Requisite Magic School Parent-Student Conference

The seacoast was relatively cool by Aeirun standards. A constant breeze kept things merely ‘Florida-hot’ instead of ‘sweltering otherworldly pressure cooker-hot.’

Gentle reeds lay amongst the dunes; this was an essential aspect of preserving the shorelines against the larger-than-Earth-standard tidal waves.

Huh. Skott ruminated on this as the convoy traveled south towards the more populated port towns of the central coastal region. Despite being an inland sea, the tides here were far greater than on Earth.

Perhaps that made sense; there were more moons here, after all.

“Hey, Lucy,” Skott began after a time. “Is Aeirun round? Like, are we on a planet? Or some kind of bizarro flat world?”

Lucy thought about it for a time, finger on her chin. With a puzzled look, she glanced at her mother. Lamora shrugged.

“Our merchant fleets are trying to determine that even now,” the prime ministress said.

“Well. Perhaps we can ask Grog about it,” Lucy chirped. “He has schooling. We’ll have plenty of time while we’re in the mage’s tower.”

The two brothers were elsewhere in the convoy, attending to various army duties. Lamora looked out the carriage window.

“You may get to ask him sooner rather than later,” Lamora said with a soft, mature smile.

Now it was Skott’s turn to look out the windows. The mages' tower loomed ever larger, its shadow covering this northern brick road as the sun arced across the sky in its midmorning configuration.

+++

By the time they reached the outer walls of the mage’s tower, it was well past sundown. These walls, and the tower itself, were products of a far older civilization than any currently active species in Aeirun. There was no correlation, as far as any scholars or Aeirunian archeologists could tell, between the elvan tree-mansions and this towering white-stone spire.

Since it was late, the Mage’s College was shut tight. They settled into the town’s portside governmental quarter and fell asleep in earnest.

Governmental liaisons were up early. Skott was stirred awake by ministerial aides milling about before dawn.

Skott looked out the window of his inn room. The sea wafted in gently as the port was carved into a naturally secluded inlet.

Skott had been here once before. The college had been a tiny thing, then. A place for elvan to send their second or third sons to give them something to do. Among the post-rebellion liberation reforms, Skott had suggested was to align the institution more along the lines of this pamphlet from Oxford they’d found falling through a micro-portal. Fifteen-plus years later, those changes had stuck. Skott noticed that they’d done up the tower façade with wood panels and ivy. In truth, he didn’t know if an Earth college would translate well to a college dedicated to magic and magecraft.

No time like the present to find out, Skott decided.

College, too, opened relatively early. The first rays of sunlight were just barely rising above the white-stone walls when the doors to the tower proper flung open. Robed scholars—mostly humans and a few elvan— stumbled sleepily into the grand wizard’s tower for morning classes.

“Oh yeah. This brings me back,” Skott said as he stepped through the threshold.

Lucy was waiting for him in the wizard tower’s grand hall, waving. Alongside her were Lamora and an accompanying security detail. Among that detail were two half-orcs who could be twins—Lamora’s sons. Well, their sons.

“Anyone been to college before?” Skott asked.

“Only on a stately visit,” Lamora said.

With its strong walls and naturally defensible position, the mage’s college and accompanying college town had gone unscathed in the great uprising against the elvan masters. Neither Skott nor Lamora had any intention of disrupting this font of knowledge, so the college had continued to operate before, during, and after the rebellion.

Skott fidgeted about, a strange nervousness drowning out a faint feeling of pride. He had a child in higher education! They grew up so fast. Still, visions of Skott’s own time in college reminded him of the years shortly after returning from Aeriun.

“Hmmm. If I recall from Grog’s correspondence…” Lamora checked a college itinerary. “He should have a lab in the Applied Number Magic section of the tower.”

“Applied what, now?” Skott asked.

“Allow us to show you,” Lamora said.

A relatively smaller security retinue accompanied the head of state on her walk through these hallowed halls of wizardly learning. Among them were Skottson and Sethset. Skott wanted to ask why these two appeared almost like twins but looked so different from Lucy when they were all part of a litter of five, but thought better of it.

The group opened up a musty wooden door and walked inside. A chalkboard awaited, another element the people of Aeirun had probably cribbed from another college pamphlet. Aeirunian ‘number magic’ was sprawled on the boards.

“Huh. Algebra,” Skott said.

It was calculus, too. Trigonometry. What Earth called math, Aeirun called number magic. Skott happened to notice a ‘college of stoneworking magic’ further down the tower, which he supposed trained what Earth would call ‘highway engineers.’

Within this empty, formula-laden lecture hall was a young half-orc in graduation robes, scribbling on a . The college’s reforms had taken that from a pamphlet too, having replaced more traditional mage robes.

“You’re, uh, supposed to wear those when you get your diploma,” Skott said.

“Oh, hello, didn’t hear you walk in.” The scholarly half-orc turned. “Mother, what a pleasant surprise! Lucy, Skotton, Seth? Well, nearly the entire family is here. And is that… the human from another world?”

“Hello, Grognar,” said Lamora. “It is indeed.”

Green-blue eyes, like the rest of the family, gazed from behind a set of spectacles. Fancy bifocals, of the kind Einstein-types would wear. G On further examination, it appeared mostly cosmetic.

Skott stepped forward. “Hello. You, ah, don’t know me, but…”

“Hello, father,” Grog said.

Skott did a double-take. He glanced between Grog and Lamora.

“How did I know?” Grog wiped down a small part of the boards clean, then drew a box with four equal quadrants. “Pougalast Squares, named after an elvan mage of old.”

“Pougalast? We call ‘em Punnett Squares,” Skott said.

Grog continued to furiously Mark ‘BG, bg’ and various permutations on the chalkboard.

“So you see,” he continued. “Among all of our mother’s children, it is simply impossible to gain our eye color, general build, and specific shade of green from a union with two orcs. Likewise, hair color and texture is unlikely to arise from any Aeriun-stock humans. Mother’s adventures during the war of liberation with her party are well-documented. We were born exactly ten months after the end of the war. It’s simply a matter of extrapolation.”

Skott was left flabbergasted, unsure of what to say.

“Okay, did everyone know this but me?” Lucy complained, annoyed.

“I keep telling you to attend classes, dear sister,” said Grog. “I have an excellent lecture coming up on trans-dimensional genetic inheritance next month. Perhaps you should sit in on some classes. Might find something to inspire you.”

“I don’t want to learn things. I want to go on adventures,” Lucy said.

“Ahem.” Well, your mother is here for a diplomatic meeting with the powers that be. We’re here because of Lucy’s adventuring. Well, it broke our magic portal ring. Might be seeing me a lot more if we can’t get it fixed.”

Skott chuckled nervously. Lucy presented the ring. The orc-scholar examined the trinket with the bottom half of his bifocals.

“Oh, yes. Cracked the casing for the resonance essence. Thing that makes it ‘tic’, yeah? Turns a thin veil between worlds into a viable portal. Otherwise, you have to wait for the right factors to summon a portal by chance. Somewhat common down south, but there’s no telling where it’ll drop you off, yeah?”

“I… have experience with that,” Skott said.

Grog was, despite a rather rough-sounding name, quite the gentleman and a scholar. Skott almost didn’t believe they were related. He recalled having a bit of curiosity and a feeling of endless scholarly possibility back in his own college, but those ambitions had quickly given way to boring, mundane career practicality.

Ah, perhaps I settled down into a major too soon, Skott supposed.

“Dear, can it be fixed?” Lamora asked her son, betraying a surprising amount of concern for Skott’s predicament.

“Fairly easily.” Grog let a pregnant pause hang in the air. “… with proper supplies. We’ll need a fresh vein of blood-obsidian. That’s going to require a field expedition.”

“Ooh, a field trip?” Lucy asked.

“Mother spoke quite fondly of those,” Sethset said.

“They were not my field trips,” Lamora corrected. “I… heard tell of this concept, and something called ‘grade school’, from your father.”

Well, I told her about my field trips, Skott thought, but did not say.

It stood to reason that Lamora did not have proper schooling, given her youth was spent running away from servitude in Auron’s tree-manses and hiding out in the southern jungles with rebellious orcs and goblins.

“Always a fetch quest,” Skott did say. “What’s the catch?”