Spring of the Twelfth Year (I)
Handout
Information given by the GM to the players that is needed to begin play. By laying the general groundwork for the story and characters, handouts give campaigns some direction. While some handouts prefer to neatly set the tone of a session, others offer only loose descriptions—either way, there will always be people who completely ignore them.
In the West, handouts are more often thematic tools used to immerse the players in the world they explore.
My eyes shot open when my nose was assaulted by a strange tartness.
“Oh, you’re awake.”
I looked around in shock to see the methuselah standing at my bedside (or rather, whoever’s bedside this was) with medicine in hand. She looked tired as she shut away the vial and lazily asked me about my condition.
Slowly and cautiously, I sat up, only to find the tear-inducing pain that had beset my flesh had all but vanished. A handful of my teeth were broken or missing, but luckily they were all baby teeth that would be replaced sooner or later. I would have lost all hope had they been part of my permanent set.
All that lingered was the dull weight of an exhausted body. Bluntly put, I should have had a broken bone or three, and the total absence of pain was unsettling in its own right.
“Where...?” I glanced around, mumbling to myself in confusion until I recognized the village chief’s abode. It wasn’t exactly a difficult conclusion to come to, as he was the only person in town with a guest bedroom this well maintained.
As I watched the woman sit in a chair next to the bed looking as weary as could be, it finally hit me: I’d passed out from sheer rage.
“Does anything hurt?” she asked.
“No, not particularly,” I said courteously.
“Well, how nice to hear. I’m not so well versed in manipulating tissue and bone, you see... Ah, and fear not, it hasn’t been so long since you collapsed. The sun has just about set, but no more.”
The silver-haired mage put away some more vials as she casually glossed over matters well within the realm of body horror. She snapped her fingers and pulled a snuff box from thin air. Adorned with mother-of-pearl, the white piece of lacquerware contained minced tobacco and an ashtray; it was clearly priceless. The golden mouthpiece and decorated bowl of the pipe she retrieved from it were indicative of equal value, and it alone could probably buy my house several times over.
Wait, who exactly is this lady that I cussed out?
“Now then, from where shall I begin?” she said.
Despite her aura of tedium, her hands’ movements were dainty as she packed her pipe. She put it to her lips without bothering to light a flame, but much to my surprise, she blew out a slender stream of smoke moments later. Apparently, fire didn’t even require a snap.
“Ordinarily, it would be quite strange for me to be the one explaining this to you, but your parents seemed unable to grasp the finer details, so I couldn’t leave it to them.”
“I...see?” I said.
I felt as though my fit from before had crossed the line and kept going, but she seemed not to mind. It was clear that she looked down on me (this was such a given that it didn’t bother me at all), but I couldn’t grasp why she was bothering to give me an explanation.
“Rather, you are the most peculiar one of them all. How in the world have you not noticed yet?”
I tilted my head as her question sailed clear over it, only for her to mirror my gesture.
“You mean to say you have this much capacity for magic, and your eyes remain closed? This must be some sort of joke,” she said, peering into me like a jarred specimen. If nothing else, her words and actions made it clear she had no interest in me as a person. “Have you never felt a wave of mana disturb your body? Have you never been overwhelmed by sudden impulses or assaulted by unbearable headaches?”
“No, never,” I answered.
“How strange...” she mused. From the way she turned away to exhale her smoke (which had a pleasant sweetness to it), it appeared she had some scrap of respect for me. Still, something about her cold gaze bothered me: the blue and green eyes pointed my way weren’t looking at a human being.
So this is why people dislike methuselah. The books I’d read said only that they “weren’t well received by others”—a phrase coated in more than a few layers of sugar. I’d suspected it stemmed from the arrogance of a long-lived individual, but...I could hardly imagine a sentient being able to endure this kind of scrutiny.
“Normally, someone with your aptitude for the craft should have some level of cognition as a mage.”
Truthfully, I’d begun raising the fundamental stats of both Mana Capacity and Mana Output in the vague hope that I might one day be able to use magic, and I’d ridden the momentum of that hope all the way to V: Good. However, my distaste for the uncertainty that came with self-study in spellcasting had left me unwilling to take the plunge on a skill that would have awoken my powers.
In some ways, this was my power’s greatest flaw. Generally speaking, skills that I “should have” obtained weren’t automatically given to me; all I received was the notification that I could do so myself with my hard-earned experience if I chose to. This weakness was why I still had yet to grasp magic despite having the disposition for it.
Not that I had any objections, of course. My power’s greatest strength lay on the other side of the coin: where normal people unwittingly wasted resources acquiring worthless skills and traits, I could elect to avoid them. The Vice category was full of pointless talents like Shifty Imagination and Petty Theft, and the fact that I would never have my experience taken by things of that nature meant my growth would be far more efficient than my peers.
Still, my mana-related stats were meant to be marginally above average, so I wasn’t sure why the mage seemed so surprised. Maybe it was because most mensch were so lacking that my Good status put me in the upper echelons of my people. I’d been working under the assumption that my Mana Capacity and Output were Good for a humanfolk, but I could see how I drew attention if it instead meant I was Good as a mage.
Although this was all my own conjecture, the world was full of intricate little mysteries, and my desire for a proper splatbook to explain all the details swelled up.
“Well, I suppose I’ll just think of you as a peculiarity and leave it at that,” she said, smacking her pipe on the snuff box to empty the ash. The mage packed another dose of dried leaves with a wicked grin. She may have been the spitting image of the sagacious elves whose wisdom never waned even in the face of the abyss, but her showy smile drove home the point that a fatal difference stood between her and the fantasy literature of my former world.
“Allow me to unearth the truth.”
Another passage from the book I’d once read came to mind as I recalled the major distinction between elves and methuselah: unlike the nature-loving elves who valued health and temperance, the mage and her flock were the progeny of civilization.
The methuselah erected lofty monuments out of reach of the filthy mitts of ignorance, and the by-product of their thirst for knowledge was the sophisticated culture they drowned in. They were city slickers who favored chiseled stone to wood; their magnificent feasts were but one of the ways they indulged in the new and exciting as they sought out the cutting edge of taste. In an attempt to soothe the terrible fatigue of eternal life, each and every one of them had given in to hedonism and had a penchant for loose spending as they immersed themselves in entertainment and study.
As a result, they held great influence, despite being far outnumbered by us mensch. Of the seven electorate houses that crowned Rhine’s emperors, two were headed by methuselah.
“To repeat myself, your younger sister is not a mensch.”
I could feel the blood rush to my head again as I opened my mouth, but her snow-white finger came up to my lips before I could speak. I obediently zipped up, to which she chuckled out her nose, satisfied that I seemed to have some manners.
“Your sister is a changeling.”
What did she just say? A changeling? Our adorable Elisa? The news was as difficult to accept as it was to believe. Myths of changelings had been passed down in the English tradition of my past world: the tales featured fairies spiriting away babies and replacing them with their own kin out of either hatred, amusement, or desire for a human child. Time and time again, these tales ended in tragedy, and some historians speculated that they were used in ancient times to explain disabled children.
However, the stories had a different flair in this world—fairies were verifiably real, after all. The coin that my brothers and I had hunted in our youth had been more than just an old man’s babbling.
Fairies were metaphysical entities altogether different from the humanfolk, demonfolk, and demihumans that dotted the land. They were sentient phenomena, invisible to most.
The only ones who could perceive them were mages with mystic eyes and young children, whose undeveloped egos blurred the boundaries of what is and isn’t. The gift was further restricted to a handful of races, according to what I’d read.
“You see, fairies may at times be born into the world with physical form by borrowing the womb of another living being.”
Hey, that wasn’t written in the book!
“Enamored by happy households,” she went on, “their souls wish for a body, and their desire manifests when they become a changeling. I can guarantee you my account is authentic; it comes from a—shall we say—primary source.”
I couldn’t process what she was saying. You’re telling me Elisa—the girl I’ve looked after for seven years—isn’t a mensch?
“Unfortunately, the process is quite taxing. Young changelings often grow slowly, are plagued with a weak constitution, or are otherwise too dysfunctional to survive more than a few years.”
That hit closer to home than I would’ve liked: this was the very reason Elisa was so attached to me. I vividly remembered how we’d all take turns nursing her and buying medicine every time she fell ill, and she was undeniably childish for her age.
“Lastly, fairies favor blonde hair and blue eyes... Do you understand what I mean to say?”
Of course I did. My mother Hanna and I were exhibits A and B.
“The girl is a changeling,” she concluded. “I dare to say that she’ll soon awaken to her talents, as well. As the fog of toddlerhood clears from her mind, her budding ego will rouse the powers of her birthright.”
I knew all too well that she was right, and for the mage to explain all this so candidly, she must have already been certain of her claim. Her actions were far beyond that of a woman stringing a child along to satisfy her boredom.
Besides, I’d experienced Elisa’s inexplicable power firsthand. I’d wondered why the radiant heat death of the first mage’s spell had vanished—it seemed unlikely that he’d slipped up. From my novice perspective, I doubted the spell would have fizzled out like it had never existed in the first place had it been a simple failure.
The methuselah had done something similar with the dismal black sphere, and both times, the kidnapper had been caught off guard by his dissipating mana—not in the way of someone surprised by their own error, but as if to question why his spell had failed in the first place.
The logical conclusion was to think that someone else had erased it. What was more, I had clearly heard Elisa scream my name, wringing every last bit of sound out of her vocal cords...and the light winked out of existence at the same moment.
I hadn’t been saved by coincidence or an enemy blunder, but by Elisa. The gears were beginning to turn behind the scenes. Something big threatened to upend life as we knew it. But even then...
“And?” I said. “What of it?”
Even then, family is not heritage alone. The ties of kinship are found in mutual love and acceptance; although blood is where family begins, it is certainly not where it ends. Whether Elisa was a changeling or a goblin had no bearing on the link between us.
Dumbfounded at my statement, the methuselah stared at me in astonishment. She shook her head as if to chase out an uncomfortable emotion and asked, “Am I misremembering? Do mensch have some sort of culture of fostering other races?”
“This has nothing to do with fostering anything. This is a matter of bonds,” I said, causing the woman to sigh in exasperation. “Did my parents say the same thing?”
My confident tone got a raised eyebrow out of the mage. If nothing else, I at least managed to catch her off guard. I’d been asleep for a few hours, and my parents had already been given an explanation much like the one I was receiving now. She’d said she’d given up on speaking to them, and I could imagine why. We were out in the boonies; the cultured idea of mundanity she expected was so foreign to my parents that they’d probably had a difficult time understanding her.
That was why she was here, pushing through the tedium of explaining the situation to me directly. I wasn’t sure what she intended by trying to rope me in, but one thing was unmistakably clear: my parents had no desire to give up their daughter. The years of hardship and love that it took to raise her remained steadfast despite the uncovered mysteries of her birth. Perhaps we would have wavered had the news come right after she’d been born, but our ties were buried under the tightly packed sands of time.
“It’s quite aggravating to see how sure of yourself you are,” she said. “An excess of wit is detrimental to success, you know?”
“It is not my intent to be witty, madam. I only speak on behalf of the faith I place in our bond.”
“Your bond, is it?” she mused quietly.
I recalled that methuselah were rigid individualists who would casually go a quarter of a century without so much as a letter to their parents after leaving the nest. Those who didn’t care for their noble title went as far as to omit their family name during introductions.
“I imagine she would have been chased down in my homeland,” she said. “The difference between two nations truly is a world apart.”
As I’d suspected, she wasn’t from around these parts, which left her perplexed at the disparity in home values. I thought it would have been obvious that different countries would have different familial structures; there was already a huge gap between the households of the city and countryside. For her not to understand that, this lady either had no interest or no experience with the subtleties of human relations.
“Well, enough of bonds and what have you. It isn’t as if that has any effect on the law.”
“The law?” I asked.
“Quite. I trust that you understand that your younger sister is a changeling by this point?” Once confirming that I understood, she began to slowly enunciate every word as if she were trying to teach a blithering idiot. “Changelings stumble into their great magical gift as their minds begin to solidify. Their powers are so great, in fact, that they verge on being dangerous.”
I didn’t need her pedantry to understand that after seeing Elisa delete a massive ball of energy on the scale that she did. It didn’t take much thought to guess what could happen once both her body and mana reserves matured.
The state would never allow a naturally occurring threat to security to remain unsupervised. As the symbol of national loyalty and the collector of taxes, the government would take action to prevent her from hurting anybody.
“In the worst case, I’m sure she would be capable enough of cleaning a small canton off of the map without a trace, judging by how impressive her Mana Capacity already is. I surmise she originates from a remarkably superior fairy. Perhaps this little home of yours was worthy of equally remarkable envy...”
The mage trailed off and began pondering with her chin in hand. I took advantage of the lull to ask what was going to happen to Elisa, since that was all that really mattered. In the worst case...
“Put a lid on that ill will of yours,” she said. “I shan’t treat her poorly.”
Shoot, I gave myself away. I’d begun preparing a fallback plan to...tidy up the situation and take Elisa into hiding, if I had to.
“Fret not, I’ll speak on her behalf. It isn’t as if I can lie when it comes to sorcery—we magia have a lot of rules.”
She laughed about how any attempt to misrepresent the truth of anything magical might end with her head flying, but I was too caught up in her unusual title to notice. What the heck is a “magia”?
“That being said, dangerous mystic beings are tightly controlled by the government.”
That seemed justifiable, but I still didn’t want to accept it. Our family’s precious angel wouldn’t burn down cities like her Old Testament counterparts; her most cherubic quality was that she was the cutest girl in the whole wide world—and no, the court will hear no objections. But I accepted that leaving her to her own devices was risky. For her to lose control and accidentally hurt those she loved was the last thing I wanted to see.
“Should the state be left in charge of her,” she continued, “I suspect she’d be treated as the object of study. I’m sure there would be plenty of researchers dying to get their hands on a specimen as long-lived as her.”
I felt every pore on my body scream at the mention of the word “specimen.” It suggested that she’d be used like some sorcerous reagent in any number of horrid experiments. The depths of magic were profound, and inhumane experiments were but a means to a greater end. As a matter of fact, in an era where life was not considered so irreplaceable, anything not explicitly forbidden by the law was sure to be fair game.
Even in the history I knew, criminals, foreign captives, and slaves had been used for all sorts of unimaginable scientific trials. The tale was so common that to unpack every awful example was an exercise in futility.
“In the best case,” the mage elaborated, “she’d be cut up right away and sent off to be used as a research sample. However, in the worst case, who’s to say how miserable—”
“There’s no need for threats,” I said. “There must be something you want for someone of your stature to be here speaking to someone of mine.”
Her vague intimidation was pointless; I was already willing to give her anything I possibly could. And it was clear that if she didn’t need anything from me, she wouldn’t have wasted her time speaking to a literal child in the first place.
I would do anything to secure a safe, happy future for Elisa. If the mage asked for a limb or an organ of mine, I would personally carve it out and package it for her. I swore on my name as a brother to protect Elisa, and I wouldn’t turn back on my word now.
“Splendid. I rather appreciate your shrewdness, you know? Anyhow, to run through the interesting bits, changelings are only dangerous due to the instability that comes from their poor control of magecraft.”
“Which means...” I said in realization.
“Quite. So long as they learn to manipulate their mana, they render themselves harmless. The empire is not so intolerant as to mistreat a harmless sentient being that once thought of themselves as an imperial citizen.”
A shining ray of hope cut through the dark despair. It was common in fiction for those outside the bounds of humanity to be treated like pariahs and used for cruel experiments regardless of how little threat they posed, and the empire’s compassionate stance was heart melting.
However, a question remained: how was she meant to master her powers? It wasn’t as if she could study on her own and then claim, “See, all safe!” We wouldn’t be able to guarantee her or anyone else’s safety.
“I shall take your sister as my apprentice,” the mage announced. “I shall raise her into a full-fledged magus. Without any worry of her accidentally exploding, her rights as a citizen will be restored and she’ll be free to live a proper life.”
“That sounds wonderful, but...”
“Right, I’m sure you’re wondering about my compensation. Truthfully, I don’t care for such things.”
She doesn’t need any compensation? This methuselah sure says some heroic things. Still, I couldn’t help but wish that she’d put a little more effort into her presentation if she planned to deliver such a gallant line. Her antithetical disinterest and smoldering pipe left a dubious aftertaste.
To begin with, everything else she’d said up until this point made it easy to see that she wasn’t the type of person to shoulder a burdensome task out of the goodness of her heart. My prediction was closer to prophecy than guesswork, and I was convinced she had some heinous plot up her sleeve.
“Frankly, I have no trouble and don’t ever intend to have trouble when it comes to money. Besides, I would outright pay to be done with this boorish fieldwork.”
I hoped that I would one day be able to utter such a line. We weren’t particularly poor, but life in the fields didn’t exactly rake in giant piles of gold. Wait, what did she say? Fieldwork?
“Nevertheless, I can’t simply pick up an apprentice at my leisure. Magia aren’t fond of unchecked proliferation of their arts, so I must charge a tuition to take on an official disciple.”
Her speech up until this point had been rapid, leaving me no time to ask any questions. Is she trying to rescind her initial suggestion? Ahh, but wait, there’s something I need to clear up before that.
“What exactly are magia?” I asked. I’d heard of mages and hedge mages, but never magia. Plus, apprenticeships were contracts with children, so I felt like she could have pulled a few strings and simply not taken any money.
“Oh... I have to start from there? Are all you country folk like this?”
The noblewoman seemed to grow weary of my ignorance, but I couldn’t help not knowing what I didn’t know—and even her name and occupation were part of the unknown.
Tired of explanations, she listlessly puffed another cloud of smoke at my sincere curiosity, but nonetheless began explaining the state-funded research institute that was the College of Magic and the magia that populated it.
The Imperial College of Magic had been founded alongside the Trialist Empire itself and was home to the scholarly endeavors of recognized magicians who wished to study the intricacies of spells and cantrips. With its main branch located in the capital, the college collected and tested the very theoretical foundations of magic, and was the only government entity that could publicly use their wizardry as they pleased.
Mages recognized by the college were geniuses a cut above the usual rabble, and they proved their distinction from the faceless crowds of other spellcasters to attain the rank of magus. They weren’t mere users of magic, but an educated class of minds who were to pave the path for magic as a whole.
The college was similar in mission to the public universities of modern Japan, and magia were akin to licensed doctors: their ability was rigorously tested in a national exam of unparalleled difficulty.
I’d never known the empire had such a position. Apparently magia were halfway to being bureaucrats, belonging to the only branch of government that could officially wield magic. And, using their political sway, they imposed ample tuition on any and all apprenticeships to prevent the unbridled spread of knowledge. Thinking back, the old man who’d given me the ring had said something similar. It all finally clicked.
That said, magia weren’t on that tight of a leash. They were free to dabble in financial ventures and they could research whatever they liked, within reason. The college would look the other way so long as the magus in question didn’t overstep their bounds, and that applied to rearing a successor as well. The empire knew that trying to control everything was doomed to fail.
However, the danger a changeling posed was a different matter entirely. The methuselah mage—apologies, magus—explained that it would all be pointless if the Rhinian authorities didn’t accept Elisa as an official magus.
“Your sister absolutely must become a magus to survive,” she said with a hefty pause. “But that comes at a steep cost.”
When I asked how much the tuition would be, the magus puffed another cloud of smoke and nonchalantly gave her answer: “A mage with no connections would need thirty drachmae to enter the college, but an apprenticeship with a magus one knows would only cost a minimum of fifteen.”
Although she spoke like she was listing off the prices of canned coffee at a convenience store, the numbers themselves were absurd. Give or take, a farming family made five drachmae per year, and even households with large fields and supplementary income would hit their ceiling around seven.
Considering our recent expenditure to build a second residence for Heinz and Mina, you wouldn’t find that much money if you turned our home upside down and shook it. To think that we’d need more than twice that... Well, it certainly reflected just how gravely the empire prioritized keeping its secrets tightly wound.
Furthermore, the magus had said a “minimum” of fifteen. Like weapons and wine, the opportunity to learn had a legally mandated lower bound, and it was in the order of gold pieces. Which meant that to receive the tutelage of a famous magus, one would expect an even higher cost of entry.
“Well, I have no issue with fifteen drachmae per year.”
“Per year?!” I shouted, unable to suppress my shock. Hold on, it’s not a one-time payment?! It’s annual?! That’s forty-five drachmae for three years, or ninety for six! Forget shaking our house down for pennies, we wouldn’t be able to afford that if we sold the whole thing!
I nearly fainted from the thought of paying that much money, and the magus watched me peculiarly. I could tell that she hadn’t managed to internalize why I was so distressed—and how could a blue-blooded noble possibly hope to comprehend the fiscal values of a commoner? Returning to the information era, she was like the genteel ladies who’d never drunk coffee out of a can; surely the gap in our understanding would have been played off for a cute laugh had we been in a manga.
“Well,” she said, “I suppose it might be a tad out of reach?”
“If shirking our taxes and refusing food and drink for a year only to come up short for half of that amount is a ‘tad’ short, then it is as you say, madam.”
“Truly? Do all the peasantry live this way?”
I’ll fucking kill you! I exploded internally. Calm down. She’s a noble. She is a creature native to a completely different world from you, I told myself. I would run out of blood vessels if I kept popping off at every turn like this.
“Enough talk of income and prices,” she said, rerailing the conversation. “I have a proposition that will solve all that ails you.”
We’re finally getting to the meat of it. I’d known she had something she wanted from me from the moment this esteemed magus chose to spend her precious time speaking to a rural kid like me.
“Would you like to become my servant?”
“Servant?” Her suggestion came so far from left field that it took everything in me to keep my jaw from dropping to the floor.
The antiquated system of indentured servitude was alive and well in the Trialist Empire. Perhaps it wasn’t outdated per se, considering that the political systems at play seemed akin to either the early or High Middle Ages, but I found the whole deal horribly archaic.
Many a lowborn urban son had his rights signed away by his parents, working hard hours at stores and factories across the country. It was a simple form of mentorship: in exchange for room, board, and a chance to put one’s most malleable years to use learning a trade, indentured servants worked for free until they were of age. Of course, this career path required a dependable master to serve, and wasn’t readily available by any means.
“Indeed, I want to take you on as my steward. Putting the down payment on your contract that I’d customarily hand to your parents toward your sister’s tuition would be a trivial task. What do you think? I happen to be of the opinion that it is quite the bargain,” she said with a showy smile—no, a sneer.
The magus was right: the deal was everything I could have asked for. A scrawny farm boy like me had no hope of finding employment at the rate of fifteen drachmae per year when the skilled scribes that reported straight to the magistrate barely made that much.
This arrangement was transparently too good to be true. To say that she had ulterior motives was an understatement. I could tell I was in for more than the typical “Sorry for tricking you” that came up in tabletop quests, but did I have any right to refuse?
Nay, none whatsoever. No matter how shady the offer seemed, I couldn’t turn away from the sliver of hope that I might be able to save Elisa. I was willing to grind my own future to dust so long as she could grow up safe and sound, even if the methuselah tore off my limbs and dug out my eyeballs to pass the time.
I folded over the blanket and stepped out of bed, kneeling down before the seated magus, doing my utmost to play the part of a loyal retainer.
“I humbly accept your offer.”
“Well said. Good boy,” she said with a satisfied nod. As she exhaled another thin stream of smoke, I suddenly remembered something important.
“I apologize for troubling you, but as a formal servant, may I have the honor of knowing the name of my esteemed master?”
The magus finally realized when I asked this question that neither she nor I had introduced ourselves. I chalked it up to the thought never occurring to her lofty noble mind. Faced with lowly commoners, she had little interest in giving her own name, and even less in remembering ours. After a beat, she smacked the ashen leaves out of her pipe and recrossed her legs as she began the chore of introducing herself.
“I am Agrippina,” she announced. “Agrippina du Stahl, formal researcher at the Trialist Empire of Rhine’s Imperial College of Magic, and member of Leizniz’s cadre, the School of Daybreak.”
My first impression was one of danger. Her name was infamous in my past life as the birth mother of one of history’s greatest villains, still berated to the modern day. Although I could not yet understand what any of the following titles meant, I was sure they were each weighty in their own right.
“I am Erich,” I mirrored. “Erich of Konigstuhl canton, fourth and lastborn son to Johannes.”
No matter. I’ll do anything to keep Elisa alive. Indentured servitude is nothing compared to crossing blades with a slew of bandits. Still kneeling, I bowed my head deeply in the face of my venerated dame.
“Mm. Well, Erich, do your best to please me. I shall act as I please, so feel free to do all that you can to accomplish your own goals.”
I saw no need for heartfelt fealty so long as I played my part—after all, she seemed to be thinking the exact same thing.
[Tips] Indentured servitude is a system that prevents large social upheaval while still attending to the needs of employment and social mobility of the masses. A similar concept known as the decchi system was used in feudal Japan, where young apprentices would work their way up to being a full-fledged artisan. In the empire, servitude is one of the few legal avenues for a minor to find work.
Agrippina du Stahl was a young—by methuselah standards—woman who hailed from the Kingdom of Seine, which lay a handful of satellite states to the empire’s west. The nobiliary particle “du” proved her family’s well-established pedigree, and her father’s barony was vast enough to live up to their stature.
However, the methuselah landholder had little regard for his territory; Sir Stahl was famous for his love of travel. He had a bad habit of leaving the management of his estate to his retainers for the better part of his time as he wandered around the globe. At times, the king would attempt to recall him only to be at a loss for where to deliver the summons.
To give you a taste of his carefree indulgence, he had once spent twenty years without returning to his motherland. Further, he’d completely missed an entire civil war on a three-year vacation—his words upon returning to the royal palace had been etched into history: “What? There’s a new king? When did that geezer die?”
Naturally, Agrippina had spent her youth ferried around by her family’s wanderlust. She had spent almost none of her one hundred and fifty years of life in the kingdom that had conferred nobility upon her.
When she celebrated her centennial coming-of-age, she practically spat in the face of aristocracy and cast her lot with the Imperial College in Rhine. Her choice came solely from her partiality to Rhinian cuisine and weather.
Her parents had only said, “Well, do as you please,” and ordered their people to send her a ludicrous allowance. They too were something of a lost cause, but that was beside the point.
The methuselah are defined by this sort of behavior. It would be futile for a mensch or any other fleeting form of life to try and amend their ways. Just as we cannot hope to fathom the qualia associated with marching in a row of ants, the eternal methuselah simply fail to comprehend mortal values.
At any rate, perhaps as a reaction to her childhood experiences, Agrippina’s excessive degeneracy culminated in one simple statement: “I think I’m quite done with travel.” Where her father had been a stringless kite, she was destined to be an immovable paperweight.
Agrippina took full advantage of her race’s flawless digestive system and its lack of waste excretion to spend seven straight years cooped up in the college’s massive library. The remarkable woman read at her leisure for the entire duration.
A normal person would have been driven mad by this sort of life. That she chose it of her own free will while basking in the glory of her debauchery begged the question: could methuselah truly be considered sane?
What was more, after half a decade, she simply commented, “I’ve a handle on the arrangement of books here.” From then on, she lay on the bed she’d dragged into a reading room and didn’t move for the last two years.
This was the kind of creature a methuselah was. They immersed themselves in all they favored and paid no mind even if it cost them everything else. From a mortal perspective, they could be considered broken organisms.
The young methuselah simply enjoyed her perfect world with every fiber of her being. However, her Eden would not last long. She may have been the highborn daughter of a foreign noble, but the library’s archivist commanded immense authority in his domain. Eventually, the librarian’s patience reached its limit.
When Agrippina’s ample donations of gold and transcriptions could no longer stay the librarian’s wrath, she was forcibly removed after a lengthy discussion. From then on, she began her life anew in her allotted research workshop.
Alas, if one were to ask whether that led to her reexamining her behavior, the answer was an emphatic no. Rather, if methuselah were so commendable that they’d rethink their priorities after a setback of this scale, they would have trampled over every other race to lay claim to the planet long ago.
Upon being thrust out of the magnificent library, she cooped up in her own workshop. Shut-ins were destined to be shut-ins no matter where they went, it seemed.
Of course, the college was by no means a lenient place: registered researchers and professors alike had an obligation to attend periodic lectures and debates. No matter how famous the lecturer or how powerful the noble, the rules remained steadfast. In the worst case, one could be demoted or stripped entirely of their title.
“Magus” was more than just a title—it was an epithet reserved only for those who furthered the pursuit of magic. The professoriat looked the other way for seven years, owing to Sir Stahl’s hefty cash contributions and the fact that Agrippina was the successor to a foreign noble house. After years of letting her get away with only writing papers, the library incident left them no more room for charity.
The council of professors demanded that she do more than publish treatises—she was to attend lectures and act the part of a proper researcher. Although their society prized byzantine speech, they made their decree as sternly and directly as possible.
And yet, alas, she did not amend her ways.
Agrippina was sloth incarnate: she used farsight spells or familiars to attend lectures, and turned in her reports by folding the paper into an artificial life-form that would fly to its destination. On top of all this, her highest achievement in sloth was when she invented a piece of parchment that synced up with the contents of a debate in real time to avoid attending in person.
She was a first in history. True, there had been cases where students or researchers would utilize farsight or familiars to listen in on lectures. To forbid that would be to burden those who were fully employed or paid their way through school by taking on extra jobs.
However, all the brilliant minds of the lecturers combined hadn’t predicted that some buffoon would use these means for every class. Agrippina was no doubt the first methuselah to squander this much time in the name of slovenliness.
Since her actions were technically allowed, they were at an impasse. Without an effective breakthrough in sight, time went idly by...until the dean of her cadre could take her indolence no longer and exploded in rage. Agrippina’s room was isolated using the lost art of space-bending magic, but the dean forced her way in anyway and demanded that she depart for fieldwork immediately.
The methuselah violently resisted the order to accompany a caravan like a normal wandering mage, but had no choice but to concede when the dean threatened to kick her out of the School of Daybreak. Not belonging to a cadre was barely acceptable for a student, but to a researcher with a proper lab, it was on par with being expelled from the college entirely.
Agrippina had known from the start that it wasn’t going to be a quick trip. She could no longer remember how long it had been since the dean had sent her on this research journey and told her not to come back without explicit permission.
Although she was fatigued by her long excursion, she had one shining nugget of information. If she recalled correctly, somewhere during the endless sermon that marked her departure, the dean had said something along the lines of “I suppose you’ll be forced to return if you take in an apprentice by some miracle, but know that...” Of course, the stringent dean would never allow her to pick up some random child to tutor.
At worst, the child would be taken in as an official student of the college. If the dean took on the responsibility of raising them instead, Agrippina would once again be sent on her merry way. She needed something, some reason to legally reclaim her nest at the college as a young mage’s master.
Today, fortune had shone on her: she’d finally found a child that had no choice but to be her disciple. She didn’t care for the money. Rotten as she was, she was a noble. Her family’s loyal retainers delivered an allowance every so often, and she’d saved most of the money she made from her publications. Though it was easy to forget, she was a superb magician in her own right.
The only part of Agrippina that was spoiled beyond salvation was her character. With her ticket to self-confinement in hand, the magus was in a terribly good mood. To be able to return to the college—the home of her beloved workshop—both legally and with good reason left her overjoyed.
What was more, the deal came packaged with a handy little manservant. Agrippina’s day could not get any better.
[Tips] There are three titles at the college. Students are mages in training; researchers are given a workshop; professors lead the former two.
Students and researchers generally align themselves with factions headed by their professors, and a good relationship with these lecturers is key to obtaining access to proprietary knowledge or laboratory funding. This is due to the fact that all of the college’s functions are dictated by a committee of professors, and the empire has little concern for its internal relations and finances.
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