Vade Retro!
- Location
- boundless optimism
Glass clatters against the pavestones as you laboriously lift yourself up with legs alone, in a motion that has more in common with a clockwork gear than anything living. You wedge the beer crate against your hip and tread that familiar road to the Academie one last time. You also realize that you actually never paid for your booze.
You look back. The bartender isn't rushing out of the pub, yelling at you. You chew on your lip as you consider the thirty trachy in your pocket. Fifty trachy to a nominista. A nominista is a golden coin, marked with the seal of Fleur. You have somewhere around two hundred noministas, and ten noministas a month buys you a month's rent for an apartment. Half a nominista is enough to buy you a pair of bad boots, cardboard soles and cheap offcast leather. Half a nominista is enough to buy a plowman's lunch of some meat baked into a pie, apples, and cheese…
You pick up the pace instead of returning. He's making good money, anyhow.
Somewhere along the Rue Tresmagus, you realize that this is the end of your long habitation in Fleur. It's back to the mountains with you. You'll never see a building taller than yourself again. All the roads will just be paved dirt. You've fallen from Empyreal heights, and all that you have to drink is either the weak hoppy ale that everyone and their mother knows, or that harsh burning thing made of fermented turnips.
The thought of that makes you take out another bottle from the crate. Now whenever you walk, you produce an annoying rattling sound. No one has yet to accost you, and you are hoping one of them will.
Fleur is a good city, a beautiful one. With so many wizards and maguses produced yearly, most of them who don't fly off abroad stay right here, erecting their very own tower and contributing in some way to the civic good. That means nine phantasms per street, each made by a separate wizard, sent to clean the streets. That means a smorgasbord of dead useful objects, such as scrying-glasses, leashed-elements, more kinds of alchemical substances that you can recall off the top of your head but most of them are some form of major hallucination, bags of holding and thousand league shoes, sold all over the world, with the profits plowed right back to Fleur.
Even the beggars eat good. You know because you pay the head dimmer on schedule after one of their boys caught you eating wizard deader brains on a moonless night.
(You wonder if the dean knows.)
Rue Tresmagus rises up to Academic Hill, where the Academie de Rei sits redundantly. You can see all of Fleur and the surrounding Armagine countryside. A forest of towers. Spellbound trees fight for sunlight with each other, forming a tangled, rustling green sea. Look deeply, Ish. You're not getting this view anymore.
"I need to get over myself," you say out loud. The mantled passersby ignore you. Eccentricities such as talking to yourself is quite common amongst the arcane profession. "It's just a place."
One of the skills fostered by the meditative exercises needed for wizardry is a sense for introspection. Furthermore, when the source of your arcane power is an image in your mind, it's impossible for a little bit of that vast, oily, subconscious sea to seep into it. Every time you return to the mind palace, you can see the cityscape of Fleur in the horizon. It's towers, it's roads, blowing red sand at your embattered palace at skin-strip-off speeds.
You stagger up the nine floors where Hieronymus Delt, the Dean of Academie de Rei, a research fellow of Astrology and an all around respected academic figure. He bears a halo of respective academica that repels you better than salt does slugs, which explains why the last time you've talked with Hieronymus Delt was when you were a first year student, still unsure which track you'd like to specialize in. In the end, you chose Evocatii, mostly because there will always be a war going on, and therefore you'd always be in for a job. Granted, a lot of that was because of a condettiore guest speaker, who really talked up the monetary benefits of the forever war with the necromantic empire of the Four Ivories.
You reach out a hand to the bronze knocker. You hesitate.
You're shaking like you've just dug up your first grave. For a moment, you imagine the worst-- Hieronymus Delt with solid evidence of your necromantic prolictivities. How would the transmutation of most of your flesh into fire feel like? Painful. Your hands shudder visibly. For a second, you stand there, in the middle of the hallway, gathering your nerve like a bale of lightning bolts.
The door opens. You cannot say if you were the agent behind it.
The Dean is sitting behind his great desk, covered in sage green leather. Parchments cover his desk-- while mundane scriveners had made the switch to pulp paper, wizards have stuck to dead animal skin, from lamb to dragon. The floor ends somewhere behind him, dissolving into a diffuse nebula of violet light, as if you had stepped out into the Empyreal instead of an office at the Tresmagus Campus of the Academie de Rei. Gravity has been ordered to deactivate, such that there is a small library of books floating in the empty space. Most disconcertingly, there is also a tall window that shows the skies above the Academie. The Dean himself is seated as a king, shadowed by the brim of his long hat and framed by a silver beard that spills deep into a rich, burgundy robe covering a cloth-of-gold vest. The only thing you can see of him are his papery hands, twirling a pen, and his glowing eyes, pale and blue as river stones, which also happened to be fixed to the half empty crate of beer wedged against your hip.
Poor start.
"I'm sorry, are you a beer seller?"
Really poor start.
"No, I'm-- I'm Hieronymus Ish," you say, quickly dropping the crate with a rattle and pushing it beyond the doorframe. "I'm here for an academic consultation, if you have the time."
Hieronymus Delt gives you the Look. Patrician disdain sharper than a knife. "I remember you," he replies. "You came in once when you were in your first year. You failed your exams. The last time I could have helped you was in your second year. Your record is right--" he waves a hand, and a scroll materializes out of thin air "--here," Hieronymus Delt continues, running a glowing eye down it. "Only two core classes? And you barely passed? Good heavens, man, that should have been a warning sign to switch, or take a gap year or something. Hunt some dragons, explore some dungeons." He tosses your record over his shoulder, where it spontaneously catches fire.
Your teeth are ground together so tight that one, you feel like they're about to break into bits, and two, takes a conscious effort to pry open. There is a heat in your mind, a dark dim angry ember, threatening to burst over.
"Well? Say something, man. I don't have all day. In fact, I believe I have another appointment, a scheduled one, coming up soon."
"I wanted," you enunciate with precision, "to talk to you to see what my options are."
"Do I look like a failure? I wouldn't know. Go out in the world. Have some adventures. Have some fun. You can't stay here, and I wouldn't recommend another stint in academica. You people don't have the aptitude for it."
"Uh."
"Don't give me that look," he snaps. "I mean, look at you. You're half drunk, you smell like the gutters. Whatever skill you had, you lost it. I'm not obligated to coddle you, I'm a professor of the Academie, not some backwater hick town school teacher."
"You wrinkled old bastard," you snarl on reflex. "Who's balls did you fondle to get your hat? I came here because I'm at my wits end, and I don't pay an arm and a leg to get this sort of thing."
"You should have thought about that before you came here like that. Get out of my office."
There is a smell of ozone. That burnt smell you get in high altitude. You're losing control of your mind palace. It's manifesting itself in the material. "Fuck you, Delt. Fuck you! If we were anywhere else, it'd be axes on the field! You sit in the… you sit in that fuckin' chair and you think your shit don't stink?"
"I'm going to ignore that," he states, steepling his fingers. "You're making a scene. Remove yourself from my office or be removed."
Now it seems that of all the possibilities in the world, of all the paths down this forking road, the single most logical course of action would be to turn Hieronymus Delt into charcoal. You pursue this course of action.
Lightning sparks to life in the metal fixtures of your palace. For this purpose, you choose fulminata, a simple spell that consists of clearly visualizing copper lightning rods to draw down light from Mars and directing it through a symbolic doorway that represents controlled access from the mind to the real. The question isn't if you can find enough energy, it's if you can control it properly. At this juncture, you don't give a damn.
A thundercrack. For a moment, the only thing you can see is a bright blue flash.
When it recedes, you see the spell captured clearly in a frozen time crystal, within Hieronymus Delt's hand. You dimly remember reading through the theory of that, but it all flew over your head. "Decent fundamentals, at least. Poor control. Fulminata's a poor choice. At your level… well, I'm not your teacher anymore," Delt remarks. "Vade retro!"
With those two words, an invisible force seizes you by the lapels and throws you bodily out of the window.
You land on your elbow, a join not made for such an action. Something cleanly snaps. As you lie gazing up on that bright blue sky, you notice another projectile shooting out of the window.
An open beer bottle hits you cleanly on the nose. That breaks too, and it's two brothers smash themselves to bits around you, embedding small glass shards into your skin and dousing you with its warm, sticky contents.
Once again, the passing crowd parts around you. This time more out of disgust and pity than for your towering frame.
Before you black out, you know for certain that you have that figure in your mind for eternity. It will be an all consuming obsession. Hieronymus Delt's shadow will loom over you.
How Will You Deal With it?
[]- Killing Him: You will kill him. One way or another, that great wizard is dead meat. At this point, you don't care if it's upfront and fair, or if it's from some evil plot. If possible, you will eat his brains and use his bones to make your focus.
[]- Showing Him Up: He says you're nothing? Well, you'll show him. One day, you'll have him coming for you for a job-- you don't know how, but you'll make it happen. You'll sign up for the hustler's university, in short.
[]- Running Away: You can't deal with it. You can't deal with any of it. He says you should go on an adventure. That's grand. As long as you can find something to occupy yourself with, he won't show.
You look back. The bartender isn't rushing out of the pub, yelling at you. You chew on your lip as you consider the thirty trachy in your pocket. Fifty trachy to a nominista. A nominista is a golden coin, marked with the seal of Fleur. You have somewhere around two hundred noministas, and ten noministas a month buys you a month's rent for an apartment. Half a nominista is enough to buy you a pair of bad boots, cardboard soles and cheap offcast leather. Half a nominista is enough to buy a plowman's lunch of some meat baked into a pie, apples, and cheese…
You pick up the pace instead of returning. He's making good money, anyhow.
Somewhere along the Rue Tresmagus, you realize that this is the end of your long habitation in Fleur. It's back to the mountains with you. You'll never see a building taller than yourself again. All the roads will just be paved dirt. You've fallen from Empyreal heights, and all that you have to drink is either the weak hoppy ale that everyone and their mother knows, or that harsh burning thing made of fermented turnips.
The thought of that makes you take out another bottle from the crate. Now whenever you walk, you produce an annoying rattling sound. No one has yet to accost you, and you are hoping one of them will.
Fleur is a good city, a beautiful one. With so many wizards and maguses produced yearly, most of them who don't fly off abroad stay right here, erecting their very own tower and contributing in some way to the civic good. That means nine phantasms per street, each made by a separate wizard, sent to clean the streets. That means a smorgasbord of dead useful objects, such as scrying-glasses, leashed-elements, more kinds of alchemical substances that you can recall off the top of your head but most of them are some form of major hallucination, bags of holding and thousand league shoes, sold all over the world, with the profits plowed right back to Fleur.
Even the beggars eat good. You know because you pay the head dimmer on schedule after one of their boys caught you eating wizard deader brains on a moonless night.
(You wonder if the dean knows.)
Rue Tresmagus rises up to Academic Hill, where the Academie de Rei sits redundantly. You can see all of Fleur and the surrounding Armagine countryside. A forest of towers. Spellbound trees fight for sunlight with each other, forming a tangled, rustling green sea. Look deeply, Ish. You're not getting this view anymore.
"I need to get over myself," you say out loud. The mantled passersby ignore you. Eccentricities such as talking to yourself is quite common amongst the arcane profession. "It's just a place."
One of the skills fostered by the meditative exercises needed for wizardry is a sense for introspection. Furthermore, when the source of your arcane power is an image in your mind, it's impossible for a little bit of that vast, oily, subconscious sea to seep into it. Every time you return to the mind palace, you can see the cityscape of Fleur in the horizon. It's towers, it's roads, blowing red sand at your embattered palace at skin-strip-off speeds.
You stagger up the nine floors where Hieronymus Delt, the Dean of Academie de Rei, a research fellow of Astrology and an all around respected academic figure. He bears a halo of respective academica that repels you better than salt does slugs, which explains why the last time you've talked with Hieronymus Delt was when you were a first year student, still unsure which track you'd like to specialize in. In the end, you chose Evocatii, mostly because there will always be a war going on, and therefore you'd always be in for a job. Granted, a lot of that was because of a condettiore guest speaker, who really talked up the monetary benefits of the forever war with the necromantic empire of the Four Ivories.
You reach out a hand to the bronze knocker. You hesitate.
You're shaking like you've just dug up your first grave. For a moment, you imagine the worst-- Hieronymus Delt with solid evidence of your necromantic prolictivities. How would the transmutation of most of your flesh into fire feel like? Painful. Your hands shudder visibly. For a second, you stand there, in the middle of the hallway, gathering your nerve like a bale of lightning bolts.
The door opens. You cannot say if you were the agent behind it.
The Dean is sitting behind his great desk, covered in sage green leather. Parchments cover his desk-- while mundane scriveners had made the switch to pulp paper, wizards have stuck to dead animal skin, from lamb to dragon. The floor ends somewhere behind him, dissolving into a diffuse nebula of violet light, as if you had stepped out into the Empyreal instead of an office at the Tresmagus Campus of the Academie de Rei. Gravity has been ordered to deactivate, such that there is a small library of books floating in the empty space. Most disconcertingly, there is also a tall window that shows the skies above the Academie. The Dean himself is seated as a king, shadowed by the brim of his long hat and framed by a silver beard that spills deep into a rich, burgundy robe covering a cloth-of-gold vest. The only thing you can see of him are his papery hands, twirling a pen, and his glowing eyes, pale and blue as river stones, which also happened to be fixed to the half empty crate of beer wedged against your hip.
Poor start.
"I'm sorry, are you a beer seller?"
Really poor start.
"No, I'm-- I'm Hieronymus Ish," you say, quickly dropping the crate with a rattle and pushing it beyond the doorframe. "I'm here for an academic consultation, if you have the time."
Hieronymus Delt gives you the Look. Patrician disdain sharper than a knife. "I remember you," he replies. "You came in once when you were in your first year. You failed your exams. The last time I could have helped you was in your second year. Your record is right--" he waves a hand, and a scroll materializes out of thin air "--here," Hieronymus Delt continues, running a glowing eye down it. "Only two core classes? And you barely passed? Good heavens, man, that should have been a warning sign to switch, or take a gap year or something. Hunt some dragons, explore some dungeons." He tosses your record over his shoulder, where it spontaneously catches fire.
Your teeth are ground together so tight that one, you feel like they're about to break into bits, and two, takes a conscious effort to pry open. There is a heat in your mind, a dark dim angry ember, threatening to burst over.
"Well? Say something, man. I don't have all day. In fact, I believe I have another appointment, a scheduled one, coming up soon."
"I wanted," you enunciate with precision, "to talk to you to see what my options are."
"Do I look like a failure? I wouldn't know. Go out in the world. Have some adventures. Have some fun. You can't stay here, and I wouldn't recommend another stint in academica. You people don't have the aptitude for it."
"Uh."
"Don't give me that look," he snaps. "I mean, look at you. You're half drunk, you smell like the gutters. Whatever skill you had, you lost it. I'm not obligated to coddle you, I'm a professor of the Academie, not some backwater hick town school teacher."
"You wrinkled old bastard," you snarl on reflex. "Who's balls did you fondle to get your hat? I came here because I'm at my wits end, and I don't pay an arm and a leg to get this sort of thing."
"You should have thought about that before you came here like that. Get out of my office."
There is a smell of ozone. That burnt smell you get in high altitude. You're losing control of your mind palace. It's manifesting itself in the material. "Fuck you, Delt. Fuck you! If we were anywhere else, it'd be axes on the field! You sit in the… you sit in that fuckin' chair and you think your shit don't stink?"
"I'm going to ignore that," he states, steepling his fingers. "You're making a scene. Remove yourself from my office or be removed."
Now it seems that of all the possibilities in the world, of all the paths down this forking road, the single most logical course of action would be to turn Hieronymus Delt into charcoal. You pursue this course of action.
Lightning sparks to life in the metal fixtures of your palace. For this purpose, you choose fulminata, a simple spell that consists of clearly visualizing copper lightning rods to draw down light from Mars and directing it through a symbolic doorway that represents controlled access from the mind to the real. The question isn't if you can find enough energy, it's if you can control it properly. At this juncture, you don't give a damn.
A thundercrack. For a moment, the only thing you can see is a bright blue flash.
When it recedes, you see the spell captured clearly in a frozen time crystal, within Hieronymus Delt's hand. You dimly remember reading through the theory of that, but it all flew over your head. "Decent fundamentals, at least. Poor control. Fulminata's a poor choice. At your level… well, I'm not your teacher anymore," Delt remarks. "Vade retro!"
With those two words, an invisible force seizes you by the lapels and throws you bodily out of the window.
You land on your elbow, a join not made for such an action. Something cleanly snaps. As you lie gazing up on that bright blue sky, you notice another projectile shooting out of the window.
An open beer bottle hits you cleanly on the nose. That breaks too, and it's two brothers smash themselves to bits around you, embedding small glass shards into your skin and dousing you with its warm, sticky contents.
Once again, the passing crowd parts around you. This time more out of disgust and pity than for your towering frame.
Before you black out, you know for certain that you have that figure in your mind for eternity. It will be an all consuming obsession. Hieronymus Delt's shadow will loom over you.
How Will You Deal With it?
[]- Killing Him: You will kill him. One way or another, that great wizard is dead meat. At this point, you don't care if it's upfront and fair, or if it's from some evil plot. If possible, you will eat his brains and use his bones to make your focus.
[]- Showing Him Up: He says you're nothing? Well, you'll show him. One day, you'll have him coming for you for a job-- you don't know how, but you'll make it happen. You'll sign up for the hustler's university, in short.
[]- Running Away: You can't deal with it. You can't deal with any of it. He says you should go on an adventure. That's grand. As long as you can find something to occupy yourself with, he won't show.
