Construction Post: TOMU 2-34
Sep. 22nd, 2011 05:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerin9/22/2011
5:30-6:00 - 200 words
9/23/2011
2:30-3:00 - 650 words (+450)
3:00-3:30 - 1200 words (+550)
5:30-6:00 - 1500 words (+300)
6:00-6:30 - 1900 words (+400)
[Beginning. The emotional background of this chapter is Mackenzie dealing with things she doesn't want to do, something she's never handled with good grace. I want to show that she still doesn't handle it with good grace, but she does handle it.]
Having a bed built for two people didn't change much about the way Amaranth and I slept together. A good night's sleep underneath her did nothing to change the malaise-y feeling that it should be the weekend. I spent a good five minutes or so when I first woke up thinking about how my academic day was bookended by obligations... starting with the survival course the school now mandated, and ending with the combat class I'd agreed to take.
If I didn't have to have those I could have filled my schedule with classes I wanted... and if I hadn't been forced to find an approved survival course that didn't involve actual delving maybe I wouldn't have to get up in the morning at all. I could have gone with all afternoon classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
For that matter, if it wasn't for the stupid survival requirement I could have dropped the class without replacing it with anything. I was ahead of the game on credits, after all...
I allowed that kind of thought to run around my head until I felt Amaranth shifting above me.
"Ah, sleep," she said, stretching out luxuriantly. "Is there anything more self-indulgent? Well, I mean, if you don't really need it."
[1 hour in. Jumping around a bit as I flesh out what the chapter's about in terms of events]
Having a bed built for two people didn't change much about the way Amaranth and I slept together. A good night's sleep underneath her did nothing to change the malaise-y feeling that it should be the weekend. I spent a good five minutes or so when I first woke up thinking about how my academic day was bookended by obligations... starting with the survival course the school now mandated, and ending with the combat class I'd agreed to take.
If I didn't have to have those I could have filled my schedule with classes I wanted... and if I hadn't been forced to find an approved survival course that didn't involve actual delving maybe I wouldn't have to get up in the morning at all. I could have gone with all afternoon classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
For that matter, if it wasn't for the stupid survival requirement I could have dropped the class without replacing it with anything. I was ahead of the game on credits, after all...
I allowed that kind of thought to run around my head until I felt Amaranth shifting above me.
"Ah, sleep," she said, stretching out luxuriantly. "Is there anything more self-indulgent? Well, I mean, when you don't really need it, I suppose."
[]
The desks in Professor Bryony Swain's classroom had all been pushed back a bit to make room for a circular folding table with a detailed model of the main and west campuses on it. It seemed pretty detailed, for the size. In fact, the grass and trees all seemed to be real if very small specimens, or else they incorporated olfactory illusions.
I looked around the classroom to try to see if the professor was in attendance yet, but if she was, she wasn't standing out. I figured that meant I was safe. It was hard to make a serious study of gnomish unnoticeability, but one of the impressions I'd picked up over the months of associating with Two's friend Hazel was that they seemed to recede further into the background when they were deeply involved with something and became somewhat easier to spot when they wanted attention.
[]
"Hey there," a voice said just behind me.
[]
"It looks so real."
"Yeah, it's part of my pet project," she said. "A three-dimensional living map of the environs of the river valley. It's not complete yet."
"Doesn't making it a perfect circle make it hard to add to?" I asked.
"Oh, the map's not a circle," she said. "The table just has a circular interface to it woven into it, to make it easier to work with. The actual map is in a cavern I'm renting from the dwarves."
"At your own expense?"
"I have funding from the Imperial Republican Geomantic Survey," she said. "The dwarves charge more, but no one else on campus has the square footage I need. Not without some kind of space-folding enchantments, and I'm told that would interfere with the interface."
"Yeah," I said. "Mixing dimensional enchantments can get tricky."
"I was told there might be tentacles involved."
"Tentacles, explosions, vortexes... all kinds of things can go wrong," I said.
"Are you a transportation major?"
"Applied enchantment."
"Oh, that explains it," she said. "You're one of the folks who likes to know how everything works."
[]
"Mornin', folks," she said. "Congratulations on making it through a week of classes. That's a milestone well worth celebrating, but we've a lot of ground to cover and I don't want to tire anyone out before their observation of the most holy night of the college student's liturgical calendar, Saturday Eve... so let's jump right in. Ms. Desjardins?"
She tipped her head in the direction of her teaching assistant, who nodded and stepped forward.
"The whole reason that most of you are here... the only reason I have to cross over to the main campus three times a week... is that the school grounds are not the sanctuary you might like to think they are."
[1.5 hours. Going well now. Need to rewrite bit referencing Eloise once Bryony's talking, now that she has a conversation with Mackenzie before.]
Having a bed built for two people didn't change much about the way Amaranth and I slept together. A good night's sleep underneath her did nothing to change the malaise-y feeling that it should be the weekend. I spent a good five minutes or so when I first woke up thinking about how my academic day was bookended by obligations... starting with the survival course the school now mandated, and ending with the combat class I'd agreed to take.
If I didn't have to have those I could have filled my schedule with classes I wanted... and if I hadn't been forced to find an approved survival course that didn't involve actual delving maybe I wouldn't have to get up in the morning at all. I could have gone with all afternoon classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
For that matter, if it wasn't for the stupid survival requirement I could have dropped the class without replacing it with anything. I was ahead of the game on credits, after all...
I allowed that kind of thought to run around my head until I felt Amaranth shifting above me.
"Ah, sleep," she said, stretching out luxuriantly. "Is there anything more self-indulgent? Well, I mean, when you don't really need it, I suppose."
[]
The desks in Professor Bryony Swain's classroom had all been pushed back a bit to make room for a circular folding table with a detailed model of the main and west campuses on it. It seemed pretty detailed, for the size. In fact, the grass and trees all seemed to be real if very small specimens, or else they incorporated olfactory illusions.
I looked around the classroom to try to see if the professor was in attendance yet, but if she was, she wasn't standing out. I figured that meant I was safe. It was hard to make a serious study of gnomish unnoticeability, but one of the impressions I'd picked up over the months of associating with Two's friend Hazel was that they seemed to recede further into the background when they were deeply involved with something and became somewhat easier to spot when they wanted attention.
[]
"Hey there," a voice said just behind me. I turned to see Eloise Desjardins. "So, what do you think of my baby?"
"It's cool," I said. Eloise was a druid, though not religiously. If she'd made the map, that made it more likely it wasn't just illusion. I was pretty sure that druid magic included illusions, but it would also include making actual plants. "Those tiny trees are real, then?"
"Yeah, it's all part of my pet project," she said. "A three-dimensional living geomantic map of the environs of the river valley. It's not complete yet."
"Doesn't making it a perfect circle make it hard to add to?" I asked.
"Oh, the map's not a circle," she said. "The table just has a circular interface to it woven into it, to make it easier to work with. The actual map is only a third the scale you're seeing it at, but it's already bigger than a house. I keep it in a cavern I'm renting from the dwarves. I had to agree to some harsh penalty clauses, and even then they only let me in because they trust druids."
"I didn't know dwarves have a druidic tradition," I said.
"They don't," she said. "But druids have a secret-keeping tradition."
"Do you really need dwarven-level security for a project like this?" I asked.
"It's not about the security," she said. "The dwarves charge more than traditional lab space would cost, but I have funding from the IRGS and no one else has the square footage I need... not without some kind of space-folding enchantments, and I'm told that would interfere with the interface."
"Yeah," I said. "Mixing dimensional enchantments can get tricky."
"I was told there might be tentacles involved."
"Tentacles, explosions, vortexes... all kinds of things can go wrong," I said.
"Are you a transportation major?"
"Applied enchantment."
"Oh, that explains it," she said. "You're one of the folks who likes to know how everything works. Watch this."
She waved a hand towards the table, and suddenly the color of everything changed slightly. That was when I realized that everything on the table had been illuminated by a second light source that wasn't falling on anything else.
"I just killed the sunball inside the cave," she said. "It makes it a little easier to see the cool stuff."
She moved her hand slightly and a soft green glow began to creep up the tiny branches of the trees. A weaker glow suffused the lawn. Eldritch purple-blue streams of energy flowed across the campus grounds. Everywhere there was a building, the green glow seemed to recede away slightly. There were a couple of exceptions. Coombes' Tomb, as the necromancy building was called, was surrounded by a blank and barren spot. The elven-influenced Archimedes Center for Student Life not only had the green life glow coming right up to it, it had veins of it crawling all over it.
In a couple of places the energy flow took a sharp turn to go around a building, though a couple of them... the halls where arcane magic were taught... were at the juncture of multiple streams.
"The violet stuff is ley lines, though you probably already know that," Eloise said. "It's an enhanced illusion with the background energy filtered out... if you were actually seeing all the magic in the area, the level on the lines wouldn't be that much higher than the surrounding stuff."
"What does it look like around the labyrinth?" I asked her.
That ancient site, probably once intended as a prison of some kind, was now a playground for local delving students. I'd spent more than enough time inside it for one lifetime, but it was supposed to be one of the most potently magical sites in the country.
"I've never been able to get a clear picture," she said. "The flow of energy around it is really complex. Obviously I couldn't model the labyrinth interior for the map, so it's just a little brick wall... pretty boring, really."
"Oh," I said. I knew I wouldn't manage to not sound disappointed, so I immediately added, "It's still really cool.
[]
"Mornin', folks," she said. "Congratulations on making it through a week of classes. That's a milestone well worth celebrating, but we've a lot of ground to cover and I don't want to tire anyone out before their observation of the most holy night of the college student's liturgical calendar, Saturday Eve... so let's jump right in. Ms. Desjardins?"
She tipped her head in the direction of her teaching assistant, who nodded and stepped forward.
"The whole reason that most of you are here... the only reason I have to cross over to the main campus three times a week... is that the school grounds are not the sanctuary you might like to think they are."
[2 hours. The idea of a tour of campus is probably something that will appeal to a lot of readers who want a more comprehensive idea of the scope of the campus, but not something I'm prepared to do right now, so I'm laying the groundwork for it.]
Having a bed built for two people didn't change much about the way Amaranth and I slept together. A good night's sleep underneath her did nothing to change the malaise-y feeling that it should be the weekend. I spent a good five minutes or so when I first woke up thinking about how my academic day was bookended by obligations... starting with the survival course the school now mandated, and ending with the combat class I'd agreed to take.
If I didn't have to have those I could have filled my schedule with classes I wanted... and if I hadn't been forced to find an approved survival course that didn't involve actual delving maybe I wouldn't have to get up in the morning at all. I could have gone with all afternoon classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
For that matter, if it wasn't for the stupid survival requirement I could have dropped the class without replacing it with anything. I was ahead of the game on credits, after all...
I allowed that kind of thought to run around my head until I felt Amaranth shifting above me.
"Ah, sleep," she said, stretching out luxuriantly. "Is there anything more self-indulgent? Well, I mean, when you don't really need it, I suppose."
[]
The desks in Professor Bryony Swain's classroom had all been pushed back a bit to make room for a circular folding table with a detailed model of the main and west campuses on it. It seemed pretty detailed, for the size. In fact, the grass and trees all seemed to be real if very small specimens, or else they incorporated olfactory illusions.
I looked around the classroom to try to see if the professor was in attendance yet, but if she was, she wasn't standing out. I figured that meant I was safe. It was hard to make a serious study of gnomish unnoticeability, but one of the impressions I'd picked up over the months of associating with Two's friend Hazel was that they seemed to recede further into the background when they were deeply involved with something and became somewhat easier to spot when they wanted attention.
[]
"Hey there," a voice said just behind me. I turned to see Eloise Desjardins. "So, what do you think of my baby?"
"It's cool," I said. Eloise was a druid, though not religiously. If she'd made the map, that made it more likely it wasn't just illusion. I was pretty sure that druid magic included illusions, but it would also include making actual plants. "Those tiny trees are real, then?"
"Yeah, it's all part of my pet project," she said. "A three-dimensional living geomantic map of the environs of the river valley. It's not complete yet."
"Doesn't making it a perfect circle make it hard to add to?" I asked.
"Oh, the map's not a circle," she said. "The table just has a circular interface to it woven into it, to make it easier to work with. The actual map is only a third the scale you're seeing it at, but it's already bigger than a house. I keep it in a cavern I'm renting from the dwarves. I had to agree to some harsh penalty clauses, and even then they only let me in because they trust druids."
"I didn't know dwarves have a druidic tradition," I said.
"They don't," she said. "But druids have a secret-keeping tradition."
"Do you really need dwarven-level security for a project like this?" I asked.
"It's not about the security," she said. "The dwarves charge more than traditional lab space would cost, but I have funding from the IRGS and no one else has the square footage I need... not without some kind of space-folding enchantments, and I'm told that would interfere with the interface."
"Yeah," I said. "Mixing dimensional enchantments can get tricky."
"I was told there might be tentacles involved."
"Tentacles, explosions, vortexes... all kinds of things can go wrong," I said.
"Are you a transportation major?"
"Applied enchantment."
"Oh, that explains it," she said. "You're one of the folks who likes to know how everything works. Watch this."
She waved a hand towards the table, and suddenly the color of everything changed slightly. That was when I realized that everything on the table had been illuminated by a second light source that wasn't falling on anything else.
"I just killed the sunball inside the cave," she said. "It makes it a little easier to see the cool stuff."
She moved her hand slightly and a soft green glow began to creep up the tiny branches of the trees. A weaker glow suffused the lawn. Eldritch purple-blue streams of energy flowed across the campus grounds. Everywhere there was a building, the green glow seemed to recede away slightly. There were a couple of exceptions. Coombes' Tomb, as the necromancy building was called, was surrounded by a blank and barren spot. The elven-influenced Archimedes Center for Student Life not only had the green life glow coming right up to it, it had veins of it crawling all over it.
In a couple of places the energy flow took a sharp turn to go around a building, though a couple of them... the halls where arcane magic were taught... were at the juncture of multiple streams.
"The violet stuff is ley lines, though you probably already know that," Eloise said. "It's an enhanced illusion with the background energy filtered out... if you were actually seeing all the magic in the area, the level on the lines wouldn't be that much higher than the surrounding stuff."
"What does it look like around the labyrinth?" I asked her.
That ancient site, probably once intended as a prison of some kind, was now a playground for local delving students. I'd spent more than enough time inside it for one lifetime, but it was supposed to be one of the most potently magical sites in the country.
"I've never been able to get a clear picture," she said. "The flow of energy around it is really complex. Obviously I couldn't model the labyrinth interior for the map, so it's just a little brick wall... pretty boring, really."
"Oh," I said. I knew I wouldn't manage to not sound disappointed, so I immediately added, "It's still really cool.
[]
"Mornin', folks," she said. "Congratulations on making it through a week of classes. That's a milestone well worth celebrating, but we've a lot of ground to cover and I don't want to tire anyone out before their observation of the most holy night of the college student's liturgical calendar, Saturday Eve... so let's jump right in. Ms. Desjardins, are you ready?"
She tipped her head in Eloise's direction, who nodded and stepped forward.
"Yes, Professor," she said.
"Good," the professor said. "Now, the only reason that most of you are here... the only reason I have to cross over to the main campus three times a week... is that the school grounds are not the sanctuary you might like to think they are. Every semester a few students learn this the hard way. Now you lucky lot get to learn it the easy way, via a tour of the campus and its environs we'll be taking for the next week. Thanks to the, ah, druidry of our able assistant, we won't even have to leave the classroom."
[]
"The campus grounds really are fairly safe, all things considered," she said. "But if you learn just one thing in this class... well, then I suppose you'll fail, because I'm not allowed to hand in a final exam with but one question on it. But if you internalize just one general principle, it's that safety is relative. It's not an either/or thing where you're either entirely safe or in imminent peril. A load of students follow the safety rules for a week or two, or through their first semester and a half... when they realize they've never once needed their weapons or seen anything going bump in the night, they decide that the rules are just a bunch of rubbish designed to keep them in line.
"This is the part where... if you're the sort of person who's apt to do that in the first place... you'll probably expect me to say that those people are all going to wind up dead. But no. It doesn't work like that. If it did, nobody would ever feel safe enough to throw the rules out the window. We wouldn't even need the rules. You'd go about armed and hide indoors at night because you'd see the sense in it without being made to."
[2.5 hours.]
Having a bed built for two people didn't change much about the way Amaranth and I slept together. A good night's sleep underneath her did nothing to change the malaise-y feeling that it should be the weekend. I spent a good five minutes or so when I first woke up thinking about how my academic day was bookended by obligations... starting with the survival course the school now mandated, and ending with the combat class I'd agreed to take.
If I didn't have to have those I could have filled my schedule with classes I wanted... and if I hadn't been forced to find an approved survival course that didn't involve actual delving maybe I wouldn't have to get up in the morning at all. I could have gone with all afternoon classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
For that matter, if it wasn't for the stupid survival requirement I could have dropped the class without replacing it with anything. I was ahead of the game on credits, after all...
I allowed that kind of thought to run around my head until I felt Amaranth shifting above me.
"Ah, sleep," she said, stretching out luxuriantly. "Is there anything more self-indulgent? Well, I mean, when you don't really need it, I suppose."
[]
The desks in Professor Bryony Swain's classroom had all been pushed back a bit to make room for a circular folding table with a detailed model of the main and west campuses on it. It seemed pretty detailed, for the size. In fact, the grass and trees all seemed to be real if very small specimens, or else they incorporated olfactory illusions.
I looked around the classroom to try to see if the professor was in attendance yet, but if she was, she wasn't standing out. I figured that meant I was safe. It was hard to make a serious study of gnomish unnoticeability, but one of the impressions I'd picked up over the months of associating with Two's friend Hazel was that they seemed to recede further into the background when they were deeply involved with something and became somewhat easier to spot when they wanted attention.
[]
"Hey there," a voice said just behind me. I turned to see Eloise Desjardins. "So, what do you think of my baby?"
"It's cool," I said. Eloise was a druid, though not religiously. If she'd made the map, that made it more likely it wasn't just illusion. I was pretty sure that druid magic included illusions, but it would also include making actual plants. "Those tiny trees are real, then?"
"Yeah, it's all part of my pet project," she said. "A three-dimensional living geomantic map of the environs of the river valley. It's not complete yet."
"Doesn't making it a perfect circle make it hard to add to?" I asked.
"Oh, the map's not a circle," she said. "The table just has a circular interface to it woven into it, to make it easier to work with. The actual map is only a third the scale you're seeing it at, but it's already bigger than a house. I keep it in a cavern I'm renting from the dwarves. I had to agree to some harsh penalty clauses, and even then they only let me in because they trust druids."
"I didn't know dwarves have a druidic tradition," I said.
"They don't," she said. "But druids have a secret-keeping tradition."
"Do you really need dwarven-level security for a project like this?" I asked.
"It's not about the security," she said. "The dwarves charge more than traditional lab space would cost, but I have funding from the IRGS and no one else has the square footage I need... not without some kind of space-folding enchantments, and I'm told that would interfere with the interface."
"Yeah," I said. "Mixing dimensional enchantments can get tricky."
"I was told there might be tentacles involved."
"Tentacles, explosions, vortexes... all kinds of things can go wrong," I said.
"Are you a transportation major?"
"Applied enchantment."
"Oh, that explains it," she said. "You're one of the folks who likes to know how everything works. Watch this."
She waved a hand towards the table, and suddenly the color of everything changed slightly. That was when I realized that everything on the table had been illuminated by a second light source that wasn't falling on anything else.
"I just killed the sunball inside the cave," she said. "It makes it a little easier to see the cool stuff."
She moved her hand slightly and a soft green glow began to creep up the tiny branches of the trees. A weaker glow suffused the lawn. Eldritch purple-blue streams of energy flowed across the campus grounds. Everywhere there was a building, the green glow seemed to recede away slightly. There were a couple of exceptions. Coombes' Tomb, as the necromancy building was called, was surrounded by a blank and barren spot. The elven-influenced Archimedes Center for Student Life not only had the green life glow coming right up to it, it had veins of it crawling all over it.
In a couple of places the energy flow took a sharp turn to go around a building, though a couple of them... the halls where arcane magic were taught... were at the juncture of multiple streams.
"The violet stuff is ley lines, though you probably already know that," Eloise said. "It's an enhanced illusion with the background energy filtered out... if you were actually seeing all the magic in the area, the level on the lines wouldn't be that much higher than the surrounding stuff."
"What does it look like around the labyrinth?" I asked her.
That ancient site, probably once intended as a prison of some kind, was now a playground for local delving students. I'd spent more than enough time inside it for one lifetime, but it was supposed to be one of the most potently magical sites in the country.
"I've never been able to get a clear picture," she said. "The flow of energy around it is really complex. Obviously I couldn't model the labyrinth interior for the map, so it's just a little brick wall... pretty boring, really."
"Oh," I said. I knew I wouldn't manage to not sound disappointed, so I immediately added, "It's still really cool.
[]
"Mornin', folks," she said. "Congratulations on making it through a week of classes. That's a milestone well worth celebrating, but we've a lot of ground to cover and I don't want to tire anyone out before their observation of the most holy night of the college student's liturgical calendar, Saturday Eve... so let's jump right in. Ms. Desjardins, are you ready?"
She tipped her head in Eloise's direction, who nodded and stepped forward.
"Yes, Professor," she said.
"Good," the professor said. "Now, the only reason that most of you are here... the only reason I have to cross over to the main campus three times a week... is that the school grounds are not the sanctuary you might like to think they are. Every semester a few students learn this the hard way. Now you lucky lot get to learn it the easy way, via a tour of the campus and its environs we'll be taking for the next week. Thanks to the, ah, druidry of our able assistant, we won't even have to leave the classroom."
Eloise waved her hand over the table, and its contents shifted. It was sort of disorienting to watch it... it was like when the view inside a TV panned across a field, only there was nothing framing it. It looked like the stuff on top of the table was moving towards the right, but where you'd expect it to fall off the edge it just disappeared. I had a feeling it would be easier to watch it up close, with less things in view outside the table's frame of reference.
"Those of you who don't mind standing, feel free to get up and crowd around," Professor Swain said as she mounted a stepladder, a long baton in her hand.
The table now showed the area around the student union and the pent, with Gilcrease and Paradox Towers back around it to the northwest and the admin building and a few other administration-related buildings a bit to the east. The tops of the two towers were cut off by the interface, revealing the hollow cardboard insides.
"Now, even the freshers here should be familiar with this general area," the professor said. "You ought to at least recognize the union and the towers, if that helps you get your bearings. Once upon a time, this was the center of the campus, going from east to west. Can you slide her south, Ms. Desjardins?"
"The map or the view?" Eloise asked.
"The view," Professor Swain said. "Like we were heading south ourselves."
"Right."
I understood what Eloise had meant by the question... when she slid the viewpoint south, all the buildings and grounds seemed to be moving north. The towers disappeared and then so did the little administrative neighborhood and the union as the easternmost school halls and non-vertical dormitories came into view.
"There's Smith Hall," the professor said. "The history department throws some excellent parties... now, if you ever join the faculty of a university you'll soon learn that every department thinks they throw the best parties. As an impartial judge and student of the art form, I of course know the truth, but I couldn't possibly say it because then the other departments would stop inviting me."
"It's the bardic arts department," Eloise said.
"You'd think so, wouldn't you?"
[]
"The campus grounds really are fairly safe, all things considered," she said. "But if you learn just one thing in this class... well, then I suppose you'll fail, because I'm not allowed to hand in a final exam with but one question on it. But if you internalize just one general principle, it's that safety is relative. It's not an either/or thing where you're either entirely safe or in imminent peril. A load of students follow the safety rules for a week or two, or through their first semester and a half... when they realize they've never once needed their weapons or seen anything going bump in the night, they decide that the rules are just a bunch of rubbish designed to keep them in line.
"This is the part where... if you're the sort of person who's apt to do that in the first place... you'll probably expect me to say that those people are all going to wind up dead. But no. It doesn't work like that. If it did, nobody would ever feel safe enough to throw the rules out the window. We wouldn't even need the rules. You'd go about armed and hide indoors at night because you'd see the sense in it without being made to."
5:30-6:00 - 200 words
9/23/2011
2:30-3:00 - 650 words (+450)
3:00-3:30 - 1200 words (+550)
5:30-6:00 - 1500 words (+300)
6:00-6:30 - 1900 words (+400)
[Beginning. The emotional background of this chapter is Mackenzie dealing with things she doesn't want to do, something she's never handled with good grace. I want to show that she still doesn't handle it with good grace, but she does handle it.]
Having a bed built for two people didn't change much about the way Amaranth and I slept together. A good night's sleep underneath her did nothing to change the malaise-y feeling that it should be the weekend. I spent a good five minutes or so when I first woke up thinking about how my academic day was bookended by obligations... starting with the survival course the school now mandated, and ending with the combat class I'd agreed to take.
If I didn't have to have those I could have filled my schedule with classes I wanted... and if I hadn't been forced to find an approved survival course that didn't involve actual delving maybe I wouldn't have to get up in the morning at all. I could have gone with all afternoon classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
For that matter, if it wasn't for the stupid survival requirement I could have dropped the class without replacing it with anything. I was ahead of the game on credits, after all...
I allowed that kind of thought to run around my head until I felt Amaranth shifting above me.
"Ah, sleep," she said, stretching out luxuriantly. "Is there anything more self-indulgent? Well, I mean, if you don't really need it."
[1 hour in. Jumping around a bit as I flesh out what the chapter's about in terms of events]
Having a bed built for two people didn't change much about the way Amaranth and I slept together. A good night's sleep underneath her did nothing to change the malaise-y feeling that it should be the weekend. I spent a good five minutes or so when I first woke up thinking about how my academic day was bookended by obligations... starting with the survival course the school now mandated, and ending with the combat class I'd agreed to take.
If I didn't have to have those I could have filled my schedule with classes I wanted... and if I hadn't been forced to find an approved survival course that didn't involve actual delving maybe I wouldn't have to get up in the morning at all. I could have gone with all afternoon classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
For that matter, if it wasn't for the stupid survival requirement I could have dropped the class without replacing it with anything. I was ahead of the game on credits, after all...
I allowed that kind of thought to run around my head until I felt Amaranth shifting above me.
"Ah, sleep," she said, stretching out luxuriantly. "Is there anything more self-indulgent? Well, I mean, when you don't really need it, I suppose."
[]
The desks in Professor Bryony Swain's classroom had all been pushed back a bit to make room for a circular folding table with a detailed model of the main and west campuses on it. It seemed pretty detailed, for the size. In fact, the grass and trees all seemed to be real if very small specimens, or else they incorporated olfactory illusions.
I looked around the classroom to try to see if the professor was in attendance yet, but if she was, she wasn't standing out. I figured that meant I was safe. It was hard to make a serious study of gnomish unnoticeability, but one of the impressions I'd picked up over the months of associating with Two's friend Hazel was that they seemed to recede further into the background when they were deeply involved with something and became somewhat easier to spot when they wanted attention.
[]
"Hey there," a voice said just behind me.
[]
"It looks so real."
"Yeah, it's part of my pet project," she said. "A three-dimensional living map of the environs of the river valley. It's not complete yet."
"Doesn't making it a perfect circle make it hard to add to?" I asked.
"Oh, the map's not a circle," she said. "The table just has a circular interface to it woven into it, to make it easier to work with. The actual map is in a cavern I'm renting from the dwarves."
"At your own expense?"
"I have funding from the Imperial Republican Geomantic Survey," she said. "The dwarves charge more, but no one else on campus has the square footage I need. Not without some kind of space-folding enchantments, and I'm told that would interfere with the interface."
"Yeah," I said. "Mixing dimensional enchantments can get tricky."
"I was told there might be tentacles involved."
"Tentacles, explosions, vortexes... all kinds of things can go wrong," I said.
"Are you a transportation major?"
"Applied enchantment."
"Oh, that explains it," she said. "You're one of the folks who likes to know how everything works."
[]
"Mornin', folks," she said. "Congratulations on making it through a week of classes. That's a milestone well worth celebrating, but we've a lot of ground to cover and I don't want to tire anyone out before their observation of the most holy night of the college student's liturgical calendar, Saturday Eve... so let's jump right in. Ms. Desjardins?"
She tipped her head in the direction of her teaching assistant, who nodded and stepped forward.
"The whole reason that most of you are here... the only reason I have to cross over to the main campus three times a week... is that the school grounds are not the sanctuary you might like to think they are."
[1.5 hours. Going well now. Need to rewrite bit referencing Eloise once Bryony's talking, now that she has a conversation with Mackenzie before.]
Having a bed built for two people didn't change much about the way Amaranth and I slept together. A good night's sleep underneath her did nothing to change the malaise-y feeling that it should be the weekend. I spent a good five minutes or so when I first woke up thinking about how my academic day was bookended by obligations... starting with the survival course the school now mandated, and ending with the combat class I'd agreed to take.
If I didn't have to have those I could have filled my schedule with classes I wanted... and if I hadn't been forced to find an approved survival course that didn't involve actual delving maybe I wouldn't have to get up in the morning at all. I could have gone with all afternoon classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
For that matter, if it wasn't for the stupid survival requirement I could have dropped the class without replacing it with anything. I was ahead of the game on credits, after all...
I allowed that kind of thought to run around my head until I felt Amaranth shifting above me.
"Ah, sleep," she said, stretching out luxuriantly. "Is there anything more self-indulgent? Well, I mean, when you don't really need it, I suppose."
[]
The desks in Professor Bryony Swain's classroom had all been pushed back a bit to make room for a circular folding table with a detailed model of the main and west campuses on it. It seemed pretty detailed, for the size. In fact, the grass and trees all seemed to be real if very small specimens, or else they incorporated olfactory illusions.
I looked around the classroom to try to see if the professor was in attendance yet, but if she was, she wasn't standing out. I figured that meant I was safe. It was hard to make a serious study of gnomish unnoticeability, but one of the impressions I'd picked up over the months of associating with Two's friend Hazel was that they seemed to recede further into the background when they were deeply involved with something and became somewhat easier to spot when they wanted attention.
[]
"Hey there," a voice said just behind me. I turned to see Eloise Desjardins. "So, what do you think of my baby?"
"It's cool," I said. Eloise was a druid, though not religiously. If she'd made the map, that made it more likely it wasn't just illusion. I was pretty sure that druid magic included illusions, but it would also include making actual plants. "Those tiny trees are real, then?"
"Yeah, it's all part of my pet project," she said. "A three-dimensional living geomantic map of the environs of the river valley. It's not complete yet."
"Doesn't making it a perfect circle make it hard to add to?" I asked.
"Oh, the map's not a circle," she said. "The table just has a circular interface to it woven into it, to make it easier to work with. The actual map is only a third the scale you're seeing it at, but it's already bigger than a house. I keep it in a cavern I'm renting from the dwarves. I had to agree to some harsh penalty clauses, and even then they only let me in because they trust druids."
"I didn't know dwarves have a druidic tradition," I said.
"They don't," she said. "But druids have a secret-keeping tradition."
"Do you really need dwarven-level security for a project like this?" I asked.
"It's not about the security," she said. "The dwarves charge more than traditional lab space would cost, but I have funding from the IRGS and no one else has the square footage I need... not without some kind of space-folding enchantments, and I'm told that would interfere with the interface."
"Yeah," I said. "Mixing dimensional enchantments can get tricky."
"I was told there might be tentacles involved."
"Tentacles, explosions, vortexes... all kinds of things can go wrong," I said.
"Are you a transportation major?"
"Applied enchantment."
"Oh, that explains it," she said. "You're one of the folks who likes to know how everything works. Watch this."
She waved a hand towards the table, and suddenly the color of everything changed slightly. That was when I realized that everything on the table had been illuminated by a second light source that wasn't falling on anything else.
"I just killed the sunball inside the cave," she said. "It makes it a little easier to see the cool stuff."
She moved her hand slightly and a soft green glow began to creep up the tiny branches of the trees. A weaker glow suffused the lawn. Eldritch purple-blue streams of energy flowed across the campus grounds. Everywhere there was a building, the green glow seemed to recede away slightly. There were a couple of exceptions. Coombes' Tomb, as the necromancy building was called, was surrounded by a blank and barren spot. The elven-influenced Archimedes Center for Student Life not only had the green life glow coming right up to it, it had veins of it crawling all over it.
In a couple of places the energy flow took a sharp turn to go around a building, though a couple of them... the halls where arcane magic were taught... were at the juncture of multiple streams.
"The violet stuff is ley lines, though you probably already know that," Eloise said. "It's an enhanced illusion with the background energy filtered out... if you were actually seeing all the magic in the area, the level on the lines wouldn't be that much higher than the surrounding stuff."
"What does it look like around the labyrinth?" I asked her.
That ancient site, probably once intended as a prison of some kind, was now a playground for local delving students. I'd spent more than enough time inside it for one lifetime, but it was supposed to be one of the most potently magical sites in the country.
"I've never been able to get a clear picture," she said. "The flow of energy around it is really complex. Obviously I couldn't model the labyrinth interior for the map, so it's just a little brick wall... pretty boring, really."
"Oh," I said. I knew I wouldn't manage to not sound disappointed, so I immediately added, "It's still really cool.
[]
"Mornin', folks," she said. "Congratulations on making it through a week of classes. That's a milestone well worth celebrating, but we've a lot of ground to cover and I don't want to tire anyone out before their observation of the most holy night of the college student's liturgical calendar, Saturday Eve... so let's jump right in. Ms. Desjardins?"
She tipped her head in the direction of her teaching assistant, who nodded and stepped forward.
"The whole reason that most of you are here... the only reason I have to cross over to the main campus three times a week... is that the school grounds are not the sanctuary you might like to think they are."
[2 hours. The idea of a tour of campus is probably something that will appeal to a lot of readers who want a more comprehensive idea of the scope of the campus, but not something I'm prepared to do right now, so I'm laying the groundwork for it.]
Having a bed built for two people didn't change much about the way Amaranth and I slept together. A good night's sleep underneath her did nothing to change the malaise-y feeling that it should be the weekend. I spent a good five minutes or so when I first woke up thinking about how my academic day was bookended by obligations... starting with the survival course the school now mandated, and ending with the combat class I'd agreed to take.
If I didn't have to have those I could have filled my schedule with classes I wanted... and if I hadn't been forced to find an approved survival course that didn't involve actual delving maybe I wouldn't have to get up in the morning at all. I could have gone with all afternoon classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
For that matter, if it wasn't for the stupid survival requirement I could have dropped the class without replacing it with anything. I was ahead of the game on credits, after all...
I allowed that kind of thought to run around my head until I felt Amaranth shifting above me.
"Ah, sleep," she said, stretching out luxuriantly. "Is there anything more self-indulgent? Well, I mean, when you don't really need it, I suppose."
[]
The desks in Professor Bryony Swain's classroom had all been pushed back a bit to make room for a circular folding table with a detailed model of the main and west campuses on it. It seemed pretty detailed, for the size. In fact, the grass and trees all seemed to be real if very small specimens, or else they incorporated olfactory illusions.
I looked around the classroom to try to see if the professor was in attendance yet, but if she was, she wasn't standing out. I figured that meant I was safe. It was hard to make a serious study of gnomish unnoticeability, but one of the impressions I'd picked up over the months of associating with Two's friend Hazel was that they seemed to recede further into the background when they were deeply involved with something and became somewhat easier to spot when they wanted attention.
[]
"Hey there," a voice said just behind me. I turned to see Eloise Desjardins. "So, what do you think of my baby?"
"It's cool," I said. Eloise was a druid, though not religiously. If she'd made the map, that made it more likely it wasn't just illusion. I was pretty sure that druid magic included illusions, but it would also include making actual plants. "Those tiny trees are real, then?"
"Yeah, it's all part of my pet project," she said. "A three-dimensional living geomantic map of the environs of the river valley. It's not complete yet."
"Doesn't making it a perfect circle make it hard to add to?" I asked.
"Oh, the map's not a circle," she said. "The table just has a circular interface to it woven into it, to make it easier to work with. The actual map is only a third the scale you're seeing it at, but it's already bigger than a house. I keep it in a cavern I'm renting from the dwarves. I had to agree to some harsh penalty clauses, and even then they only let me in because they trust druids."
"I didn't know dwarves have a druidic tradition," I said.
"They don't," she said. "But druids have a secret-keeping tradition."
"Do you really need dwarven-level security for a project like this?" I asked.
"It's not about the security," she said. "The dwarves charge more than traditional lab space would cost, but I have funding from the IRGS and no one else has the square footage I need... not without some kind of space-folding enchantments, and I'm told that would interfere with the interface."
"Yeah," I said. "Mixing dimensional enchantments can get tricky."
"I was told there might be tentacles involved."
"Tentacles, explosions, vortexes... all kinds of things can go wrong," I said.
"Are you a transportation major?"
"Applied enchantment."
"Oh, that explains it," she said. "You're one of the folks who likes to know how everything works. Watch this."
She waved a hand towards the table, and suddenly the color of everything changed slightly. That was when I realized that everything on the table had been illuminated by a second light source that wasn't falling on anything else.
"I just killed the sunball inside the cave," she said. "It makes it a little easier to see the cool stuff."
She moved her hand slightly and a soft green glow began to creep up the tiny branches of the trees. A weaker glow suffused the lawn. Eldritch purple-blue streams of energy flowed across the campus grounds. Everywhere there was a building, the green glow seemed to recede away slightly. There were a couple of exceptions. Coombes' Tomb, as the necromancy building was called, was surrounded by a blank and barren spot. The elven-influenced Archimedes Center for Student Life not only had the green life glow coming right up to it, it had veins of it crawling all over it.
In a couple of places the energy flow took a sharp turn to go around a building, though a couple of them... the halls where arcane magic were taught... were at the juncture of multiple streams.
"The violet stuff is ley lines, though you probably already know that," Eloise said. "It's an enhanced illusion with the background energy filtered out... if you were actually seeing all the magic in the area, the level on the lines wouldn't be that much higher than the surrounding stuff."
"What does it look like around the labyrinth?" I asked her.
That ancient site, probably once intended as a prison of some kind, was now a playground for local delving students. I'd spent more than enough time inside it for one lifetime, but it was supposed to be one of the most potently magical sites in the country.
"I've never been able to get a clear picture," she said. "The flow of energy around it is really complex. Obviously I couldn't model the labyrinth interior for the map, so it's just a little brick wall... pretty boring, really."
"Oh," I said. I knew I wouldn't manage to not sound disappointed, so I immediately added, "It's still really cool.
[]
"Mornin', folks," she said. "Congratulations on making it through a week of classes. That's a milestone well worth celebrating, but we've a lot of ground to cover and I don't want to tire anyone out before their observation of the most holy night of the college student's liturgical calendar, Saturday Eve... so let's jump right in. Ms. Desjardins, are you ready?"
She tipped her head in Eloise's direction, who nodded and stepped forward.
"Yes, Professor," she said.
"Good," the professor said. "Now, the only reason that most of you are here... the only reason I have to cross over to the main campus three times a week... is that the school grounds are not the sanctuary you might like to think they are. Every semester a few students learn this the hard way. Now you lucky lot get to learn it the easy way, via a tour of the campus and its environs we'll be taking for the next week. Thanks to the, ah, druidry of our able assistant, we won't even have to leave the classroom."
[]
"The campus grounds really are fairly safe, all things considered," she said. "But if you learn just one thing in this class... well, then I suppose you'll fail, because I'm not allowed to hand in a final exam with but one question on it. But if you internalize just one general principle, it's that safety is relative. It's not an either/or thing where you're either entirely safe or in imminent peril. A load of students follow the safety rules for a week or two, or through their first semester and a half... when they realize they've never once needed their weapons or seen anything going bump in the night, they decide that the rules are just a bunch of rubbish designed to keep them in line.
"This is the part where... if you're the sort of person who's apt to do that in the first place... you'll probably expect me to say that those people are all going to wind up dead. But no. It doesn't work like that. If it did, nobody would ever feel safe enough to throw the rules out the window. We wouldn't even need the rules. You'd go about armed and hide indoors at night because you'd see the sense in it without being made to."
[2.5 hours.]
Having a bed built for two people didn't change much about the way Amaranth and I slept together. A good night's sleep underneath her did nothing to change the malaise-y feeling that it should be the weekend. I spent a good five minutes or so when I first woke up thinking about how my academic day was bookended by obligations... starting with the survival course the school now mandated, and ending with the combat class I'd agreed to take.
If I didn't have to have those I could have filled my schedule with classes I wanted... and if I hadn't been forced to find an approved survival course that didn't involve actual delving maybe I wouldn't have to get up in the morning at all. I could have gone with all afternoon classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
For that matter, if it wasn't for the stupid survival requirement I could have dropped the class without replacing it with anything. I was ahead of the game on credits, after all...
I allowed that kind of thought to run around my head until I felt Amaranth shifting above me.
"Ah, sleep," she said, stretching out luxuriantly. "Is there anything more self-indulgent? Well, I mean, when you don't really need it, I suppose."
[]
The desks in Professor Bryony Swain's classroom had all been pushed back a bit to make room for a circular folding table with a detailed model of the main and west campuses on it. It seemed pretty detailed, for the size. In fact, the grass and trees all seemed to be real if very small specimens, or else they incorporated olfactory illusions.
I looked around the classroom to try to see if the professor was in attendance yet, but if she was, she wasn't standing out. I figured that meant I was safe. It was hard to make a serious study of gnomish unnoticeability, but one of the impressions I'd picked up over the months of associating with Two's friend Hazel was that they seemed to recede further into the background when they were deeply involved with something and became somewhat easier to spot when they wanted attention.
[]
"Hey there," a voice said just behind me. I turned to see Eloise Desjardins. "So, what do you think of my baby?"
"It's cool," I said. Eloise was a druid, though not religiously. If she'd made the map, that made it more likely it wasn't just illusion. I was pretty sure that druid magic included illusions, but it would also include making actual plants. "Those tiny trees are real, then?"
"Yeah, it's all part of my pet project," she said. "A three-dimensional living geomantic map of the environs of the river valley. It's not complete yet."
"Doesn't making it a perfect circle make it hard to add to?" I asked.
"Oh, the map's not a circle," she said. "The table just has a circular interface to it woven into it, to make it easier to work with. The actual map is only a third the scale you're seeing it at, but it's already bigger than a house. I keep it in a cavern I'm renting from the dwarves. I had to agree to some harsh penalty clauses, and even then they only let me in because they trust druids."
"I didn't know dwarves have a druidic tradition," I said.
"They don't," she said. "But druids have a secret-keeping tradition."
"Do you really need dwarven-level security for a project like this?" I asked.
"It's not about the security," she said. "The dwarves charge more than traditional lab space would cost, but I have funding from the IRGS and no one else has the square footage I need... not without some kind of space-folding enchantments, and I'm told that would interfere with the interface."
"Yeah," I said. "Mixing dimensional enchantments can get tricky."
"I was told there might be tentacles involved."
"Tentacles, explosions, vortexes... all kinds of things can go wrong," I said.
"Are you a transportation major?"
"Applied enchantment."
"Oh, that explains it," she said. "You're one of the folks who likes to know how everything works. Watch this."
She waved a hand towards the table, and suddenly the color of everything changed slightly. That was when I realized that everything on the table had been illuminated by a second light source that wasn't falling on anything else.
"I just killed the sunball inside the cave," she said. "It makes it a little easier to see the cool stuff."
She moved her hand slightly and a soft green glow began to creep up the tiny branches of the trees. A weaker glow suffused the lawn. Eldritch purple-blue streams of energy flowed across the campus grounds. Everywhere there was a building, the green glow seemed to recede away slightly. There were a couple of exceptions. Coombes' Tomb, as the necromancy building was called, was surrounded by a blank and barren spot. The elven-influenced Archimedes Center for Student Life not only had the green life glow coming right up to it, it had veins of it crawling all over it.
In a couple of places the energy flow took a sharp turn to go around a building, though a couple of them... the halls where arcane magic were taught... were at the juncture of multiple streams.
"The violet stuff is ley lines, though you probably already know that," Eloise said. "It's an enhanced illusion with the background energy filtered out... if you were actually seeing all the magic in the area, the level on the lines wouldn't be that much higher than the surrounding stuff."
"What does it look like around the labyrinth?" I asked her.
That ancient site, probably once intended as a prison of some kind, was now a playground for local delving students. I'd spent more than enough time inside it for one lifetime, but it was supposed to be one of the most potently magical sites in the country.
"I've never been able to get a clear picture," she said. "The flow of energy around it is really complex. Obviously I couldn't model the labyrinth interior for the map, so it's just a little brick wall... pretty boring, really."
"Oh," I said. I knew I wouldn't manage to not sound disappointed, so I immediately added, "It's still really cool.
[]
"Mornin', folks," she said. "Congratulations on making it through a week of classes. That's a milestone well worth celebrating, but we've a lot of ground to cover and I don't want to tire anyone out before their observation of the most holy night of the college student's liturgical calendar, Saturday Eve... so let's jump right in. Ms. Desjardins, are you ready?"
She tipped her head in Eloise's direction, who nodded and stepped forward.
"Yes, Professor," she said.
"Good," the professor said. "Now, the only reason that most of you are here... the only reason I have to cross over to the main campus three times a week... is that the school grounds are not the sanctuary you might like to think they are. Every semester a few students learn this the hard way. Now you lucky lot get to learn it the easy way, via a tour of the campus and its environs we'll be taking for the next week. Thanks to the, ah, druidry of our able assistant, we won't even have to leave the classroom."
Eloise waved her hand over the table, and its contents shifted. It was sort of disorienting to watch it... it was like when the view inside a TV panned across a field, only there was nothing framing it. It looked like the stuff on top of the table was moving towards the right, but where you'd expect it to fall off the edge it just disappeared. I had a feeling it would be easier to watch it up close, with less things in view outside the table's frame of reference.
"Those of you who don't mind standing, feel free to get up and crowd around," Professor Swain said as she mounted a stepladder, a long baton in her hand.
The table now showed the area around the student union and the pent, with Gilcrease and Paradox Towers back around it to the northwest and the admin building and a few other administration-related buildings a bit to the east. The tops of the two towers were cut off by the interface, revealing the hollow cardboard insides.
"Now, even the freshers here should be familiar with this general area," the professor said. "You ought to at least recognize the union and the towers, if that helps you get your bearings. Once upon a time, this was the center of the campus, going from east to west. Can you slide her south, Ms. Desjardins?"
"The map or the view?" Eloise asked.
"The view," Professor Swain said. "Like we were heading south ourselves."
"Right."
I understood what Eloise had meant by the question... when she slid the viewpoint south, all the buildings and grounds seemed to be moving north. The towers disappeared and then so did the little administrative neighborhood and the union as the easternmost school halls and non-vertical dormitories came into view.
"There's Smith Hall," the professor said. "The history department throws some excellent parties... now, if you ever join the faculty of a university you'll soon learn that every department thinks they throw the best parties. As an impartial judge and student of the art form, I of course know the truth, but I couldn't possibly say it because then the other departments would stop inviting me."
"It's the bardic arts department," Eloise said.
"You'd think so, wouldn't you?"
[]
"The campus grounds really are fairly safe, all things considered," she said. "But if you learn just one thing in this class... well, then I suppose you'll fail, because I'm not allowed to hand in a final exam with but one question on it. But if you internalize just one general principle, it's that safety is relative. It's not an either/or thing where you're either entirely safe or in imminent peril. A load of students follow the safety rules for a week or two, or through their first semester and a half... when they realize they've never once needed their weapons or seen anything going bump in the night, they decide that the rules are just a bunch of rubbish designed to keep them in line.
"This is the part where... if you're the sort of person who's apt to do that in the first place... you'll probably expect me to say that those people are all going to wind up dead. But no. It doesn't work like that. If it did, nobody would ever feel safe enough to throw the rules out the window. We wouldn't even need the rules. You'd go about armed and hide indoors at night because you'd see the sense in it without being made to."