Old Yru Upper Plaza, Backstreets | 12:09 PM | First Day

As we stepped outside into the rain, I withdrew my scepter. They were long, slightly bulky rods a little over half the length of one's arm - just about small enough to carry around on your waist.

I paused for a moment to concentrate, did the math in my head, then carefully spoke the words of the incantation as I held it aloft.

E n t r o p y - D e n y i n g

"...(𒌍𒌷𒀭)(𒌍𒁁𒀭)𒅥𒌈𒆜𒈣𒂠, 𒋢𒀀𒅆𒌫𒃶,𒈬𒊹."

The Power, at its core, was simple. It was capable of doing three fundamental things: Moving particles, gathering information about particles, and performing math. In order to manipulate it, the caster used an incantation - a series of mathematical and conceptual instructions drawn from a dead language, always starting with the initiating word, 𒀭 (meaning 'divinity'), and ending with the terminating word, 𒊹 (meaning 'totality') - in either verbal or written form to dictate what actions it should perform, and their own conscious mind to determine the target. Eris, the academic term for energy in an arcane context, was consumed proportionally to the difficulty of the task, and had to be allocated properly to avoid the incantation failing or the energy discharging in a violent backlash. Finally, it had a range of about 10 meters.

From those basic principles, over the past 14 centuries, an incredibly complicated framework of conceits had sprung. Scepters to store eris, runes to partially pre-complete incantations so they required as little as the initiating and terminating words, and a litany of disciplines that built math upon math to accomplish increasingly complex and specific tasks. In the present day, it was generally agreed that they numbered 12: Pyromancy, Aetheomancy, Geomancy, Radiomancy, Biomancy, Thanatomancy, Chronomancy, Golemancy, Metamancy, Neuromancy, Divination and Transmutation. There was also the defunct discipline of Egomancy, and the three applicational pseudo-disciplines of Alchemy, Runescripting and Arcane Engineering.

And all of these in turn had more schools than you could shake a stick at, which themselves had their own sub-schools, and... Well, you get the idea.

Thanatomancy, my discipline, was divided into three (major) schools: traditional, transformative, and entropic, based on their approach to death as a phenomena. Traditional Thanatomancers saw it as simply a life form - from a single-celled organism to something as broad as a forest - ceasing to function, and most of their methods were based around restoring that functionality without trying to actually restore it to life. Skeletons clawing themselves out of the ground was the prototypical image, which the colleges and even the Mekhian government had expended so much effort in recent centuries trying to excise from the public consciousness.

Not that it had done them much good. Bunch of glorified grave-robbers.

On the other hand, Transformative Thanatomancers almost rejected the concept of death completely, seeing it instead as... Well, a transformation. Life shifting in nature and being simplified, but not per-se destroyed. The focus of their incantations and research were much closer to Biomancy than the other schools, using living and dead tissue in tandem.

Finally, Entropic Thanatomancy conceived of death as a process that applied not just to living beings, but in broader strokes, to the loss of order from anything in reality. That a flame going out was just as much a death as a bug being squished, and that mindset was the only truly reasonable one for preserving that order. It flirted with Aetheromancy; the study of using the Power to manipulate physics.

I was an Entropic Thanatomancer, with the incantation I had just used being one of the signature techniques, though this application of it was pretty primitive. The symbol of the school was an inverted ankh, which crowned the head of my scepter.

As I finished speaking, a peculiar half-bubble of force began to form over our heads where the rain came to a very abrupt stop, the individual droplets not exactly repelled, but rather appearing to give up their descent in mid fall. They hung overhead, coalescing into each other the longer we remained unmoving.

"This seems kinda frivolous," Ran said, over the increasingly loud winds, looking up at the result with her arms crossed.

"What?"

"I said that it seems like a waste of eris," She rephrased, louder.

"Oh. I suppose so," I said, putting my scepter back into my bag. "But it's fine, isn't it? There'll be time to recharge it later."

"Phew, this is great!" Ptolema held out the palms of her hands to both sides of her, as if to marvel at their lack of wetness. "I thought I was going to have to get soaked again just as I was starting to dry off!"

"Don't you know the Matter-Suspending Arcana, Ptolema?" Ran asked.

"Well, yeah, but only for like, stopping bleeding and holding stuff like muscle tissue apart," she said. "I couldn't do the math for something like this on the spot. You're amazing, Su."

"It's not really that difficult," I said, secretly thrilled. I loved compliments, even when they came from the Ptolemas of the world. "I only had to learn it once. Then I just adjust the values by a simple metric based on the angle and severity of the downpour."

"Could you stop the wind, too?"

I shook my head. "To do that, it'd have to encircle us completely. And then if anyone got too close, their resistances would break the enchantment."

"Aww."

"We should set off," Ran said, looking at the clock on her logic engine. "If this ends up taking a while, we're going to be cutting it close already."

"Alright," I said, nodding.

We put up our veils (Ptolema's, unlike ours, was a deep green shade that sort of matched her outfit) and set off out of the alley. Since we'd been standing in one spot for a while, there was a loud thunk behind us as the built-up rainwater fell to the pavestones.

The coordinator's office was also not far from the academy, but unfortunately it was "not far" in the opposite direction to which we'd originally traveled to get to the cafe. We headed back down the boulevard, past one of the largest grocery distribution houses in the city, and down a set of steps to a lower level of the district, which leaned more residential. Tall, four-to-six story townhouses with tiled rooftops dominated, with the occasional towering apartment building reaching twenty or more. The streets here were filled with plant life to the point they were half way to being gardens, flanking us on both sides with abundant purple and white floral displays, and tall trees on the brink of flowering for the spring.

It was in weather like this that these sorts of planning choices, which had become extremely popular in the modern age as the hyper-conservative styles of the pre-alliance and fundamentalist era finally faded away, started to become problematic. Despite being separated from the walking area by little stone barriers about a quarter of a foot tall, mud had begun to spill over and through the cracks on to the street.

That was the risk of making things pretty rather than practical. It only worked so long as the rest of the world stayed compliant.

Some people were gawking at us a bit on account of the unconventional barrier I'd put up. Enchantments to physically shield people from rain in a fashion akin to a glorified umbrella were common enough, but this was a bit rarer. It was making me sort of regret it. I didn't like being stared at. I struck up a frivolous conversation to distract myself.

"Hey, Ran," I said, looking to her.

"Mm?"

"You know, you never really gave your opinion, back when we were talking after the conference."

She looked confused. "About what?"

"Immortality."

"Oh, right, that." She seemed disinterested, speaking flatly. "I think people dying is great. I'm absolutely in favor of it."

"Hey, come on," I said, "be serious."

"I am being serious," she said, in a fashion so deadpan you could almost believe it. "If everyone died, it would be a massive improvement for the world right now."

"What are you guys talking about?" Ptolema interjected.

"She's talking about the pursuit of living forever," Ran said, now facing forward again. She jerked her thumb in my direction. "After Kam's creepy speech, the two of them were arguing about it."

"Oh!" She said, nodding. "I didn't think it was creepy. I don't even really think about stuff like that, and it was still kind of getting me pumped up."

"I feel like you're pretty easily swayed by people being passionate," I said.

"Hell yeah!" She grinned. "If someone cares about something that much, well, it's gotta be worth something, right?"

That's certainly one way to think of it, I thought to myself.

"What's your opinion, Ptolema?" Ran asked, seemingly wanting to make someone other than herself the focus of the questioning. "You think people should live forever?"

She considered this for a little while, crossing her arms and looking pensive. "Weeeeellll, I guess it would be hard for everyone to live forever, right? I mean, there's only so much space in the Remaining World."

"That issue came up in our conversation," I said, nodding.

"But it'd be great if people could live another few hundred years, at least. Or if people didn't start getting all weird-looking and crusty when they were past 400, and could stay healthy right up until the end. That'd be a big improvement."

"Getting 'old and crusty' is what kills you, though," I said, echoing a sentiment Kam had expressed in our conversation earlier. "If you got rid of that, what would actually do them in?"

"Huh." This seemed to throw her off for a moment, and she scratched at her head. "I guess I didn't really think of it that way. ...Maybe the best thing would be to get to where we can keep people young and healthy to 1000, and then we made it the law so, when you get that old, that's when you have to die?"

I furrowed my brow. "Wouldn't that be, uh, murder?"

"No way!" She said, shaking her head. "It'd be totally fair! They could do it in a painless way, so nobody has to suffer before the end like it is right now. So everyone gets 1000 years of good life, and then they have to step aside for the next generation. That'd be fine, wouldn't it?"

"Why 1000?" Ran asked.

"It's a clean number," she explained. "Feels fairer than something random, like 1032 years."

"Guess you've got me there," she replied flatly.

"How would you kill them, exactly?" I asked.

"I dunno," Ptolema said, shrugging. "I guess it would be the best to let 'em pick? They could do something romantic like jumping off a cliff in a pretty place, or something simple like being killed with the Life-Slaying Arcana in their sleep. There's a lot of okay options, right?"

I stared at Ptolema curiously. It was in moments like this that I really did wonder to what extent she was self-aware about some of the stuff she said, and secretly messing with people. There had to be some of that, for certain, but just how far did it go?

"Let's test this idea," I said, switching to my Serious Devil's Advocate voice. "Say you have someone who is an amazing arcanist or scholar, one of the best in the world. And for their whole life, they've been producing innovations that have done tremendous good for humanity, in a way that's objectively quantifiable and not controversial. Them being around observably makes the world a better place."

"Okay," she said, nodding.

"Now, that person lives for a thousand years, and sure enough, their day comes up. Would you kill them, to more than likely make room for somebody merely average? Just to reduce tiny bit of strain on the world's resources?"

I could see that I had delivered an intellectual hammer-blow with this argument. Her face contorted, her lip curling downwards as she re-calibrated her perspective. "Hmm, that's a good point. I guess it wouldn't be right to do that." She thought for a few moments, and then her eyes brightened, an idea coming to her. "What if we had a rating system?"

"A rating system...?"

"Yeah," she said, nodding. "For people. So, you know, every time you did something really good, you'd get some points, and every time you did something really bad, you'd lose some points. And those points would determine how many years you get in total. That way, the really good people could stick around doing good forever, and the bad people dying sooner would make up for it."

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Wow," I said, my eyes widening. "That's, uh."

"You ever thought about writing dystopian fiction, Ptolema?" Ran asked, impassively.

I cracked up a bit, snorted, and giggled for a few moments.

"Hey, quit ganging up on me," she protested, frowning. "I'm not gonna answer questions if you're just gonna treat me like I'm an idiot."

"S-Sorry, Ptolema," I said, calming myself down. "I'm not trying to be mean. It does, uh, sound kind of a dreadful idea, though."

"Well, it's not like I'm an expert, you know?" she said, looking at me with a dejected expression. "I became a healer because I wanted to help people, and I do. But this big stuff kinda goes over my head. I didn't even want to go to this conclave thing when they told us all about it."

"That's fair," I said.

"Besides," she said, "It'd still be better than nature, right? Than how people die at the moment. That's just totally random."

"Yeah," I said, and after thinking about it for a few moments, admitted more sincerely, "I suppose it would."

We walked for a few more minutes before we arrived. The coordinator's office was actually really close to the academy, as the crow flies - you could actually see the structure and the protrusion of the hillside on which it was built almost directly overhead. However, because of the awkwardness of the terrain and the dreadful, ancient street planning that dominated the city center, you had to go around the long way.

...well, I say that, but you could levitate down with the Power, obviously. But they'd fine you for that if it wasn't an emergency.

The building itself was much like the others in the area - a thin, three-story residential property constructed largely of light-colored stone, with a blue tiled roof, compressed tightly alongside many others. Nothing marked it as an office, and indeed, only the first floor was an office. The second floor was where the coordinator lived excepting some weekends and when the academy was closed, and the third was a private lodging he rented out to some students. The academy had no dormitories - the neighborhood had already been too densely packed when they'd built it about a century ago - so most of the full-time students who didn't have a residence elsewhere in the city lived in this area, their accommodation offered as part of a support programme.

None of the three of us here used it, though. Me and Ptolema because we were bougie snobs who didn't need it, and Ran preferred to save herself debt and just take a longer trip. She'd always been an early riser.

I muttered the words to terminate the shielding effect as we stepped up to the door, and then knocked on the metallic handle.

"I really hope this is quick," Ran said, quietly. "We need to be back up at the academy and setting off in less than an hour."

"Uhh, he didn't make it sound like it'd be too bad," Ptolema said.

"We'll see," she replied skeptically.

We waited for a few moments, and then the door creaked open. However, the person who answered was not who I'd anticipated.

Standing in the doorway was a tall, wide-shouldered young man with a lean figure. He had a dark brown complexion, and kinky black hair that was somewhat messy and unkempt, having grown to about hit ears without much in the way of human intervention. He had strong features, a tall face, and was dressed in a white tunic and dark blue longskirt with an intricate design at the hem, with a scepter strapped to his belt.

Wearing it so openly was a bit of a taboo breach. But then, for him, it was pretty tame.

As soon as he saw us, he smirked. "Heheh, what's this? Who could these three girls with such impeccable fashion sense be, I wonder?"

"Ugh, don't be weird, Seth," Ptolema complained, pulling her veil down. Ran and I followed her cue, doing the same.

"Aw, c'mon, I'm just messing around," he said. "The old man said you'd be showing up, so I figured I'd save him the trouble of getting up and let you in."

"What are you even doing here?" she asked, as she stepped into the hallway. I followed. The office was a very cramped environment - lots of shelves packed with documents, files, and tomes of all sorts, and with less lighting than was ideal. It created a somewhat claustrophic atmosphere.

"Guy asked me to come in and fill in some blanks on my files," he explained, his tone friendly. "Guess I'm such a screw-up the archivists can't even be bothered to keep my paperwork straight, huh?"

"I bet you messed something up when you filled them in to begin with," Ptolema said,

"You're cold, Ema," he said with a chuckle, then turned in our direction. "Nice to see you, Ran, Su! You're both looking nice for our 'big day'." There was some amount of sarcasm in the last two words.

"Uh, thanks," I said, brushing some hair out of my eyes.

This guy was another person from our class, if you haven't guessed as much already. His name was Seth of Ikkuret. Of all my classmates (other than the top two), I probably knew him the least - like Ptolema, we were kind of polar opposites in terms of demeanor and interests... Except Ptolema was a girl, so we at least had something in common. So, honestly, I don't have all that much to say about him. He was a hard person to pin down; kind of both a class leader type and a class clown at the same time, though he often clashed with Kam for the former role. (She aggressively disliked him, incidentally, and would often only refer to him with phrases like "that oafish idiot" or "that relentless pain in my ass" when he wasn't around.)

One trait of his that I did dislike was that he would often praise people for their looks, which was the one kind of compliment I didn't especially care for.

He was one of the two Biomancers in the class; the most conventional of the healing disciplines. The term "Biomancy" is essentially self-explanatory, but like any style of arcana that gets popular, it had splintered into numerous schools. I'll explain in more detail when I can compare him directly to the other biomancer in our class, but the short version is that his school was the less gross one.

"Where's the coordinator?" Ran asked, also unimpressed by the compliment.

"Down here, miss Hoa-Trinh," came a cool, elderly voice from several doors down.

Seth grinned. "Guess that answers that, huh?"

We headed down the corridor, to the room I knew from past experience was the study-slash-archive-slash-mountain of books in which the coordinator usually resided. Ran knocked, despite the fact that there was probably no point. She wasn't the type to take chances when it came to authority figures.

"Come," he said.

We stepped into the chamber.

Describing the office is a bit difficult, because I'm not quite sure whether the word 'organized' or 'disorganized' is, strictly speaking, more appropriate. Nothing was out of place, per se, but when you reach a particular singularity of sheer stuff in a given room, it becomes impossible to think of it as wholly tidy. The whole house was filled with books, but here, it was everywhere. Tomes filled the shelves, and then the floor beside those shelves. Chests upon chests of paperwork were piled high in all corners. And the smell of dust and and parchment was overbearing-- And parchment isn't even supposed to smell of anything.

At the back end, at his desk by the windowside, was class coordinator Nindar of Inadu, now turning to face us in his heavy leather seat. He was a short, Ysaran man with typically light brown skin, with slumped shoulders, a bald head, and a visibly aged, weathered face, pointed and sharp. He was dressed in black robes.

"Miss Rheeds," he said, looking to Ptolema. "Thank you for your assistance."

"No problem, sir!" she replied, looking pleased with herself.

"However," he continued, his tone inquisitive, "While I will not send you away, I'm not sure why I have the pleasure of your company for a second time?"

Ptolema blinked for a moment.

"Oh! Oh," she said. "...I didn't have to come back here, did I? I could have just delivered the message and, uh, gone off to do whatever."

"That was implicit, I thought." he said, with a very slight smile.

"Oh geez. Now I feel kinda dumb." She scratched at the back of her head. "I guess I oughta just leave, huh?"

"Hey, Ptolema," Seth said, looking to her. "I'm basically done here, too. You wanna leave these two to do whatever they're doing, and go grab something quick to eat? Then we can head straight to our meet-up points after that."

Ptolema snorted, crossing her arms. "Why'd I wanna eat lunch with a creepo like you, huh?"

"'Creepo'?" he said, with a smirk. "Your attacks become crueler and more esoteric by the day, my lady."

"I'm gonna make your face esoteric," she warned, "if you don't stop callin' me weird stuff like 'my lady'. Creepo."

He snorted, breaking out into soft laughter.

Despite how this dynamic might come across to you, Ptolema and Seth were actually pretty close friends, so far as I could tell. They spent time together often for one reason or another, both for reasons related to the academy and not. I sometimes suspected that they could be dating, though every time it started to seem likely, something would happen or there'd be a piece of evidence that completely contradicted the idea.

Though, I wasn't very good with picking up that kind of thing regardless, so take it with a grain of salt.

"Fiiiiine," she said, rolling her eyes. "I guess I could eat a bit..."

"Great!" Seth said, perking up. He looked over to the coordinator. "This is alright, isn't it, professor?"

"Yes, it's fine," he said, starting to look a little impatient with the goofing around. "Go."

"Alright! Let's go, Ptolema."

"Yeah, yeah." She turned to us. "See you in a couple hours, you guys!"

"See you," I said.

"Bye," Ran said, more bluntly. After the two of them left back out the door, I noticed that for some reason, she seemed a little dejected, looking towards the ground.

However, Nindar left little time for me to say something to her, speaking up almost as soon as the thump of the front door closing ran down the hallway. "I apologize for summoning you both here at the eleventh hour, so to speak. I understand that it is probably quite inconvenient, and was due to my own negligence in not getting matters in order sooner."

I was surprised. It was rare to hear a personally-invested remark from the coordinator at all, let alone an apology.

"Uh, it's fine." I said.

Ran said nothing at all. Something odd was definitely going on. I looked at her, and her face was tense, and a little worried.

"If you don't mind, I'd like to speak with both of you privately. It should not take long - no more than a few minutes each." He turned towards me. His motions were, as always, stiff. Almost mechanical, after a fashion. "Miss Fusai. The matter I wanted to discuss with you is more pressing, so I think it would be better if you were to go first."

I furrowed my brow, puzzled. "What's going on, professor?"

"Ran," he said, turning to her for a moment "In the front room, at the table next to the fireplace, I have your personal files. While I'm speaking with miss Fusai, I'd like you to review them quickly and make sure that everything is correct."

There was something odd in his tone. Something suggestive, almost.

"Yes, sir." She lowered her head for a moment, then stepped out of the room. I glanced at her and saw, for just a moment, a troubled, tired look on her face.

I furrowed my brow, worried.

"Have a seat, miss Fusai," he said, extending a hand to a wooden chair, adjacent to his desk.

"Uh, sure."

I headed over to it, then lowered myself down to the seat. Nindar regarded me with a firm, unflinching look.

You're probably wondering about the title of 'class coordinator'. which isn't exactly normal, compared to something like 'teacher" or 'professor' - though, as you've already seen, he was a professor and we did sometimes use the title. But that wasn't his role when it came to our group.

Because we were all prodigies - supposedly among the best in the world for our age - and already deep into adult-level in terms of skill if not qualification, we didn't need someone in an educator role to manage our class, but we still required someone who would administer our affairs, lessons, testing, and the timing and nature of our projects. Nindar, a veteran member of the staff, had been appointed to that role when the class had been created a couple of decades ago. He'd managed all of five groups of exemplary disciples that had preceded ours.

And he filled the role well; almost harrowingly well. He was never late, he seemingly never made errors in our assignments, and was capable of pulling strings in the academy for our projects expertly. He'd arranged for me to have access to tomes of arcana that most students would likely never see on multiple occasions.

Not that I knew anything about him as a person. These were just facts.

He also held the de-facto position of academy archivist - one he'd possessed even before the reopening following the bombing. He'd supposedly been in the position for literal centuries, being among the eldest of the staff and perhaps the eldest continually serving.

Up close, with my glasses off, I could see how old he really looked. The hard lines and markings on his face, the sagging under his bloodshot eyes.

It was a rare sight, in the modern age.

"You're, uh," I hesitated, smiling awkwardly. "A-All of this is making me kind of nervous, sir."

He looked at me for a few more moments. Then, he sighed, allowing the tension to leave him somewhat. "My apologies," he said. "It is not my intention to intimidate you, Utsushikome."

"It's alright," I said.

"The stress of the day is getting to me, I fear. Not four hours ago, I was tearing myself apart with worry that something would go amiss with the presentation."

I made an attempt at a reassuring smile. "I thought it went fine, sir."

"Mm, more or less," he conceded, nodding. "Mercifully. But yes-- Two hours ago, I learned of something pertaining to your trip to the conclave. I believed it was important for you to know, before you set off."

"Pertaining to me?"

"Pertaining to you," he said, "and to your grandfather."