Well, it happened.
You've flunked out.
Set the stage. You've just received your transcript from the Academie de Rei, and it's clear as day that you're not staying any longer than the end of month. You can see your marks, and there's no amount of begging and extracurriculars that can convince the Dean to retain your moron ass.
Outside your garret apartment, thirty minutes walk from the Academie, students who'd gotten good news from the institution race through the skies, leaving varicolored contrails slashing across the sky. Hooray for them.
You've been drinking. Heavily. Granted, you were drinking-period-heavily even before the Fates, the Gods, and the ineffable turning of the universe at large conspired to cleanly bean you upside the head with a chunk of bad news. You would also, presumably, be drinking-period-heavily if several things in several different time periods went differently and you were a successful student instead of a sad sack of borderline sh*t. Actually, hey, what's to say that you actually failed?
Consider: the outside world is full of demons and malign influences. Bad stars govern the fates of the teeming mortals. The psychic pressure of lurking jinn and maeljinn press into your Mind Palace, threatening to overrun the mental constructions that allow any spellslinger worth their salt to toss a spell. Slacking your powerful control may induce hallucinations, to name a single one of the manifold symptoms one may suffer from a Breach. Mental control, therefore, is paramount. What is non conductive to mental control? Drinking-period-heavily. Perhaps you are haunted and the transcript is an illusion placed by a demon to mock and taunt you.
Okay, close your eyes and return to your mind palace…
A mind palace was and is a technique that aides memorization. You close your eyes. You visualize something-- a house. What's the build, doesn't matter, what's important is that you can intimately place yourself there. Feel the floorboards under your feet, every creak of the eaves. Associating memories with physical, concrete locations here is better than rote. If you want to get last week's travel retinue, you could, for instance, ascend to the second floor cabinet, where you could extract a mental handbill with your travels all cleanly written down.
Very neat. Very pat. The fact that the techniques to construct a mind palace also breaches the Empyrean, the source of the secret workings of the world, and allow one to cast what is commonly referred to as magic. Look outside the window. In the case of every adept, they see the same stars. Swift Mercury. Bountiful Venus. Warlike Mars, waning Saturn, jovial Jupiter, and the paired Sol and Lua. These stars only change in prominence and luminosity, according to each Adept's tutelage.
Describe Your Academic Track
[]- Evocatii- The sign of Mars dominates. Your mansion is made of red iron and ruddy teak. Hot winds howl outside your walls. Red stand piles up against your mansion, which stands as solid and stubborn as old soldiers.
Evocatii is the art of summoning and directing energy, in various shapes and forms. In your current state, you can generate enough lightning from torches and mirrors in your Mind Palace and project it to the Real to seriously injure a man, or use telekinesis to move small objects around.
[]- Alchemie: The sign of Mercury dominates. A swift band of light crosses the sky. Your mansion is an airy affair of open vaults and tall columns, pure water mixing with liquid mercury running in streams in the floors and dripping over the eaves.
Alchemie is the art of transmuting and reshaping base matter. You are absolutely incompetent at the transmutation of basal forms into higher forms, but you can reshape roughly your body weight in unenchanted material to whichever shape you want, but prolonged use like this taxes your concentration heavily.
[]- Divinarie: The sign of Saturn dominates. Your mansion is made out of pale wood and bright mirrors. You cannot walk an inch without a bright glint of reflected starlight stabbing into your eyes. Outside the garden of wan flowers rustles.
Divinearie is the art of shaping malign or beneficial influences on human action. After intense concentration, you can map out someone or something's near term future, but always hazy and frequently subject to error. You might, and this just might be the trance state talking, be able to influence that future.
Aaand nope, nada, nothing. Everything's peachy keen, you are not possessed or under a malign inclination. The ink on the parchment doesn't change at all. You've just flunked out.
You've flunked out.
Repeat that a couple times to yourself. Get used to the idea.
Getting into the Academie de Rei was painful. Hours of studying, of intense visualization. You were forced to take up realistic sketching and you were ass at it. Once there was a king who ordered all his subjects to bring fifty pounds of dirt to built a great wall, but the problem was, a lot of his subjects were sharecroppers who didn't own the land that the king asked for. No problem, said the king, you're a little scrawny, but you'll serve. And he took those sharecroppers and in a stunning display of magna fortis, mighty hand, a common Evocati technique, compressed the sharecropper into a brick and continued on his architectural efforts. You bring this up, not just because you want to think about anything other than your current situation, but to draw an analogy to the pain that poor peasant must have felt as his tendons and bones were compressed into a solid material, to your decade plus of preparatory work before you were even able to light a candle across the room with the power of your mind (First Year Practicals. You took five minutes and nearly ran out the instructor's patience). Indeed, is your pain not greater? Your suffering more in perpetuity? Being compressed to a brick hurts like hell, but it stops. You're stuck here forever.
Getting here is a journey of a thousand miles of interesting life decisions, but one of them sticks out in the mind the most. If you were asked why you've flunked out, you've got an explanation slash excuse right here:
[]- Potion Addiction (Glug Fiend): You don't have a drug problem. You have an incompetence problem, which the mana potions help fix. Yeah they make your brain buzz and your heart flutter, and you've been noticing this black ivy crawl all over your memories, and you've been diving into your scholarship fund to buy more potions, and you've been drinking them outside of academic purposes, but you don't have a drug problem. Period. It's only a problem when you can't stop, and you can stop. You just choose not to. For real.
[]- Former Gifted Child: You breezed through prep. Memorization? No problem. Music as a discipline came naturally to you, but you struggled a bit with art and was always merely okay at mathematics. But you choked and you choked hard when you stepped into the Academie. The moment you realized you weren't the smartest aspirant in class was the moment you fell to pieces. Every time you saw one of your classmates make good progress on their term paper, your stomach knots itself into a ball. Every time you burned the midnight oil to get an okay result, only to overhear that some other guy thought it was the easiest thing in the world, you consider the rope.
[] - Irreconcilable Class Issues: In the Academie dei Rei, you've concluded that you simply don't have the class for it. You see, your parents were barbarians. Bar bar bar, they drank blood out of human skulls, and weren't they oh so proud when their child went off to the big city to make a name for themselves. Cons: it sucks sh*t in here. You'd rather be in the craggy mountains of your childhood, wrestling ice trolls to submission in a variety of holds. When someone expects you to hand in coursework, you dream of burying an axe in their skull. You are also mildly concerned that you are quickly becoming a stereotypical pastiche of your culture.
