Vyrn quietly hugged the hallway at the prestigious Stillmere University he was attending, as he passed by a classroom discussing some arcane nonsense.
“As we have discussed previously in the last semester the local geography has a natural fractal pattern that changes how the Thaumaturgic Spectrum is seen and encounters with the local region. This is why we believe the old empire placed his throne here all those millenia ago.”
Vyrn thought to himself “I’d rather stare at the sun until my eyes bleed than learn about some long dead asshole.” But just to make sure he peeks his head inside to make sure Calist his roommate is in there, as he usually is, he’s near the front.
While Vyrn was skipping class, it wasn’t without reason. Stillmere University has a very expensive tuition, so unless the students were born from nobility or a very successful merchant house. You were sponsored by one of them. At the end of the first semester (which is the only free semester), there is a competition or as the other students call it, the stock show. There the students do challenges of various sorts for the favor of a Patron. If you don’t get one and you can’t pay it yourself you can’t come back for the next semester. If you are lucky the Patrons only ask for a number of years working for them as repayment. If you are a number of unlucky students they ask you to do work for them while you are in school. And if you are especially unlucky like Vyrn, the work you do is neither particularly “allowed” or “legal”. And if you get caught you would get kicked out anyways.
Luckily Vyrn is quite capable of sneaking about, which is probably why he was sponsored in the first place, he was able to get past everyone else in a game of capture the flag. Where afterwards he was approached by a man wearing a very intricate mask made of iron making him from the Houses of Vital, across the Noinant Sea. Being a Fetchling has its advantages. One of them is just kinda blending in to whatever he needs to. Taller and thinner than a normal man with unusually quite pale skin with hair just a shade lighter than all black with matching eyes.
The oddest part of his most recent missive from his mysterious patrons is that he needed to break into his own dorm to steal one of his roommate Calist’s journals. So of course he’s going to need to do it while the rest of his roommates should be in class. And thus he needs to skip his lecture about some garbage about the history of Decadale, the first country to re-introduce the monarchy. Who-Fuckin-Cares. While also making sure Calist is in his class.
After Vyrn delivers the journal to the dead drop, he is gonna eat like a king for a week. After a year of working for whatever house he works for, they built a layer of trust between each other, where when they give him his orders they pay him in advance. But just to be safe he doesn’t spend the money until he gets the job done.
As he was sneaking underneath all of the windowed doors to the classrooms he couldn’t stop thinking about the essay he is gonna have to pawn onto one of his roommates to do. Wondering how he is gonna make it up for them. He wouldn’t ask Calist, that would feel too dirty, even for Vyrn. But desperate times and all that, so who knows.
The university doesn’t really care about how well you do in your classes, more about if you pass you get to move on to the next. Otherwise you either pick a new path (that is up to your Patron if to approve), or you don’t re-enroll. Thankfully the university doesn’t allow patrons to demand repayment on what they spent on you, but they do have the option of dropping you after any semester, and unless you get another one in the interim you are not allowed back.
Another cool bonus about Vyrn’s patrons is that they don’t really care what classes he takes, as long as it is not obvious they don’t care about their classes. If Vyrn can do the job and maintain whatever classes he so chooses then good for him. So Vyrn developed a system. Where you have to take at least three classes a semester, and they can range from one lecture a week to multiple experiments a week. And then he takes one additional blow off class. So he has an excuse if he needs to be somewhere and an alibi if he isn’t.
So he chose The Myths and Chronicles of Decadale, the first of many classes about the countries of the commonwealth as his blow off class.
The hallways of this university are quite pretty too without the traffic of all of the students and teachers crowding everything. A white marble flooring with gold and gray veins swirling around each other. The rest of this building is made of a dark gray stone.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
As Vyrn enters the large common area that connects the different towers of thaumaturgy and the main dormitory building. He quickly takes cover by one of the abundant benches near as he sees a teacher running from the faculty dorms to the tower he just left. He hears the teacher angrily mutter “by Xiomara’s Weave.” As Vyrn patiently waits for the unknown teacher to enter the tower he just left, what could a teacher out of a class could be so upset about?
Vyrn slips into the dormitories easily, the main doors would never be locked. As he walks the familiar path towards the dorm he has lived in. Inside the dorm building is just as nice as the rest of the facility, a brushed gray stone brick. With permanent lights every ten feet or so, only allowing very little shadows, which is unfortunate for Vyrn. He takes careful steps onto the floor-length rugs. It takes but a minute for him to make it to his room, he enters quickly and checks the room to make sure none of his roommates are in. Being the mostly responsible students, they are indeed out for their classes, letting Vyrn have total access to their rooms.
Vyrn enters Calists and Rejen’s shared rooms, and searches through them for Calist’s private journal. He doesn’t know what his iron masked patron wants with it, and wouldn’t want to.
As Vyrn focused on letting his eyes change to the Thaumaturgic Spectrum of something or other, seeing the real world in shades of gray appealed to Vyrn, being a shadow-born. But seeing the spectrums of magic is a whole other thing entirely, this area has had countless runes, wards, evocations, curses, blessings, and many other channels of magic strewn about it. Causing background haze if you were to look outside while focused in this spectrum. But there is a surprising amount in Calists and Rejen’s room. With two full beds on either side, mirroring each other with a wardrobe and desk on each side, with a dimmable magical light on the side of the desk with the bed on it. Exactly the same as Vyrn and his roommates.
He focuses on Calist’s side of the bedroom, sifting through his things, with the utmost care of putting them back where he found them. He notices an odd ward near the middle of the bed towards the head rest below the mattress. Sliding the mattress down a foot reveals a lockbox attached to the slots of the bed so you couldn’t see it if you were to take a quick peek under the bed. The lockbox is warded closed but is able to be opened without disturbing the bed any further. Thankfully Runes and Wards are a class Vyrn has a particular devotion for and has attended rigorously throughout his education, mostly because the best way to know how to take something apart is how to make one in the first place.
As he is kneeling on the bed frame to get closer to the lockbox, he notices the wards sealing it shut are quite well designed. He didn’t know Calist was that capable with them. Was he given this box by his sponsor? How could his patron possibly know about this? But who cares. He starts pushing and pulling his aura around the lockbox to see where the ward is weakest or fraying. “An enchantment and ward can only be as strong as the surface it is applied to '' his teacher’s number one lesson on ward and enchantment making. He tries to obscure sections of wards from each other with his aura, trying to cause an issue with the way the runes interact with each other. He then finagled with the hinge. Eventually causing the runes to counteract themselves. The lockbox pops open and reveals a tanned leather journal with a simple clasp connecting the covers. Slipping the leather journal into a pocket within his robes he closes the lockbox.
Carefully putting everything back the way he had so many times before with anyone’s rooms he has searched through. He started to leave knowing he had about 15 minutes before this period ended, letting all of the students and teachers free for their classes for half an hour. He needed to drop off the journal to the usual dead drop, as well as find a place to lay low until the next period started, which was his favorite Wards and Enchantments.
He slips back out of the dormitory and hugs the wall around to the northwest corner, making sure the coast is clear, he starts walking towards a tower a ways away. The dead drop has only changed a few times since he started. He was never explained as to why, but he assumed it was because they were found but not reported. Most recently and quite exorbitantly it’s been a small pocket dimension between the roots of a few large trees nearby. Vyrn knew pocket dimensions, especially lasting ones, are quite expensive and isn’t sure how anything Calist would know is worth the expense of using one.
But he also knows it is not his business to know. As he makes his way towards the trees, he drops to a crouch, as he sees the same teacher as before walking with, with what appears to be, Calist. They are both hurrying to the dormitory. Vyrn books it towards the three trees that house the dead drop. He slows as he nears the surface roots that house the small storage space, he has to concentrate on the thaumaturgic spectrum again. Pocket dimensions have a strange aura about them, really good ones mask their indent on the astral. This one just hopes that no one else knows where to look for it.
The entrance is small, maybe 6-8 inches across and half that tall. But you wouldn’t be able to know how much it can hold, unless you built it or stuffed it full. The rune worker teacher Magister Higinil’s favorite example is a small disk, an iron chip sized or so, and he grabs a 10ft pole. He shoves the entire thing inside and back out again. The greatest thing about the pocket dimensions however is, you can kind of set the conditions on the inside. If you want it hot, it can be hot, or cold, or steamy or other properties with covalent forging. And it’ll protect it from the outside elements, at least as long as not too much of the elements get into it.
While Vyrn isn’t sure how deep this one can go, he knows it is at least as deep as his arm span as he places the book as instructed.