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Supplementary: Princeton University Pennant Banner, 1920 - 1940
CHAPTER ONE — PERSEPHONE
Sierra Reva stood in the suite's living room, her brows knit together and her hands on her hips—the very epitome of the word unimpressed. Everything about her Gotham-U experience thus far had been underwhelming: it started with the drive, which had been barely thirty minutes long, which would've been even less if there hadn't been traffic. When Sierra decided to go to college, she figured she'd have her interstate experience, or at least her upstate experience, packing her shit into one of Bruce's bigger cars and hightailing it half-way, quarter-way, any-way across the country to reach her fresh start—the fresh start in question would be of the Ivy League variety.
Or at least, Little Ivy. In her head, she pictured the end of a coming-of-age movie, a vaudeville montage set to some alternative, alt-rock song collating her past, present and future into one Oscar-worthy stretch of open road. This road was meant to lead out out out of Gotham City, and into the unknown.
Instead, it leads out out out of the corner of Gotham Sierra's familiar with and in in in to the part of the city that was procured for the university's founding two centuries back. Maybe if Sierra hadn't been raised in Gotham, practically born and bred here, she might've found some value in the city, in its architecture, its history, its theatre. But she had been, and where a non-Gothamite might've ooh-d and aah-d, she grimaced, turned away. She didn't want gargoyles, she wanted out.
At least before, she'd had the luxury of the Upper East Side apartment she shared with Selina; spacious, well-lit (by Gotham's standards, at least), comfortable and clean. Her "suite" here, in Kind College, was easily a third of her apartment's total size. Its oversized window had an unremarkable view of the student commons square outside (Kind College and two other colleges, the names of which Sierra hadn't bothered to remember from the tour, were all built around the square) and the furniture, though new and modern, had a cheapness to it that Sierra could sense from a mile away. It was like a display home. Or a medium-budget porn set. Either-or.
There was that, the furnishings, and then, the company. Their suite was to accommodate three: Sierra; a girl named Margo who was yet to make an appearance this fine moving day; and Aurora Catrine Dent.
Aurora Catrine was Sierra's best friend, and her sister in every sense but the conventional. In terms of beauty, she is nothing but the conventional. Aurora Catrine—Kat, Sierra can hear her chide—is blonde, bleached blonde, her skin almost as light as her hair and her eyes a brighter blue than both. She is equal parts beautiful and boring at once, which cancels out and renders her otherwise invisible to the untrained eye. Judging by her complexion, her complete whiteness, it would be fair to assume she's never stepped foot on a beach before, or never seen a ray of sun that isn't dulled to nothing by Gotham's incorrigibly cloudy skies; Sierra would reason instead that beach is a serviceable word to describe her sister.
