for more clues in the textbook tomorrow," I said.

...

That night, instead of looking up different tie-knots again, I kept trying to solve the cipher. Sitting in the dorm bunk, I read over and over to try to figure something out. I don't know any greek, so it was difficult.

Currently, I thought that alpha (ɑ) was "a", pi (π) was "p", and either omega (ω) or omicron (ο) was "o". The message was starting to make a little sense...

Just kidding, it wasn't. The cipher was nowhere close to being solved with only 3 letters. Whoever wrote this must be really secretive.

There was something weird about two parts of the phrase; the parts in quotation marks. "μɩͱɩ_νομεν_εστ_Εττɑ" and "ΑΒΩΛΙΣͰ". Something told me that they would be important.

"ΑΒΩΛΙΣͰ"...

"Kiara, you gonna go to sleep?"

Lydia was getting into the bottom bunk, and I realized it was already 10 pm. "Yeah Lydia."

Dropping my notebook onto the desk across the room (which was risky from the top bunk yet I managed to do it), I turned the lamp off and was left with my thoughts.

"AΒΩΛΙΣͰ"...

"AΒΩΛΙΣͰ"...

"ΑΒΩΛΙΣͰ"

"ΑΒΩ"...

I drifted off to sleep before I could think about what it meant.

...