“I think she’s trying to figure out if you’re a man with tits, or a she bear,” Devlin proffered to no one in particular at the sight of the girl eying the camp, its occupants, and especially the Doctora after the gate had been wedged open and the troop had entered the main courtyard, captive in tow. Devlin himself was smaller than Aibhilin, and was every bit the barbarian born he had been taken as by the Auxiliary. From the Whit’Mar freehold all the way across the Wastes and North of the accepted border established during the First Crusade, he had only wound up here through a series of poor decisions made as a young fortune seeker intending on returning to his warband a hero, slaves and wealth trailing in his wake. Instead he had taken a bolt to the right shoulder in his first engagement and wound up a slave in the fighting pits of the Southeast, before being offered up to the Empire to take the place of his owner’s son in the mandatory tribal Auxiliary drives of the late seventies. None of that would matter to this girl, though. If she was an Imperial subject she wasn’t from anywhere Aibhilin had ever heard of. 

Once she had gotten through the gate and set her eyes upon the Doctora it was immediately apparent just how tan she really was. Not necessarily particularly dark skinned by birth, but tan. An oddity to be sure, someone the imperials would have wanted as a house slave more than a brutish pit fighter. Must have been from a nomadic tribe, born above ground in a place that wasn’t as prone to the erratic weather she would be sure to get her fill of here. She had gotten lucky to have been taken by the group she had been for what it was worth, considering she no doubt only survived because of her youth and had almost certainly lost those closest to her in the engagement. It wasn’t legal for the Auxiliary to take personal slaves as such, let alone to sell them for personal gain. They were in the employ of the Empire and couldn’t profit from their duty until leaving the service, but that didn’t mean the occasional especially high value person didn’t fall through the cracks and wind up being exchanged for bronze shards behind closed doors. The troop were either too foolish to note her worth to the right buyer, or were more committed to the cause then the average by far. 

None of that mattered now, not anymore. She’d been presented to a school, and from here the involvement of the Auxiliary as an official Imperial body would come to an end one way or the other. This barbarian girl was now a subject of the empire, and would either take the sacramenta and join the camp for which her employer would pay the Empire a finder’s fee, or she would be given a day’s provisions and pointed towards the nearest settlement, the one which provided Australos with its own provisions and food stuffs, to live out her life as a subsistence level forager. There was no way to keep her from simply returning back to where she had been taken by the troop in the first place of course, and no one would blink or try to stop her if she waited until the Auxiliary moved off and took the same route she’d been taken on to reach Australos back home. Knowing how the Auxiliary operate however, the chances that anything was left for her to go back home to were slim to none. In her experience most who went back turned around a day or two after getting home and realizing there was nothing left for them there volunteered at the camp. 

Chances were she had probably never seen so many people in one place in her life as she was about to see flooding into the courtyard. Australos wasn’t a large outfit, only twenty to thirty fighters at any given time and a handful of paid staffers, but they were far larger than any group who could manage to survive jumping from hand-dug well to tiny natural spring out in the desert. The larger cities could only exist because of a direct access to a natural aquifer, and even most of them gravitated at around six hundred people in total. Everyone was aware of the arrival at this point, and they’d all made their way to the courtyard to get a look at the new recruit for themselves. Most were not enthused. Too small, female, barbarian, whatever their individual complaint was it was plainly visible that she wasn’t going to be quick in making friends of her potential fellow fighters. She shouldn’t take it personally. Fight camps were tight knit units, and most would rather a small group who’d known one another for years then outsiders of unknown skill and intent joining the stable, but they didn’t say anything out loud. They knew what came next, and would hold their tongue until it was passed. 

Aibhilin neither smiled nor glowered toward the youth as she sized her up. She didn’t much like looking at people like they were meat, had too much experience on the other end of the ordeal to appreciate being the one preforming the visual dance of half passionless stare down half cold hard napkin arithmetic. It was costly to train a fighter, and every one they took who didn’t come out of their first engagement alive was a significant monetary loss to the camp. Aibhilin looked the girl in the eyes only after carefully examining her every other feature in a process that left her feeling like she needed to bathe. She had curiosity in those eyes of her’s, and the glimmer of intelligence. Aibhilin herself was not known for her intellect, nor her appreciation of those who thought they could think their way around an axe to the head, but it was enough to come to her decision. “This is a camp. We fight other camps for food, hides, metal,” she tapped at the long blade hanging from her sword belt to emphasize the possibly foreign term, “we protect our own. You can stay here and be a camp fighter like us, or go home. Your choice,” the Auxililary wouldn’t appreciate the, “or go home,” bit, but outsiders hound them. The choice would be this girl’s regardless of the troop’s opinion on the matter.