Kasimir

[TAG: RP, 1392 words] [OOC: @Matrim's Dice Think you should ask the GM. Hael apparently put up a contract to hug another student for a drab and got a 0.5 tuition reduction but I'm not sure if it's still legal. FYI. Yes yes RP party in the thread, join me! I just broke the 25k mark guys xD Handwriting on paper during conference breaks has been such a pain holy chull. As much as I am really enjoying this break, I never want to try to 50k a game again holy chull. As I told Drake, I did in fact once clear a NaNoWriMo in a week; that is, I wrote a 50k novel in a week, but I was pretty much very sleep-deprived, out of it, and having psychedelic moments where I imagined writing chapters that weren't real and that I never did by the end. Still! I am determined to meet this challenge! @DrakeMarshall: Now that I'm on a PC and can't legally message you without at least knowing the Name of Wind, just gonna have to drop this in thread. Sorry I'm not doing it. Low key kind of really want to swear kanly on your behalf and go on a rampage to rival the one I embarked on when the Elims killed STINK, but I really, really want to get to chill for one game and not have Village depend on me, and I guess that won out. Sorry bro. No vengeance oath this time ] xxviii. duel In one of the many travelogues in the Archives, sometimes a little more akin to wander-tales than true accounts, prone to exaggerations and hearsay, Hannes Vahasin wrote of duels between the Adem taking no more than three blows to determine a victor. With sympathy, it was less straightforward. Kevan had taken the Advanced Sympathy class out of a sense of duty and obligation; not because he found Sympathy fascinating but because it was required to graduate. Sometimes, he wondered how Master Sympathist felt, teaching a class of students who were at least partially indifferent to his specialisation. You got all sorts of students, after all, even once they’d made their way into the lofty ranks of the Arcanum. You always took some classes because you had to, because the Chancellor’s Office told you or your sponsoring Master that you would not be allowed to graduate without them. Sympathy was considered the backbone of the University: you graduated with either Alchemy or Advanced Sympathy. Kevan’d taken one look at the Alchemy curriculum, with all its talk of principles and reguluses and had given right up and gone for Advanced Sympathy, which at least also freed him up for Siaru classes conducted by Master Isaak. To tell the truth, he’d dreaded Advanced Sympathy. His grades in Advanced Sympathy the first time around had been indifferent, but then, it had been difficult juggling his failing career as an artificer and also trying to do well in Advanced Sympathy. This time, he had enough time to put into his studies in Advanced Sympathy, even with all the studying he’d had to do to make sure his foundations were actually strong. Part of Advanced Sympathy, however, involved Master Sympathist pitting students against each other, telling them curtly that learning how to defend themselves against another sympathist was crucial. (Why, he didn’t say. But whispers of malfeasance crawled about the classroom: the University was always teeming with stories of sympathists gone rogue, and if you thought about it, they were a threat University students understood. They heard about those all the time. Skindancers were elusive, the stuff of fairy tales. And privately, Kevan had his doubts that a skindancer would ever be so polite as to challenge him to a sympathist’s duel, in order to allow him to die on his feet.) At this point, he was doggedly trying to juggle the two conflicting and inconsistent beliefs in his head: that the wick he was holding wasn’t the same as the piece of wick that Feemor was holding. It was harder work than Kevan had believed. There were logicians who were working to develop systems of paraconsistent logics, but reasoning yourself into a belief was more difficult than you’d expect. Holding on to it with the stone-steady solidity of your Alar was another. They’d both been allowed to draw from candles. Some of the more advanced students in the class were using lesser heat sources—one had tried straw, as in Kvothe’s legendary bout with Fenton. Master Sympathist had shut that down quickly. He didn’t want heroics in his class, he’d said. How long had it been? Kevan didn’t know. He was certain his foot had gone to sleep. To and fro they went, glaring at each other, stubbornly holding on to their wicks with their Alar while trying to draw enough heat in the binding to overwhelm the other’s defence. Abruptly, he felt the flash of warmth in his hand. He let go just as a puff of smoke went up from the wick he was holding in his hand. Nothing from Feemor’s. Feemor accepted the congratulations of their classmates, and some coin exchanged hands, surreptitiously, though Kevan expected that Master Sympathist really knew everything that was going on in his classroom. Simply another aspect of University tradition. Kevan let out a tired sigh. At least he’d held Feemor off for over an hour. It felt…frustrating, being one of the few students in the class still working with candles while the others were allowed more inefficient, more creative linkages and sources. He hadn’t refined his Alar, Master Sympathist had cautioned him, and the part of Kevan that needed to be a good student had worked on it, doggedly practising the mental exercises that Master Sympathist had set them. At the same time, he found he couldn’t have cared less. He was studying Advanced Sympathy not because he wanted to, not because it truly interested him, but because the Chancellor’s Office had decreed it was necessary to earn his guilder. As the students filed out of the class at the end, the master held out his hand in a forestalling gesture. Obediently, Kevan hung back. “Sir?” he asked, cautiously. “I’ve been watching your progress,” Master Sympathist said, without preamble. “You’ve improved quite a bit since your first set of classes.” “Thank you, sir.” “The readmission seems to be agreeing with you.” He hesitated. “It is a relief,” Kevan said carefully, “To be able to devote more time to Advanced Sympathy rather than dividing it between the Fishery and Advanced Sympathy.” “But not between Rhetoric and Logic and Advanced Sympathy?” Master Sympathist asked, shrewdly. Kevan spread his hands out in a wordless shrug. “We have our interests and our skills, Master. With all due respect to Master Artificer, I recognise now that I was as cut out for Artificery as a crow is for winning talent pipes at the Eolian.” Now that was a mental image. Master Sympathist must’ve thought so too as he hid a chuckle behind a cough. “So I can tell. Well, keep on working hard, E’lir, and I imagine you’ll do fine in your classes.” Except Kevan didn’t know if ‘fine’ was enough. He didn’t say that, though. He thanked Master Sympathist, and when it was clear the man had nothing else to say, he turned to leave. The master’s question made him draw to a halt in the doorway of the classroom. “You don’t care very much for sympathy, do you, E’lir?” A beat later, Master Sympathist added, “I read your appeal essay.” Kevan turned about. “No, sir,” he said. There was no concealment, not on this. “I don’t.” Explanations drifted through his mind. The way it felt as though it mattered, flipping through books and articles, knowing that people who had lived, loved, and died decades, even centuries before you were born had agonised over the same beautiful, crucial questions. The sense that you were asking something which, one way or another, tapped into the most primal, elemental questions of how to be human: what was the good, really and truly, how you ought to behave towards one another, and layered on top of that like sediment, questions of what the good life was and where new technologies fit into it, and what knowledge was, what this entity was that students at the University ostensibly sought and craved and chased after like a man dying of thirst in a desert seeking water. More than sympathy, practised by a small tenth of a tenth of the population. Sympathy looked inwards. But reading those books, arguing with Master Anders and the gillers and his classmates, he’d learned that people were wrong, when they said Rhetoric and Logic looked inwards. It looked outwards: you didn’t pursue these questions for their own sake (though you could, and some did.) You asked them, because the asking was part of what it meant to be human, and the asking was part of the pursuit of the betterment of humanity. And what could possibly be better, be more crucial, be more worth devoting his time at the University to than that? He could have said all of that, of course: thoughts teeming in his head, but it didn’t feel right, dismissing Master Sympathist’s subject before him, and what did it matter? He knew the University regarded Rhetoric and Logic, and pretty much all the non-Arcanum subjects as idle pursuits: that your life, in their eyes, only truly began when you entered the Arcanum. All of these thoughts sounded only like mere justifications, and he was beginning to learn there were points when there was no argument to be made, by rhetoric or by logic. There was, in fact, no argument necessary at all. So instead, “I don’t, sir,” he repeated, simply, and he left the classroom, closing the door behind him.

[OOC: @Matrim's Dice We're not supposed to reuse old PMs. Can't legally reply in there and cba to remake Drake’s monstrosity. Vaguely remember a weird BM hack but too tired to retrieve details.]

[OOC: Soddit not posting RP until later, accessing my stash is murder on mobile and conference is tiring. Siiigh.] [OOC: Wasn't particularly fussed, kind of figured you were scrambling for time and the reduction.]

[TAG: RP, 1044 words] [OOC: Drakebro! D: D: Ok tbh I will fix all formatting later. Mostly grey, justification, font, italics. At conference so mobile only. 23k ftw >>] xxvii. fracture Kevan half-shouldered, half-shoved the door open, and staggered out into the washroom. He made it just in time before he fell to his knees and was violently sick. There went breakfast, he found himself thinking inanely, even though he couldn’t seem to stop himself. There went breakfast, and then he was just bone dry, heaving convulsively over the waste receptacle that Re’lar Talin had pointed out to them, even before they’d begun the clinical observation session. You saw things, on Yll. He wasn’t so sheltered from the reality of death as that. There were eagles and wolves that hunted sheep, and you had to kill them, and he knew that, had made the kill and the dressing himself, but to see mangled flesh exposed this way—compound fracture, Re’lar Talin had said, clinically, and probed, and now Kevan was about to be sick all over again. He heard the sound of the door creaking open. “You alright, E’lir?” and Kevan’s blood ran cold as he recognised the voice. Oh merciful Tehlu, he’d done it now, if Master Bob himself had come to find him. He was about to croak, “I’m fine,” but his stomach churned again and he was gagging back the taste of bile that flooded his mouth. Next came the regular cadence of footsteps; he knew those by now, was attuned to Master Bob surveying the rows of students during practical, as they demonstrated bandaging, and stitching wounds on the carcasses (usually pig) commissioned for those sessions. “Focus on your breathing, E’lir,” Master Bob instructed, calmly. “Breathe as I count. Can you do that?” “Yes, sir,” Kevan croaked. He breathed in to the slow count, and out to the same count, trying to stop himself from gagging, trying to think of anything but the mess he’d made. His mind settled on the flow of the Omethi River as it rushed on beneath the Stonebridge, washing away all things: leaves, stones, boats, powerfully cleansing. It was a little like some of the mental exercises they’d had to do to master Sympathy, to develop the strength of conviction required for Alar, except at the same time, he was fighting against his own physical reflexes, and he knew there was only so much you could do (the case study here was binder’s chills, you were limited by what your body let you do, and right now his body only seemed to want to hurl, and he forced himself to steady his breathing, to try to hold it back, to breathe only as Master Bob counted, until he’d achieved some semblance of control again.) The Master Physicker must’ve known the moment Kevan was feeling better, because he pressed a canteen into Kevan’s hands. “Swill it about your mouth, and spit,” he instructed. “Then drink the rest of it.” Numbly, Kevan did so. His mouth flooded, thankfully, with the taste of mint. Obediently, he threw out the first mouthful, and then the second, and then, once he could no longer taste his own bile, he sipped at the mint-infused water. “Feeling better?” Master Bob wanted to know. Mutely, Kevan nodded. He did not know what to say. He couldn’t bring himself to meet Master Bob’s eyes. He felt ashamed, having fled the observation room so quickly. He didn’t think the rest of the student group had left at all. That only seemed to make things worse. “Re’lar Talin mentioned that one of the E’lir was having difficulties,” Master Bob said, conversationally. “This, of course, was after some of the other E’lir were trying to tough it out, and then threw up in the observation room.” Startled, Kevan looked up, and into the Master Physicker’s dark eyes. Master Bob, it was said, could project calm and reassurance, or utter irritation, depending on which side of him you got. Most of this term’s class had seen the irritated side of Master Bob, with things getting worse as the term wore on and there was no sign of the skindancers in their midst. (Except Jenali, Kevan’s mind reminded him—Jenali, if rumours were correct, driven mad either by Naming or by a skindancer and you never did know, did you?) At the moment, Master Bob seemed as calm as the courtyard pond on a still day. “There is nothing wrong with knowing your limits, E’lir Kevan,” Master Bob went on. He held out one hand. “There is a reason why Re’lar Talin told all of you where the washroom was. I expect students in my Medica to know their limits; to know when they cannot perform a surgery, or a procedure, to know when they cannot carry on.” He held out the other, a gesture of balance. “I also expect students in my Medica to be willing to work past their revulsion, or their own squeamishness. Like sympathy, physicking is not for the weak. This is your first time in my Medica, doing observation, am I correct?” Kevan nodded quietly. “Well, you won’t be the first E’lir to throw up while doing observations, and you’ll be far from the last E’lir to be doing so,” Master Bob stated. “What you have to decide is if this is something you can handle, or learn to deal with. And if you cannot…” He shrugged. “There are worse things in the world than walking away with a class or two in my Medica.” He gestured. After a moment of blank confusion, Kevan handed him back the canteen. “Think about it, E’lir Kevan. And now, I believe Re’lar Talin should have finished handling the rest of the E’lir batch and will be looking for you.” Kevan knew a dismissal when he heard one. “I’ll get back to the observation room, sir.” He ran his hands under cold water from the tap, and then splashed some of it on his face. Water, running like the Omethi. Unperturbed, unchanging, except in the way that water changed, from moment to moment. One of the interpretations of the Lethani argued that past was an illusion, and the future was an illusion as well. The only thing that was real was the present. The only thing the water knew, Kevan thought, was the here and now. He held on to that in his mind, and kept his composure. “Thank you, sir.”

[TAG: RP, 443 words, ANALYSIS, 618 words] [OOC: Elevations depend on the EP filed the previous Turn. In the case of M1 Elevations, they're based on your pre-game EP, i.e. submissions EP. Either: A. Everyone didn't submit for one particular field (includes a variety of sub-scenarios including a mixture of art, music, and essay submissions, and the GMs RNGing EP for those who had gone art or music or didn't submit at all, but that one field didn't get any love according to RNGesus), or: B. One of the non-elevated players who was voted on: <Archer, Drake, Mat, Szeth, Steel> had to have lost EP to a total of zero EP while offsetting the DP they had. The thing is, we know there are several constraints here: Crossing out Szeth and Steel as they both elevated, thus not our problem EP in a Master's field can only cancel out DP from that particular Master. Each Master has a total of 3 DP, but may assign fewer to a student since it's purely RNG. For Archer, Drake, Mat to be brought on the Horns, they had to have accumulated a net minimum of 5 DP [=15 DP] For Szeth and Steel to not be brought on the Horns, they had to have accumulated a net maximum of 4 DP or less. [=8 DP] They also cannot be at 0 EP as they can't have elevated if so. The total DP assignable is 27. All DP will be assigned while Masters are NPC. Note that 15 DP (minimum for Archer, Drake, and Mat to have had) + 8 DP (maximum for Szeth and Steel to have had) gets us a total of 23 DP. We still have 4 missing DP! If we presume that Szeth and Steel (in particular) accumulated less than 4 DP, then Archer, Drake, and Mat especially have to account for the missing DP. Based off the rules, we can surmise an upper ceiling of 7 DP for Archer, Drake, and Mat. This is because: There's a very big gap between 7 DP and 8 DP in terms of the likelihood that all charges would be dropped. So at maximum, it's likely we can assume an average of 7 DP. That's more than enough for EP, depending on luck, from a Master to be burned away, resulting in zero elevation. Tbh also none of this matters to Village, so curious why that's a hole you're catching your brain on, but then, my fault too since I think this was interesting to game out All of this could easily be wrong because probability is whack sometimes. Cr: @DrakeMarshall for basic formulation, expansion/suppositions my own.] [OOC: oh ok smhhhh everyone wants credit for ponzi schemes these days] [OOC: Reread bits of MR64 and actually I'm not sure I want to vote TJ anymore. It is time to offer my very SE blessing to Archer, Ash right now.] [Less OOC: I am lodging a complaint against Jincs for scandalous offenses against any decent sense of chronology! Tehlu only knows one day lighting as in the tales of Tarbolin the Great will smite them from the hallways of Mains and their classmates will no longer have to deal with the daily assault on anachronistic integrity!] [OOC: Ngl the Ash vote is a gut vote - I don't feel as confident of Steel anymore, having forced my tired brain to go through LG94 and LG86 all over again. I would probably be willing to be talked into Sart as well as I'm not very happy with a V!read of Sart being predicated on a TWTBAW sort of line. IDK. Kind of too tired to revise him and unfortunately tiredness will be my default state this week.] [OOC: ...I'm going to keep agonising about this even when I shouldn't, aren't I >>] xxvi. sunlight It had been a long, tiring day of classes: Master Bob’s practical at the Medica, the Siaru class he was taking because Kevan’s Siaru wasn’t very good and while Aturan was the lingua franca in all the remnants of the Empire, the Cealdish tongue was the runner-up, and then Master Anders’s class, and he still had an evening tutorial with El’the Aksel, though Kevan was so tired it felt like a heavy fog had descended on his brain and nothing else was really making sense anymore. Mains, if you thought about it, was haunted by the weight of the immense history it carried. Rooms were bricked off, and it was easy enough to run into dead ends here and there. But some of the passageways had open windows that could be navigated, and Kevan slipped through one, carefully, and landed quietly in a small, open courtyard with an old oak tree. There was a bench there, ancient, wood worn smooth, roughened in places where generations of students had carved their initials into it. Kevan hadn’t bothered, so Soren had done it for him. It felt…pointless. Pretentious, maybe. Why did you need to scream your existence against the amnesia of history? They were here, once. Living, breathing. The rest was history. And they weren’t anybody in particular. None of them was the next Kvothe, Tehlu be thanked. Sometimes, Kevan wondered if what had gotten to Kvothe was the weight of his own expectations, the weight of his own legend. Devan Lochees’s work was immortal, and Kvothe had wanted his story told, but the original text was all but lost, and all they had left was Rothfuss’s serialisation of the ur-text, the popular books known as the Kingkiller Chronicles. You could allow yourself to wonder about the ur-text that was lost, about what had been said, mistranslated, retranslated. Names in the wood, carved there, sinking deep. Spreading roots. The sunlight was a soft, regretful yellow, and warm against his skin. Kevan drew one long breath, breathing deep, feeling the wind reach into the core of him. One breath, and then another. And then the next, and the one after that. You had to take those moments, to sit there, to drink in beauty. Even if it was the particular gold of sunlight, the regretful shade of metheglin in the tavern light, the hour before a long walk back to the University in the dark of a moonless night, time enough to address the ages, history, all of creation. Kevan sat on the bench, and let the sunlight into the tired, empty spaces in his being. Allowed it to move through him, and felt refreshed, renewed.

[TAG: RP, 441 words] [OOC: You consider STINK to be one of two people keeping the thread running?] xxv. splint Kevan said, “I don’t think that’s how you’re supposed to be doing it.” Master Bob—looking increasingly harried as the term wore on, which suggested something else perhaps, wheels within wheels, forces they knew nothing about, and again, the mind went to Jenali, Jenali who had broken, and gotten crocked, and really, you expected that of Namers, but even so, you wondered, or the University rumour mill did that for you—was stalking down the row of students, snapping out corrections as he went. Deon himself was looking utterly frazzled. Midterms did that to everyone. He muttered a curse as the bandages snarled, and he tried to redo them all over again. Patiently, Kevan held still. They had only two more practicals before the midterm, and Deon was having a hard time keeping up with the class. He would’ve paired with Eithne, but Master Bob had yanked him aside. “You pair with Deon, E’lir,” he said, and pushed another woman towards Eithne. Deon wasn’t really cut out for the Medica. Making decisions under pressure got to him, and the more Master Bob or one of his gillers breathed down his neck, the more Deon made hasty judgements and careless mistakes. Right now, he was managing to get the drape of the sling pretty wrong, and although he hadn’t actually gotten Kevan to clench his fist about the end of the splint, Kevan’d surreptitiously done so, hoping not to get Deon into further trouble with Master Bob. “The first knot has to be against my elbow, then tucked it so it doesn’t trail,” he murmured quietly, figuring Master Bob wouldn’t hear him. “And the other end of the sling goes under my armpit so the second knot meets behind my neck, and you have to secure it properly.” “Tehlu have mercy,” Deon muttered, running fingers through his hair and messing it up further. “Alright, alright, I guess I’ll have to start again from the beginning…” Kevan quickly checked if Master Bob was near. Fortunately, he was not. “Yeah, I think you have to. The splint should be fine, it’s the sling that needs to be done again.” “Thanks,” Deon said, softly. “Tehlu, I really regret signing up for classes at the Medica, but Master Linguist says I need an extra class this term if I want to graduate on time, and Master Bob’s class was the only one that still had vacancies…” Kevan knew all about the pains of timetable jigsaw. There were only so many classes you could take, and a whole world of things to learn. Only so much time, in all the world. Slipping away, the more you chased after it.

[TAG: RP, 413 words, ANALYSIS, 625 words] [OOC: Double-posting because El yells at me if I edit votes in. Rough thoughts because I need to put them somewhere, I'm lazy to use my GM PM, and let's not delude ourselves pretending that I wouldn't have been thinking or trying to solve the game even if I'd put 20% effort in and I am going to actually put votes on someone ig. And I'm too tired to think of how to RP phrase this, so w00t here we go I guess. V lean on Drake. Maybe bro goggles. IDK. I've caught E!Drake before but I've also caught him quite a while back under different circumstances so I don't feel it is as applicable anymore. Interest feels a bit more organic/authentic than murderpuppy. V lean on TKN. Ht Drake for this, can't remember if he explicitly pointed it out or if I'm hearing Aman's voice from BT1 cf. Xino. Blatant mercenary voting ironically feels Village because he'd be forced to follow through if on teammate. Weighted with caution because TKN has some counterintuitive E!plays, but gotta start somewhere ig. Mat - nfc want to think casualness in thread a good look but also got argued nonstop by Drake about this so I guess he goes into the pool of IDK. Sart - not making sense to me therefore probably Village, have been @ about this before, quite sure he'll abuse this against me one game, what do I know, I don't have the bandwidth/mental energy to think Sart through nor the desire to hardKas this game. Hesitation here from Sart's non-engagement/low engagement with alignment but what do I know. Wonko - Point on perspective aside, feel analysis currently emerges from a Village place. Ok with V read for now. TJ - Feeling lack of WiM, not really sure tbh, some aspects of V play coming through but expecting exploit at some point, probably deserves to be chunked into IDKwthbbQ. Archer - Tough one. Feel the AA play skews V!Archer by a tad, never wanna underestimate E!Archer's playbook, but also feel the issue is that Archer's sort of got a promissary note here he's never cashed. IDKwthBbQ it is. Steel - Opening skews closer to E!Steel meta, zero presence in this Turn is making me consider if I've made a misevaluation, but reluctant to V read this early. IDKwthbBq expands again! Szeth - Sort of gut good off malfeasance weirdness but tbh I don't have a reason to lean one way or another. Man I am so tired rn who am I forgetting STINK - Good taste in games and thread PMs, shift in play, DK how to read rn. Let's just go with IDKwthbbq. Araris - Tbh I don't know & don't have a particular read. Man am I so tempted to chunk these last two players in 'IDKwthbbq' because if I have to look at the player list to figure out who you are, something's wrong. JNV - Ok nvm hope u break out soon Holy Ruin, Destroyer of Worlds And return in triumph. Ash - Promissary notes not cashed. IDKwthbbq feels right. Tentatively ok with votes on Ash, feel eh about Drake push, don't disagree about the Archer point and TWTBAW tends to be a bad call of mine when it comes to Archer so I will go Archer, TJ and call it a day. Having sort of semi-broken my "I will just uni sim life and not care loooool" schtick by actually trying to work out who I can vote on with some conscience, I will now proceed to peace out, having considered myself to have done my democratic duty for the Turn and probably all Turns for the rest of this week. Thank u RL. Someone send thoughts and prayers for the conference.] xxiv. breaking Students always got crocked. The subjects taught at the Arcanum, they were reminded regularly, were not for the weak-minded. Still, the news that Jenali had been elevated to E’lir with Master Herkimer as sponsor, only to have subsequently been crocked felt ominous, as though it was a reminder that no one was immune to snapping under the pressure of their studies. Kevan hadn’t known Jenali. A few words exchanged between classes, but they’d never really talked, and since Jenali was working in Naming, they’d barely been contemporaries. He’d made no secret of his distaste for the esoteric arts of the Arcanum. Freed from his struggles in the Fishery, his Sympathy grades had improved, but Kevan just didn’t find Sympathy as fascinating. Nor did he care much for Alchemy, or Naming, and Master Artificer had all but solicited his word he would stay out of the Fishery from then on. Some of the students whispered that there was something strange about Jenali’s crocking. Kevan wasn’t so sure. On the one hand, Naming was easily the most volatile and fickle of crafts taught at the Arcanum: the body count of the subject was the stuff of University legend. On the other hand…well, the skindancers were among them, weren’t they? Nevermind that no one had seen one, and that students were filing spurious complaints against each other, and… you had to wonder, really. Absence of evidence wasn’t evidence of absence but at some point, you either started to construct increasingly wild theories to account for absence, or you made the best inference you could, which was… Which was what? That the Masters were conspiring to send students on a wild goose chase? That the skindancers were a lie? Kevan didn’t know. Something about the news of Jenali’s crocking had lodged under his skin though, and he wasn’t really sure why. His mind returned to the paper boat, sinking in the current, dragged under by the Omethi, and he shivered. Went back to his books, determined to work on fending off the one set of troubles that he could. The midterms stopped for no E’lir or skindancer, and Kevan would be damned if he didn’t do his best. He’d given his word, after all. They’d given him a second chance, all of the Masters; well, enough of them, no thanks to Master Alchemist. He’d give up his good right arm and swim across the Omethi weighed down with a sack of rocks before he disappointed Master Anders.

[TAG: RP, 484 words, DISCUSSION, 622 words] [OOC: I'm not going to say 'respectfully' because that would be insincere - why is this my problem? My RP makes thread offers. If people aren't interested in PMing me to arrange to RP together, or aren't interested in building off the classes, that's not my problem. I patently created offers at the very start during M1 which were ignored - Drake at least had Ash pick up on his. If people aren't interested in engaging, that's also not my problem, as I get on just fine on my own, and it's not my job to hold up your RP. The first rule of improvisation is 'yes, and' and if all of you need schooling in RP etiquette, it's frankly also not my job. I don't really give a damn about your financially-motivated vote. I do object to the fact this reason is blatantly wrong-headed and insists I take responsibility for what should be collective responsibility. Not for the first time, I've had it up to here with this game expecting me to hold things down for everyone in terms of analysis and now, apparently, RP as well just because I happened to rand Village. And no, nobody tell me that is bloody unfair to y'all - take a look at the blatant inactivity across LG94 and later LG95 and tell me I wasn't holding things down. If you don't want to post and RP, I'm certainly not going to stick around and hold my 50k goal hostage to your collective lack of desire to show up and RP. (No condemnation to players who don't want to RP - I get that it's not everyone's schtick but I strenuously object to the claim it should somehow matter to me that I'm here to collectively build some cohesive RP atmosphere. No. No, I'm not here to do that, and it's legitimate that I don't care for it.) If I came here to RP and then started complaining no one wanted to RP with me or to help me build on my RP, people would say I'm being unfair to them. Well, I came here to RP and I'm holding it up on my own so I don't need to be indebted to or dependent on anyone to do it for me. In fact, it would be unreasonable of me to hold my personal wincon hostage to everyone else's schedule and desire to RP. Not really sure what you have to object to that.] xxiv. mending Soren took a sceptical look at the broken halves of his reed pen. Kevan read the answer in his hesitation, in the slow cadence of his voice, the moment Soren started speaking. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I could inscribe both ends of the pen, but with sygaldry, you always need a full set of runes in order to attach anything to each other, while making sure that the forces are dampened so that the two halves don’t destroy each other, which takes more runes. And that doesn’t include compositional worries, at which point you need to be sure of the composition, and then potentially add even more runes. Which your pen might not have room for. Where possible, you’re better off using glue. Which I could do, but you might want to talk to someone who specialises in Alchemy or Chemistry first, see if they have any sealant that we aren’t using in the Fishery.” At least Soren hadn’t told him to get another pen, Kevan thought, and he’d appreciated that greatly. So he went looking for Percyl. He’d talked to the other E’lir a little, between classes. Their schedules hadn’t really overlapped very much, but Kevan’d seen him around, and he knew Percyl was taking Alchemy classes, which more or less qualified him, in Kevan’s book. Finding Percyl though, proved to be a challenge. He asked around in several classes in Mains and in the Mews, and even poked his head into the Archives. But it was midterms season, which meant no one knew where anyone was, and he wasn’t able to get hold of anyone who seemed to know where Percyl was, much less Percyl himself. Eventually, Kevan gave up and went back to Soren, who dragged him off to go see Sathel, from Master Anders’s class. As it turned out, she worked in the Fishery but knew of a transparent alchemical glue that dried transparent but hard as steel, and applied the tenaculum to both ends of the broken pen, dipped it in some metallic dust, and then let both halves dry, so the middle of the pen appeared to be a resin with glittering flecks all over. “There you go,” Sathel said, matter-of-factly. “You can’t hide the fact the pen is broken, but you can make the breaks beautiful.” “You’re poetic today,” Soren noted. “As if you aren’t, always,” Sathel retorted. “And well, there’s function, but there’s also beauty. What’s the point in making solutions that aren’t particularly pleasing to the eye? The aesthetics should matter too. Well, if that’s it, I have a project to work on…” He knew a dismissal when he heard one. He thanked her, offered help with Master Anders’s midterms, even though truth to be told, Kevan was feeling less than confident in it himself. She agreed, which made him feel better about the lengths she’d gone through to fix his pen. Edited to add: [OOC: Final rejoinder. I live and work in a timezone that gels very badly with most NA players. This has been the subject of consternation previously, such as in MR56, where Aman and I didn't have a PM but had enough timezone overlap to actively solve in thread together. One way or another, this game's playerbase is predominantly NA. Given the tempo in recent games, if I wait for any NA player to get on and work with me here, I'm more likely to die of old age. Add more time if we stipulate PM coordination for RP, whether IG or OOG, since that especially requires the other player to log back in and have time to read and then compose a response. That works so good in a 36 hour Turn! (Note: bluetext in PMs is allowed for strictly RP coordination only.) Maybe you'd like to consider that for those of us who want to do things, live our lives, also RP, and play in a RP-centric game, cannot afford to have our RP held hostage to the vicissitudes of NA players, much less their schedules, and the fundamental timezone incompatibility. I'm fairly confident an NA player would feel the same about being held hostage to my timezone and scheduling. I'm done here.]

[TAG: RP, 404 words.] [OOC: Np, will be me over the next couple of days due to conferences.] [OOC: I am really motivated? I'm aware it's chancy the longer the game drags as I'm a perennial Elim target and I certainly don't want to make the Elims feel bad about killing me either as this wouldn't be fair to them so I'm pushing as hard and fast about hitting my personal 50k goal as I can to get it and die peacefully. As for why the 50k target - it's a white whale and a fun/weird target to set myself in an SE game and there's been enough said about Village dependence on me playing hardcore from...LG94, LG95, and probably Ash writes a whole dissertation about that, Drake certainly did. I don't want to be forced to hardcore engage, optimise, and play my usual Village workhorse style so the 50k target is extravagant enough combined with the setting and RP incentive that I could see myself doing it rather than having to once again carry half the Village analysis and strategising on my own. Also a healthier way to engage with the game in some ways since being the Village workhorse is often very stressful at some point. Even if the Elims kill me this Turn, I'll at least have beaten Hael's record for tuition reduction, which will be something I can at least say I did. Anyway you can take or leave this bit as you like; I'm just contextualising my approach to the game and it's valid to say E!me would have to say the same thing, I'm just pointing out that crunching this sheet amount of words does take time and effort, and bandwidth. I did say I was prewriting the RP, which is why the posting rate is high: I did not prewrite before the game, but I did spend last evening prewriting a decent chunk that I'm posting, and allowing myself to just write or expand on 200-word episodes allows me to have some wordier segments and less wordy ones. As I mentioned, and I wasn't fibbing, I'm on about 20.6k at the moment so I have a decent backlog to just keep posting.] [OOC: I think my point is that Elims not having a kill is a potayto/potahto difference - given insanity is a softkill, arguing you feel badly about targeting a player feels like it comes from a mindset of kill hunting nevertheless. I would certainly not expect E!you to say insanity in the thread, given that targeted insanity is fundamentally an Elim ability!] [OOC: Point taken. But that's after you get another Name, I would think. Probably why you said next Month, but Wilson has also just confirmed that she would require Wind and another Name in conjunction, if not a specialist Name, in order to allow a kill.] xxiii. protection Strange to find solace in half-remembered knots, in the middle of the midterms. But—with all the rumours flying of students who’d been crocked, students who seemed fine, and the knowledge that this was what the skindancers did to you, they sabotaged you, got inside your head somehow, drove you insane, got you crocked—well, you did what you could. El’the made grams, and there was a small but healthy black market in those items. Master Artificer did what he could to clamp down on it, but that was the way of human fear. Stressed by the exams, by whispers of crocked students, Kevan found himself stranding wire, rawhide, cord, and slowly shaping the knots his grandmother had taught him. Heard her whisper—no, not like this, guiding his fingers into the intricate patterns that spelled safety, protection, peace. Peace he added, especially because it seemed appropriate, in the hustle and bustle of midterms, the time when all students were fretting their heads off. That made three—the traditional number was six. Six balanced things, his grandmother’d said. He made the knot for shelter, which was distinct from safety, protection, because of a characteristic double-loop near the terminus of the knot, and it was left-slanting, to attract malfeasance and misfortune. The luck knot came next, left-slanted as well, because it was meant to siphon misfortune, but with the v-shaped knot on the top and on the bottom, merged so it looked like a star or a budding flower. It wasn’t enough to siphon misfortune; you had to capture luck, encourage it. Folk traditions and superstitions, Kevan’d told himself, even as he’d learned sympathy, and gotten a taste of sygaldry. And yet. Strange what things the mind turned to, for solace in troubled times. He wondered if that was what his grandmother had felt, stranding his cord. Story knot after story knot. The final knot, to seal it all: Happiness. Always happiness. It was the knot he remembered the best, the one that took shape the easiest beneath his fingers. He set aside Soren’s cord, and began stranding the next one for Eithne. You did what you could, in these troubled times. Perhaps he was better off studying. Perhaps it wasn’t a gram. But you did what you could, and you hoped, and if Tehlu was merciful, if God was kind, well. Perhaps you and those you cared for would live to see the dawn. And pass your midterms. Edited to add: [OOC: Ngl I loled.]

[TAG: RP, 1026 words, analysis 264 words.] [OOC: Fair enough, and sorry - I did get fairly incredulous as it's a two page thread at the moment, and honestly two page is pretty sad given memories of how more active SE has been in its heyday. I have mixed analysis in, yes, but I've stopped because I can't keep up with the pre-writing, and after having been tasked with counting my own analysis (*cries*), I've tried to demarcate more clearly for the GMs's sake. Either way, you'll know if there's analysis - that's the point of the tags. Would definitely like to have a RP partner, though I'd rather defer planning to PMs ] [OOC: I'd argue it's functionally a potayto/potahto difference, seeing as Insanity also advances the Skindancer wincon, and Insanity locks you in the Crockery where no one can interact with you and you can't do anything unless someone insane enough blows up the Crockery (I've worked out how to do it while trying to preserve as many lives inside as possible) but I can't quite line up the skills I need to get it done, hence my asking for co-conspirators at the start of the game. (Yeah this was Operation Daybreak.) But also I'm not sure it should be done: doing so would benefit both the Village and the Skindancers and it would be a right mess. There are...considerations I don't wanna go into in detail in the thread, and I dunno if it's better to die with them since the SDs will probably ask the GMs about it. Sure, you can break out, but given it's a d20 roll and only a d10 if you know five names, it's de facto jail for most players and from a Village wargaming perspective, it's better to be conservative enough to regard it as a jail/de facto kill. I'm assuming that using Wind to kill is minimally chancy, given the action types associated with Wind. Having wargamed a bit about Naming scenarios with the GMs for Operation Daybreak, the sense I get is that you're encouraged to use the appropriate Name for the appropriate task, otherwise it gets chancy. But I'll defer to players like you and @Araris Valerian, who do more with Naming than I have.] xxii. drabs “Have you ever wondered,” said Jahan, conversationally, “Why this damned University keeps getting targeted over and over again by skindancers?” “To be honest,” Renlin said, “I’ve really just been trying not to get killed. Have you heard about Master Anders’s logic midterms?” “We’ve heard about it at least eleven times already,” Owyn snarled. “Well, you can hear it again,” said Renlin, mulishly. He set down his reed pen, and folded his arms across his chest. “So, my roommate in the Mews did logic under Master Anders, oh, two terms ago. And he tells me Master Anders sets this utterly insanely trollish midterm. You think, oh, well, it’s easy, it’s just ten bloody questions, right?” “But it’s a trap,” Kevan finished, for him. “Yeah, it’s a trap alright,” Renlin said. “Thing is, Master Anders sets really subtle questions. My roommate gets a group of E’lir specialising in Rhetoric and Logic. Figures that with the bunch of them, all elevated by Master Anders, they should be able to work together and get a great result on the exams, collective genius and all that.” “Sounds more like collective stupidity, given how it turned out,” Melke said. He was an E’lir studying in the Medica. No one had quite figured what had possessed him to sign up for Master Anders’s class. “That’s one way to put it,” Renlin said, sourly. “One of them didn’t want to do it, said it was too much work. So he sits there while everyone else tries to work out the correct answer to the question, and ends up rolling a die for the answers to the questions. And guess what?” “He tops the class,” Jahan sighed. “What’d it be like, to have that kind of luck?” “He tops the class,” Renlin echoed. “And he does it by scoring three points, one point higher than the collective minds of the rest of Master Anders’s E’lir, which is a pretty sad state of affairs, either way you look at it. The point is that we’re all probably going to die anyway, whether to the skindancers or in the midterms.” “Well, but the skindancers,” said Jahan, doggedly. “Listen, I think I’ve figured it out.” “Jahan, I don’t think anyone here particularly cares about skindancer psychology,” Owyn drawled. “They want to murder us or wear our skin like a cloak.” “Or sabotage us, and drive us utterly insane,” Kevan muttered. “Or that,” Owyn allowed. “I don’t really think any of us care to know more about the workings of utterly depraved minds.” “You’d think so,” Melke spoke up. “But that’s why it’s interesting, isn’t it? The curiosity is in the deviance, in whether skindancer psychology maps well onto what we’d think of as normal human psychology.” “And the Medica student speaks.” “Well, maybe they’re vicious and they want to kill us all.” Sathel sighed and closed her textbook with a definitive thump. “I think they’re here to destroy the Arcanum,” she said, simply. “That’s it. A fully-trained arcanist is powerful, and the Archive probably hoards Fae lore. They don’t want that out in the world.” “Are we powerful enough?” Renlin wondered, quietly, giving voice to the question on everyone’s minds. Kvothe the Bloodless was the stuff of legend; lightning on a clear blue day. The sort of bright star that burned once every ten generations. The rest of them…they were nothing. They were ordinary. Maybe they knew some of the principles of sympathy, maybe they were one of the very few who could call a single Name. “The University has stood against the Fae before,” Kevan pointed out. All thoughts of the books were forgotten. But he knew, even as he said it, that the past was one thing. The present and the future were another thing altogether. “That’s a fallacy of generalisation,” Renlin said. “You can’t induce the state of the future from the state of the past.” “Maybe not,” Kevan countered, “But you certainly can formulate an inference based on the past. It might not meet the threshold of deductive logic, but that doesn’t mean the inference isn’t valuable.” Renlin acknowledged the exchange with a nod. “Well, the point is…you know what the Masters say.” He did. Always, always the comparison to the glory days, the golden days, the days when the arcanists striding the hallways were each legendary in their own right, the dilution of the University over time. But Kevan couldn’t bring himself to care, to feel sorry about it. He knew his own inadequacy intimately: he just didn’t believe that the University had become worse off. It had become more human. It had turned away from chasing at the wind to seeking answers to lived, human concerns. And he couldn’t fault that turn, couldn’t see anything wrong in it. And if the Fae destroyed them? Asked that small voice in his head. What then? “We all know,” Owyn snorted. “Tehlu’s sake, you’d think they were permanently attached to Kvothe, longing and dreading for the day they’ll find the next one.” The name that had become both praise and curse at the University, even now, when they were so long removed from the days where Kvothe had once walked those halls. “Honestly,” Jahan said, breaking the silence that had fallen, the silence that always seemed to fall the moment anyone at all uttered that name, “I was just thinking that maybe the problem is they don’t hand out drabs so often anymore. When was the last time any of you handled a drab?” “Couple of days ago, playing corners,” Owyn said. “Well, apart from that. We know the Fae can’t abide the touch of iron. Maybe if we put up holly and iron all over and paid for everything in drabs, they’d run off from how much iron we’re working with.” “Or they’ll just call the wind and smite you,” Renlin scoffed. “Or use some sort of Fae grammerie to murder you, whatever that is. And then we fail the midterm and Master Anders kills us too. No thank you.” He turned back to his textbook. “Anyone got a solution for the fourth question on page 53? I can’t seem to close the tree.”

[TAG: RP, 523 words] [OOC: Not really sorry, and sure, you do you Certainly, E!me would have so much bandwidth to focus on hitting 50k words, let alone the amount of output I've been producing in raw, pure RP without analysis, which absolutely must be read to keep up with the thread. Talking about it feeling bad to kill me until I hit 50k sounds like a Skindancer complaining about kill targets to me, so: Wonko, Wonko - barring Assassins, most Village players won't have an access to a kill this early. Come back to me when you have an actual suspicion.] xxi. iron “Pay up,” Owyn said, grinning maniacally, and Kevan sighed and pushed the last counter towards the other student. Owyn yelped as the iron brushed his fingers, and there was a loud crash as three students all simultaneously flipped the table at once. Kevan realised his clasp-knife was in his hand and he didn’t even bloody know how to use it, had never been in a knife-fight before, back in Yll, they taught you the sling, and if you fooled around with the shepherd’s lance a bit, you learned the staff, but he had neither here, and his blood was pounding in his ears, he felt simultaneously the terror of utter vulnerability and some emotion teetering precariously between a scarlet mist of rage and utter horror— Owyn dropped the drab, and his fingers were unmarked. “Gotcha,” he smirked, and then Kevan really did want to stab that bastard, just for that crap. “Tehlu’s bloody balls, Owyn!” Jarvik snapped, crossly. Soren shook his head, and his knife disappeared back up into its sheath. He’d taken to carrying that long knife around ever since he and Owyn’d begun to attend the scriv classes in self-defense. Kevan’d thought about it, but it’d been so bloody hard trying to make the timetable juggling work out—not without costing him the class in medicine he’d already studied half the term for, so he’d shrugged and figured he’d do it the next term. If they were still around, by then. If the skindancers hadn’t thoroughly screwed them all over. You took risks, all the time, in life. Big risks, like leaving your island home and travelling to a University you’d only ever heard about, never seen. Small risks, like playing corners with Owyn, Jarvik, and Soren. Risks like sending the Masters an appeal that was either borderline rude, utterly insane, extremely bold, or a combination of all three. “Not the sort of thing to crack jokes about right now,” Soren said, slowly. “Everyone’s jumpy right now, Owyn.” Everyone’d been told about holly and iron, but Kevan would’ve bet his midterm grades that most of them were still going to struggle to recognise skindancers when they saw one. And this was on top of the looming threat of Admissions, with nearly half the term already gone, and midterms, and all the normal worries that a student at the University had. No, he wasn’t sure skindancers were at the top of his list of worries right now. But damn Owyn to hell all the same. “Right,” Owyn said. “Sorry, everyone. I won’t do it again.” “And you need to stop playing with that,” Soren said, looking over at Kevan’s knife. “At least you know how to hold it, but a clasp-knife’s a liability in a fight.” “It locks,” Kevan pointed out, unaccountably stung. “A locking mechanism is a point of failure,” Soren pointed out. “No matter how good the engineering is. It’s not something you want your life depending on.” Reluctantly, Kevan nodded. “I’ll get a sling,” he said. He shoved the clasp-knife back into his pocket. Probably see if he could get iron bullets made for it. If he had the time.

[TAG: RP, 480 words] [OOC: smh where are the NAs when u need them smhhhh] [OOC: Don't disagree it's reasonable, do feel it's rough with current disciplinary thresholds. But reiterating I never played KKC and I notice past games started very low tempo.] [OOC: Gonna be on conference for the next couple Turns so participation will be rough. Not sure if I need to talk to the GMs about my plans to idle out in the game. If I start ignoring you in PMs, that's why >> Guess who's on 20k words now though ] [OOC: Two Masters cannot elevate the same player - the GMs RNG for which Master elevates the player. The thing is, due to a small quirk of EP filing, the results this cycle don't have anything to do with how EP was filed. That's for this Month (along with the remnants of EP anyone has based off M1 results.) M1's elevations were entirely based off submission. This entails that there's one field no one made any submissions for.] xx. snapping The loud sound, and the sudden jolt of pain startled Kevan out of the haze of scribbling in his notebook and then referencing the text he was reading. He opened his hand, and watched as a thin line of blood appeared. He’d applied too much pressure on the reed pen, and it’d snapped, cleanly, in the middle. Annoyed with himself, he shook out his hand, and stared at the snapped halves of the reed pen. He couldn’t particularly say it was a favourite, and yet… It’d been the first pen he’d picked up when he came to the University and as much as he’d told himself it was purely sentimental, well… Well, maybe it could be sentimental. Maybe he was allowed it. He picked up a rag and wiped clean the metal nib of the pen and re-examined the break. As far as he could tell, the break was a clean one. Maybe if he went to Soren or Percyl—one of the students doing Alchemy, at any rate—they could give him something to bond the halves of the pen back together. The pen didn’t have an internal reservoir, which meant it didn’t work by capillary action, only by the ink that remained on the flexible metal nib. Still a step up from the charcoals he’d worked with, back in Tirnagh. But the University prided itself as a centre of learning and innovation, which meant that a scribe’s tools were easy enough to pick up here. There were shops here that sold all kinds of pens, all kinds of inks, and all kinds of papers, from a creamy off-white paper to less-absorbent, thin sheets that made for extremely light and easy to use notebooks. The lack of an internal reservoir meant that technically, he might get away with bonding the snapped halves of the pen back together. Having cleaned off the nib, he placed both halves of the pen on the ink rag. He’d have to ask Soren later, or Percyl. He looked down at his notes and then cursed. In his distraction, he hadn’t realised that a large blob of ink had splashed right over his notes, blurring the line. Hastily, he slid the ink rag out from under the pen halves and dabbed furiously at the page, trying to save it. He blew lightly on it and fanned it, trying to coax the ink to dry. The damage hadn’t been too bad: some words smeared, half the page was gone, but as far as he could tell, the ink hadn’t really soaked over to the other side of the page, meaning his work was safe. Probably. Heaving a tired sigh, Kevan left the open notebook on the window sill to dry further, and set about to making sure he hadn’t left his own blood anywhere. Dangerous enough for an arcanist, and especially so in such a time as this.

[TAG: RP, 471 words, analysis, 405 words.] [OOC: I think the point I'm making is, there's no 'just talking about money' here, because from a hard Village point of view, that's just a fundamental trade-off between getting the tuition reduction, and reducing the (already very weak) pressure being applied, given this essentially requires dilution of at least one of two votes everyone has. In other words, it's a proposal to trade time and tempo for tuition reduction. Do you wanna? Well, sure I guess, again, not the person to be commenting here since my gameplay up to this point has been RP and method acting-based but I felt like no one else was actually looking at the implications for the Village wincon, and I've said my piece. I think the real question here is whether Village can afford to. I'm aware that in most previous KKCs, there was enough time for players to just sort of faff around the first couple cycles and wait to level up and then wreak havoc with 1337 powers. I don't know if we have enough padding here for this. Some of this has to do with modelling what happens with scaled down DP. But I reiterate that if one side just needs to target and hit successfully, we can drive ourselves insane, and we need to not just vote enough, but to get lucky with the DP RNG and then the expulsion RNG...that just seems like a rough climb. Maybe there's a factor in your analysis here I'm missing though. You've at least played this before, and there are probably other KKC veterans who will know better than I do. I certainly won't pretend my game modelling is all that great because I quite frankly didn't notice anything weird until I was trying to work out wtf was going on with Steel and Szeth wrt the Horns ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If this is a 'do this if u have no suspicions and just want the tuition reduction' proposal then yeah I guess that works I suppose but then there's the ??? about having no suspicions and not wanting to Village bread and butter. IDK bruh I will accept again that I shouldn't be telling people how to play since I don't wanna hard Village this, I just have doubts about giving the tempo to the Skindancers tbh. Also this is blasphemy shin noodles are great smh you should just dump them in curry and they're god-tier.] xix. worth “E’lir Kevan?” Aksel called out, as the rest of the class began filing out of the classroom. “A word?” Kevan paused in the middle of stuffing his notes back into his satchel and nodded. He finished the rest of his packing quickly and headed over to the lecturer’s desk at the front of the classroom. “You look…tired,” the giller said, as he erased the last of the scribblings on the chalkboard. “Midterm season?” Kevan nodded. “Everyone puts the midterms on the same few days,” he said. Wondered if he sounded whiny. It was a fact though, and a matter of student consternation, that the lecturers always seemed to find the exact same few days to cluster the deadlines on. “Have you heard of E’lir burnout?” Aksel asked. Kevan shook his head. “It’s more common that you expect with students recently elevated,” Aksel explained. He brushed off leftover chalk dust from his hands. “The move from the University to the Arcanum makes them feel as though they have something to prove. And then they half-kill themselves or burn themselves out trying to show they’re brilliant, or outstanding, that sort of thing. Really, it’s more prevalent in Arcanum students than at the University side, but I digress.” He did have something to prove though, Kevan thought. Master Anders had fought for him. That meant something, in the face of all the doubts. Master Artificer had let go of him, even though more students elevated inevitably meant better for Master Artificer’s logistics and resource allocation, as far as administrative policies at the University was concerned. He was so terribly aware of the fact he lacked brilliance, and that he owed Master Anders, and he didn’t have the faintest idea of how to repay everyone except by working his damnedest. Even if it meant ignoring some parties he wasn’t interested in, anyway. “Take a span off, E’lir Kevan. Do something, anything that isn’t reading more papers on the Lethani. I promise you, your grades won’t suffer for it, and as far as our department is concerned, you have nothing to worry about.” Except that wasn’t true, even if it was kind. He struggled with the readings all the time. He lacked the raw, incisive brilliance of Owyn at his best moments, or the stolid hardworking nature of Basil. And he always, always felt so painfully… “You don’t have to prove yourself worthy to anyone, E’lir,” Aksel concluded. “Not even to yourself.” Kevan thanked him, because that was the polite thing to do. He left, his mind full of thoughts, full of determination to make up for the missing time. Aksel, he thought, was wrong. Kevan’d fooled him somehow, he didn’t understand enough, and that meant he had to work twice as hard, to keep up, and hope it didn’t blow up in his face somehow.

I will pray to the Village gods for you that they will have mercy U_U Rather than causing something demonic to awaken in you again.

[TAG: RP, 299 words, analysis, 325 words.] If only I had the decency to be born a noble instead! [OOC: Probably but if only people had the decency to ask in thread smh :eyes: ] [OOC: To hard Village or not to... Alright: on the serious front, I feel like someone with more brainpower/more determination to hard Village this than me needs to model this out because barring us acquiring any serious tankiness, the skindancers have a much better PtV than the Village right now, so I don't know the extent to which we want to be low tempo. On the assumption of a three Skindancer world, we're on seven Turns to a loss. Keep in mind we win when they are expelled or killed, not just brought on the Horns and lashed. Unlike previous games, the Masters are handing out 3 DP each, and we're not counting the use of EP to offset DP (which true, can be dicey.) This means that until we get our hands on kills, voting such that a Skindancer accumulates at least 11-12 DP is necessary (note: this is like DP from 1/3 the Masters!) and that gives us a measly 10% shot at getting the Skindancer expelled. That's really bonkers bad, since the sabotage works pretty straightforwardly. Now, it's not as awful in a two Skindancer world, since I forgot we're fourteen players, so two Skindancers isn't as likely, but just for the maths, that world would mean we're eleven Turns to a loss. Whatever I've asked the GMs about this and am waiting for an answer as the DP situation could be pretty grim. That being said, I'm finding it hard to care, as the guy who is patently in this for the uni sim life, so IDK bruh I'm just conflicted. Kinda wish there was a version of this ruleset but without the Skindancers, like an Heirs run. I'd totally play tbh.] Edited to add: Sorry - I can't do maths. In a three SD world, we're ten Turns to a loss which is less puckery but I still DK about giving up tempo unless the DP situation is less dire. xviii. tomato sandwiches “Kevan, you’ve got to help me out here,” Soren begged. Leafing through his lecture notes, focused on the symptoms of a fracture, Kevan was barely paying attention to the ongoing argument. “Hmm?” he asked. “I’m telling you,” Valerra said, “You’re being unnecessarily dramatic.” “It is an abomination, and it should be cast into the fire.” “...commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing more than sophistry and illusion,” Kevan muttered. “What was that?” “A lapse,” he said dismissively, filing away the reference in head, though it’d amused him to make it, all the same. “What’s up then?” Soren said, “Raw, beefsteak tomatoes do not belong exclusively in a sandwich.” “Whyever not?” Valerra challenged. “Look, it’s got two slices of bread on either end, doesn’t it? That’s basically the definition of a sandwich.” “A sandwich isn’t just whatever you put between two slices of bread,” Soren objected. “And even if it were, a sandwich of tomatoes alone is just plain wrong.” Valerra took a bite of her lunch. “Tastes good to me,” she pronounced. “You see what I have to deal with?” Soren bemoaned. “Look, it’s about as appealing as a carrot sandwich.” “Less juicy,” Valerra interjected. “Good, proper tomatoes taste like sun and warmth when you eat them. Hints of summer.” “Less poetry, more taste please,” Soren said. “At least put anything else in there! A ham! Some bacon! Smoked fish! Some cheese! Anything but the abomination that is raw tomato, I’m begging you, for the sake of all sandwiches.” Kevan sighed and returned to his reading. “Sorry, Val, I’m going to have to side with Soren on this one. Raw tomatoes just taste awful. They need to be purified in fire first.” “You both just lack taste,” Valerra grumbled, in response to Soren’s triumphant crowing.

[OOC: Only if you die a donor smhh universities don't give a damn about students these days, but donate some money and suddenly they rename the whole block after you and then you come back the next sem and be like "wait my classes are in the what lecture theatre now where the frick's that???"] [TAG: RP, 562 words] xvii. knots Most people, Yllish or otherwise, didn’t know how to read Yllish knots these days, much less to strand them. In that light, Kevan probably shouldn’t have felt surprised that Eithne would’ve approached him about it, eventually. “You have a cord from your grandmother, don’t you?” she asked, out of the blue. They were studying for the medical midterm together, and Kevan wasn’t feeling particularly confident. Some of the older E’lir had warned that Master Bob set deceptively easy midterm exams, but they often had hidden traps meant to ensnare a less-than-careful student. “Yeah,” he replied, absently. “She taught me to read them, a little.” Realised a moment too late that this might have been a tactical mistake, where Re’lar Eithne was concerned. “Really?” Eithne asked, brightening up. “That’s amazing! I don’t think anyone at the University, not even Master Linguist, quite remembers how to read Yllish story knots. Sometimes, there’s a giller who’s picked it up, and makes Archivist, but often not.” “I’m not surprised,” he said, carefully, racking his brains, wondering how to beat a tactical retreat. If it even was possible at this point. “The story knots are meant to be read by hand. It’s difficult to transcribe something as tactile as that.” Another strand, another connection to a debate he’d read about in the Archives, in the Rhetoric and Logic section. The Medica had learned to remove cataracts through surgery only last year, and in some cases, to restore sight to patients who had been born blind. But then: if the blind learned to see, did they learn something new by seeing a tomato? Or were they simply accessing a new ability, or acquiring the same knowledge through a different modality? None of which explained the experience of learning to read, however haltingly, the messages woven into Yllish story knots. “Could you teach me?” she asked, as he’d known she would, the moment he’d made that mistake. “We didn’t have anyone who remembers, even in Dhoiall. The last one must’ve died two decades before I was born, and the knowledge was never passed on.” He hesitated. Difficult, even now, to explain to one as Eithne his hesitance, his strange aversion-and-yearning towards anything Yllish. It wasn’t something Eithne could understand, in her struggle to preserve and catalogue it all. And yet…and yet it was a piece of home, a fragment of his grandmother (and not for the first time, he wondered how she was doing, if she would still be there when he returned, if all he was doing was squandering time, and to what end? You couldn’t stay in the same place forever: like a boat, the current carried you onwards, and yet…and yet couldn’t you want to stay there, in that moment, forever? And his mind went to Soren, on the Stonebridge, for no reason, keeping him anchored to the Stonebridge, in case he’d lost his balance and gone over.) “I don’t remember most of it,” he admitted. “I wasn’t the best student. But yeah, sure, I guess. After midterms, though.” “I’ll trade you for help with the history midterms,” she offered. He wasn’t the best at writing historical papers; something to do with historiography and how he hadn’t quite mastered the art of juggling and weaving sources into a coherent narrative, while evaluating them. “Alright,” he agreed, with an inward sigh. “For help with the midterms, then.”

[OOC: Listen bro I'm tryna finish this RP challenge before I die ok I don't feel like I have much time left so I feel some anxiety about whether I can finish it or not ] [OOC: I both got the rollover time wrong and wanted to spite Drake >:D And anyway asking for an extension is in the uni student tradition, right? @ me if you dare, Drakebro, I do not fear u!! ] [TAG: RP, 549 words] xvi. boats There were traditions in the University, and traditions upon traditions. Some of them were silly things, the sort you scared feckless first year students with, like telling them about the fourth classroom in Mains, bricked-off, that you only saw on moonless nights with the light of a sympathy lamp, and if you saw it, then the ghosts of students past who’d been possessed by skindancers were going to claim your soul too. Some of them were small superstitions, the sort you believed in because it gave you a sense of power over the horrors of Admissions, like spitting for luck as you crossed the Stonebridge. This, Kevan had decided, was madness. The Stonebridge ran over the Omethi, just high enough that he wasn’t even sure if they could hit the river if they tried. “We’re not going to make that throw,” he muttered. “Oh, ye of little faith,” Owyn said. “We’re going to make it! Students have been what, doing this throw for years now, and most of the time, they don’t screw it up!” “The wind can foul your throw,” Soren warned. “You’ve got to watch for that.” He bent over the Stonebridge—too far, enough that Kevan’s stomach clenched, and he reached out reflexively to grab and steady Soren as he made the cast. The folded paper boat dropped to the waters of the Omethi. For a moment, leaning in, Kevan thought the boat would collapse, but then it righted itself and glided on down the Omethi and in moments, had drifted out of sight. “Hah!” Soren exclaimed, aloud. “I told you so!” Kevan stepped back, and let go. It was a warm evening, and he fumbled about for his own paper boat. “Oh, c’mon, you don’t have to worry like that, Kevan,” Soren grinned. “I know what I’m doing.” A good cast was supposed to mean luck for the rest of the term. Something that was probably lightening Soren’s spirits, as they all contemplated what the term was supposed to mean for them, with the University teeming with skindancers and the horrors of Admissions looming. Halfway through the term already, and the pressure was mounting. When it was his turn, Kevan leaned over the bridge and tried to assess his target. He’d meant for a quick, downward cast, but the wind picked up just as he made his throw, and the boat landed side-first. It bobbed up and down in the current, but soon sank, and the Omethi carried it out of sight. He felt the foreboding, deep in the marrow of him. He looked away slowly. A poor cast. Wondered what it meant for his prospects, for the term ahead. It was just a superstition, he told himself. Still, the blank, shocked looks on the faces of the others only seemed to make him feel as though he was living on borrowed time. “Well, if the skindancers get me,” he joked, “Do me a favour and get rid of them, alright? Can’t say the same for if Master Anders pushes me over the Stonebridge.” Soren snorted. “Fluff-headed E’lir,” he said, and something in Kevan’s chest tightened at those words. “Far as anyone can tell, you’re the E’lir he keeps talking to the other masters about, you’ll probably make elevation any day now, and well-deserved at that.”

[OOC: k I would wait but separate posts are a thing and also the NAs seem to be wanting to have a chill weekend so what can I say man that's fine.] [TAG: RP, 208 words] xv. omethi flow Beneath the Stonebridge, the Omethi River sang as it rushed on, past the University, past Imre. It was easy to lose yourself, Kevan thought, on the Stonebridge, looking below at the onrushing Omethi. The river did not know, did not care of the countless students and hopefuls and traders and Masters that had crossed its span, daily, for centuries. The bridge over the Omethi, according to the Archives, was as old as the Great Stone Road, older even, as old as dirt and memory, and the subject of multiple legends and bits and pieces of folklore and stories. And below: the Omethi itself, rushing on, always rushing, the water singing, and if you listened, sometimes, maybe you thought you heard something else—what made the water water, the same sort of water as rain, as the snow and ice, as the oceans and seas and clouds and rivers, all of it one, single thing that was singing. You could write a song about it, a song that captured the song of the river, of the Omethi, lively plucks of the lute, and even then, there was still something else beneath it, something written into the river like words on a window-pane frosted over, icily-translucent. Meanwhile, the Omethi flowed on.

[TAG: RP, 524 words] [OOC: RIP. Well, there is a Village use-case if you are Village and want to use your new 1337 Sympathy powers, but basically you gotta bind to your greatest suspect, so you create a risk that if they try to sabotage you, they'll sabotage one of themselves as well. 1 for 1 trade is worse for Elims than for us, so that should keep them off you. But that's explicitly where you A. want to be correct enough that they won't want to go near you (since if they know you are binding to a Villager, that's basically a freebie for them), B. don't want to be asking for volunteers.] xiv. procurement A late night, at the Stonebridge, the Omethi River burbled below as it ran onwards, separating the University from the rest of Imre. Waters touched with moon-silver. Kevan shivered in the night breeze, drew his cloak more tightly about himself. Soren held the sympathy lamp: he was the one spending all the hours in the Fishery, had even gone for doping the emitter so the sympathy lamp let out a gentle blue glow rather than the red lighting Kevan had been used to seeing. “I still think this is pointless,” Owyn huffed. Jarvik said, “You think everything is pointless, if it doesn’t involve enough excitement for your tastes. Fishery could catch fire and you’d think it was the best day ever.” “Can we please forget about the Fishery incident already?” Kevan muttered. “No,” Owyn said, just as Soren said, “What Fishery incident?” He hadn’t been paying attention. “I’m going over to his side,” Kevan said, and he slipped across the Stonebridge, putting Soren between himself, Owyn, and Jarvik. “Why don’t you work as a scriv, Owyn?” Valerra asked. “For Master Alys?” Owyn asked. “What is there to do, fight papercuts? Someone saw a scary book, help?” In the muted light of the moon and the sympathy lamp, Kevan saw Valerra roll her eyes. “In Acquisitions, cabbage-head. Tehlu preserve us, you’d think you lived on nothing more than adrenaline and impulse alone.” “What do they do in Acquisitions?” Kevan asked, curiosity getting the better of him. He was taking a history of technology class taught by Master Alys, which was terribly undersubscribed: everyone else was rushing into Fae lore, but the way he saw it, he’d heard just about enough of the skindancers and wanted to take classes he actually found fascinating. At the moment, they were covering the use of lift systems in old Modegan infrastructure, which was in and of itself interesting, and then moving on to the Great Stone Road dispute. “They’re Master Archivist’s arms-and-legs,” Valerra explained. “Dogsbodies. Mostly, they do procurement work, which takes them out of the University. Rafel—one of the Acquisitions scrivs, and Master Alys’s giller—she conducts self-defense classes every Orden and Cendling. They’re primarily meant for scrivs, and required for those doing procurement work, but sometimes, other University students sign up for them.” Owyn whistled. “It’s that dangerous, then?” “Of course it is,” Valerra said. “What do you think? They’re primarily seeking to expand the collection. Often, they’re after rare texts, which means they may have to defend themselves from getting robbed, or dealing with some unsavoury figures willing to double-cross them, kill them, and sell the text to another bidder. And that’s not including those who deal with archaeological dig-sites…” “You’ve just given him his new purpose in life,” Jarvik said, dryly. “I’m not sure that’s a good thing.” “I’m talking to Master Alys first thing tomorrow,” Owyn declared. “She could always use more in procurement,” Valerra admitted. “People don’t stay in the field for long. It takes a certain sort of personality to stick with the job. Don’t worry though, she makes sure your tuition and your belongings are accounted for while you’re on the road.”

[OOC: Guess who hit 15k words! Anyway, I'm trying a new convention to make the GM's lives a tad easier.] [TAG: RP, 755 words, ANALYSIS, 338 words] xiii. heimweh As he moved in to his new lodgings, the inn room slowly took on some of the trappings of home. Kevan’d privately been grateful to have acquired some distance from the University: as much as the thought of his own room in the Mews was tempting, the presence of other students and the incessant parties the first years seemed to want to throw was driving him up the wall. They were supposed to be here to study. To learn, to take in everything they could. He thought of Alfons’s admonition, of the kindling of a flame. The point of education wasn’t to fill up the emptiness in your knowledge, but to create the craving for it, the desire to learn. An unexpected connection there, with the thought: the giller in charge of the class on Ademic thought was a harried El’the on track for his guilder. “He’d probably get it, easily,” Soren confided, as they were playing corners. Soren seemed to know a lot about the goings-on of the University, and sometimes Kevan wondered where he’d gotten that from. “Aksel’s problem is that he never, ever slows down.” “Ademic thought,” Aksel had said, in class, “Centres on readings—oral transcriptions, really—of Rethe’s stories to Aethe about a concept referred to as the Lethani. The Lethani is central to Ademic thought, and we will spend most of this term working to understand the different readings ascribed to the Lethani.” Many of them seemed to boil down to puzzles, Kevan had noticed. When he’d pointed that out, Aksel’d asked him why he thought that was so. That had preoccupied him for two spans, until it’d come to him in the middle of drawing diagrams to prepare for midterms in the Medica. The puzzles were designed to be maddening; frustrating, even. They were meant to incite thought or reflection, to build on the student’s curiosity, to draw them deeper into contemplation of the Lethani. Kindling the flame. Perhaps, Kevan thought, you found truth in many guises, buried in many texts. Through it all, the home-longing surged and receded. It welled up when you least expected it. And it never disappeared, not entirely. The grey-patterned rug was on the floor, and the succulent from Soren sat on the window sill, though Kevan had taken to closing it when he wasn’t in. He didn’t have many possessions, and he wasn’t sure that anyone in their right mind wanted to steal a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics, or his worn, half-scribbled-in notebook, but it never did to be careless, especially with the times they were in. It got better. It had gotten better. But you could be surprised, sometimes, at the strangest things that sent the home-longing snaking back to life: the harsh rasp of Commonwealth, especially Cealdim accents. The harsh consonant jutting in at a time when he expected the softness a Yllish would have lent it. The scent of cooking from the inn’s kitchens: it wasn’t bad, and he liked some of the food you got in the Commonwealth, but they barely did anything with mutton, and some of the textures, the cheeses, were all wrong. He missed the flatbread his father made, each span. And they didn’t do butter properly at all; not in the Commonwealth. It tasted dead. It was the best word for it: there wasn’t much flavour at all. There were songs about the rolling green hills, sung to the drum and to the pipe, songs he discovered took on a different meaning, this far from home: songs to make the heart crack and ache, even if you thought people who went on about the preservation of old Yllish culture were full of it. You could hate Yllish, and you could love it. You could hate what had become of Yll: the endless quest to preserve that which was long dead, and you could still see it as indescribably precious, to be catalogued, something uniquely in your blood, in your lineage, of Adeiren, to the end of days. He thought he understood what drove Eithne now, sometimes wondered if she hated it, in the same way he did, wanted to let Yll die, to let it transform itself, to be whatever it had become, Yll and Not-Yll, the way being owned had transformed Yll under empire, into something not quite recognisable. He hung the corded bracelet from his grandmother, the length of six story knots, on a hook by the window and almost thought the room at the Gyre and Vane felt a little more like home. Edited to add: [OOC: Hmmm. Can we sort of model this, a bit? 9 Masters = 27 DP, with Drake having the highest chance of accumulating DP, followed by Archer and Mat and Szeth (tied), then Steel. Notably, of the lot, Steel and Szeth both get elevated - this is significant because Szeth doesn't get brought on the Horns, while Steel does. Szeth had two votes, so was twice as likely as Steel to attract DP. The fact that Szeth didn't get brought on the Horns probably suggests either that Szeth was very lucky, as Mat concluded, or that Szeth had pre-existing EP with the Master whose DP got placed on him, so the EP got burned. If Szeth and Steel hadn't made any submissions at the start of the game, they would start with two random EP. That probably doesn't seem very good for elevation, but depends on the EP landscape. Interesting because the Horns threshold is 5 DP, but Steel also managed to get elevated, suggesting Steel accumulated 5 DP but still had EP for elevation. ...And yeah we have eight elevations, which is suggestive that one field didn't get touched and I'm surprised by that. Worth noting as well that the lower DP has implications for the Village vis-a-vis the Skindancers - we're supposed to kill or expel them, and lower DP means it's harder to hit the expulsion threshold, whereas they can just drive us insane. Have asked the GMs about this, but this feels about as useful as I'm interested in being when I have 45k more to write ] Edited to add 2: [OOC: Christ in Heaven why. Look, unless a Physicker is also protecting you, if you are a Villager, you've just told the Skindancers that Sabotaging you will also Sabotage whoever you've picked? Like I don't understand from a Village perspective what the point of this is + it increases your insanity risk by one? Cf. Can't really see this being good to use at this juncture without coordination, but maybe someone correct me if I'm wrong.]

[OOC: I'm leaning a bit Village on them (as indicated by the RP in which I voted Steel), but your knee-jerk Steel defense made me sort of lean Evil again as I kind of E!read Steel and dk how I feel in general about your play rn so it's a wash. Can't say I'd explain them if requested, but might if I'm in the mood. Depends on how hard I wanna go this game and right now the answer is "not very." I can say Drake solicited more thoughts from me about those in PM but in thread, it kind of ties in to my /shrug about how hard I wanna push/play this game right now. I do have more thoughts on them but also don't feel it's constructive saying them in thread as if I'm correct about them, I'll probably mess with what you're trying to do if V, so I'm better off chilling.] [OOC: Could just ask me, as I'm not really feeling the mood to do extreme shenanigans this game. As my RP said explicitly, not sure how far I'd go, and this is entirely pragmatic as I want to break the NaNo limit of 50k in RP before I die, and I kind of think I might have a better chance of doing so if I'm not up in the Elim's faces and annoying them and hardKasing this. At the same time, Steel looks pretty Evil* to me so wcyd. I'm currently on 8k+ words so at this point I think if I make it for five Turns, I should break the 50k barrier and can die peacefully. *Qualified by the usual 'this is T1M1' stuff, but it boils down to a meta read: not sensing V!Steel's dgaf and I generally see more engagement off E!Steel. Not seeing V!Steel's typical tentativeness in engagement either, CBA to link but anyone who wants to cross-check can go look for the 'Steel is Village I'm not accepting anything else' post I made in LG94, or whichever number the Threnody LG was. There's probably a better comparator in the LG Fifth and I ran, but CBA to check as I'm here for my uni sim life - he did have some activity there and less dgaf and was Village so maybe that should be compared. LG86 I think. Agree this is early and could be a function of higher enthusiasm for KKC compared to another game, but that's where I feel like going rn so that's where I'm going.] xii. symmetry “Today,” said Master Anders, “We’re going to talk about symmetric and asymmetric relations.” He scribbled an ‘x’ on the board in chalk, and then a ‘y.’ Brushed the chalk dust absently off his fingers; a reflexive action, by this point, Kevan thought. He supposed it happened if you taught for long enough at the University. “Let’s test how much you’ve done the readings. Someone tell me what a symmetric relation is?” The silence that descended upon the classroom was a silence of many parts: one for each student who had mysteriously developed a fascination with the floor, the ceiling, or the chalkboard, but not with Master Anders’s searching gaze. “Just because you can’t see me doesn’t mean I can’t see you, you know,” Master Anders said. “Well then, E’lir Kevan. What’s a symmetric relation, according to MacBride?” “A binary relation, R, is symmetric if and only if whenever y bears R to x, x bears R to y,” Kevan recited. He’d underlined the definitions the first thing when the group of them had quietly gone over the assigned readings before class. He liked the class, at least. It was the one place no one seemed remotely interested in the skindancer threat that had descended upon the University. It felt like a safe haven of sorts, almost. “Good,” Master Anders said, and circled the ‘x’ and the ‘y’, and then drew one arrow connecting them. This he labelled ‘R.’ Then he drew the other arrow, back from ‘y’ to ‘x.’ This he labelled ‘R’ as well. “This is a symmetric relation. Someone else give me a simple example of a symmetric relation?” “Siblings,” Owyn suggested. “If Alys is Bob’s sibling, then Bob is also Alys’s sibling. It’s symmetric.” “Very good,” Master Anders said, and added that to the diagram on the chalkboard. “Symmetric relations, simply put, are reciprocal. That is, things like sibling relationships, or marriage. Someone explain to me why parenthood is not a candidate for a symmetric relationship?” This one Kevan saw. “Because if Alys is Bob’s parent, then Bob is Alys’s child. The parental relation only goes one way by nature. It’s asymmetric. Probably like teaching,” he added. “Correct, E’lir Kevan, though ideally, we hope that the teaching relation goes both ways. A good teacher learns from his student, just as the student learns from the teacher. We’ll come back to this later, as there’s an argument teaching isn’t really asymmetric. You’ve pre-empted the next question, which is: what is an asymmetric relation? So I’ll quickly run us through this. An asymmetric relation, according to the assigned MacBride reading, is when x bears R to y, but y does not bear R to x. Can someone give me an example of an asymmetric relation?” “Love, sir,” said Owyn, and the classroom laughed. “What, I mean, think about it. We literally have a cottage industry of ballads about unrequited love. Being in love with someone doesn’t mean they’re in love with you.” “But they could be,” said Jahan. “Otherwise, how do you explain your parents?” “How do you explain yours?” Owyn countered. Kevan hid his amusement. “E’lir,” Master Anders said severely, stepping in before this could become anything more than a small spot of conflict. “Here’s the question, then. Are there any other kinds of relations besides ones that are symmetric and ones that are asymmetric?” Kevan frowned, staring at the second diagram that Master Anders had chalked on the board. Symmetric relations were by definition reciprocated. Asymmetric relations were, by definition, one-way. That seemed to suggest… “Uh…what about relations that are sometimes reciprocal and sometimes not?” An odd thought, that. In Yllish, ownership was always reciprocal: most relations were. You could not love, without that love being in some way reflected. Everything was grammatically connected. Eithne thought it was insightful; Kevan thought it was plain stupid. “Good, E’lir Kevan. We refer to these ‘it depends’ cases as ‘non-symmetric’ relations. That is: by definition, there is no world in which a sibling relation isn’t symmetric. That’s why it is an instance of a symmetric relation. While love is a very clear-cut instance of a relation that can fail to be symmetric, sometimes, it really just is symmetric. So we call it a ‘non-symmetric’ relation. Asymmetric relations, such as parenthood, are a one-way street: barring legal fictions such as adoption and time travel novels, if x is y’s parent, then there is no world in which y also bears the parental relation to x. It is definitionally asymmetric.” Dutifully, Kevan copied the scrawlings on the board and the ensuing discussion. “Of course,” said Master Anders, “So far we’ve discussed binary relations because they are a simple case, and this is a beginner level class. We’ll talk about n-ary relations in higher level modules…”

[OOC: I am not afraid of ur @s!! I will do whatever the feck I want to! >:) Including not filing EP if that makes me happy smhhhhh >:) Clearly I am no coward!! My Shard is Valor smhhhh! who says i'm not i'm nearly at 10k words of RP already >:D if this game lasts two months and i don't die until the end u can get cooked RP but until then it's gonna be more raw than a gordon ramsey upbraiding & ur gonna take it >:( ] xii. safety One of the students raised a hand, and was called on by Master Bob. “E’lir Basil?” “Above all, do no harm?” Basil ventured, his voice wavering with indecision, and perhaps some nerves at being put on the spot, even if he’d invited the gaze of the entire lecture hall. Master Bob shook his head. “Incorrect. Indeed, the most well-known formulation of non-maleficence is the formulation E’lir Basil has just shared with us. As Arbasus writes in the Modegan Codices, “Above all, do no harm,” sometimes translated instead as, “First, do no harm.” The practitioner does take this to be a guiding foundation principle of the practice of medicine, but that’s theoretical. We’re talking about a practical situation here. Re’lar Eithne?” Kevan hadn’t even noticed that Eithne had raised her hand. “Prioritise the welfare of the patient?” she suggested. Master Bob shook his head again. “Potentially a reformulation of Basil’s suggestion, but possibly dangerous, even.” Kevan was frowning, and from a glance at the rest of the lecture hall, he could tell that the other students were just as puzzled. He laid his reed pen down on the groove of the pen rest and recapped the ink bottle. Master Bob had acknowledged that non-maleficence was significant to the physician, but had emphasised that they were looking to medical practice here. Yet, didn’t foundational principles guide practice? What did you get, that was supposed to be more important than the beating heart of medicine? “Let me help you out here,” Master Bob said, not unkindly, as the silence stretched out in the lecture hall. “Suppose an earthquake has hit Imre.” “It’s the wrong part of the Four Corners for earth tremors,” one of the students muttered, and then flushed when she realised her voice had carried. “Suppose, then,” Master Bob countered, “That a rogue Namer has called the name of Earth, and buildings are being smashed to pieces like kindling.” Laughter, like bubbles, filling the silence, ascending to the rafters. “Someone brings you a patient, hurt by falling debris. What is the first thing you should do?” “Make sure your surroundings are safe,” Kevan said. “What was that, E’lir?” He looked down at his notes. “I know you said something, E’lir Kevan. What was it?” “Make sure your surroundings are safe,” he said again, more loudly. “Exactly,” Master Bob said, and stared severely around the lecture hall. “Even in the Medica?” someone else asked, incredulously. “Well,” Master Bob said. “Institutions like a clinic or the Medica are a luxury. Under most circumstances, you will not have to worry about your personal safety when attending to a patient. But suppose the patient has turned violent? Or suppose you are attending to a patient in an emergency situation? We can afford to speak of principles like non-maleficence because we often treat patients in environments that have been secured, that are clean, and that are under our control. And we forget that this is not always the case. The first rule of practical medicine does not involve the patient. It involves you. If you do not tend to your own safety first, you create an additional casualty.” Kevan noticed the hesitation, before the Master added, “And in such a time as this… perhaps you should not be so quick to assume the Medica itself is safe, eh, E’lir Resan?” A thought that felt like sacrilege, and almost terrifying, when the Master in charge of the Medica himself admitted it, before the entire lecture hall.

[OOC: You ain't the boss of me! Just to spite u I should completely refuse to file EP tbhhhh >:) ] [OOC: Across two Turns (but as you know, the three Turn set-up is new), he achieved a reduction of 10.45 talents, so theoretically he should have earned .45 extra but as you know, it don't work that way. As I'm trying to hit a NaNo record, I feel there's a decent chance I can probably equal his achievement through raw RP at this point, but we'll see.] xi. bob's anatomy The lecture hall seemed particularly crowded. But the mood was high: there was an air of anticipation, rather than anxiety, as though most of the students gathered were eager to take the fight to the skindancers, rather than nervously preparing for the worst. What did you do, Kevan wondered, when you lived in such times as this? Part of him wanted that quiet life at the University, working on problems of reasoning, of knowledge, of what you could keep, and what you couldn’t. Such a change from Artificery. But what did you do with words such as these: “Two things fill the mind with ever-new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and steadily I reflect upon them: the starry skies above me, and the moral law within me.” How could you not wonder at a mind, at such a person, who could pen such words, who could imagine any words, any sort of imperatives at all, taking on the same force as laws of nature? How did you experience the world, think of duty in such a way? His train of thought drew to an abrupt halt as Master Bob (and there were too many jokes, really, cheap jokes once students learned about the plum bob and Master Bob’s name) cleared his throat. “Welcome to the introductory module for medicine,” Master Bob said. Silence descended on the lecture hall: immediate and effective, as students hushed and quickly paid attention. They were going to need this, Kevan thought. Everyone knew that. “I hope all of you have acquired the anatomy text we’ll be using for the second half of this course. I know it’s unusual—typically, we’ll spend the entire term on the text and understanding the human anatomy, but in light of recent events, the first half of this module will teach you to diagnose injury and to immediately take action and treat casualties. In the second half of this module, we’ll focus on making sure you’ve internalised the basics of human anatomy. There will be labs involving working with our silent mentors: bodies donated for one reason or another to the Medica in order to train the next generation of students in technique and medical practice. I will not tolerate any disrespectful behaviour. Any student caught goofing around during labs will be immediately banned from my Medica.” He looked around at them, and seemed to decide they’d internalised the warning enough. “Well then. What is the first rule of rendering care to a patient?” Kevan had done the readings, he was pretty sure he had done the readings, but at that moment, he wasn’t really sure. Looking around, he wondered if anyone else had figured that out.

I disagree with this logic because there's no liquidity - you can't spend the money anywhere else at all, it only goes towards your tuition. If you have an excess tuition decrement, you don't get more money. Regarding it purely as money earned means that you can't explain what happens when you have a 10.45 tuition reduction, yet don't gain .45 talents. Edited to add: Minimally, I'd argue it's actively misleading: Mat is asking how to earn talents. By telling him how to reduce tuition, you're not helping him increase his liquid assets, so it's not addressing his concern as a Ruh student.

RIP, misread. But yeah, lodgings should be every cycle too, no? At least I remember tuition is every cycle, but tbhhh just between us I lowkey want to break the M'Hael's tuition record in the same number of Turns Sir if anyone uses Linguistic Analysis on u, I hope that this shows up very clearly as a damned lie >:( x. music A silence descended on the Eolian as the drummer finished playing. And then the applause. Somehow, Kevan figured she’d probably win her pipes, with that voice. He chuckled quietly to himself. Of all the things to win talent pipes for, in the Eolian… He wondered if the owner of the Eolian knew. Perhaps he did; some musicians were well-travelled. Perhaps he didn’t. Too few knew Yllish these days, not even Yllish themselves. He didn’t care much for it, after all. "What was she singing?" Jarvik asked, leaning over, his voice hushed. As though to speak any louder was to disturb the impact the song had left on the room. Kevan did his best to keep his expression straight. It wasn't something he was particularly good at, which was probably why Jarvik, Soren, and Owyn always cleaned him out when they played corners. These days, he played for low stakes and the fun of it. The problem wasn't losing money, the problem was that Owyn always insisted on playing for the most embarrassing stakes and there were only so many times you could take being made to go hang Jarvik’s socks from the highest point of the University. “It’s a love song,” he said, carefully. “A love song?” Soren asked. “It’s so cheerful!” “Haven’t you heard cheerful love songs before?” Valerra raised an eyebrow. “The Rose of Reaping? Red Is The Rose?” “Well…” Soren huffed. “There’s Sir Savien—” “Tehlu’s sake, Soren! That’s a tragedy! Of course it’s not cheerful! It’s not a love song!” “Well, love is a tragedy!” Jarvik sighed. “Well, what is the love song about?” And there it went. There was no avoiding it, after all. Briefly, Kevan considered lying to Jarvik, but he wasn’t really in the mood to make up a whole song from cloth, especially if Jarvik took it in his head to keep humming it when they played corners. “Seaweed.” “Are you—” Jarvik used a word that would probably have made a sailor blush. “—kidding me, seaweed? That lovely love song is about seaweed?” “What is it, praising the seaweed?” Soren asked, sarcastically, having apparently overheard. Kevan sighed. “It’s a—folk song.” Briefly, he thought about Eithne, about her one-Re’lar crusade to keep what was known about old Yll, about Yllish alive. “It’s about courting a girl with great seaweed.” Jarvik choked. “Seaweed?” He asked again, as though the comment had broken his brain. “Seaweed?” “You’ve done it now, Kevan,” Valerra said. “He won’t be good for anything for the next hour or so.” “Seaweed?”