Excerpt from: the little book of read me first.
This is the student's guidebook for a new student at Nersinia. No one may alter or in any way circumvent the student's ability to comprehend/gain access to the information Herin, on pain of Nersinian displeasure. The only one who may curate, punctuate or extenuate is a member of MASTER staff and the Coteries given Proctor.
How to tell your Proctor from another: Here is its likeness, voice approximation and mana signature. If you attack the proctor, it may defend itself allowing for no permanent damage. Your proctore may be killed in which case you should scour this book: The student's guidebook for first year students for all the information it is worth, you may also go to the cafeteria section JB6 for a daily lecture of relevant information pertaining to your studies. P.S: bring an apple and eat it loudly.
How to tell year students apart: First year students will get a sort of leather pauldron to wear on your left shoulder with clearly legible markings denoting year visible from the front and back. Your upperclassmen will also wear markings but pretty much always on their shoulders. This is sometimes called a personal Stole and in later years often have a student's accomplishments, adapts crafting's, allegiances, and masteries. This is part deterrent and part advertisement for services. Some students take their Stole of and look like some random dude, if you kill them accidently and they are say three years your junior. Well only Nersinian capriciousness and how far down the Nersinian displeasure scale you are will ensure how dangerous or damaging the punishment will be. A good way to not run in to this problem is simply to not kill indiscriminately, but you do you.
How to tell MASTER staff from Teaching staff: If when in its presence you feel as if a thick chainmail has bound itself to your back, and your former accomplishments as small as ashen dust. Then you are probably in a MASTERS presence, rejoice, for you will most likely not see one again until third year. If you have the willpower or fortitude to try to talk to one, you may be rewarded, or it may burn you where you stand. MASTERS may simply be allowed to kill anyone and anything, we do not know what the rules are for them. It is rumoured that a MASTER wiped out an entire coterie because he was cranky once, this is unconfirmed of course.
How to tell Teaching staff from some random dude: Nersinia employs very few pure teachers, most of your teachers will be upperclassmen desperately trying to get N-points to pay for their future classes with real MASTERS. The few pure teachers are experts in their field and are sourced from all over our Prime material plane, they are guests of Nersinia and killing or maiming one will lead to your quick death. It is therefore advised if you are being hunted by fellow students, to stick close to pure teachers as only the dumbest of your fellow students will risk soul disintegration. A pure teacher will have markings as such on his left or right shoulder visible from front and back.
Nersinia, the best way to describe this terrifying entity has become: A school/Dungeon/demi plane/sentient magic item or items/God or god or gods. Gives out points and punishment. Eternally vigilant/scatter-brained and eternally unfair/just.
This place is scary, often times capricious, and always trying to teach you lessons you may not survive from. But there are rules. Find the rules that work for you, and you might survive or even thrive, bull your way with your current value, morality and preconceived notions I guarantee you will be rendered down to spell components by the end of the week. You will be tempted to group up with others to form a team, DO NOT DO THIS. Nersinia will throw challenges at you all day every day, but they will be calibrated for you: one person. If you group up, the challenges will be calibrated for your group, even while you are away from your group. If you believe someone has something to trade or can grant you a Favor, my advice is counterintuitively to meet up not in a safe space. Your elders have worked out that Nersinia has a tendency to group up sentients who spend time with each other in safe zones.
Time: As with pretty much all things in Nersinia Time is denoted weirdly. A day has 24 hours like the prime plane, but they are denoted in the bells 12 ringing bells from 1200 a clock, one strike, to 2400 a clock 12 strikes of the bell. But it is the other that takes some getting used to, at 0100 there is an unnatural silence blanketing the entirety of Nersinia for one second, at 0200 it is two seconds long. This happens until at 1100 when an entire 11 seconds of unnatural silence comes over the school. We do not know how it happens only that no sound can travel during the silence, no talking, no explosions, no pleading. Everything happens as it did during normal times, but whatever is spoken, or sound created is lost to all but Nersinia. This will take time for you to adjust to but a simple tempus cantrip can be used to know the time whenever so it's not really a problem. Remember that thing are written in the denotations of the Silence 0100-1100 and the bells 1200-2400.
Your room/sanctuary: One of the biggest boons as an inhabitant of Nersinia is your inviolable room, no one may tinker or enter your room up to including seven meter in front of your door jamb. All domination or suggestion or hypnosis spells/abilities will passively be dispelled when entering your room. You will start off with a relatively spars room in the beginning, but with time, mana, enchantment and sacrifices you can grow your room into a truly shocking space. Filling one's room with equipment, experiments and even separate biomes, is a pleasure but also a necessity. If you are say checking the mana to blood differential in a recently obtained damaged necromantic spell, you could go checking the libraries, but it might take days. If you instead sourced 24 rabbits, sacrificed 20 of them to your room for a tiny garden patch, with feed included. Let 2 breed and test the spell on the 2 remaining, and you have saved days of potential effort. This is the reason that over the years a rumour has spread that the MASTERS rooms have grown to city level places. It must also be said that Nersinia and its Students and alumni do not countenance a search or attack on its soil, or current inhabitants. Leading to the rumour that former MASTER demi Lich Yarrow have fled for refuge here, after his failed bid at godhood, during with he sacrificed the entirety of a small kingdom. Still two hundred years later most current empires and papacies have a bounty out for his soul.
There is however a flaw with the room and indeed the entire school, the grand workings you will walk through and live within each day does not go easy on sub-par enchantments. Most especially spatial, even master crafted spatial equipment degrades at a shocking rate if not kept under at least a constant fourth circle stasis spell. This has led to a strange tradition where most MASTERS do not clean out their rooms of all their knickknack's and old or abandoned research. Of course, a MASTERS knickknack may be a flask of eternal life, an entire sentient species long though exterminated or their favourite sock. The most common spell put on a room in Nersinia is paradoxically the spatial spell extend personal time. That is because of the massively spatially aspected mana currents flowing through Nersinia makes it so this complex and mana costly 4-circle spell can be cast as a 2-level spell, thus giving you a lot more time to study, sleep and plot. I personally heartily endorse its placement although with the proviso that the spell should be dispelled and recast each 6 hours of personal time spent within it. Warning DO NOT cast multiple spatial spells on anything in your room including yourself.
The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
When becoming a MASTER or 4-year student one is required to give up a sliver of one's origin soul, with this sliver Nersinia will know of your death, and your room will revert its ownership back to Nersinia. Nersinia being generous to a fault and terrifying as only the unknown can be, will sprinkle these riches through its libraries and ruins. Yes, there are ruins, yes you may pay to undertake expeditions, yes you will die. Why? Why? You’re a first year! Half of fifth years die during their first expedition.
As a student here you are expected to pay for the truly ground-breaking latest research with N-points or your own private research. But common, forgotten and forbidden (outside Nersinia that is) spells may be dug up, traded or stolen. You may also want to supplement your wealth by missions from private sentients in with case I urge you not to take a job as a researcher or research subject. There is never enough subjects and a contract as a researcher will be written in such a way as to require you to become a subject at your smallest mistake (with someone will force you to make.) I suggest procuring subjects, sentients and other, though one of the portals, the listings of their activation, duration and placement may be found on the jobs board.
The jobs board: This can be found in several places but the most certain to be active is the ones outside the cafeteria or the one inside the jobs room in the main library (whichever library that is this week). I would suggest you do not take a single job contract set on the jobs board without having at least a devil accountant circle 1 take a look at the contract. Personally, I never do a private contract without a proper Devil lawyer having given the go ahead. Ritual conjuration 1 is taught in the first semester if you take your time and practice on weaker Planarlings using the tips and circles in this book and others you find, it should keep you in relatively one piece. Thanks to Nersinias vagaries Planarlings are bound by extreme oaths here so as long as you fulfil your part of the contract and stay within Nersinia when the contracts are negotiated.
I personally use devils for contracts as I feel they, find and hide the more vicious clauses and hidden text in your favour. Devils take souls, gold, secrets and blood. But if all you have is say some slaves, you may ritually release them to a God to gain an angelic boon. Take the same slaves and have them slay each other in ritual combat, et viola, you have a demonic boon. Kidnap a child and flay its skin of to gain the eye of a nightmare prince, what I am saying is: you have options, do what is cost effective and feels right in the moment.
Proper payment: Your wealth can be in magical reagents, equipment both common and rare, magic spells, knowledge both magical and mundane, but the easiest way to pay in this place is in Chainglass chits. Chainglass chits or chits for short are a highly specialised and more important stable form of currency within Nerisnia. Some hundred years ago a mad wizard sought to trap lesser concepts within an elegant fractal perpetual neutral equation, he succeeded to a point. The sealed concepts he made was later found to be accessible if shaven down to small near indestructible slivers by high level wizards. If you hold a chit in your hand and subsume it within your mana a small idea of some concept will come to you, or you will die horribly. This gives the small chits value, as almost all students have tried this shortcut to a concept understanding at least once in their years living in the school. Now the outside worlds rose-coloured Lauftium thaler, the amber song plates of EverNever and the Spire-runes of Mordragar are fantastic, but their magic clashes with Nersinia making then unstable. As so they will not be trusted by your upperclassmen to stay solid for long enough to use. As everywhere on the prime plane, Demonic brass, Angelic feathers, Somnium obsidian, and High human coins can be used wherever and whenever.
Nersinian missions: These are missions given out by the school itself or a MASTER, they give out N-points and little else. They range in rarity from wash hallway 137b free of blood and viscera by start of third bell, teach class 1 cohort 944 telekinesis in classroom 46,91T for 2 hours starting at fifth bell today, make sure 7-year student Ordent Taiser student number 9033502881247 experiences true love within 2 years (P.S. Ordent Taiser may never know this is a Nersinian missions if he suspects something soul death awaits all involved.) This last example actually happened last year, needless to say there was SO MUCH BLOOD. It is hypothesized by upperclassmen that since Ordent Taiser was a brilliant enchantment student he grew too comfortable in his day-to-day life, and that he stopped growing as a wizard. Nersinia hates the static and the mundane, take heed of this lesson.
Faction missions: These are almost always more trouble than their worth and has to do with Nersinias uncountable Factions (warning the factions cannot give N-points, if offered immediately report to nearest MASTER and you will gain N-points.) The ones you are most likely to come across are the Phoenix society: Necromancers seeking to eradicate death, a pretty chill group who always pay on time if you take their procurement missions. The Us: Middling planarlings trying to gain full acceptance into the Prime plane through constant saturation of a prime plane natives mana. Most succubus's, incubuses and concubuses are in this category. The Main Library wars: No one knows how many Libraries Nersinia holds or has held, all we know is that over time the potency and volume of magic, secrets and lies of a library spawns a consciousness. These beings seem to wish to grow and subsume each other, but trough a quirk of Nersinia cannot do this peacefully, hence they fight for books, registers, and readers. Only the main library is safe, and the mantle of main library change every week. You may pledge yourself to a library and the boons you get are quite potent: Help with classes, missions, weeding out of deliberate misinformation, access to near all the books your library has. But you are as good as barred from all the other libraries, and your library may fall in the war making you an outcast.
Nersinian displeasure: If you pick a Nersinian mission and do poorly, I would immediately pick another mission and throw all my wealth and effort into it. If you do poorly again, I would seek to do a legendary accomplishment. Slay a dragon, conquer a demi plane or forge a legendary thing. All of your upperclassmen have seen what happens when one fails a Nersinian mission. The best thing that could happen is you get a bounty of N-points on you. The bounty system is fantastic but utterly dominated by upperclassmen, this is also why next to no one have succeeded in running from Nersinia before the drop out at the beginning of fourth grade. The bounty will mark them and its literally free N-points.
In the margins of page 3 where it specifically says how to get someone to look for hidden text, there is printed in Abyssal, Angelic, Demonic and high human.
On the death of student or at end of year, this books ownership will revert to Proctore Salt.