Opening Scene — Balamb Garden, Morning

The Garden hums.

It always does — a low, constant vibration that runs through the floors and up into the walls, so familiar to anyone who has lived here long enough that they stop noticing it entirely. Most mornings it's just background. This morning it feels like anticipation.

The field exam is close. Everyone knows it.

The main hall atrium moves with the particular energy of something approaching — not chaos, not celebration, just a kind of collective held breath. SeeD candidates cross the Garden logo on the floor without looking down. A group of second-years near the directory board are having a conversation that keeps stopping and restarting. An instructor moves through the crowd with a stack of folders and the expression of someone who has already been awake for two hours.

On the second floor walkway, Instructor Quistis Trepe stands at the railing reviewing her clipboard. She has the stillness of someone solving a problem before anyone else has noticed it exists. Below her the atrium moves and breathes and she watches it with the patient attention of a person who is quietly responsible for quite a lot.

From somewhere in the direction of the training center, muffled by distance and two sets of doors, comes the sound of something impacting a wall. Rhythmic. Deliberate. Zell Dincht has apparently been up since before dawn.

In classroom 1-B, a handful of early arrivals have already taken their seats. The room is not full yet. It will be soon.

This is a morning like other mornings, except that it isn't.

You have been at Balamb Garden long enough to know its rhythms — which corridors get crowded after breakfast, which instructors are worth arriving early for, how the light falls through the upper windows in the hour before the day properly begins. You have been here long enough for the hum to feel like home.

Your name is on the exam roster. It has been for two weeks. This morning that fact has a different weight than it did yesterday.

You are somewhere in the Garden — the atrium, the corridor, the cafeteria still half-full from breakfast — when the morning finds you.