Construction Post: TOMU 2-34
Sep. 27th, 2011 03:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerin9/27/2011
3:00-3:30: ~1300 words (+400)
3:30-4:00 ~1700 words (+400)
9/29/2011
5:00-5:30 ~2400 (+700)
[Beginning. Carried over ~900 words from previous.]
"The professor is here," Eloise announced to the classroom at large. She waited a few seconds for everyone to sit down and look down towards her, then gestured to where Professor Swain now stood atop a stepladder. "Professor?"
"Thank you, Ms. Desjardin. Good morning', 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 back to the union. It was a little less disorienting to watch from a distance, but it had been better up close.
"Those of you who don't mind standing, feel free to come down and crowd around," Professor Swain said as she lifted a long baton in her hand. "It's well worth seeing. I'll have a projector in place by next week, hopefully, but this was in the way of being an impromptu addition to our curriculum, since Ms. Desjardins happened to mention her work to me last night at a sort of informal interdepartmental mixer."
The table now showed the area around the student union and the pent, but it had "pulled back" a bit to cover more of the grounds. 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 natural 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?"
"I do think so."
"I won't say you're wrong, but only because they're good enough that I wouldn't like to be disinvited," Professor Swain said. "And as they say, 'better a bad epitaph...' But no, just between you, me, the walls, and the students, it isn't the bards."
"What exactly makes you the best judge?" Eloise asked.
"It's my culture, isn't it?" Professor Swain said. "The first party was a birthday party thrown by a gnomish mother who wanted her babe and herself to have a chance to experience the natural jubilation that came from the birth. She did it again the next few years out of concern that the child was missing out on some of the finer points, and then it got to be a bit of a tradition."
I thought it was a shame that Hazel apparently didn't get along with Professor Swain, because they had similar senses of... maybe "humor" wouldn't be the best word, but they certainly had similar stories. I figured a good half of the Willikins family tree was apocryphal.
"That sounds a little pat to me," Eloise said.
"Oh, yes, Little Pat was the wee babe's name," the professor said. "Patrick Door. Now, he grew up to invent a useful device that revolutionized keeping the weather out, to say nothing of privacy in the privy."
"You're just messing with me now, aren't you?"
"Oh, no, I have a whole class to mess with," Professor Swain said. "On that subject, let's move on... we'll return to the subject of parties at a later date. This swath of the campus on the eastern edge was once the whole campus. There are some newer buildings mixed in... there's Weyland Hall, built by an alumnus bequest not eleven years ago, and down in the southern corner of this part of campus we have the Em, one of the newest buildings... but by and large, you'll find the oldest purpose-built buildings on campus here.
"And more particularly, the oldest protective spells and enchanted pathways. This is important because when you're here, you're right on the edge of the campus. There's nothing to the east but the main road, which is not a barrier to anything. There's nothing north of the towers but practice fields and the skirmish pitch. There's nothing south of the Em but trees. It's easy to feel like you're right in the thick of things here, like these old and well-traveled paths are so much a part of the school that nothing would dare intrude on them, but the facts tell a different story. Ms. Desjardins, if you'll just show those spots I've highlighted."
[]
"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."
[One hour in.]
"The professor is here," Eloise announced to the classroom at large. She waited a few seconds for everyone to sit down and look down towards her, then gestured to where Professor Swain now stood atop a stepladder. "Professor?"
"Thank you, Ms. Desjardin. Good morning', 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 back to the union. It was a little less disorienting to watch from a distance, but it had been better up close.
"Those of you who don't mind standing, feel free to come down and crowd around," Professor Swain said as she lifted a long baton in her hand. "It's well worth seeing. I'll have a projector in place by next week, hopefully, but this was in the way of being an impromptu addition to our curriculum, since Ms. Desjardins happened to mention her work to me last night at a sort of informal interdepartmental mixer."
The table now showed the area around the student union and the pent, but it had "pulled back" a bit to cover more of the grounds. 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 natural 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?"
"I do think so."
"I won't say you're wrong, but only because they're good enough that I wouldn't like to be disinvited," Professor Swain said. "And as they say, 'better a bad epitaph...' But no, just between you, me, the walls, and the students, it isn't the bards."
"What exactly makes you the best judge?" Eloise asked.
"It's my culture, isn't it?" Professor Swain said. "The first party was a birthday party thrown by a gnomish mother who wanted her babe and herself to have a chance to experience the natural jubilation that came from the birth. She did it again the next few years out of concern that the child was missing out on some of the finer points, and then it got to be a bit of a tradition."
I thought it was a shame that Hazel apparently didn't get along with Professor Swain, because they had similar senses of... maybe "humor" wouldn't be the best word, but they certainly had similar stories. I figured a good half of the Willikins family tree was apocryphal.
"That sounds a little pat to me," Eloise said.
"Oh, yes, Little Pat was the wee babe's name," the professor said. "Patrick Door. Now, he grew up to invent a useful device that revolutionized keeping the weather out, to say nothing of privacy in the privy."
"You're just messing with me now, aren't you?"
"Oh, no, I have a whole class to mess with," Professor Swain said. "On that subject, let's move on... we'll return to the subject of parties at a later date. This swath of the campus on the eastern edge was once the whole campus. There are some newer buildings mixed in... there's Weyland Hall, built by an alumnus bequest not eleven years ago, and down in the southern corner of this part of campus we have the Em, one of the newest buildings... but by and large, you'll find the oldest purpose-built buildings on campus here.
"And more particularly, the oldest protective spells and enchanted pathways. This is important because when you're here, you're right on the edge of the campus. There's nothing to the east but the main road, which is not a barrier to anything. There's nothing north of the towers but practice fields and the skirmish pitch. There's nothing south of the Em but trees. It's easy to feel like you're right in the thick of things here, like these old and well-traveled paths are so much a part of the school that nothing would dare intrude on them, but the facts tell a different story. Ms. Desjardins, if you'll just show those spots I've highlighted."
The map view began to move again, following a path between spots where big red Xs appeared, Professor Swain narrating what... and who... each one represented. I recognized some of them, as I'd been there for the aftermath or heard about them later.
"Young man out jogging or walking in the rain on the tower trail, killed by ghouls," Professor Swain said. "Young woman partially paralyzed by plant toxins, chased down by ghouls here, died in this ditch here. Three people died under this tree, probably by some sort of nesting creature, though the ghouls leave little for us to go by... you might be noticing a common thread, but notice also that ghouls are only the sole cause of death in one case."
I had a strong suspicion that the case she was referring to wasn't a ghoul kill, either... the mermaid Iona had spent nights hunting before she met her own fate, and though I believed she'd more or less followed her kind's injunction against hunting on dry land, she'd had no problem with bending it to the breaking point. Like by killing someone caught out in a torrential downpour.
For that matter, the "nesting creature" might have been Iona, too... her natural form had feathered arms. I kind of doubted that, though. She seemed too opportunistic and not patient enough to lie in wait. It would be tempting to pin as many of the red Xs as possible on her, but that just wasn't realistic... it wasn't like the campus had suddenly become dangerous when she enrolled.
Thinking about that made me suddenly consider that maybe she wasn't the first or only student to prey on classmates after dark. Maybe Iona's "crime" in the eyes of those who dealt with monsters who happened to also be people was not the fact that she'd killed, but the fact that she'd done so without subtlety or restraint.
She'd certainly picked the wrong person to tear apart for her last victim... someone with important ties and who had been lounging in one of the safer areas of the campus. The fact that she'd been able to get away with her depredations up to that point suggested that there were right victims. Like, people who were wandering where they shouldn't be after dark.
It was a scarily plausible thought... but one that could easily lead to jumping at shadows. The natural and supernatural dangers of the region were well-documented enough without any imported bogeymen.
[]
"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 draft. I've edited the beginning a bit, the interaction between the professor and the TA wasn't quite right... Bryony was too peremptory and Eloise was too passive. Bringing Eloise's project into the classroom shouldn't turn her into a teaching prop.]
"The professor is here," Eloise announced to the classroom at large. She waited a few seconds for everyone to sit down and look down towards her, then gestured to where Professor Swain now stood atop a stepladder. "Professor?"
"Thank you, Ms. Desjardin. Good morning', 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. Are you ready?"
She tipped her head in Eloise's direction, who nodded and stepped forward.
"Absolutely, Professor," she said with a smile.
I had the feeling that she liked showing off her "baby", and she had plenty of reason to. The detail and craftsmanship would have been worth a healthy dose of pride alone, but the way she interfaced with it was a cool effect, and possibly unprecedented in several ways. Setting it all up would have required solving some of the same problems faced by TV makers, and druid magic was rarely used for any kind of modern applied enchantment.
"Wonderful!" the professor said. "You folks are all in for a bit of a treat for the next few sessions... we're going to be deviating from the planned curriculum very slightly, due to an unexpected opportunity.
"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 we all 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 around a little, though staying more or less focused on the union. It was a little less disorienting to watch from a distance, but it had been better up close.
"Those of you who don't mind standing, feel free to come down and crowd around," Professor Swain said as she lifted a long baton in her hand. "It's well worth seeing. I'll have a projector in place by Monday, hopefully, but this was in the way of being an impromptu addition to our curriculum, since Ms. Desjardins happened to mention her work to me last night at a sort of informal interdepartmental mixer."
The table now showed the area around the student union and the pent, but it had "pulled back" a bit to cover more of the grounds. 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 hollow cardboard insides. To judge by the curve, there was a dome-shaped field of effect, maybe about half as high as the table was wide.
"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. "As though 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 natural 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?"
"I do think so."
"I won't say you're wrong, but only because they're good enough that I wouldn't like to be disinvited," Professor Swain said. "And as they say, 'better a bad epitaph...' But no, just between you, me, the walls, and the students, it isn't the bards."
"What exactly makes you the best judge?" Eloise asked.
"It's my culture, isn't it?" Professor Swain said. "The first party was a birthday party thrown by a gnomish mother who wanted her babe and herself to have a chance to experience the natural jubilation that came from the birth. She did it again the next few years out of concern that the child was missing out on some of the finer points, and then it got to be a bit of a tradition."
I thought it was a shame that Hazel apparently didn't get along with Professor Swain, because they had similar senses of... well, maybe "humor" wouldn't be the best word, but they certainly had similar stories. I figured a good half of the Willikins family tree was apocryphal.
"That sounds a little pat to me," Eloise said.
"Oh, yes, Little Pat was the wee babe's name," the professor said. "Patrick Door. Now, he grew up to invent a useful device that revolutionized keeping the weather out, to say nothing of privacy in the privy and boudoir, as they say dans la belle Merové."
"You're just messing with me now, aren't you?"
"Oh, no, not just you... I have a whole class here to mess with," Professor Swain said. "On that subject, let's move on... we'll return to the subject of parties on and off campus at a later date. This swath of the campus on the eastern edge was once the whole campus. There are some newer buildings mixed in... there's Weyland Hall, built by an alumnus bequest not eleven years ago, and down in the southern corner of this part of campus we have the Em, one of the newest buildings... but by and large, you'll find the oldest purpose-built buildings on campus here.
"And more particularly, the oldest protective spells and enchanted pathways. They lack some of the later innovations that are present elsewhere in campus. This is important because when you're here, you're right on the edge of the campus. There's nothing to the east but the main road, which is not a barrier to anything. There's nothing north of the towers but practice fields and the skirmish pitch. There's nothing south of the Em but trees. It's easy to feel like you're right in the thick of things here, like these old and well-traveled paths are so much a part of the school that nothing would dare intrude on them, but the facts tell a different story. Ms. Desjardins, if you'll just show those spots I've highlighted."
The map view began to move again, following a path between spots where big red Xs appeared, Professor Swain narrating what... and who... each one represented. I recognized some of them, as I'd been there for the aftermath or heard about them later.
"Young man out jogging or walking in the rain on the tower trail, killed by ghouls," Professor Swain said. "Young woman partially paralyzed by a spider bite, chased down by ghouls here, died in this ditch here. Three people died under this tree... that is some fantastic detail on that tree, by the way. How do you get the leaves like that?"
"They grow that way," Eloise said.
"Oh, right," the professor said. "Anyway, three killed, probably by some sort of nesting creature, though the ghouls leave little for us to go by... you might be noticing a common thread, but notice also that ghouls are only the sole cause of death in one of these cases. Two young lovers out for a late stroll attacked by striges here... one survived, though later dropped out. These all happened in the last academic year, mind you."
I had a strong suspicion that the one case she had referred to wasn't a ghoul kill, either... the mermaid Iona had spent nights hunting before she met her own fate, and though I believed she'd more or less followed her kind's injunction against hunting on dry land, she'd had no problem with bending it to the breaking point... like by killing someone caught out in a torrential downpour.
For that matter, the "nesting creature" might have been Iona, too... her natural form had feathered arms. I kind of doubted that, though. She seemed too opportunistic and not patient enough to lie in wait. It would be tempting to pin as many of the red Xs as possible on her, but that just wasn't realistic... it wasn't like the campus had suddenly become dangerous when she enrolled.
Thinking about that made me suddenly consider that maybe she wasn't the first or only student to prey on classmates after dark. Maybe Iona's "crime" in the eyes of those who dealt with monsters who happened to also be people was not the fact that she'd killed, but the fact that she'd done so without subtlety or restraint.
She'd certainly picked the wrong person to tear apart for her last victim... someone with important ties and who had been lounging in one of the safer areas of the campus. The fact that she'd been able to get away with her depredations up to that point suggested that there were right victims. Like, people who were wandering where they shouldn't be after dark.
It was a scarily plausible thought... but one that could easily lead to jumping at shadows. The natural and supernatural dangers of the region were well-documented enough without any imported bogeymen.
The professor was continuing her litany of the dead.
"As we wind our way around the campus's eastern edge, notice how many of the deaths happened in the area around the union, the pent, and the fountain... the site where the fountain was, I mean," she said. "I don't want you to take away from this that this area is the most dangerous. Statistically, it's fairly safe. That's why more students hang out there at night than other parts of the campus, and that's why there are more deaths. The lesson here is that nowhere is safe, only safer. Not to undermine that, but notice how we're staying away from the admin annex. I don't know what kind of extra precautions they have there... and nobody will tell me... but monsters seem to give it a wide berth. Think about that if you're looking for an escape route."
I thought it likely that there were extra enchantments around the administrative building, but I also imagined that a lot of the local predators steered clear of it because they knew it housed an omega apex predator. Embries could probably have protected the entire campus from routine threats through a simple exercise of his vast will alone, but his attitude on the subject probably amounted to predation happens. A warm body becoming food for the ghouls every now and then wasn't a problem to be solved but a fact of life.
"Would you like to add something?" the professor said, after Eloise cleared her throat.
"Just a suggestion to not get too close to the main admin building itself at night," Eloise said. "Since we don't know what security spells they have."
[]
"Now, there are no dangerous flora or fauna actually residing on the school grounds," the professor continued. "Regular patrols by campus security and students looking for experience credits clear out most things that take up residence. So with the exception of the ghouls, which are common enough and range widely enough to come back again and again to the lights and life they sense on campus, it'd be hard to come up with a concise list of things you might encounter when you go bumping around after dark. You might as well assume that anything that comes up in class might very well stray into your path at some point.
[]
"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."
3:00-3:30: ~1300 words (+400)
3:30-4:00 ~1700 words (+400)
9/29/2011
5:00-5:30 ~2400 (+700)
[Beginning. Carried over ~900 words from previous.]
"The professor is here," Eloise announced to the classroom at large. She waited a few seconds for everyone to sit down and look down towards her, then gestured to where Professor Swain now stood atop a stepladder. "Professor?"
"Thank you, Ms. Desjardin. Good morning', 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 back to the union. It was a little less disorienting to watch from a distance, but it had been better up close.
"Those of you who don't mind standing, feel free to come down and crowd around," Professor Swain said as she lifted a long baton in her hand. "It's well worth seeing. I'll have a projector in place by next week, hopefully, but this was in the way of being an impromptu addition to our curriculum, since Ms. Desjardins happened to mention her work to me last night at a sort of informal interdepartmental mixer."
The table now showed the area around the student union and the pent, but it had "pulled back" a bit to cover more of the grounds. 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 natural 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?"
"I do think so."
"I won't say you're wrong, but only because they're good enough that I wouldn't like to be disinvited," Professor Swain said. "And as they say, 'better a bad epitaph...' But no, just between you, me, the walls, and the students, it isn't the bards."
"What exactly makes you the best judge?" Eloise asked.
"It's my culture, isn't it?" Professor Swain said. "The first party was a birthday party thrown by a gnomish mother who wanted her babe and herself to have a chance to experience the natural jubilation that came from the birth. She did it again the next few years out of concern that the child was missing out on some of the finer points, and then it got to be a bit of a tradition."
I thought it was a shame that Hazel apparently didn't get along with Professor Swain, because they had similar senses of... maybe "humor" wouldn't be the best word, but they certainly had similar stories. I figured a good half of the Willikins family tree was apocryphal.
"That sounds a little pat to me," Eloise said.
"Oh, yes, Little Pat was the wee babe's name," the professor said. "Patrick Door. Now, he grew up to invent a useful device that revolutionized keeping the weather out, to say nothing of privacy in the privy."
"You're just messing with me now, aren't you?"
"Oh, no, I have a whole class to mess with," Professor Swain said. "On that subject, let's move on... we'll return to the subject of parties at a later date. This swath of the campus on the eastern edge was once the whole campus. There are some newer buildings mixed in... there's Weyland Hall, built by an alumnus bequest not eleven years ago, and down in the southern corner of this part of campus we have the Em, one of the newest buildings... but by and large, you'll find the oldest purpose-built buildings on campus here.
"And more particularly, the oldest protective spells and enchanted pathways. This is important because when you're here, you're right on the edge of the campus. There's nothing to the east but the main road, which is not a barrier to anything. There's nothing north of the towers but practice fields and the skirmish pitch. There's nothing south of the Em but trees. It's easy to feel like you're right in the thick of things here, like these old and well-traveled paths are so much a part of the school that nothing would dare intrude on them, but the facts tell a different story. Ms. Desjardins, if you'll just show those spots I've highlighted."
[]
"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."
[One hour in.]
"The professor is here," Eloise announced to the classroom at large. She waited a few seconds for everyone to sit down and look down towards her, then gestured to where Professor Swain now stood atop a stepladder. "Professor?"
"Thank you, Ms. Desjardin. Good morning', 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 back to the union. It was a little less disorienting to watch from a distance, but it had been better up close.
"Those of you who don't mind standing, feel free to come down and crowd around," Professor Swain said as she lifted a long baton in her hand. "It's well worth seeing. I'll have a projector in place by next week, hopefully, but this was in the way of being an impromptu addition to our curriculum, since Ms. Desjardins happened to mention her work to me last night at a sort of informal interdepartmental mixer."
The table now showed the area around the student union and the pent, but it had "pulled back" a bit to cover more of the grounds. 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 natural 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?"
"I do think so."
"I won't say you're wrong, but only because they're good enough that I wouldn't like to be disinvited," Professor Swain said. "And as they say, 'better a bad epitaph...' But no, just between you, me, the walls, and the students, it isn't the bards."
"What exactly makes you the best judge?" Eloise asked.
"It's my culture, isn't it?" Professor Swain said. "The first party was a birthday party thrown by a gnomish mother who wanted her babe and herself to have a chance to experience the natural jubilation that came from the birth. She did it again the next few years out of concern that the child was missing out on some of the finer points, and then it got to be a bit of a tradition."
I thought it was a shame that Hazel apparently didn't get along with Professor Swain, because they had similar senses of... maybe "humor" wouldn't be the best word, but they certainly had similar stories. I figured a good half of the Willikins family tree was apocryphal.
"That sounds a little pat to me," Eloise said.
"Oh, yes, Little Pat was the wee babe's name," the professor said. "Patrick Door. Now, he grew up to invent a useful device that revolutionized keeping the weather out, to say nothing of privacy in the privy."
"You're just messing with me now, aren't you?"
"Oh, no, I have a whole class to mess with," Professor Swain said. "On that subject, let's move on... we'll return to the subject of parties at a later date. This swath of the campus on the eastern edge was once the whole campus. There are some newer buildings mixed in... there's Weyland Hall, built by an alumnus bequest not eleven years ago, and down in the southern corner of this part of campus we have the Em, one of the newest buildings... but by and large, you'll find the oldest purpose-built buildings on campus here.
"And more particularly, the oldest protective spells and enchanted pathways. This is important because when you're here, you're right on the edge of the campus. There's nothing to the east but the main road, which is not a barrier to anything. There's nothing north of the towers but practice fields and the skirmish pitch. There's nothing south of the Em but trees. It's easy to feel like you're right in the thick of things here, like these old and well-traveled paths are so much a part of the school that nothing would dare intrude on them, but the facts tell a different story. Ms. Desjardins, if you'll just show those spots I've highlighted."
The map view began to move again, following a path between spots where big red Xs appeared, Professor Swain narrating what... and who... each one represented. I recognized some of them, as I'd been there for the aftermath or heard about them later.
"Young man out jogging or walking in the rain on the tower trail, killed by ghouls," Professor Swain said. "Young woman partially paralyzed by plant toxins, chased down by ghouls here, died in this ditch here. Three people died under this tree, probably by some sort of nesting creature, though the ghouls leave little for us to go by... you might be noticing a common thread, but notice also that ghouls are only the sole cause of death in one case."
I had a strong suspicion that the case she was referring to wasn't a ghoul kill, either... the mermaid Iona had spent nights hunting before she met her own fate, and though I believed she'd more or less followed her kind's injunction against hunting on dry land, she'd had no problem with bending it to the breaking point. Like by killing someone caught out in a torrential downpour.
For that matter, the "nesting creature" might have been Iona, too... her natural form had feathered arms. I kind of doubted that, though. She seemed too opportunistic and not patient enough to lie in wait. It would be tempting to pin as many of the red Xs as possible on her, but that just wasn't realistic... it wasn't like the campus had suddenly become dangerous when she enrolled.
Thinking about that made me suddenly consider that maybe she wasn't the first or only student to prey on classmates after dark. Maybe Iona's "crime" in the eyes of those who dealt with monsters who happened to also be people was not the fact that she'd killed, but the fact that she'd done so without subtlety or restraint.
She'd certainly picked the wrong person to tear apart for her last victim... someone with important ties and who had been lounging in one of the safer areas of the campus. The fact that she'd been able to get away with her depredations up to that point suggested that there were right victims. Like, people who were wandering where they shouldn't be after dark.
It was a scarily plausible thought... but one that could easily lead to jumping at shadows. The natural and supernatural dangers of the region were well-documented enough without any imported bogeymen.
[]
"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 draft. I've edited the beginning a bit, the interaction between the professor and the TA wasn't quite right... Bryony was too peremptory and Eloise was too passive. Bringing Eloise's project into the classroom shouldn't turn her into a teaching prop.]
"The professor is here," Eloise announced to the classroom at large. She waited a few seconds for everyone to sit down and look down towards her, then gestured to where Professor Swain now stood atop a stepladder. "Professor?"
"Thank you, Ms. Desjardin. Good morning', 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. Are you ready?"
She tipped her head in Eloise's direction, who nodded and stepped forward.
"Absolutely, Professor," she said with a smile.
I had the feeling that she liked showing off her "baby", and she had plenty of reason to. The detail and craftsmanship would have been worth a healthy dose of pride alone, but the way she interfaced with it was a cool effect, and possibly unprecedented in several ways. Setting it all up would have required solving some of the same problems faced by TV makers, and druid magic was rarely used for any kind of modern applied enchantment.
"Wonderful!" the professor said. "You folks are all in for a bit of a treat for the next few sessions... we're going to be deviating from the planned curriculum very slightly, due to an unexpected opportunity.
"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 we all 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 around a little, though staying more or less focused on the union. It was a little less disorienting to watch from a distance, but it had been better up close.
"Those of you who don't mind standing, feel free to come down and crowd around," Professor Swain said as she lifted a long baton in her hand. "It's well worth seeing. I'll have a projector in place by Monday, hopefully, but this was in the way of being an impromptu addition to our curriculum, since Ms. Desjardins happened to mention her work to me last night at a sort of informal interdepartmental mixer."
The table now showed the area around the student union and the pent, but it had "pulled back" a bit to cover more of the grounds. 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 hollow cardboard insides. To judge by the curve, there was a dome-shaped field of effect, maybe about half as high as the table was wide.
"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. "As though 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 natural 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?"
"I do think so."
"I won't say you're wrong, but only because they're good enough that I wouldn't like to be disinvited," Professor Swain said. "And as they say, 'better a bad epitaph...' But no, just between you, me, the walls, and the students, it isn't the bards."
"What exactly makes you the best judge?" Eloise asked.
"It's my culture, isn't it?" Professor Swain said. "The first party was a birthday party thrown by a gnomish mother who wanted her babe and herself to have a chance to experience the natural jubilation that came from the birth. She did it again the next few years out of concern that the child was missing out on some of the finer points, and then it got to be a bit of a tradition."
I thought it was a shame that Hazel apparently didn't get along with Professor Swain, because they had similar senses of... well, maybe "humor" wouldn't be the best word, but they certainly had similar stories. I figured a good half of the Willikins family tree was apocryphal.
"That sounds a little pat to me," Eloise said.
"Oh, yes, Little Pat was the wee babe's name," the professor said. "Patrick Door. Now, he grew up to invent a useful device that revolutionized keeping the weather out, to say nothing of privacy in the privy and boudoir, as they say dans la belle Merové."
"You're just messing with me now, aren't you?"
"Oh, no, not just you... I have a whole class here to mess with," Professor Swain said. "On that subject, let's move on... we'll return to the subject of parties on and off campus at a later date. This swath of the campus on the eastern edge was once the whole campus. There are some newer buildings mixed in... there's Weyland Hall, built by an alumnus bequest not eleven years ago, and down in the southern corner of this part of campus we have the Em, one of the newest buildings... but by and large, you'll find the oldest purpose-built buildings on campus here.
"And more particularly, the oldest protective spells and enchanted pathways. They lack some of the later innovations that are present elsewhere in campus. This is important because when you're here, you're right on the edge of the campus. There's nothing to the east but the main road, which is not a barrier to anything. There's nothing north of the towers but practice fields and the skirmish pitch. There's nothing south of the Em but trees. It's easy to feel like you're right in the thick of things here, like these old and well-traveled paths are so much a part of the school that nothing would dare intrude on them, but the facts tell a different story. Ms. Desjardins, if you'll just show those spots I've highlighted."
The map view began to move again, following a path between spots where big red Xs appeared, Professor Swain narrating what... and who... each one represented. I recognized some of them, as I'd been there for the aftermath or heard about them later.
"Young man out jogging or walking in the rain on the tower trail, killed by ghouls," Professor Swain said. "Young woman partially paralyzed by a spider bite, chased down by ghouls here, died in this ditch here. Three people died under this tree... that is some fantastic detail on that tree, by the way. How do you get the leaves like that?"
"They grow that way," Eloise said.
"Oh, right," the professor said. "Anyway, three killed, probably by some sort of nesting creature, though the ghouls leave little for us to go by... you might be noticing a common thread, but notice also that ghouls are only the sole cause of death in one of these cases. Two young lovers out for a late stroll attacked by striges here... one survived, though later dropped out. These all happened in the last academic year, mind you."
I had a strong suspicion that the one case she had referred to wasn't a ghoul kill, either... the mermaid Iona had spent nights hunting before she met her own fate, and though I believed she'd more or less followed her kind's injunction against hunting on dry land, she'd had no problem with bending it to the breaking point... like by killing someone caught out in a torrential downpour.
For that matter, the "nesting creature" might have been Iona, too... her natural form had feathered arms. I kind of doubted that, though. She seemed too opportunistic and not patient enough to lie in wait. It would be tempting to pin as many of the red Xs as possible on her, but that just wasn't realistic... it wasn't like the campus had suddenly become dangerous when she enrolled.
Thinking about that made me suddenly consider that maybe she wasn't the first or only student to prey on classmates after dark. Maybe Iona's "crime" in the eyes of those who dealt with monsters who happened to also be people was not the fact that she'd killed, but the fact that she'd done so without subtlety or restraint.
She'd certainly picked the wrong person to tear apart for her last victim... someone with important ties and who had been lounging in one of the safer areas of the campus. The fact that she'd been able to get away with her depredations up to that point suggested that there were right victims. Like, people who were wandering where they shouldn't be after dark.
It was a scarily plausible thought... but one that could easily lead to jumping at shadows. The natural and supernatural dangers of the region were well-documented enough without any imported bogeymen.
The professor was continuing her litany of the dead.
"As we wind our way around the campus's eastern edge, notice how many of the deaths happened in the area around the union, the pent, and the fountain... the site where the fountain was, I mean," she said. "I don't want you to take away from this that this area is the most dangerous. Statistically, it's fairly safe. That's why more students hang out there at night than other parts of the campus, and that's why there are more deaths. The lesson here is that nowhere is safe, only safer. Not to undermine that, but notice how we're staying away from the admin annex. I don't know what kind of extra precautions they have there... and nobody will tell me... but monsters seem to give it a wide berth. Think about that if you're looking for an escape route."
I thought it likely that there were extra enchantments around the administrative building, but I also imagined that a lot of the local predators steered clear of it because they knew it housed an omega apex predator. Embries could probably have protected the entire campus from routine threats through a simple exercise of his vast will alone, but his attitude on the subject probably amounted to predation happens. A warm body becoming food for the ghouls every now and then wasn't a problem to be solved but a fact of life.
"Would you like to add something?" the professor said, after Eloise cleared her throat.
"Just a suggestion to not get too close to the main admin building itself at night," Eloise said. "Since we don't know what security spells they have."
[]
"Now, there are no dangerous flora or fauna actually residing on the school grounds," the professor continued. "Regular patrols by campus security and students looking for experience credits clear out most things that take up residence. So with the exception of the ghouls, which are common enough and range widely enough to come back again and again to the lights and life they sense on campus, it'd be hard to come up with a concise list of things you might encounter when you go bumping around after dark. You might as well assume that anything that comes up in class might very well stray into your path at some point.
[]
"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."