You are named Hieronymus Ish. This is your wizardly name, and your birth name is quite different and entirely unpronounceable.
Right now, you are thinking that you shouldn't have left the Craglorn Mountains. You face the prospect of returning and informing your clan that all the money and effort they spent to prepare you for the Academie de Rei would have been better spent buying some more horses after the last bunch got et by that wyrm. The thought makes you reach for the bottle, which contains nothing but the stale smell of lukewarm beer and a slightly sticky sensation.
You need some more beer. You need to figure out where you're going next. The pub, where one can buy a six pack of swill on the cheap, but also in general, in life.
The stairs creak dangerously as you descend the narrow stairwell and cross the hallway of some cloth merchant's house to open the door. They do their best to ignore you, which is quite hard, seeing as you stand a full head and shoulders above most people here in the city, Fleur. Nevertheless, you do your level best to return to favor.
First of all, you've got some money left to fund your six year tuition. You are in your fourth year, so that's two years worth of money to start with. Now, that's not your money, technically, since it's a loan, and locked up behind a banker's cheque and goes directly towards the Academie de Rei per semester. Now that you've flunked out, it'll remain in the bank, but you know from gossip that those guys take forever and a day to update their records.
Second, you've got your academic stuff. Notebooks, textbooks, and your various foci, such as the classic staff, the lyre, your alembic… You'll have to sell them all, you're afraid. You have to recoup some of your losses. You can't get your fourteen plus years but you can get some of your cash back for the road.
Thirdly…
How do you get your pocket money?
[]- Grave Tending
A wizard never dies. Something of them remains in their mental constructions, and it is a public nuisance when their corpse sits up straight and shambles about with all the blithe confidence they had in life. That is where you come in. Grave tending, a thankless job for public servants and wizard interns, tasked to keep bodies squarely in the ground where they belong, and only occasionally suffer from necromantic despoiling, something you have totally never done. You have certainly never used forbidden procedures to desperately steal some snatch of understanding from a stiff wizard corpse.
[]- Professional Gambling
What started as tableside entertainment to add color to an evening with the lads blossomed quickly into another calculated addiction. It's a matter of probability, a cool head, and a good memory. All skills that the wizardly trade inoculates as well. And of course, since you mostly play with other students, you have gotten exponentially good at cheating, although in tough cases you simply stare at the other guy from your towering height and allow a little lightning to manifest, in order to cow them to give the game up.
[]- Value Assayer
All around the world, animalii monstrum, are born. Dragons and cockatrices, basilisks and jinn manifestations. They are hunted and sold to cities where they are processed into a variety of useful items. You work for a butchery house that creates those items, verifying their purity and authenticity via magical means. It is a job far under someone of even your academic calibre, but it pays and no one expects anything of you. Furthermore, you have been defrauding Melusine and Daughters via the mysterious disappearance of certain small items, for your own use.
…come to think about it, whatever your side hustle is, you might have stuck in the Academie a lot longer if you used that time to apply yourself to your studies. It's water under the bridge, you repeat to yourself. No use crying over spilt milk.
Enrolment Day is basically a civic holiday in Fleur, where the Academie de Rei towers over the rather small and shabby municipal palace of the Duc d'Armagine. Thousands of students are out in the street celebrating their continual participation in the greatest academy of higher learning in the civilized world, thousands of students are seeking consolement in their eventual eviction, and the means of both are pretty much identical. The only way an observer can tell is by mien. Happy? They're in. Desolate, drinking in gutters and corners while others revel? Yeah, they're out.
Ha. Look at you, implicitly excluding yourself from your fellows. Along the cobblestone way to the pub, you repeat to yourself that just getting into the Academie is worth something, isn't it? It's a selective institution. It usually teaches legacy students or the upper crust, ducal and royal scions. The fact that it picked you had to speak for something, right?
You're just in the bargaining phase of grief, you're afraid. You've just flunked, implicitly validating every veiled comment of "what's this barbarian doing here?" Doesn't that just blow all.
Your steely thews are quite useless in every area of academic endeavour, but it's efficacious in pushing aside the mob that throngs the cheapest student bar in the district. It is only ten in the morning and it's already thronged. Celebrants, check. Depressives, check. You also brush pass someone that stinks of sweat and jangles with knives and possessing a generally rakish attitude. At least he took one look up at you and decided that he doesn't want none. He's not the only one there. There's a lot of well, adventurers, is what the polite term is. One could also use grave robbers, mercenaries, and this is the most devastating one if you know how to pull an uptown accent, the help. Immediately identifiable by how many weapons they carry on their person-- sabres with glowing runes, jingling pouches of shot, and a lot of gold rings for some reason.
You rap your knuckles against the cheap pinewood bar and shout, "six pack pale!" The harried moustachio'd barkeep has them stacked up in piles underneath the counter. The bottles clink against the cheap plywood box. Already you are courting envious stares from the poor fellows off to the side, where it's clean to see that they've run out of drink. Worse luck, a wizard never shares his food. Or was that a dragon? Or was that a cat? The crate goes against your hip as you shoulder your way outdoors, where you stop, blinking in the sunlight.
Where do you go from here? Well, there's a very nice, very inviting gutter. Getting a head start on things is very nice. Also, you really don't want to go back to your shitty apartment. The sun's out, it's warm, thank the small mercies.
You experimentally lay down in the gutter and pull out the cork on the first bottle with your teeth. Nice, cold, and tastes like piss. Everything you want in a lager. You nurse the bottle as a unicorn pulled wagon trundles by.
Somewhere something explodes in a deep, bassy thum that makes the earth shake. A faint, rosy color diffuses across the sky in a ring. Evocatii, a third year spell, A Means of Roses, combined with an explosive form. You can do the first and tint your spells but not the second. But how hard was it, really? Did you just fumble, or was the instructor trash, or was it, and say this to yourself perfectly clear, Ish, you were just not cut out for this thing. Magic in general.
Aaand there goes the first bottle. You stare up into the bright blue sky, feeling the sewer water trickle around your head, as if you were a great still stone in a river. Of shit.
You should find something to do.
[]- Keep Drinking
Fuck it.
[]- Find your Academic Advisor
Your Academic Advisor also happens to be the Dean of the Academie de Rei. As it stands, you should still avail yourself of the facilities of the Academie while you still can.
[]- Scope Out Thirdroyal Bank
You need your money, and as long as it's stored in the form of a letter of credit in the vaults of the Thirdroyal, you don't have it. The solution therefore is highly simple.
