In two months, just about everything they thought they knew about their current setting and situation would turn out to be false. In two weeks, they would find themselves at the heart of a convoluted conspiracy surrounding not just their school but their entire questionable government system. In two days, they would take a rather difficult physical assessment. In two minutes, the bell would ring to start class.

They were most concerned with the final of the aforementioned events. They would be more concerned with the physical test if they had bothered to remember that said test was, in fact, occurring in two days.

They were not concerned with the ongoing intergalactic cold war involving the questionable government. Nor were they concerned with the ongoing violent seizure of distant planetary colonies, which was also tied to the same questionable government. Nor were they even concerned with the ongoing gang conflict occurring on their own domestic planet, which the questionable government had surprisingly little hand in. They were concerned with student things, because “they,” in this instance, refers to eight students in a class in a military academy, funded by the very same aforementioned questionable government. At least two of those eight students cared about grades, but no more than four. “Student things,” it turned out, was more a matter of convoluted interpersonal relations than grades.

They were not concerned with any of the aforementioned things—“they” now referring to not the class but rather a singular student sitting at the front of the room, buried in a notebook. Their intentions went unknown to their peers. They were not concerned with intergalactic wars or interpersonal relations. 

Rather, the single concern of this single student was, unremarkably, words.