The morning after that she found a small table that was new to her room, upon which an array of potions and elixirs had been arranged in mostly small vials. A large, bulbous beaker stood at the center of it all. Its viscous contents were a barrage of colors, red stacked upon orange stacked upon green stacked upon lavender. Dyeawan marveled at how, despite being liquid, none of the colored layers ran together.

She’d been provided with an empty beaker the size and shape of the rainbow one, and it wasn’t difficult, even for a mind not belonging to Dyeawan, to discern what she was supposed to do. Never studying or working with potions before, it was the first task to take up an hour of her everyday rounds. She also accidentally dyed half her room a patchwork of colors from the various vials in the process.

Her attempts to mimic the rainbow beaker resulted in a mess of every color bleeding into every other color, no matter how carefully she poured each one, until Dyeawan noticed the weight and thickness of each elixir varied from vial to vial. The heaviest of them was the lavender.

Instead of pouring the lavender first, she tried reversing the process. She poured the red, the top color from the rainbow beaker, into the bottom of her empty beaker. Dyeawan could scarcely believe it as she poured the orange and watched it not only soak completely through the red, but also force every drop of it to the top, the two elixirs remaining completely separate.

The fifth task was a stack of ancient volumes accompanied by a scroll and quill. Questions about the contents of the tomes and their subject matter, largely concerning the laws and doctrine of Crachian society, were penned on the scroll parchment awaiting her answers. Though Dyeawan had only just read her first real book days after arriving at the Planning Cadre, she found she could now absorb every word of a three-hundred-page volume in a matter of an hour or less. She needed only to glance at an entire page to commit its contents to memory, and the meaning of most words she’d never heard before she could intuit from their relationship to the words she did know.

It took her all of a morning and an afternoon to become an expert on Crachian law. The only aspect of it which confused her were why it was written in such an unnecessarily convoluted way with so much excess verbiage, and why every process seemed to include a dozen more steps than were necessary to arrive at the same conclusion.

Most of the questions in the scroll simply required her to remember facts and quotations, but the final one asked her to interpret the overall purpose of the Crachian doctrine.

After a few minutes of thought, Dyeawan wrote down: To confuse people like me.