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Home.
It'd always seemed like a bit of an odd concept to Dinah Fox. 
You attached some kind of worth to a place. A spot of earth,  for having occupied it long enough it'd gotten familiar to you. 
Perhaps that was because she didn't tend to get acquainted with any path of earth for all that long, but she found it her to attach that kind of sentimentality to a place. 

Cyrus still had memories of the house. The grounds. All of the buildings. The tree swing and the fish pond. 
The only she could remember clearly herself was the dogs. Daisy, Arrow, Mountain. Missing the dogs. Telling them they needed to go back and get the dogs. 

Of course they never did go back and get the dogs.

When you start early then letting material things go became pretty easy,  though there were more things that didn't ever really leave your grasp.  You travelled light because of the weight of your own grudges. 


It'd been a long trip to Marchand. Getting to somewhere where the bus was going to pick up was about as difficult as just getting to the place itself, so it seemed smart to cut the middle man. It was not as if she was coming from overseas. 
Though, she might as well have been for all the hassle involved. 

Money ran out a little after she got out of the state, and it had been mostly hitchhiking from there. Begging, borrowing and stealing her progress toward the marker on her folded roadmap and trying not to get murdered along the way...though that was never totally guaranteed. 
She'd spent most of the night trying to find someone going the rest of the way to some indistinct location, and eventually hit upon a delivery driver who was easily bribed enough to let her take a seat amid the boxes and packing bags for the next four hours,  until it slowed to a crawl at the end of a forested path, and she was able to hop out. 

The young man wound down the window as she hooked her backpack over one shoulder, giving a rather pointed cough. 

[color=a2d39c]"Oh. Yeah. Sorry. Thanks for the help."[/color]

With one deft movement, she extended a hand to shake his, which came away with a small plastic bag of ground-up leaves sat neatly in the palm. He nodded, and without a word, the van took off and rounded the corner. 

The rest of it, Dinah made on foot. She wasn't unused to walking. But it had been a long few days. Enough that when she caught sight of the building she could almost put aside her considerable misgivings about the entire thing. Almost, but not quite.  She could almost imagine word for word what her brother would be saying about it. 

'That isn't a place for people like us. That is another Council vanity project. You'll hate it there. And they'll probably hate it that you showed up.'

Though the last one seemed more of a plus to her. Maybe that was the difference between her and her brother, and was why she was here and he was working as dish washer in 'Who The Hell Cares' West Virginia. If there was one thing in the world she was good at, it was digging her heels in. 

Dinah walked along the drive, approaching the gates, getting a little bit of scrutiny from the gate guard as she presented her letter. It might have been the name on the letter, though she guessed it was something else. 
She didn't exactly...match well with the general ambience it was giving off. 
The prestigious private school vibe didn't really gel with the unkempt hair, the faded T-shirt that had clearly belonged to a male who was several sizes bigger that she was, the denim jacket with skinned elbows, and the canvas hiking boots held together by two rings of silver duct tape around each. 

Scruffy seemed an understatement. She looked like a homeless person.

But she was a  homeless person with an invitation, and so she proceeded with some haste into the building. 

The common room looked like about five different furniture stores with wildly different clients, and possibly one hapless passing natural history museum, had all violently collided.
Even with that in mind, it was still one of the nicest places she had seen in a while. 

A few students has already arrived and were evidently making the most of the networking opportunity. The young Fox was entirely unconcerned about that though. 
No travel budget meant no food budget either, and the last cereal bar was a long long time ago. 
So she didn't waste much time, grabbing an entire box of cereal, sticking her hand in, and biting into the entire handful. 

Feral was probably quite a good word. 
Terramancy really was the only primary where you could turn that into an advantage.