Kasimir

Y'all gonna make me break RP in sheer exkasperation this early aren't you >> Your social class has an associated stipend. You get that amount of money every Turn. Otherwise, you can go to Imre and fulfill black market contracts for $$$. If you have a good musicality stat, especially @Matrim's Dice since you're Ruh so you get the +2 musicality bonus, it's probably worth hitting the Eolian in Imre and trying for your talent pipes. If you get your talent pipes (and they can't be stolen), you should be able to get a ten talent income every cycle. ( @little wilson / @Elbereth - every three Turns, correct?) Besides that, you can probably consider going to the moneylenders in Imre, or I expect if you are an Artificer you can make a contract to sell an item you made, which should get you some cashflow. You do not get half a talent for posting: that's tuition reduction. This means it's subtracted from your default ten talent tuition: in a way, you do get that money but you can't spend it, you never see it, and if you get more reductions than tuition, you won't earn $$$ from it. You just don't pay tuition. Keep in mind this matters because it won't pay your lodgings cost for you. Bloody hell guys read the damn rules already >> smhhhhh as if u ain't Interesting. Why do you think Steel is worth defending? Erhebt euch :eyes: Ironic given what I've told you, but feel defense of Steel actually washes out to pretty Evil so...go ahead? >:P Sigh. So much for my 'don't get involved nice chill RPful game' eh. My next post will go back to trying to break my personal goal of RPing a NaNoWriMo in this game so hopefully I'll get back there >>

ix. kinsmen He knew her, even before she first spoke. That shock of flame-red hair—nothing screamed Yllish more—and he felt that instant jolt of recognition, even before she said, “Cyae tsien?” Was it possible to both love and hate something? Kevan didn’t know. He felt sick to his stomach for a moment; the longing after that taste of home, the memory of dreaded Yllish lessons, when his grandmother refused to answer anything that wasn’t spoken in Yllish. Was it possible to hate your own history, your own culture, imparted to you with desperation, to preserve the desiccated bones of something that had been long devoured by empire? “Atae tsien,” he said, and then swapped back to Aturan. “I haven’t seen you around, I think.” “I could say the same for you,” the Re’lar said, and the Yllish lilt to her voice, despite the flawless Aturan, was another brush against the home-longing, unexpected and unasked for. “I used to study under Master Artificer,” Kevan said, by way of explanation. “Oh, that explains it, then!” she said, cheerfully. “I was elevated by Master Alys and have been taking classes with Master Linguist. We probably haven’t really overlapped in classes.” “Probably not, yeah.” “Eithne Lorcaen,” she said. An introduction. “Out from Dhoiall.” Which put her as originating from more or less the other coast of Yll, towards the Reft, rather than the Centhe Sea. “Tirnagh,” he replied. Watched as she placed that on her mental map of Yll as well. “I’m Kevan.” “Braigh?” she ventured. “Adairen,” he said. Most people didn’t bother with tribe lineages any longer; not after all these centuries. In his application for admission to the University, he’d just dropped it altogether and gone with the more common ‘son of Jair’ appellation. Reciprocity: it always came back to this, you couldn’t own a country, couldn’t make it yours, and not alter its nature and your own in the bargain, not even years later, the particular aspect of Yllish grammar both frustrating and comforting in the connections and interdependence it asserted, in a nation that, in long memory, captured the way one life jutted to intersect another, the way blood ran through and between the tribes (and the Aturan generals had exploited this, had exploited tribal interests to advance their own, of course.) “What brings you here then?” he asked. “The University or the Medica?” Kevan shrugged. “Yes.” “I wanted to learn, same as you.” “The University or the Medica?” “Yes.” He had asked for this one, he supposed. “With the rumours of the skindancers, I thought it best to pick up some knowledge of basic medicine,” Eithne explained, taking pity on him. “I guess I just don’t want to have to watch someone I could save die.” That was something he viscerally understood. “I’m clearing some electives,” Kevan admitted. “But I hadn’t done much physicking and thought it was a good time to pick up some classes in the Medica.” “I think that’s nearly everyone right now,” she said, glancing at the students filing into the lecture hall. “I don’t remember the introductory class ever being this packed.” He really hadn’t been paying attention outside of his travails at the Fishery, so he took her word for it and started preparing to take notes. “Guess everyone feels the same way,” he said, neutrally. “Think so.”

viii. skindancers There were whispers of skindancers at the University. Part of Kevan wanted to dismiss them: there were always whispers of skindancers, and rumours that Seoras himself had been taken by one. (“Don’t worry about the skindancers,” Master Artificer had said then, gruffly. “Worry about your grades, E’lir Kevan.” Which was a fair assessment of the situation, given he’d come to the University to learn to craft things, buoyed by the memory of the old Aturan roads, the memory of ancient endurance, and that unarticulated desire to make something; something that lasted, something that made the world a better place.) By the time he’d pulled his grades out of their relentless death spiral and re-emerged, a readmitted, fresh-faced E’lir, there were whispers again of skindancers, and that the Masters had hired some sort of security expert to deal with the problem. It wasn’t his problem, Kevan told himself. But the skindancers. They were going to drive people insane, kill them, or expel them. He figured there were maybe two of them, maybe three. He wasn’t sure about the particular numbers, but he dug quietly into the Archives for accounts of the last few skindancer incursions. (Really, by this point, you’d expect everyone to be more prepared for skindancers. Holly and iron, neither of which he had.) (Seneca had written of duty; part of it spoke to Kevan, even as he didn’t want to get involved. It was Tehlu-cursed stupid of him: he’d been given his second chance, he was here to learn all he could, to make the best use of his time at the University, to drink deep from the cup of knowledge, rather than to…apparently, fight a war against the Fae. He knew all of that, and yet a small voice inside told him he could do no less.) The Fae preferred to act in small numbers. He dipped his reed pen in ink and wrote that down in a steady hand. This meant they acted covertly as well: by his reckoning, they were more likely to get rid of the students first than to destroy the University. At least, since they were apt to target Naming, Alchemy, and the Archives (and he couldn’t help that relief there: they weren’t interested in Master Anders’s classes at the very least), he supposed one way or another, they would simply target those fields rather than go for extra credit. If they did at all. It felt easier to sabotage or to kill or to expel rather than to speedrun the University to replace the Masters, which meant that they were dealing with nine months before they could expect to be overwhelmed. Nine months. Damnit, he wasn’t going to graduate in nine months. Wasn’t even sure if he wanted to. This meant they had to get off to a good start—they couldn’t afford to waste too much time—and that in and of itself was a whole can of wyrms. He wanted to learn everything Master Anders had to teach. He didn’t want this. It wasn’t fair. He tamped down on that emotion, realised his grip on the pen had turned white-knuckled as ink dripped onto the page in blots. Ah, screw that. At least it wasn’t on the records, or Master Alys would probably have him banned from the Archives as well. Wouldn’t that be something? Suppose the skindancers were already among them. The security expert certainly seemed to think so: Inesta’d said that some of them were probably already possessed. He pressed the pen to the paper—hesitated, and then scrawled a few names. Jincs. Percyl. (More sentiment, he supposed, than true reason to think that Percyl hadn’t been compromised. But did you really go for a crazy E’lir who was all about alchemy?) More hesitation before he added Francis to the list. Was woefully aware of how out of his depth he was. He had kept his head down the last incursion. Had, as Master Artificer suggested, focused on his studies. And here he was, writing a list he didn’t have time to think too hard about, not when he had at least three term papers due. Not when he’d sworn not to disappoint the Masters, not when the thought of letting Master Anders down was more than Kevan could quite bear. One final hesitation, before he inked the last name, a different name. Steel. You should keep quiet, and keep your head down, he told himself. You lived longer that way, if you pretended. If you didn’t see. If you told yourself you were just here to learn and graduate. But. What good was the pursuit of knowledge, if it did nothing for the world, for the place that had, over the span of two years, become his home? Kevan ground his teeth together and underlined that final name. Time enough to pursue that strand when the term papers were done.

vii. story knot No one spoke Yllish anymore, not outside of small pockets on Yll that stubbornly tried to recreate a prelapsarian paradise from the old days of the kings, before the Aturan Empire had come and crushed all resistance and smashed Yllish culture, Yllish language, Yllish memory with a warhammer. What it meant to be Yllish today was an eternity of tortured reflections in a fractured mirror, seeking to reclaim some state that had been lost to them, that continued to be lost to them, for ever and ever. Kevan’s grandmother was a traditionalist. She taught him Yllish, but he spoke Aturan with his parents, and quietly resented the lessons whenever he struggled with one of the fourteen indicative verb tenses. Almost no one could read the story knots these days, but the traditionalists kept the glimmerings of this knowledge, and part of him resented that as well, dreamed of the open roads. You could know this, could know you were taken by empire, could still be seduced by it anyway, could still turn away from those dry old lessons of your heritage, could still be turned off by the task of rediscovery, of painstaking reclamation, couldn’t you? The first time he felt the home-longing, acutely, was the first night in the Mews, with Soren, Jarvik snoring, and the strange air of the mainland, the Commonwealth. It took him long moments to realise he was missing the warmth, the hint of the sea. Dusty buildings everywhere he looked. Less space. He was walking his own road, on his way to fulfilling his dreams. He clenched his hand around the luck knot his grandmother had woven for him before he left, a small cord of a bracelet, taught him to read. Luck, she shaped. He read the next few more slowly: more painfully. He disliked story knots. Safety. Health. Success. Knowledge. And the last, because all proper blessings, he had been taught, came in strands of six: Happiness, but if you twisted the knotted cord just so, closed so it was oriented as a bracelet instead: Love.

vi. rug The markets of Imre were bustling; a riot of noise and colour. It had hit him like a sheep’s kick the first time he’d come to Imre, fresh from Tarbean. (Tarbean had been another shock to a Yllish country boy, one way or another. So many people and houses packed together. And all that noise. The sailors had laughed at him, gawking, fresh off the docks. “Try not to act so green, country boy,” one of them had said. “The cut-purses will get you.”) Two years removed from that Kevan, he felt…odd. There was a strangeness here: a distance in time that separated you from the ghost of a past self that you could barely inhabit, any longer. Or perhaps it was the other way around: you became the ghost of your future self. Or you grew into that ghost of your future. Odd, walking through the markets, knowing how much had changed. And how little had. “C’mon,” said Valerra, yanking at his elbow. “The rugs are that way.” “Why do I need a rug again?” he asked, bemused. The whole point was that the innkeeper furnished the room, in any case. Both Soren and Valerra had taken one look at the bare, whitewashed walls and spartan furnishings and immediately insisted he make his new lodgings feel a little more like home. “Or you’ll find yourself in the Crockery within a span,” Valerra’d said back then, ominously. “That exact shade of white would drive any man insane in a month,” Soren said, dismissively. “It isn’t that bad,” Kevan had protested—oh, alright, he had to admit that it sort of got on your nerves after a while, set your teeth on edge. It was a bright shade of white, the sort any travelling apothecary sold cleaning twigs for and made spurious claims about. And it was utterly bland. Maybe that was why he’d gotten reasonably affordable lodgings, at this time of the year. “Because your room right now is a disaster,” Valerra declared. “The sort that generates further disasters in its wake.” Her tone implied there was a story there, but when Kevan asked, she’d merely said something about a pair of E’lir in Introductory Reaction of Principles, which meant it was alchemy, and Kevan knew absolutely nothing about alchemy and furthermore, wasn’t minded to know more about it. Drawn in Valerra’s wake, Kevan followed, and the two of them moved through the rug market. He dismissed most of the woolen rugs as too expensive for his budget, she dismissed a fairly bland cream rug he’d paused at with a disdainful, “You’ll be crocked faster,” and finally, eventually, they both settled on an inoffensive grey rug. It seemed bland, but then you noticed there were geometric patterns woven into it, and because it wasn’t remotely colourful, it was selling for far cheaper than Kevan expected it to be. They haggled the seller down by two talents, but eventually, they left the market, Kevan carrying the rolled up rug under an arm. “I still think you could use a tapestry,” Valerra said, thoughtfully. “Or a painting—maybe something in blues, to blunt the monotony a little.” “Soren would accuse me of trying to murder the succulent,” he said, startling a laugh out of her. “Oh, he absolutely would, wouldn’t he?” She wasn’t wrong, though. Having spread the rug on the floor, it did soften the harsh sparseness of the room a little, but something on the walls wouldn’t have gone amiss. It was a little better though, and he was grateful enough for the improvement. For the next few years, if things didn’t change, he would be calling this small room home.

v. plant Soren turned the pot about, adjusting the placement of the plant on the windowsill. Dusk had fallen: out the window, he could see the lights of the University, glittering across the Omethi river. Kevan hadn’t planned on moving out, but it’d been difficult to settle his accommodation plans, especially with his status as a student so recently in question. One thing had led to another, and the next thing he knew, he had to vacate the rooms he’d had at the Hammer and Anvil since he’d moved out of the Mews as an E’lir. A year ago. Felt as though it had been longer. It was possible, wasn’t it? So much could happen in the span of a year: you could discover old dreams were dead, best laid to rest. You could discover you had to let go of childish dreams; could discover in yourself the capacity to do so, despite the pain that resonated in your chest. You could discover you liked other classes; had other talents worth exploring. Could discover that you believed in something, wanted to stand for something. All of that, and yet, part of him wondered if he would ever have come to Master Anders’s notice, had he not been such an utter disaster in the Fishery. Pointless to wonder now, Kevan supposed. But it wasn’t the sort of thing you could just will yourself not to think about or to pursue. Too many implications to the thought, after all. Too many alternate paths, down which we could stray. It was said by the elders that when a man met a ruselka, his path forked. It had not been a ruselka, that day he’d signed up for Master Anders’s classes, out of curiosity. But it had been close enough. “How about now?” Soren said, stepping back to admire his handiwork. The small aloe stuck out of the sandy soil in the fired clay pot. Kevan caught sight of sygaldry scratched into the rim of the pot and bit back the pang of—wistfulness, he supposed. “It’s fine with me,” he said. “Thanks, Soren.” “I don’t want to come back to see you’ve killed it,” Soren said, warningly. “It is a living thing. It deserves more respect than you give your Fishery projects.” “Ouch.” “That was low, wasn’t it.” “Yeah, quite.” “I mean it,” Soren said. “Give it plenty of light and some water. It’s a succulent and rather hardy so I don’t think you can kill it.” Stepping back, he scrutinised Kevan’s new lodgings with a judgemental eye. “At least it looks more like a place to live in now. And you have a friend.” He gestured towards the potted aloe. “Valerra says she’ll be by after her shift in the lab is done. She has ideas for what to do with your walls. Between you and me—” he lowered his voice, so Kevan had to lean in to hear his whisper, breath tickling his ear, “—I think you should lock your door and bar your window. And save the plant first.”

[OOC: Oh and to be clear, I'm messing around / taking the piss and appreciate the fix, hence the slightly-less OOC ] [OOC: I've stopped partway through Path of Daggers as it's a slog, but am mostly on Arkady Martine's books, then Drake made a rec I need to look up.] Edited to add: iv. beer and friends “Well, I’ll give you this,” Valerra said, “You sure know how to pick your fights.” “Pick them?” Soren scoffed. “Every single one of them except Master Alchemist voted in favour of readmitting him as an E’lir on a clean-slate basis. If the Masters were this nice to me in Admissions, I’d actually have slept like a baby the last span instead of fretting myself halfway to the Crockery. I swear, I wake up at night muttering the names of the five catalytic bindings. Zairen is this close to throttling me to an inch of my life, I swear it.” He named the other E’lir he shared rooms with. “I’m surprised Master Artificer did,” Kevan said. He remembered those kind eyes, the request to have the following words struck from the record. A bear of a man, surprisingly deft and gentle when he handled his tools, and his eyes were kind. But in the ensuing months, he’d taken on the status of a giant, a terror, as Kevan continuously made mistakes and botched projects in the Fishery. Much of it was in his head, Valerra kept telling him that. Kevan knew that. But it didn’t take away the fear each time he made a mistake, each time he expected Master Artificer to lose his patience and to yell at him. Or the deeper, more primal fear: that he had disappointed the master, or that he was this close to watching his dream crumble before his eyes like the dirt roads, or this close to being expelled from the University, even though he knew they didn’t expel students, not for being awful at classes. No, they simply raised your tuition to an unbearably high amount. All of this passed through his head. But what he said was, “I didn’t expect him to be so kind,” and really, he meant all of them. All the Masters, who had voted, even Master Herkimer, when Kevan hadn’t been remotely interested in Naming. (Really, he thought they’d spent a bit too much time glorifying the Arcanum, and a bit too little time recognising the other subjects mattered, too. Maybe that was why his appeal had struck a chord with a few Masters, though he privately suspected some of it was Master Anders’s support. At any rate, he’d accepted there was a very high chance it would have backfired; made the Masters angry.) Well, that would be a lie. He thought the metaphysics of Naming was fascinating, but metaphysics and epistemology and naming and reference all came together in a tangled knot, if you read any proper commentary on Chalmers or Dennett, and then you understood why it was so difficult to untangle. But he hadn’t come to the University, chasing at the wind. He’d come to learn the craft of good roads. And now here he was, a readmitted E’lir in Master Anders’s charge, and somehow, it felt like a new beginning. “Whyever wouldn’t he be?” Valerra asked, confused. Because he didn’t deserve it, Kevan wanted to say, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you said at the Spinning Vane, not even to friends, and not when the night was still young. Soren made an impatient noise. “Enough talking about Admissions,” he said. “I have had enough of this Admissions nonsense; we all survived, our E’lir here definitely got what he wanted and isn’t returning to his island to twiddle his thumbs so I consider that an absolute win. We are going to drink ourselves utterly stone-blind and enjoy being young and alive for once.” He stared darkly at Kevan. “No Yllish fruit drinks. We are going for proper, fine, dark scutten, drink of the kings of Cealdim.” “You can have your scutten,” Valerra said, “I’m sticking with my Bredon beer.” “Heretic!” “Utter barbarian!” Kevan sighed and rested his forehead against the scarred and pitted wood of the bar. The argument seemed to recede into the noise of the pub, along with the merry wild tune of the pipes, the sort meant to be played indoors by a warm hearth. He hadn’t expected kindness. But sometimes, the world gave you more than you expected to have received, more than you thought you deserved. A second chance. Bredon beer, and friends.

[Slightly Less OOC: Strictly-speaking, if you hate to do it, would you really do it? So do you hate to do it, or do you mean it as a figure of speech? If you mean it as a figure of speech, what is it precisely supposed to mean? If you mean something, shouldn't you come right out and say it rather than dabble in linguistic ambiguity? And thanks, I think I read too much WoT lately ]

iii. aturan roads There were old Aturan roads everywhere in Yll. Warm, sunkissed Yll, where the rolling hills met the glittering jewel-blue waters of the Centhe Sea, and—Kevan supposed—where the Aturan Empire had come, all those centuries ago, and laid down their roads and other trappings of empire, and the story knots faded away into memory. His grandmother (you had a complex web of relations in Yllish grammar; you always took joint ownership because most relations were reciprocal, when acknowledged, and even when they weren't) had the memory still; he'd learned a little, before he started fidgeting, looking to the horizon and the slice of old road in the distance. No surprise, in her eyes, he'd come to the University; he was more than half-foreign, the way the Yllish reckoned it. (You could be Yllish and still foreign: relations were reciprocal and when the old Aturan Empire had Yll in its clenched-fist grip, Yll, too, left its mark on the empire—but that is less talked about, less remembered, for all they keep the language in parts, and the forgetting covers the distant past in Yll, anything before the empire, even story knots, and their young grow up dreaming not of sheep but the University, of the city, of old Aturan roads, and life beyond the fire-burned hills and the necklace of the Centhe, tightly wound about Yll, enough you could choke, enough they were Yllish and Not-Yllish, not the way their foremothers would have reckoned it.) He had played on the old slice of road when he was a boy, poking at the hard grey substance—concrete, the schoolmaster had explained; he hadn't a guilder, but he'd stories of the University aplenty, and doled out his lessons generously—the old Aturans were masters of construction, in a way they hadn't been able to replicate, for all the pride of the University. Other roads were made of packed dirt, or stone, and needed rebuilding, and then there were the shepherd-lances, when you had to traverse quickly, and he'd learned the knack, a simple child's game, springing from the lance, but there was always the call of the road, the knowledge long-forgotten to most like the story-knots, and a far more compelling mystery. Roads that endured, long after the empire had fallen. Had placed a mark on Yll, forever, and people used the roads, for all they didn't speak well of the empire. They kept to them, and traders used them, rather than the dirt-and-stone roads. You could hate the empire, if you were one of those traditionalists. But you couldn't deny what empire had done to Yll (reciprocal, always reciprocal, even if you thought it wasn't, it was baked into the grammar, having a relationship to anything or with anything changed both of you, communally.) He had a knack for study. He knew this. The story-knots weren't compelling. The loop of roads, slicing through the shadow of the rolling hills was. And he'd a knack for the things the schoolmaster taught: mathematics, geometry, chemistry, fragments of artificing—fragments of what he'd learned at the University, drank in enough to know he had to go to the source, in the end. He left, following the curve of the old Aturan road to the Reft, called by the roads, called by the song of knowledge long forgotten that someone had to care about (and the Yllish story-knots could stay forgotten; they were half-Yllish and half-Not Yllish, his grandmother had lamented, centuries gone and no one was interested in remembering, in rediscovering what they hadn't been allowed to remember. The price you paid when you were a vassal of empire.) He never looked back. [OOC: As I said, I'm here for my nice, chill RPful uni sim game I am damn well going to RP for all I can, I have a plot arc for Kevan and believe I can keep up with this. I really miss UG, what can I say?] [Slightly Less OOC: That GPA won't keep itself high! I'm here to study, not to get distracted!]

[OOC: Declaring my utter lack of interest I'm here to live my uni sim dream life that I can't IRL because I graduated and I can't PhD, to my utter sorrow.] [Slightly Less OOC but Still OOC: Says you >:P I reject the oppression of the rules! I am here to learn, and my GPA will stay perfect! I need to go to grad school, not engage in extracurriculars!] ii. relief Kevan struggled to keep any expression of relief from his face. Not now, he thought. But that smile felt like the light at the end of a very long tunnel. Like a snapped-off plank that a drowning man might cling to. You couldn't help but feel inadequate, when you kept on struggling, and the tuition fees only kept piling on. When you kept treading water. When other students, noble or otherwise, seemed to breeze through the tasks Master Artificer set them without much difficulty. He was a disappointment, and he knew it. "Master Artificer's Despair," he'd said with a laugh to Soren and Valerra that day, after the fire, and you could say those words, and own them, because the alternative was to have them cast at you, but it broke your heart, and ground its heel on the dust of your childish dreams, anyway. Sometimes, you had to accept you couldn't get what you wanted. Maybe, if he was minded to be poetic, Kevan might've said that was the last step, the last falling away from childhood: Admissions last term, when he listened to the Masters pronounce a tuition that was so extravagantly high he could no longer hold to the pretense that everything was fine, if he just worked harder, did away with more sleep, if he did more anything, if he was better, stronger, smarter, just more than what he was, he would graduate with his guilder and be an artificer. And if he mixed the rain with piss, it would become delicious candy. If he was minded to be poetic, he could have written an essay about how his boyhood ended, that day, in the corridor But he wasn't especially so minded, and it seemed a rather dramatic reaction to events that, if you thought about it, was perfectly normal in the Arcanum. Less than a quarter left each year with their guilders. No one wrote stories about the ones who left, or the ones who were left. He followed Master Anders back into the room, a respectful step behind. But still, he felt the relief, bursting within him like the sun through clouds at dawn. "Kevan, son of Jair," the Chancellor began. "You've brought before us a rather unconventional proposition." "I know," Kevan said. "As I've set out in my proposal, Masters, the register in the Archives demonstrates at least two others: Ethas Saverant, and Mira, daughter of Helas. It cannot therefore be strictly-speaking, said to be unprecedented." Master Alys's mouth quirked. "Well then," said the Master Archivist. "How long did it take you to uncover that, E'lir Kevan?" "Several months, searching through the student rolls. The Chancellor's office fortunately keeps thorough documentation of all decisions made, and I concede the point that it was a sufficiently unconventional decision that the Chancellor of the time found it worth noting." Master Anders raised a hand and was acknowledged. "I call for a formal vote on the motion at hand." The Chancellor nodded, a wry twist to his lip, a slant to his gaze. There was an exchange there: Kevan didn't know what to make of it. Perhaps Master Anders would explain, subsequently. Perhaps not. "E'lir Kevan to be re-admitted to the University on a clean-slate basis. All in favour?" He knew, and still he could barely bring himself to breathe as he raked his gaze across the length of the table. Master Alchemist abstained; Master Anders had his hand up, he counted— A single abstention. A single one. That was all. His breath caught in his throat and stayed caught. He could not believe it. Both Ethas and Mira had taken a quorum of six. Master Artificer met his gaze and shrugged. "Motion passed," the Chancellor said. "Welcome to the University, E'lir Kevan." There was that hint of irony, there, and not all that buried. "Thank you, Masters," Kevan said. "I swear I won't give you cause to regret this." He meant every word. "E'lir Kevan?" Master Artificer said. He turned to Chancellor. "I want what I'm about to say struck from the record." "Really," Master Alys began, aggrieved. "Sustained," said the Chancellor. "E'lir Kevan. Tehlu knows I've many a student with more talent and who puts in much less work than you do. But please, on your mother's life, for the sake of my sanity, never, ever set foot into my Fishery again." "I think I can manage that, Master," Kevan replied. "And—" Foolish impulse, that. "—I'm sorry." Sorry that it turned out this way. Sorry that—he had wanted, but hadn't been enough. Master Artificer shrugged. "You are not the first to find out the Artificer's path is not yours. Perhaps you will do better with Anders, eh?" He could breathe again, and he felt lighter than he had in months. Maybe two years. "I certainly think so," Master Anders said, and Kevan swore, there and then, never to disappoint him. Edited to add: [OOC: Oh yeah tbh I'm not really keen on Operation Daybreak anymore and the M'Hael says he understands if I can't carry it out as it takes more planning than I really wanna bring to bear in my nice, chill, RPful uni sim game but if anyone's interested, HMU, as I'll definitely need help to succeed.]

i. under pressure Admissions were nerve-wracking. Always were. Every term, students clustered about, trying to jostle and trade for a more favourable tile. Not for the first time, Kevan had found himself wondering about who had designed the admissions system. Requiring Admissions be handled by the Masters, drawing random tiles from a cloth bag, and then allowing students to sell off and trade their slots... It didn't really seem like the basis for a functioning system to him. And indeed, all they had was a dysfunctional, chaotic mess as E'lir and Re'lar and El'the and students milled about, trying to sell half the clothes off their back, favours, and just about everything under the sun for a tile of their choice. This term, it was more nerve-wracking than most. Though he always fretted. It was one thing, being smart enough to be admitted to the university. But then there were expectation. The ones you had of yourself, even if others didn't really have all that much of you. He ground his teeth together and stuck his hands into his clothes pockets to keep from interlacing his fingers together and wringing his hands about. Fidgeting. Trying not to wonder what could be keeping the Masters so long. They'd asked him to leave the room as he conferred. Master Anders had winked. Knowing one of the Masters, at least, had his back, made Kevan feel less afraid. But he was still fighting the urge to pace, to listen to the voices he could dimly hear as they argued and conferred in the room beyond. Nobles, their families could afford to pay, whatever their tuition was. He'd already begun to feel the weight of his tuition, pressing down on him. Everyone knew how the University worked: you needed intelligence, or wealth. The more of one you had, the less of the other you needed. He tried. Oh, he tried. Had dreams of becoming an artificer, almost. The image of the old Aturan roads in Thales's A Traveller's History of the old Aturan Empire danced back into his mind. The drawing of the Aturan roads, still standing after the might of the old empire had faded into so much dust. What would it be like, Kevan had asked himself, time and again, to build something that endured, that made the world just that bit better, like the ancient Aturan roads, still used by traders even in places where there was only a distant memory of empire. In the Fishery though, all of that fell apart. He struggled on the projects, broke things. Then there was the fire, and the rumour that Master Artificer was just going to ban him from the Fishery for life. He struggled with Sympathy classes, because his grades in Artificery were slipping, and before he knew it, his tuition and the pressure of studying felt like the weight of a mountain, pressing down on him. One last roll of the dice, Kevan thought. If they didn't listen...if they didn't care...he didn't know what he would do. Well, he would have to leave, wouldn't he? He'd tried, and he'd failed, and he knew he wasn't cut out for Artificery, and maybe there was some power in that. The thought was...difficult to bear, though. He didn't like failing. Didn't like the waiting, either. His pacing ground to a halt as the door opened. Master Anders beckoned. He didn't look—grim. Then another part of Kevan realised that Master Anders was smiling, the way he did whenever a student raised a particularly perceptive point in class. His knees threatened to give way, and his breath crashed back into him in a rush.

Favourites? Favourite ink? We're here to talk shop!

Possible. The spare parts I have predated this pen and Chinese pens are also not known for consistency (some of the later converters don't fit earlier models) so I wouldn’t be surprised if this is just such a problem. The pen started leaking ink again as soon as I put the new nib unit in, so I probably need to empty it out before redoing the nib unit fit.

I'm starting to suspect it's a nib unit machining tolerance issue actually. This must be the third or fourth time I've changed the housing and was careful to select one without flaw this time but saw a small distortion that might be the beginning of a crack when I screwed the housing unit in. I think I might just order an entire replacement unit from PenBBS and then give up on this particular one as too screwy.

Iceland, probably.

Warabi mochi with matcha, just because I could, it's low effort, and I love the texture of chewy foods.

Update: Cracked nib unit has finally come out, thanks to the power of the long soak in dish soap, a chopstick, and a rubber band. All praise the power of chopsticks!

Not them, but I'll note I'm expected to miss over a week in KKC around the second half of August as I'm going to have to go on duty and all people who have done that duty post with more seniority have told me to expect to not have energy for anything else. If I'm lucky, my duty posting is later than that, in early September. I've made plans to mitigate and El and Wilson seem ok with what'll happen in that week. But fundamentally you also have to ask yourself what you are comfortable with committing to.

>Doubt.jpg

Not @Cyclops, but I'll note that four-packs and Cyclops being in CONUS pretty much suggests it's either Ebay or Amazon. AliExpress is still possible (you'd likely need to search Yongsheng as that's the Chinese pinyin for Wing Sung), Taobao is not the best option for anyone in CONUS who doesn't have a good freight forwarding options or the capability to navigate their arcane forwarding/parcel bundle options. Edited to add: For anyone who's confused - Yongsheng = 永生 = Eternal Life/Immortal (lit.) = Wing Sung which is Cantonese for the same characters. It's not uncommon to see Wing Sung pens marketed as Yongsheng online especially on Chinese-facing webfronts but Western customers will probably be more familiar with Wing Sung.

Also, Christ, now that's a one sentence horror story. I don't have a bulb flusher, I use a syringe which sort of has the same effect but IDK, maybe not gentle enough. Wow, that's pretty damning. Me and that Nakaya - I just can't take it to work.

Had to buy the flush, sadly. Household ammonia is a pain to import where I am. They are, but they also make sense - Japanese fines are more usable for daily writing, whereas a Western medium with the fill capacity of a Pilot 823 makes for a good workhorse. I can't say I know very much about it as the Chinese philosophy specialists at my university all had to learn Classical Chinese and I was like, man I can't even read this thing in Chinese let alone Classical Chinese but it was one of the parts I liked (When TAing, I usually had to tell my students whenever we covered Zhuangzi: "This is the best sense I can make of this, I recognise there are probably holes in my explanation but this will get you through the exam, and if you have further questions, approach me and we will Learn Zhuangzi Together or you can ask Bob* (different TA, not his real name) who's a Chinese specialist." ) Oh, yikes, but nice that Amazon sent a whole new set! RIP. Off Amazon too? I usually hear scratchiness as a complaint of Platinum UEF, not Soft Fine.

Yes, I really like the tamenuri, because of the two-colour effect. So you are become Bluefingers now? I feel you on this. Both the 3776 Nice F and Custom 823 M are really good choices. 道可道﹐非常道 (If) the Way can be expressed, it is not the transcendant Way.