Fable - Ask Exornithics

A roleplay which may be open to join but you must ask the creator first
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(OOC: The thread is open to all College students and staff).

Vaezhasar had arrived early, as became a man who liked to stack the odds by the simple expedient of being the first piece on the board. He sat, not quite enthroned, but certainly accommodated, in a chair he would have described, in a moment of charity, as a geological event with armrests. Petrified wood made poor cushion and excellent argument; it insisted on the sitter’s attention the way a stern tutor insists on declensions in long dead languages. His armor didn't complain and indeed moved with great smoothness as he crossed one greaved leg over the other and regarded the lectern before him, where a book of respectable girth lay open: vellum gone the faint yellow of old ivory; binding stout enough to survive an overzealous apprentice or an underfunded library move. The helm, for once, did not occupy his features. Unmasked, he wore the expression of a man trying out the dangerous sport of serenity and half suspecting he would be better at sarcasm.

Behind him the board waited: a great, ivory-white rectangle fastened to the wall the way a proclamation is nailed to a city gate, meant to be read and not, under any circumstances, redecorated. Across it ran a legend in dark indigo, letters tall and prim as magistrates: Study of magical entities. The script was too crisp for human industry. Ink—even the good stuff brewed by those solemn fellows in the Alchemical Quarter—bleeds, feathers, yields to the grain. This line did not. It possessed the uncompromising edge of a rune cut by a patient hand with a better class of chisel. If it was handwriting, the hand had never been mortal and had a pedant’s sense of kerning.

The hall had the calm of a well-fed cat and the echo of a half-remembered hymn. Light from tall windows quartered the space into honest rectangles; dust motes paraded as if under inspection; everything smelled faintly of chalk, beeswax, and hypotheses. Elbion’s builders loved pale stone and clean lines, and the College had obliged them for centuries: old marble given a new polish each generation so that youth could admire antiquity without getting grit on their sleeves. The place sat at the city’s northern brow like a diadem, its tower the nearest thing Elbion had to a sundial for the whole district, and its lone gate, down the hill and around two turns, saw more anxious foot traffic on examination days than the counting houses saw on tax day. That was the College for you: an enclave with its own old laws, well-guarded doors, and an ingrained talent for reminding the city that genius requires a perimeter.

He allowed himself the small wicked pleasure of imagining the students’ arrival in taxonomical order, as befitted the hour’s subject. First would come the diurnal scholars, those punctual creatures who measured life in margins and found their courage in well-sharpened quills. Then the shy bipeds traveling in pairs, watchful as hares. After them the solitary predators of the back row, hooded, intelligent, and sullenly certain they were the most interesting entities in the room. Last, inevitably, the migratory flock who had been waylaid by breakfast, romance, or both. Vaezhasar’s mouth tilted. If the College had taught him anything, it was that classification is a convenience and exceptions are the only reliable rule.

He leaned back. The chair accepted exactly as much of him as stone accepts a chisel, and no more. On the lectern a ribbon marked the page where some former scholar, anonymous, meticulous, and now safely historical, had glossed a paragraph about familiars with a marginal note so neat it looked printed. He read it, snorted, and closed the matter with an economical, “No.” It would make a good opening: the courteous demolition of a respectable error. Students appreciated a cleanly disassembled fallacy; it suggested the universe possessed hinges.


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Surprisingly, the first to rush into the classroom - ferreting through the door like a chased squirrel hoping to avoid detection and banging his knee against a cunning chair for his efforts - was Pomrick.

But unlike the punctual creatures that usually beat him to this race, Pomrick carried a stack of battered tomes in his arms and a satchel with scrolls and half-broken quills, all spewing pages and white feathers like misaligned teeth. The left side of his hair looked half-shaven, half-burnt, a slime-green tint to the crops and exposed bit of scalp.

Pomrick looked at the almost empty classroom, flabbergasted. He could swear he had been late. Lifting a crumpled note in his hand, he squinted to parse the brisk notes of his master - *Thaumaturgic Alterations in...*

However, he didn't have time to read further before his eyes inevitably drew to the armoured shape, languidly sitting in his chair, observing him.

The note dropped from his hand, drifting down to the floor like a fallen feather. Pomrick gulped, frozen as if a spell of petrification had seared onto him.

Vaezhasar Drakspae. The terrifying mountain of metal that had coolly judged him at the gala. His unholy helmet was now off, but somehow, that didn't help. Now he could fully see his chiselled, sculpted face and dispassionate eyes - all hard, cold and imperious like marble, skewering him with a single look.

The gaping classroom sucked him in, no flood of bodies to protect him from the maester's attention. Exposed. His bones felt brittle and immobile as glass. Should he run? Quickly excuse himself and leave? His eyes travelled to the white board, trying to parse what class this was and link it to his draining memory of where he was supposed to go.

Vaezhasar Drakspae
 
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Still housing several far too large bites of a muffin, Thadd strolled casually in. Tucked in the crook of one arm was several more baked goods. They had clearly come straight from the dining hall in no particular hurry.
His eyes passed over the mostly empty hall blankly. Then he squinted at the board of very complicated looking ink. Looked back at the rest of the hall. A thought very slowly wandered across his mind.
He fished in his pocket for a bit of parchment and unfolded it.
Damn. He had taken his roommate's schedule. Again.
Mouth still full of the last bite of muffin he turned to glance at the doorway in thought. Should he go wake that guy up? He had been pretty moody lately. Thadd just knew he was going to get the silent treatment again.
He had meant to come to the combat class but it looked like this Maester had two different classes.
It was a bit of a trek back to the dorms, and it seemed kind of rude to leave when there was only him and one other guy here so far. That's it! Maybe if he took really good notes then they could sleep in and he could be forgiven. Thadd mentally high fived himself for the excellent solution.

He meandered up to the only other student already here. Starting on another baked good he glanced down and bent to scoop up the little note. Thadd handed it over with a beaming grin both too bright for the hour and oblivious to the other students' petrified face. "you dropped this!" He proclaimed then seemed at a loss for how to hand it back to someone so over burdened with a small stationary store. He tucked it into the chaotic satchel.
He turned the high beam of his smile toward the Maester sitting in the uncomfortable looking chair at the lectern.
"Mornin' Maester Drakspae!"

Pomrick Bloomsfield
Vaezhasar Drakspae
 
Pomrick Bloomsfield
Thadd

Vaezhasar didn't rise from his seat, not at first, at least. The chair, that geological argument against comfort, held him with the stolid authority of a treaty clause nobody quite remembered signing but everyone feared to break. His gaze, practiced in the cataloguing of specimens both willing and otherwise, scanned the two young men with the methodical precision of a customs inspector who has just spotted irregular stitching on a merchant's purse. First Pomrick—ah yes, there was the telltale shimmer of discomfort, worn like an ill-fitted doublet at a state dinner—then Thaddeus, who bore himself with the careful dignity of one who has memorized the first three chapters but suspects the examination will concern the fourth.


"Good morning, Thaddeus, Pomrick," he uttered, the words measured out like expensive spice, then finally rose. Two meters and change of man unfolded from the chair, spellsteel ornamentation catching the morning light in a manner that suggested metallurgy had opinions about punctuality. The armor moved with him like water that had taken lessons in geometry. He paid no mind to Pomrick's discomfort—one did not, after all, interrupt a butterfly's struggle from its chrysalis merely because the process appeared undignified—and simply nodded absentmindedly, the gesture carrying all the weight of a magistrate acknowledging a point of order he intended to ignore.

"You may sit. The rest may arrive late, but I'll allow it, this once." The concession emerged like a duke granting passage through his lands: magnanimous, temporary, and thoroughly recorded for future reference. "Our first class on the topic of magical entities will be purely introductory, so that you may more easily familiarize yourself with the matter."

He drummed his armored index finger against the whiteboard, the sound possessed of that peculiar resonance achieved when metal meets mineral with intent. Each tap marked time like a metronome designed by someone who believed rhythm should make a statement.

"For those of you that have attended Maester Kikwi's class on magical beasts, I must make a small distinction that'll keep the lot of you from mixing up the two subjects." He paused, allowing the silence to mature like good cheese. "The creatures, if they can be called such, that you'll be learning about in next six months, are all sapient, exhibiting intellect on par or superior to that of humans and other humanoid races."

The last word hung in the air with the finality of a cartographer's boundary line: here be dragons, it seemed to say, but the sort that might correct your grammar.