Weekend Blog: Woodstock, Cabins
This past weekend was one of those lovely good-friends good-food good-adventures damn-am-I-tired weekends where we drive to Troy (near Albany, about a 3.5-hour drive because, in NY, you can’t go straightanywhere if you’re below the Thruway. It’s more like — go east-southeast to get to Ithaca, travel southerly with east for a while to go below the lakes, travel around some hills for a bit while heading mostly east, and then head north-northeast for a while on a highway (Expressway? Fast multi-lane divided road with limited access but no tolls).)
In the midst of this lovely weekend — a trip to Woodstock (Which is not where the concert was held but likes to pretend it was, a fun little shopping town that would have seemed like it had a lot of head shops, did I not live in Ithaca), a drive through the Catskills, a quest for forks — we ended up discussing the regional variations on some seasonal-access dwellings.
“Oh, it’s all cute little cottages,” I started — in about the center of the Catskills, as far as the map says, not far from where we saw the World’s Biggest Kaleidoscope a few years back — and was told that around here, they’re called bungalows.
Thus began an interesting circle of discussion: T. and I are from the Great Lakes; K is from the Catskills; E is from Maine. To me, a cottage is a generally seasonal-use privately-owned dwelling on the water. To E., it’s a camping feature. (E calls what I call a cottage a summer home). To K, a bungalow is a seasonal-access rented no-foundation building in the mountains — I’d call that a cabin.
(Add to the mess that log cabin is its own thing, and I spent from 5 years old ‘till I moved out living in a log cabin my parents built from a kit.)
The building I’d originally started this conversation with said cottageto me because of its small but sturdy size, small yard, and cute shutters, by the by. Maintained, clearly, but only used once in a while.
So what about where you’re from? If there’s that much variation within the NE of the US, I’m curious about the broad span of the rest of my readership.
What’s a small home you own but live in or visit part of the year?
What’s a building in a campsite you can stay in rather than tent camping?
How about a rental you stay in for a week or two on vacation?
Does the physical location of these (water, woods, camping, mountains) change the term?
Bonus: what does “log cabin” bring to mind?
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An Adventure, Chapter 1
It wasn’t so much that Oxana was trying to get away from something as that she was just trying to get away. It was the first day without rain in a week, her books had all gotten boring, and all of her professors seemed slightly more awful than normal – which was saying something, with the class load she had this semester.
So she went walking. It was threatening to rain any minute, so she took her raincoat and her umbrella, the one book she hadn’t finished reading, and her flashlight, because you never knew.
Her mother loved saying that. You never know. What, exactly, you never knew was left, usually, as an exercise for the observer, but in this case, you never knew if the power was going to go out. At SUNY Edowanda, it was safer to say you could probably bet the power was going out. Oxana and her roommate Giannina had bought camping lanterns, stocked up on rechargeable batteries, and gotten very good at working right down to the last drop of power on their laptop batteries.
That wasn’t today, though. Today, Oxana was going to go spelunking in The Abandoned Dorm. She had her pocket bolt cutters, though she doubted she’d need them, the flashlight and spare batteries. And as long as she could make it across the dorm quad before the skies opened up, she was golden.
Everyone had stories about the The Abandoned Dorm, but nobody had a clear answer. Oxana had done a cursory look in the library, but History of SUNY Edowanda was not a large subject area, taking up only three books and two thesis papers.
What they knew is that there were beds and lamps and some clothes in there, that it was at a slightly skew angle to the rest of the already-hilly campus, and that it was marked clearly with very faded signs, stay off, which everyone, of course, ignored. The doors were bolted, some windows boarded up, but its roofed breezeway was a favorite necking spot and at least one garage band Oxana knew of practiced in the easily-accessible courtyard.
The rain was threatening by the time she got to that courtyard – ducked under a chain, walked through a long arched tunnel, moved three lawn chairs aside – so she went quickly.
She knew which door she was aiming for. The chain on there was already rusted. It was like they had only been pretending to try to keep people out – maybe enough to avoid a lawsuit? It took two hits with a nearby rock to break the chain, the lock cracking and falling with a clatter to the cracked pavers below.
She really didn’t think anyone would try to prosecute her for trespassing, signs to that end notwithstanding, but still, she was wearing gloves. She slipped in through the door, pushed it closed behind her, thinking as she did
He jumped in and shut the door, forgetting what a very foolish thing this is to do.
On the other hand, leaving a door ajar would definitely signal anyone looking that she was in here. So she pulled it shut and looked around.
SUNY Edowanda was not known for spending a lot of money on its students, so Oxana wasn’t too surprised to find that the entryway looked not all that different from the courtyard in her dorm, nor that there were still signs up advertising a dance from probably-1999, by the “party like it’s the end of the world” theme and the awful fonts.
There were coats in the lost-and found; there was a can of cola still on the table in the lounge, and the TV there was still playing static that looked, if you squinted, like Highlander. “Ghost town,” Oxana murmured, just to hear a voice. The way it echoed, she immediately wished she hadn’t.
The dorm rooms were mostly closed, but a peek into one unlocked one looked as if its inhabitants had left in a hurry. There were still blankets on the bed, still books on the shelves, and there were clothes strewn all over the place. Hurried packing – or, if Oxana’s freshman-year roommate had been any indication, just an ordinary day.
The rooms you could see from the courtyard windows did not look this inhabited. They looked like they had held people at one time, not like that one time had been an hour ago.
She picked a book off the shelf, not recognizing the title, and flipped through it. Psych text, from the looks of things, and from a far more psychedelic era than 1999.
She stuck it in her bag. Maybe she’d give it a read later. Sometimes those old texts were good for a laugh, and sometimes they just had better information than the new books. There was a layer of dust on the book – on everything in the room – despite that people-just-left feeling. She doubted the owner was coming back for the book.
The next three rooms she looked in were much the same – a mess of clothes strewn everywhere, books still on the shelves, dust covering everything. One of them had a dress that had to be from the fifties sitting over an ancient typewriter. Another one had clothes that were maybe ten years out of style.
She pulled out her phone to take pictures, but it was reading no signal and no battery. Edowanda was hard on phones; she stuck it back in her pocket. Next time, she’d bring a film camera.
She wondered how she already knew there’d be a next time. Was she going to bring Giannina? Somehow she knew that was a no, the way she knew she’d be here again and again and that Giannina was never going to believe her about exactly how strange this was.
She picked one more room at random and caught her breath. It could’ve been her room. The clothes, well, maybe a couple years out of fashion, but not that much. The blanket, the poster – it all looked modern.
She was pretty sure The Abandoned Dorm had been abandoned for decades. At least for years. None of this should have been here, not the mp3 player on the floor, not the exact same textbook she had for intro to psych.
The room that looked like the 1920’s hadn’t freaked her out. This did. She couldn’t explain it, couldn’t even picture how she’d explain it to Giannina. Look, clearly this place was abandoned a long time ago. That made sense. I’m not sure about the 70’s-feeling room, that was pretty odd. And the 1999 posters. But something that could’ve come from our room? How does that make any sense at all?
Oxana had a feeling she ought to have been freaked out sooner, but she supposed everyone had their threshold. She backed out of the room, closed the door, and went looking for something less creepy.
The dorm building was three stories tall, like a large portion of the older dorms on campus. The newer ones – the ones with elevators – were all ten, fifteen stories, more compact, but the old ones had been built on cheap swampland and sprawled in long wings.
She didn’t want to look at more dorm rooms. She was pretty sure she wanted to look at anything but dorm rooms.
The stairs at the end of the wing she was in went down as well as up. That was new; the stairs in her dorm only went down in one locked stairwell by the RA corral. Well, down probably wouldn’t lead her to more dorms.
Imagine dorms in the basement of a sinking building. She shivered melodramatically, thinking of watching the dirt climb up your windows until you were in the dark.
The stairs downward seemed even creepier. The lights had been on upstairs, but down here, there were only flickering red lights, the emergency system. It bathed the halls in even more creepiness.
Even worse, there were no doors down here, and the tile, rather than being flecked off-white like everywhere else in Edowanda, was some sort of stone-like grey. And so were the walls.
“Great,” she muttered, and then stopped, because her voice echoed off the walls. I’ve wandered into a cave under Edowanda. Well, I wanted an adventure.
She kept walking, because she hadn’t come this way to turn around because of the floor.
She reached a door after what seemed like far too much walking – she had to have come back down the dorm hall and started on the opposite one by now – a tall steel door with a broad, ornate handle, looking out of place down here.
Then again, Edowanda had the strangest bits of architecture placed in the oddest places, like at one point the state-sponsored architects had been beset by a flare of rebellious artistic flare and insisted “No! This square brick building needs an ornate archway! But just one!” So a fancy doorknob on a basement door seemed about keeping with the overall weirdness of her alma mater.
She hesitated with her hand on the doorknob. Somehow, this seemed more like trespassing than anything she’d done before now. If she went through this door – if she went through her, she was deliberately breaking and entering.
That was stupid, she scolded herself. She’d broke the chain, she’d opened dorm doors. She was already breaking and entering. This door wasn’t even locked.
Still…
She chased the thought away. If she was going to do this, she might as well do it all the way.
She opened the door.
A new story. SUNY is State University of NY; this one is made-up.
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Funeral – best-Laid Plans
First: Funeral
Previous: Funeral: Introductions
Senga smiled crookedly at Erramun. “We fix problems. Sometimes we end things, sometimes we start them, but mostly people just pay us to solve situations they need solved.”
“That sounds really, really vague.”
“It’s meant to be really, really vague.”
“So which side of the law are you on?”
“We’re a legal organization. Most of the time, we stay on the proper side of the police and of the law. Sometimes we fudge things a bit,” she admitted. “Those moments where the Ellehemaei in us has to be more important than the law-abiding citizen.”
“And in those times?”
“We clean up after ourselves. So, back to advice.”
“It’s advice you want when you run a cleaning service and you’ve just been handed someone named Death Comes Silently.” He sounded bitter rather than dubious. “You want advice.“
“Well, I don’t want you for wetwork, although if you fade away without something to kill, I’m sure I can come up with someone who needs ending.” She looked him in the eye and watched his responses.
There was a little twitch of surprise and then a tiny smirk that barely touched his lips. “I can live without killing. I’m not one of those. But if I was-?”
“If you were, we’d have to shift our business model a bit, but I’d keep you fed.”
“…Generous. So you don’t have a problem with killing, but you don’t want me for wetwork. So…”
“So I don’t mind killing generally, but I don’t like it in the specific. It’s messy, it gets to be too easy, and it’s really hard to be sure someone’s evil enough to deserve killing. So. Death Comes Silently. What do you do that isn’t death?”
“Come Silently?” He smirked a little bit.
“I think that was actually a joke. Or at least a pun. So, ah. You’re the world’s quietest at orgasms or you sneak?”
“I do a lot of things very quietly. I’m pretty good at B&E, actually.” His smile had vanished and he was really looking at her again. “You really want me to advise you?”
“I’ve just been handed an Ellehemaei several times older than me, at a guess. You know things I don’t. You’ve have had to have been living in a box to not know more than I do.”
She didn’t miss his twitch, but she didn’t think he wanted her to see it, so she ignored it.
“You’re not gonna lose face, having your Bond Servant tell you want to do?” He was holding himself very still in his chair. Not like he was afraid, she thought, but maybe like he didn’t know if he moved, if he could stop moving.
“There’s a difference between telling me what to do and advising me. And mostly, we’re family, my crew. The good sort, not like my cousins. If I have you giving me advice, they’re going to think it’s cool.” She set her hand on his knee and watched how he went even more still.“Okay,” she said, more quietly. She stood up and locked her door, then throw up a complex Working that meant that nothing short of a bomb was getting into her room – or out of it. “I think we need to have a more important conversation first.”
“More important than what you want to do with me? I’d like to know what I’m going to be doing for the next six years.” He stood up, then, as she closed the distance between them, sat back down again.
“What’ve you been doing for the last six years?” Damnit, no, she was letting him distract her. Well, maybe he needed to say it.
His face shut down.
Maybe not.
“You going to order me to tell you?”
“Not yet. So. I don’t get to know what you did for the last six years and you want to know what you’re going to be doing for the next six. So. Advice and back-up, until I know more.”
“So… rather than ordering me into telling you, you’re going to blackmail me into telling you?”
She found herself smiling. “Seems fitting for me. You think being advice and back-up is a punishment?”
“I’m not so old I need to be the grumpy old sensei in the back of the room just yet.”
“Well, I’ll keep that in mind. Now that we’ve decided we don’t agree on that in the least,” she sat back down on her bed, “more important things.”
“-than what you’re going to do with me?”
“Well,” she smirked at him, unable to resist the straight line, “I thought we’d talk about what I’m going to do with you.”
He glowered. “Make sense, woman.”
“Telling me what to do already?” she teased, and then almost regretted it as his face underwent contortions trying to deal with a guilt-surge. “Easy, easy. I’m not mad at you.”
“I don’t care if-” He trailed off, grumbling. “Fine. You’ve got me by the short and curlies. What are you going to do with me?”
“Now that’s an image. And maybe I’ll think about that later,” she admitted. He was a handsome man. “You’ve been under a collar before.”
“I’ve been Owned before.” He touched his bare neck and shifted his shoulders. “The last one didn’t survive.”
“I don’t think you’re going to kill me. If you were, I think you would’ve done it in the funeral home. Would have been easy; you wouldn’t have even had to get your hands dirty if you didn’t feel like it, you could just say ‘no.’” Senga shrugged. “So. So’ve I. I know how it gets weird in your head. I can’t stop that, it’s the way the natural law works for fae.”
“I know that,” he snarled.
“You know it, but you’re twitchy and fighting it and making yourself feel like shit, if I’m any good at people – and I’m pretty good at people, and it’s just gonna get worse, and you know that too. The bond’s pushing at you, it does that. It’s magic.”
“I know that!”
This time it was a shout.
“Then why are you acting like a nervous virgin in his first collar?” She didn’t shout back, but she snapped it out.
“Who are you to tell me anything about how I’m acting or what I’m doing or how I’m feeling?” he bellowed back at her.
“The person who’s responsible for it,” she retorted. “Remember? I just agreed to take you as my Bond Servant, which means that I agreed to be responsible for you, body, mind, and heart, for the next six years. This, I have a vested interest in what you’re doing.”
“You don’t know anything!”
“Then maybe you should tell me.”
“I-” He cut himself off and glared at her. “All right.” He looked far too angry for the concession she heard in his voice – or maybe, she supposed, he was angry because he was conceding. “I will tell you one thing. But then I’m going to ask you a question.”
“I welcome it.” She folded her hands in her lap and waited.
“I don’t like the collar.”
When it became clear that he wasn’t going to elaborate, Senga tried her best raised-eyebrow look at him. He looked back at her implacably for several minutes before finally sighing.
Senga was fairly certain she’d only won that staring contest with him because he was currently her Bond servant. She made a mental note not to be in a position where she had to try that otherwise.
“I don’t like the physical collar. The sign of it. The way it feels. The restriction.”
“Aah.” She studied his neck for a minute. “That makes me wonder what sort of collars your previous owners put on you. That being said…” She considered her words for a minute. The collar, within fae society, was the sign that he was hers, sworn to her. If he wasn’t wearing one, it suggested that he wasn’t under her control.
Considering she was pretty sure everyone was going to think that anyway – she was definitely going to think it! – she had to play this one carefully.
Her thoughts were either a lot more transparent than she’d meant them to be, or he was having the same thoughts. “You can’t afford to look weak, or everyone will assume I’m in charge.” He shifted a little. “I’m not an in-charge sort. I don’t want that.”
“I don’t want it either. It’s the feel you hate?” She looked at him again and thought about a strip of leather like a dog collar around his neck. She thought about pulling on the d-ring in front and watching him resist it. She thought about him wearing nothing but the collar…
…this was not helping her have calm conversations. On the other hand, if those thoughts were transparent, he hadn’t picked up on them. He looked nervous.
“I’m not a dog,” he muttered. “I don’t like being treated like an animal on a leash.”
“…Aaah. Well then.” She reached out and touched the side of his neck. “That, I can work with.”
He leaned his weight ever so slightly into her hand, as if pretending he didn’t want to feel the touch. “You can? What are you going to do?”
“I can’t afford to look weak,” she reminded him slowly. “You’re going to have to wait until I do it. Until then-”
Her phone buzzed, interrupting her thoughts. She forced down a curse while she glanced at the screen.
“Well. Job calls. You can make yourself at home, or you can go check out Monmartin Manor and see how much we’ll have to do.” She tossed him her car keys. “I assume you know where it is.”
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Worldbuilding June Day 1, B
1. Introduction
B. Portal Bound
Many centuries ago — nearly a millennium — portals opened between an untouched planet and several other worlds, and a few people came through, a farmer and his family.
Over time, those portals shifted — when they were open, where they opened from — until a clever wood-carver discovered that with the right bits of magic and the right bits of wood, you could stabilize a portal. It still opened when it pleased, of course, but with the proper doors, it would open to the same place and in the same place.
The main nation of this story is run by a bureaucracy that balances on the mandate of the long-missing Prince. It runs well enough, this nation, and the bureaucrats like it that way.
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Worldbuilding June Day 1
1. Introduction
Desmond’s World
The world Desmond lives in is on the cusp of industrialization, a word in which most people don’t believe magic exists. Poverty, class struggle, hunger, and crowding are, however, all too real.
The nation Desmond lives in is isolated on all four sides: on three sides by nearly-impassible mountains, and on the fourth by an ocean which is inhospitable and almost entirely non-traversable. It’s a small nation, seven days’ travel by horse long from pass to pass and three days’ travel by horse wide at the widest.
While magic is not believed to exist, it underlies everything, just as the tight isolation, the high price of any trade goods, and the stratified class society do.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1333031.html. You can comment here or there.
Protected: : a piece of its history
Funeral: Introductions
First: Funeral
Previous: Funeral: Coming Home
Senga shifted herself between Allayne and Erramun quickly. “Don’t kill her, either,” she whispered. “Allayne, this is Erramun, sa’Death Comes Silently, a former associate of my great-Aunt Mirabella’s and, ah, currently, thanks to Great-Aunt Mirabella, my Kept, my bond servant. Oh, we got the Manor, too.”
Allayne looked Erramun up and down. “Forget the Manor, your aunt gave you a man? How do I get to be part of your family?”
“Generally,” Erramun answered, with a dangerous rumble to his voice and an obvious lack of being impressed by Allayne, “by losing some of your current family, often violently. At least, that’s what seemed to happen to Senga here. Sa-” He frowned down at her. “You can’t call me sa’, you own me. And I can’t call you sa’, I don’t know your name.”
“You seriously Own him. You Own him. You went to a funeral and came back with a man. Only you, Senga, only you. I told you you should have taken me with you.” Allayne clucked cheerfully. “Well, hello to you, Erramun oro’Senga. And if she wants to call you sa’, I wouldn’t argue with her. She had a fun sense of protocol. Probably comes from growing up with Mirabella as family matriarch. I know that would make me absolutely crazy, and I think Senga here just sublimated it into some strange manners.”
Senga coughed. Erramun looked a little off-put and a little confused. Allayne often had that effect on people she wasn’t in the middle of hooking in.
“Allayne. I survived the funeral, I have to figure out relocated Erramun and then relocating us to the Manor-”
“-you have a bond servant now. Delegate. He can figure out how to move himself, he can figure out getting us into the Manor, and then you and I can gossip about your horrible cousins.”
“She has a point,” Erramun pointed out. “I can get my stuff.”
“You don’t have a car here.”
“You are…“ He trailed off, turning a slightly-funny color, and bowed. “I’m sorry. My temper got away with me.”
“That was your temper getting away with you?” Allayne asked. “I mean, man, I can see it, you shouted and threw shit and-”
“Erramun,” Senga asked carefully, “what am I missing?”
“Other ways of getting from one place to another,” he answered, and then frowned.
“You know -” she trailed off. He wouldn’t thank her for talking about the way the Bond was pressing on him in front of Allayne. He probably wouldn’t like it even when they were alone. “If you want to go get your things on your own, you can feel free to do so. Be back before dark, and if you have more than will fit here and in the garage, we’ll have to work something out.”
“I don’t have much.” He bowed and left – presumably before she could give him any more orders.
—
Senga spent the next hour fending off questions from Allayne she didn’t want to answer, packing up as much of her stuff as she could, fending off questions from Chitter once Allayne had gone there, and trying to remember Monmartin Hill Manor.
She’d been very young when they moved out – not quite to her fifth birthday – and she remembered mostly the feeling of being torn from a place rather than many details. The closets had been huge for a four-year old. The whole place had been bigger than she could even fathom at that point.
Putting all of her team in there was still not going to fill it.
Maybe she could put Erramun on the far side of the building. That would make him happy.
No. She folded another set of dresses into a garment bag. No, it wouldn’t actually make him happy; that wasn’t how being a bound servant worked. He’d think he was happy right up to the point where he was screamingly miserable, and then it would echo through the building.
No, she’d accepted responsibility for him; she was going to have to actually accept him, one way or another.
She was in the middle of packing up a box of weapons when he stomped back into her room. He was carrying three large duffle bags and wearing a glower – as well as older jeans and a t-shirt. He looked at once more comfortable and less.
“This is it.” He hesitated, and then said, when she didn’t question him, “I put three boxes in storage with a friend of mine. Stuff – I don’t want anyone else getting their hands on.”
“Anyone but your friend.” She wasn’t offended, she told herself sternly. He didn’t even know her. Of course he didn’t trust her.
“He won’t open them and he won’t touch ‘em without my permission. He’s a good friend.” He smirked crookedly. “Offered to kill you for me.”
Senga tensed, and tried not to show it. She could tell he noticed from the way his smirk shifted. She was really going to have to up her game around him.
He snorted. “I said no. The day I can’t handle a collar is the day you kill me, not the person holding the leash. And besides,” his smile faded into a grimace, “those damn envelopes.”
“I know the feeling. She liked her blackmail, didn’t she?”
“Mirabella? Always got the feeling she liked knowing things. Blackmail was just a convenient result of knowing a lot of things.”
“You knew her better than I did.” Senga sat down on the edge of her bed and looked up at him thoughtfully. “I get the feeling there’s a lot you know better than me, actually.”
He looked down at her for a moment before his smile faded and he sat down slowly on the only chair in her room. “Well, I should hope so,” he joked weakly. He wasn’t quite meeting her eyes. “I’ve got a few years on you, I think.”
“Probably more than a few. So – how would you feel about advising me?”
“I’m not your Mentor, I’m your Bond Servant.” The retort had very little heat in it, and she thought he’d surprised himself with the concept. “But – you’d take it? Advice?”
“Probably better than most of my family, though that’s not saying much. When I’m on a job, I’m not going to want you following me around telling me what to do – especially since my job might be the one area I know what I’m doing more than you do. But the rest of the time, yeah.”
“What exactly is it that you do, anyway?”
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There’s an Actual Worldbuilding month from Tumblr
And it’s June!
So pick up to seven days and give them a setting, and I will follow the list of prompts here (http://worldbuildingjune.tumblr.com/) and your list of settings.
If a date isn’t setting’d, I’ll pick whatever I want 😉
1
2 Desmond’s Climb
3 Dragons Next Door
4 Aunt Family
5
6
7
8 Stranded
9 Things Unspoken
10 Things Unspoken
11
12
13 Fairy Town
14
15 Fairy Town
16 Science!
17
18 Space Accountant
19
20 Space Accountant
21
22
23
24
25 Dragons Next Door
26 Stranded
27
28 Aunt Family
29
30
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Classes
First: Slaves, School
Previous: Collar Food
It turned out Hellina and Meshron had a secondary purpose in shadowing the new students through breakfast – it was their job to guide all of the first-year blues to their first class.
That turned out to be a lecture room big enough for all twenty-seven students (with three seats left over, Des noted), fronted by a tall person with a very long white beard dressed much more like the students than most of the adults they’d seen.
The person wore long pleated pants that touched the floor in brilliant blue, a jacket in a lighter blue, and a shirt underneath in crisp white. The collar was gold and seemed to sparkle and shimmer.
“I am Professor Hapdegh, and I am here to teach you the basic theory of collar magic and its history. You may call me Professor Hap if it is easier, and I generally answer to he and him pronouns, although I’m not all that concerned one way or the other. Now, I don’t think I’ll remember all your names, but I’m going to try. Let’s start in one corner and work our way around, shall we?”
They went around the circle, giving names and, in some cases but not all, pronouns. That was how Desmond learned that Talia was she, Doria did not name pronouns, and Wesley was he, although none of those was very surprising. Jefshan choosing to go by she was a little surprising, but not horribly so; Des had seen taller women.and quite a few women in pants, lately.
The rest of the circle held few surprises until they got back to Professor Hapdegh, who began telling them about magic. Magic, the reason they were all here; magic, the thing that, until just two days ago, Desmond had thought something relegated to the annals of history.
“Magic,” Professor Hapdegh began, “as you – as most people – think of it, has long been relegated to the annals of history. It is not magic that we do here, the way a magus or a wizard would; it is not the world-shaking power that we can hold or anything nearly that great or exicting. No, here, we wield something small and something very, very controlled.
“There are things that you need to know, and one of them is why you were chosen. Much of this will be covered in later classes, so I will say now only this: not everyone can work with magic.”
He waited for everyone to either process that or scoff it away as an of course, and then continued. “You might say the mages all died. Indeed, you will probably find yourself saying that quite a bit over the next few weeks, and I will tell you this: that is truth. You are not, nor will you ever be, mages.
“What you are, on the other hand, are magic-users whose power is focused, filtered, and controlled by your compatriots, your collars. You are not mages. You are never alone in your own heads; You will never find yourself blowing up city blocks, because if you have those thoughts, the collar you are wearing will shut down your access to magic.
“If this sounds particularly harsh, I will remind you that the rest of the nation still believes that mages are all dead for a very good reason – the mages did an unforgivable level of damage to us, to our nation, to our people – even to the world around us – in their heyday. You are not mages, because mages would be killed on sight, or hunted until they were forced to go into hiding.”
Desmond swallowed. He could see Talia fiddling with the loose blue cravat that looped over her steel-grey collar.
But Cataleb asked, rather loudly, “then what are we? we’re not mages, but we have power, we can’t do damage, but we can do magic?”
“We are slaves,” Professor Hapdegh answered calmly. “We are people who would have the power one way or another, so we are controlled. The flip side to that is – we are very well compensated and, as long as we cooperate within limits, we can lead comfortable lives.”
“I don’t like that ‘cooperate,’” Cataleb complained. “We do what we’re told like good little minions?”
“The trick, Cataleb, is to become strong enough and wise enough within your chosen area of expertise – that will come later – that you are given a very good position which you can enjoy. And the first part of that is to chose an area of expertise that you enjoy. But that will come later. Now, moving on. We are collared because that way the nation can use our magic without risking us destroying it. It is a trade-off, I will admit, but I have not found it a bad one.”
“How did you end up a teacher, Professor?” Jefshan asked. “Was that your chosen area of expertise?”
Professor Hapdegh coughed. “in a way, in a way. I went into research – we did, my collar and I. Learning about old magics and then about new ways of using them.”
“So… you were learning about magic and now you teach about it?” Jefshan raised her eyebrows. “What if one of us wants to do that?”
“Then do very well at this class, for starters.” The professor’s smile was wide and a bit teasing.
“Now, as I was saying,” he continued, before anyone could interrupt again, “there was a time when mages controlled almost everything, because of their ability to wield magic in vast swooping attacks. Nobody questioned them – not and survived.
“But there were benefits. The mages could tame the demon waters. They could make the dangerous passes passable. They could help with industry and with agriculture, and they did, on their good days.
“The problem was that they had many bad days as well…”
Desmond left class with his mind swimming and found himself flanked by Talia and Jefshan. “So. I want to be a magic historian,” Jefshan declared, to nobody’s surprise.
“I,” Talia mused, “want to ride on the ships and ‘tame the demon waters’. I want to kill the demon waters, but I’ll settle for taming them a little bit.”
“I…” Desmond shook his head. “I don’t know yet. I wanted to be an accountant,” he muttered. “This is not a good path to being an accountant.”
“No,” Jefshan agreed, “but you could be a school administrator. Or you could teach math, if we learn math here. Or… well, maybe even this school needs accountants.”
“Maybe it does.” Desmond was pretty sure it didn’t.
Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1339944.html
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