Chapter 642 - Professor Elaine II

I half expected everyone to come barging out the moment [Portcullis] opened up. The gate rolled up, and… nothing. It was easy enough to sense what was going on - everyone was playing a murder mystery game. Seeing what everyone was doing also let me see the answer to the game, which was one of the reasons I tended not to play it.

Fenrir did it in the tavern with a tsunami. 

“We’re here!” I announced. “Who wants to go exploring?”

There was a huge chorus of ‘me!’ that met my question, and I got out of the way of the inevitable stampede. My family had clearly been conspiring against me. Nina went with Iona to explore, and Auri went with Sara off to do their own thing. Titania strolled out a minute later with grace, poise, and a large empty wicker basket.

Fenrir had a heck of a job, and it was clearly giving him some anxiety. The mighty wyvern was usually the lord of his domain, the apex predator, the ruler of all he beheld - for the ‘law of the jungle’ definition. He was willing to go claw to claw against any invaders, up to and including dragons.

The School wasn’t his territory. The School was ruled by [Long Zhi, The Cerulean Scholar]. Fenrir was, in his own way, going to pay tribute to the greater dragon, and humbly request he be allowed to stay.

It would normally be nearly impossible for the wyvern to bend his neck. It really, really helped that his early, formative years had all been at the School, and he’d grown up and matured under the oppressive feel of the ancient dragon. Now that he was returning, he didn’t want any mistakes or misunderstandings.

“Got everything?” I asked the shrunken wyvern, holding a literal dead pig in his mouth. Golden necklaces with pretty gemstones were looped around his neck, and he was holding a fancy Ice statue in one of his claws. Fenrir glared at me with one eye, unable to do anything more with everything he was holding.

He took off with a flap of his wings, heading to one of the orbiting islands. We waved after him.

“Good luck!” Iona said.

“Come back soon!” I said.

“Brrrpt!”

“Byeee!” Sara said.

We waved Fenrir off, and I double checked my healing range was on and including wyverns. Worst case, I was fairly certain I could get us all out of here, alive. I didn’t think there was a risk, Iona didn’t think there was a risk, but Fenrir had been in a mood. 

“Go visit your office.” Iona told me. “Get settled in there, and then the first thing I want to do with you is see if the lake’s still around.”

“I love the idea!” I did a little happy spin, my blue robes flaring out. I’d seen the lake as I approached the island, and I couldn’t wait to revisit the place where we’d first started dating. It’d been too long. “I also need to check [Portcullis’s] perimeter, and see where I’m limited to.”

I couldn’t open the door, then fuck off to the other side of the world and expect it to stay open. Skills had ranges, and I was frankly lucky I didn’t need to manually hold the door open. It was a scaling distance per level, but it was a small scaling distance per level. I had a good sense of where it was and how far I could be, but there was nothing like walking the perimeter and seeing what range I was pseudo-trapped in.

Sure, I could leave the area, but then I’d be slamming the door shut. If Sara had class and she wasn’t out the door yet, she’d be stuck inside until I opened it back up. If Auri had bread baking and left for whatever reason and I closed the door on her, we’d have a lovely charred smell filling the [Manor] when I got home.

Worst of all - if someone was halfway through the door, they’d get sliced in half. I didn’t want to slice my family members in half, especially not if the ‘critical’ part of them fell on the wrong side of [Portcullis] and ended up inside [Manor]. Cross-dimensional healing wasn’t part of my skillset.

No, far better to know where I could easily go, and where I had to start stepping carefully.

“Nobody is allowed to pass through [Portcullis] until I get back.” I carefully told everyone. “Go grab what you need in case I get distracted, then I’ll put up a door.”

All the snickers and eyerolls everyone had at ‘distracted’ were patently unfair. I crossed my arms as an initial pile of loot was extracted from [Manor], then I put a tarp over our area to keep it dryish - no telling if the island would fly somewhere wet - and slapped a spare table over [Portcullis], creating a physical reminder of don’t go inside.

Then we split up, and I took a walk.

The town was still developing. Everything on the Island currently had to be imported from the surface, and it wasn’t exactly an easy mission. A single home would need dozens of cartfuls of stone, and the logistics problem was hard enough when the house’s location was staying still on the ground. Making it mobile and needing to carry it a mile into the air, if not more? Yikes.

Doing bulk logistics was one of the jobs low down on my list of careers I wanted to try out at some point. Seeing the good it could bring though… I was tempted. Give it a try, move a few tons of material, and help the School and the town get up off its feet? There were more worthy opportunities, but not many.

Ugh. The more I saw of the world, the more I was convinced that logistics made it go round.

The town had roads marked and buildings squared out, showing the clean layout that it would someday have. Almost the same as what Skye did in Orthus. I should see about getting her to visit, maybe find out who did the layout and have them meet. I wasn’t going to assume the School had the best people, not after the playing board got flipped after the Immortal War.

Damnit.

I could only get halfway into the town’s center square. There wasn’t anyone set up yet, but I just knew, deep in my heart of hearts, that the vendors selling exotic fruits - my beloved mangos - would be set up on the far side, close enough to smell, and yet far away that I couldn’t barter, haggle, tenderly caress, negotiate, and buy.

I shrugged.

That’s what [Teleportation] was for. The real trick would be landing the coins I sent back right on their most noble nose. Anyone bringing me mangos was automatically noble.

Nodding to myself, I continued my rounds, occasionally needing to backtrack and go through back alleys, instead of sliding down the main roads. Oh sure, I could just walk through the empty lots, or fly over them later, but the point was to see where I could walk. Sara couldn’t fly yet, and the build she was imagining for herself didn’t include it. I’d rather know now ‘Hey Sara, we can’t walk down that street, I’ll need to stop halfway and turn around’ than to come to a screeching halt halfway through and need to turn around.

A shame a lot of the lots were empty. It’d be nice to get a good feel of ‘Sara wants to go to a place out of range’ versus ‘hey I can come here no problem.’ Of course, I’d be slowly leveling, but I didn’t see myself getting more than 2-3 levels in [Portcullis] by the time Sara graduated. It was a high level skill, and I wasn’t exactly doing much with it. Door’s open, come on in. As opposed to the experience of ‘oh god get the door open and dive in before the invading army kills us all’ sort of experience.

Having circled the perimeter I could reach inside the town, I had a wave of melancholy hit me as I approached the fence demarcating the line between the School and the town. I shook my fist at the sky for dramatic effect, ignoring the looks I got.

BACK IN MY DAY the School had a dramatic stone wall separating the School and the town. Now it was barely a ‘please keep out’ suggestion. The dragon’s gate announcing any visiting [Princesses] was an open gap. Not that the School needed to be separated from the town, and…

I was waffling. I shook off the mental cobwebs and headed over to the School buildings, merrily cutting across the overgrown lawn. I was still in range, and this was the more important part - checking which parts of the School I could freely visit, and what was off limits.

The eight central towers had gotten cut down to size, and the gigantic buildings I remembered from my days weren’t gone, but they were a far cry from their former splendor. The same long term planning that I’d seen in the town was present here. The towers had a single layer, but the base was large, indicating they’d planned on building and adding layers as needed over the years. The fancy administrative building had a single layer of blocks marking out where it would eventually be, with a small portion roughly the size of a hut being ‘fully’ built out right now.

As much as they were trying to build for the future, roofs did need to be properly positioned.

On and on it went, and I wanted to shed a tear as I saw the state of the library. Oh grand structure of a thousand stories! Where did you go!? Your secret catacombs, your hidden reading spots, a million million tales to get lost in another word, reduced to this!?

Well, that just wouldn’t do. Bulk logistics is my new middle name! Forget building out the town, I’d single-handedly get the library rebuilt if I had to quarry the stones and chop down the trees myself. Of course, I’d rope Iona into helping, and a bit of exercise would do Sara good… yes, yes… and there was no way they’d be able to hide all the secret passages from me! 

New challenge: Read every book in the current library, and read all of the ones that came in. I could probably pull it off as well, getting into things this early, and it might bump the quality of my third class up a hair. 

“Hi!” One of the students, a faun, waved me down with a smile as she approached. “I’m Tessara! I don’t think I’ve seen you before. Are you a new student?”

I looked at her black, unadorned robes. I glanced significantly at my blue, silver-stitched robes, indicating my graduation and proficiencies. Ah well, she had to be new.

“No, sorry. I’m one of the new professors. Professor Elaine.” I introduced myself. “I’m teaching several of the medicine courses.”

“Well, with a name like that, I doubt you’d be teaching the combat classes.” Tessara joked.

Just for that, I wanted to teach one of the advanced combat classes. It was fun seeing the utterly shocked expression on people’s faces now and then, when the small and ‘harmless’ healer utterly demolished them. Maybe not teach the class, just audit it now and then. 

I had good memories of the School’s combat team. On one hand, I felt like I was at a point where I could fight in the ‘unrestricted’ section if I wanted to… on the other, I was at the point where people would be able to openly study me, and people would use that against me. I’d gotten lucky last Immortal War, there were no promises I’d get lucky again.

“Maybe!” I utterly failed at being mysterious. “What are you studying?”

“Natural philosophy.” She answered, her eyes going bright. “I want to know all the mysteries of the world. How it works. How it ticks.”

I nodded along.

“A worthy field to study. I might see you in one of my classes! Well, this looks like my tower. Best of luck.”

I left Tessara behind, and found my office. A plain desk and a stool were the only things inside right now. No bookcases, no shelves, no storage. The absolute bare minimum required for a professor. I didn’t mind, I’d brought a lot of my own things, and there was far too much to rebuild to decorate every new professor’s space. I had my own space, not a shared office with five people crammed together, and that was luxury enough for me.

I swapped out the ‘four legs and a surface’ desk for a much nicer one we’d made a few years back, and selected my second-favorite armchair to sit in. I realized a minor failing of my logistics solution from [Manor].

It came with all the bookshelves innately included. The class had strong roots as a [Reader] class, and it was reflected with numerous bookshelves littered all over the [Manor] itself, built into the very structure of the place, nevermind the absurdly sized library in the middle. We just hadn’t needed too many bookshelves, and most of the storage related to them had turned into cabinets over the years. It was an easy, eventual fix. 

Oh, that was an interesting person flying around. Wonder when she’d get here?

I spent a minute looking around the place. What vibe did I want to give for [Professor] Elaine? Stern and serious? I imagined my hair up in a bun and a pair of horn rimmed glasses, and shook my head. No no, that was far more [Librarian] than [Professor], though I enjoyed that role as well. Slightly mad? That wouldn’t work either, medicine was a serious profession, and it was too easy to sink into the role, then confuse and befuddle people, which could lead to poorly trained [Healers] and all the problems there. Plain and boring was boring, and I was an Immortal. Boredom was a deadly enemy. I didn’t want to spend my life with every day being the same. 

OH! She was alive!?

I wasn’t quite done with the witch aesthetic, and the robes were part of my required outfit for teaching. No reason to not continue it. With a mental shrug, I filled the room with most of the trappings I’d had in the cottage, mirror, incense, and pipe included. I turned when I heard a small tapping at my shuttered windows. No glass, just angled wood. I opened the window for Auri, who promptly fluttered in at high speed, nodding to herself as she spotted her third-favorite perch already in a corner.

“Brrrpt?” She asked.

“I’m settling in nicely.” I said. “Haven’t met anyone yet, and I need to sit down and spend some serious hours… minutes really… doing lesson prep. Is Sara alright?”

Last I’d heard Auri and Sara were going off together, and if Auri was here… Sara was old enough to be trusted on her own, but maaaybe needed half an eye when it was a new place. Mostly on a ‘don’t get lost’ aspect.

“Brrpt! Brpt?” Auri reassured me.

“Sure, you can stay and help.” I said.

Auri wiggled happily, and I settled down to work, tracking one particular person. She was busy right now, but if she didn’t come to me soon I was going to go find her. I stashed a bottle of wine in my desk. If needed, I’d donate a pint myself.

I smiled as Marcelle headed my way, and I sketched out a quick spell right before she knocked on my door. It slowly opened, with dramatic creaking noises added thanks to my spell. The lights flickered.

“Come into my parlor.” I invited Marcelle. She was alive! She’d survived the Immortal War! I was delighted, and already plotting various upgrades for Sara - assuming she didn’t want to grab biomancy herself. 

To her credit, the vampire didn’t even flinch, striding in like she owned the place. I was already pulling out glasses and twisting a corkscrew into the cork of the bottle.

“Elaine! Auri! How wonderful to see you two again!” She said. I [Teleported] her a chair, and she settled in like a princess.

“Would you like a drink?” I offered. She beamed at me.

“Please!”