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Supernova
- Joined
- Dec 2, 2009
The Academy of the Arts was, not to put too fine a point on it, much larger on the inside than on the outside. While the outside was the old ruins of a castle, the inside was grand with the decorations of centuries of students. All these hallowed halls, stretching into the tide of infinity. Statues and paintings cluttered the hallways, as did vast windows into amazing places. One window opened to some place deep in the sea, surrounded by coral and lit by a lantern. Another showed a nebula vast and proud, completely the image of the very pillars of heaven. Steamy reptile filled jungle could be viewed through some, desolate landscapes, vast views of the Earth and other planets and places.
There were a few thousand students there at any given time of the year. But the ranks had thinned, the hallowed hallways occasionally becoming empty and infested with thaumavores, creatures that fed off of the byproduct of magic. It had sunk into the wood and stone, layers of magic, centuries deep and festering with joy. Everything looked new, no matter how many millenia it had already seen. The students themselves rarely met in mass and the teaching was laissez faire at best, occasionally negligent when the situation called for it in the minds of the partially mad scholars who ran this great, grand institution.
The students themselves were housed in whatever room they could find, usually off a branch of the school that was fairly stable. It was only the occasional hall where you would find fantastic purple fungus cheerfully tearing through the baseboards, thirsting for anything magical. Most of the rooms provided what the students needed, doing away with small messes and slowly changing to suit their desires. It was said you could tell a lot about someone from a room they had stayed in for long enough.
Take, for instance, Mark Simakas. He had been a student at the Academy for five years, dutiful as he was. He had enrolled at fourteen, coming into the school with more knowledge about current affairs than the majority of his peers who had started much younger than he. However, he did catch up, exceeding his fellows in some areas, and showing weakness in others. He had a reputation for being a pitiful diviner, though some did envy him for the ease with which he brewed potions and altered the properties of matter, turning lead to gold and creating alloys with a simple hum.
However, recently Mark had been plagued by a series of pranks. His lab, the living knob of wood that had grown out of the wall, full of various instruments of the potion brewer's trade. A crucible, pliers, thick leather gloves, goggles, smock, all manners of containers, a magically powered centrifuge and countless other little paraphernalia. Today he was running three projects simultaneously. The first, and perhaps most important, was his attempt at making super potent wands. He was letting the core--a combination of feathers, hair, bone and plant root stuck together with tree sap--rest in a mixture of plants, salts and gems. His theory was that the core would soak up the thaumaturgically charged liquid and produce a wan of surpassing quality and durability, able to act not only as a vast store of magical energy, but able to absorb others and with it cast faster and more efficiently.
The second was stimulating the growth of a tulip, as well as attempting to make it bare erasers. It was his project for herbalism and biology based magics. The tulip in question had every color of the rainbow, in dots and stripes, along the stem before the petals burst into pure light. Sometime around the petals made of light he realized that things were not exactly going the way he had envisioned, however it filled him with a sense of levity and good will, so he kept it around.
The final project was sitting in the centrifuge. It was a potion to increase someone's strength and vitality. Permanently. Experimenting with potions such as those was frowned upon as it could have unintended side effects. The great sages who ran the much vaunted Academy for the Arts could attest to that, having developed irregular tics due to similar experimentation.
He was currently in the middle of brewing a new potion, something he had done a hundred times before, a liquid to bolster his attention. The sleeves of his tunic were pushed high up past his elbows, crimson smock wrapped tight around his body. The potion burbled, thick and yellow, reeking of magic.
There were a few thousand students there at any given time of the year. But the ranks had thinned, the hallowed hallways occasionally becoming empty and infested with thaumavores, creatures that fed off of the byproduct of magic. It had sunk into the wood and stone, layers of magic, centuries deep and festering with joy. Everything looked new, no matter how many millenia it had already seen. The students themselves rarely met in mass and the teaching was laissez faire at best, occasionally negligent when the situation called for it in the minds of the partially mad scholars who ran this great, grand institution.
The students themselves were housed in whatever room they could find, usually off a branch of the school that was fairly stable. It was only the occasional hall where you would find fantastic purple fungus cheerfully tearing through the baseboards, thirsting for anything magical. Most of the rooms provided what the students needed, doing away with small messes and slowly changing to suit their desires. It was said you could tell a lot about someone from a room they had stayed in for long enough.
Take, for instance, Mark Simakas. He had been a student at the Academy for five years, dutiful as he was. He had enrolled at fourteen, coming into the school with more knowledge about current affairs than the majority of his peers who had started much younger than he. However, he did catch up, exceeding his fellows in some areas, and showing weakness in others. He had a reputation for being a pitiful diviner, though some did envy him for the ease with which he brewed potions and altered the properties of matter, turning lead to gold and creating alloys with a simple hum.
However, recently Mark had been plagued by a series of pranks. His lab, the living knob of wood that had grown out of the wall, full of various instruments of the potion brewer's trade. A crucible, pliers, thick leather gloves, goggles, smock, all manners of containers, a magically powered centrifuge and countless other little paraphernalia. Today he was running three projects simultaneously. The first, and perhaps most important, was his attempt at making super potent wands. He was letting the core--a combination of feathers, hair, bone and plant root stuck together with tree sap--rest in a mixture of plants, salts and gems. His theory was that the core would soak up the thaumaturgically charged liquid and produce a wan of surpassing quality and durability, able to act not only as a vast store of magical energy, but able to absorb others and with it cast faster and more efficiently.
The second was stimulating the growth of a tulip, as well as attempting to make it bare erasers. It was his project for herbalism and biology based magics. The tulip in question had every color of the rainbow, in dots and stripes, along the stem before the petals burst into pure light. Sometime around the petals made of light he realized that things were not exactly going the way he had envisioned, however it filled him with a sense of levity and good will, so he kept it around.
The final project was sitting in the centrifuge. It was a potion to increase someone's strength and vitality. Permanently. Experimenting with potions such as those was frowned upon as it could have unintended side effects. The great sages who ran the much vaunted Academy for the Arts could attest to that, having developed irregular tics due to similar experimentation.
He was currently in the middle of brewing a new potion, something he had done a hundred times before, a liquid to bolster his attention. The sleeves of his tunic were pushed high up past his elbows, crimson smock wrapped tight around his body. The potion burbled, thick and yellow, reeking of magic.