Chapter 2 – Academic Life

Mirian stood for a moment, trying to decide what to do about the shadowy figure she’d just seen. She spotted one of the Torrviol guards in the plaza. He stood out amid the dark cloaks moving about the courtyard, his black, white, and orange tabard bright even in the overcast day. The nearby lamplight glinted off his polished ceremonial plate armor. Each guard also carried a ceremonial halberd, though if it really came to fighting, they had four wands and a revolver at their belt.

She walked over to the man, wondering how one reported something like this. She’d never had to report a crime or anything like that before. “Hi, sorry to bother you.”

The guard stood tall, not moving.

Mirian cleared her throat. “It’s just… well, this sounds a bit silly, but I just saw a man, well, person, up on the roof, and they didn’t look like a student. Atop the flat-roofed red-brick building there,” she said, gesturing. “Then he jumped onto the Alchemistry building. His face was hidden. I don’t think he’s supposed to be up there.” Then, still receiving no response, she said, “I just thought you might want to know.”

The guard glanced at her. “I’ll report it,” he said, and continued to stand still, surveying the plaza.

“Great. Well, thank you. I’m… off to class,” she said, and walked off. Glancing back, the guard has still made no move to go anywhere or do anything. Apparently ‘report it’ meant later–much later. Now Mirian felt like a fool, and she needed to get her head on straight because Alchemistry was going to take all her focus. She hoped the creepy cloaked man stayed away from the classroom.

The motto above the Alchemistry Building door read “Respect for the Fundamental Forces of the Universe,” and below that, “In Memoriam,” and the four names of the deceased, at least two of whom had not respected the magical chemistry they studied in the building. She made her way up three flights of stairs into the room, where Professor Sefora Seneca was waiting at the lectern, eyes on her pocket-watch. Professor Seneca was a middle-aged lady with dark hair and bright eyes who absolutely delighted in the subject. She alternated between excitedly talking about the subject and then surveying her audience of students, eyes full of pity because she could tell they clearly weren’t getting it. “It’s a complex subject, so it takes a lot of study,” she was fond of saying. One student had heard it so much he commissioned a small banner with those words and presented it to her, and so she often would just punctuate a part of her lecture by simply pointing to the banner and looking out at the class over the rims of her thin spectacles.

Mirian hurried into class and hung her cloak on one of the pegs, then took a seat near the front of the room.

The nearby clock tower bell bonged out its six chimes. Professor Seneca snapped shut her pocket watch and began class immediately, ignoring the few students who were hurrying to their seats.

“Alright, class! Today we’re going to do a grand overview of the principles of alchemistry. And before anyone asks, yes, this will all be on the exam tomorrow. After that, there will be time for questions.”

She hit a rune on the lectern, and the lights dimmed. She hit another rune on the lectern, and a small spell engine installed in the ceiling came on, projecting an illusion spell onto a central pedestal in the front of the classroom. The illusion spell was preconfigured to show the various concepts Seneca described, and the technology still baffled Mirian. The spell-engines she had seen as a kid could heat a building, spin a turbine, or push an object, but nothing like this. The technology was growing in leaps and bounds, and she still felt a sense of wonder at it.

“Remember, we started our class reviewing the types of mana flows. The natural mana that orbits your soul is the auric mana. This is the stuff you have been using in all your spellcasting since your first year, so moving on. It can be used in spell engines, but spell engines are inefficient and extremely mana hungry, so directing your own mana flows into a spell engine is a good way to accidentally get your soul peeled apart, so don’t do that.”

“Will that be on the test?” a student in the middle row blurted out.

“It will be now!” Professor Seneca happily chirped. “No more interruptions, please. Mana traveling along an organism’s aura–that includes humans–is considered in-flow. Think of it as the kinetic force of a moving object, like a river. The energy is in the motion. Your other classes cover that extensively, so we won’t dwell on it. We contrasted that with alchemical mana, which is stored in magichemical bonds, much like chemical energy-rich substances like sugar or wood store energy. The three types of magichemical bond are each governed by a different equation.”

The illusion in the center of the pedestal changed to show three pictures and three floating equations next to them. Several students in the class scrambled to write them down. Mirian found the color-coded tab in her notebook that was for the class and checked to make sure the equations she had written were correct. They were. Also, she’d memorized them already. Math was the easy part for her.

“Alchemical mana is classified in three ways: One is usefulness to humans. Remember, this form of classification is archaic, but it’s still used everywhere so you need to know it. A-class mana is the only mana that is safe to channel. Classes go A through D, and D-class mana will kill you instantly. Again, a metaphor: You can get energy from eating plants. A-class mana is like a carrot. Great. Eat as many as you want. Using B-class mana is like eating plants that will give you diarrhea; you can do it a little bit, but it will hurt. Using D-class mana is like eating a piece of anthracite coal. Yes, it used to be a plant. Yes, there’s lots of energy in there. No, you can’t use it; don’t eat toxic rocks.”

She didn’t pause, because this was stuff they’d covered back in the 200 level classes, though a few students were hurriedly jotting notes about it anyways. Embarrassing.

“Next, mana is classified on a volatility scale. One is perfectly volatile, which means it is in the process of exploding. Zero is perfectly stable. The average human aura has mana orbiting in a flow of about 0.1. The average myrvite fossil has a stability of one thousandth of that. Incredibly stable, right up until that’s disrupted, and then it has an index of 0.9, which is why it kills you if you try to use it. This leads us to the Tarrian-Bolt equations of flow transformations…”

The lecture continued, with the projected equations and diagrams also changing. Here and there, Mirian took more notes, but mostly, it was already in her notebook, written in her neat but tiny handwriting, color-coded, and with tiny equations or diagrams next to the words.

One of her classmates, Nicolus, leaned over at one point to get a closer look at her notes. “Damn,” he said, raising both eyebrows for emphasis, then went back to his own notes, which were chicken-scratch that she wondered if even he could read.

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Mirian blushed.

Nicolus was one of those handsome types that had his good looks magnified by his easy confidence. Adding to that he was tall, muscular, and apparently came from a very wealthy family. These days, wealthy families tended to send their children to the extremely prestigious foreign schools west of Baracuel, but the Torrviol Academy was ancient and renowned enough that it was still a respectable choice.

Mirian had stayed away from Nicolus, mostly because he was at the center of a great deal of relational drama she did not want distracting her from her studies. She hadn’t even noticed he’d sat next to her, which was no doubt causing immense consternation for someone.

She focused back on the lecture.

Next, Professor Seneca covered the third classification, which was magichemical molecule-type. Here, there were a dozen categories, each with a hundred common alchemical compounds. This was what most of the lecture time and labwork had focused on, and also the part that gave Mirian a headache. She had stayed up in the Bainrose Castle Library for hours each night, and she still barely felt like she understood it. It wasn’t that Seneca was a poor alchemy teacher, it was just, as she kept saying, really hard.

With five minutes left before the class ended, Seneca started taking questions. Most of the questions were stupid, and just proved that some of the students hadn’t been listening, so Mirian tuned them out and paged through her notes.