The Reformation of The Academy

      Day One: Pneuma?

      Day Four:

      It’s probably some marketing scheme to sell magazines and fashion, but, if it’s true that the weather is controlled such that ‘you can set your watch to it’, then, I don’t know, it could be useful. But, I’m not sure if there are seasons or not or if the pattern takes a month to redo, a year or several years, I’m not familiar with meteorology either. If I’m lucky the previous people would have made a schedule for the weather and if I’m luckier still, I might be able to find one. Sage, as the both of us have decided on her name, is terrified of thunder. I wonder why that is. Either it’s her animal features making it much too loud for her. Then again, maybe it’s something to do with how primitive of a culture her people have.

        This world is largely quiet, filled with the sound of nature. The only interruption would have to be thunderstorms, which can be pretty dangerous to be in. The wind, the lightning, getting chilled from the rain. Thunder is also very sudden as well. I’ve never been scared of thunderstorms, I find them rather nice when I’m indoors. But, I’ve also been exposed to plenty of sudden and loud sounds compared to Sage. Car horns, backfires, fireworks, gunfire… maybe the cavemen of old had a similar fear of thunder? When I think about it, lightning is quite the terrifying event. There’s not really much quite like it in the world.

       I need to wash my clothes, find some basin to collect water, find some better light sources and also a damned pair of shoes.

       I’m glad to have found this campus. I’ll do a walk around the building for the rest of the day, see if there’s anything useful around. I wonder if there’s a chemistry lab in here. If so, maybe I’ll move in there. That’d be nice.

        That makes me wonder if I can get power to run in this building, somehow? If I can get power maybe I can get water to run? I’m not sure about water, if it does run it wouldn’t be clean, I don’t think. Then again, the old civilization may have had an advanced water purification facility somewhere around here? I don’t know how to get one of those running… I’m also not an electrician, so, if the power is really messed up there’s not a whole lot of hope there, really.

        I guess I will see. At any rate, it’s safe enough here.

        Note to myself: Leave the next couple pages blank for weather notes. Maybe find another blank book just for weather updates.

       Day One: Sunny and very hot, no clouds, steady downpour at around midnight

        Day Two: Overcast, hot, heavy thunderstorm in the evening

        Day Three: Sunny and Very Hot.

        Day Four: Sunny in the morning, hot, storms started around 11:45AM in the area, lasted for three hours then turned into a steady drizzle, cooling off a bit. Storm came from the south?

        Fritz sighed and closed his journal. He’d written very little compared to the couple of hours of thinking he was doing over the course of his short entry. By now the storms outside had settled down, turning into a steady and soaking drizzle. Sage, thankfully was now back to her former self, more or less. She had left for about an hour - to do what, he wasn’t entirely sure - but, now, she was hovering tentatively at his side, engrossed in him as well as his writing. When he shut the book she finally spoke:

      “Whats flower smell on Fitz? An whats… Fitz doing?” She asked.

       The Chemist allowed himself a small smile; sure that Sage had been absolutely itching to ask for hours now.

       “Oh, that is scented soap. Odd-Ears use it with water to clean their bodies and to smell better. And I was taking notes… eh… writing. So I can read it later and not forget things.”

        Sage looked somewhat confused for a bit, probably not realizing that she would have more questions from his answer than she thought.

         “Oh. Sage uses just water. Soap… is better? An writ-in’? Read?”

          Fritz frowned and rubbed his eyes, thinking for a moment before answering: “Soap does a better job at washing off oils and dirt. It helps keep you healthy. As for reading and writing… well…”

          He flipped his journal back open and stared at his notes for a moment. A linguist, he was not and he hadn’t the foggiest idea how to explain language to someone that was unfamiliar with the concept. He’d never really thought about it, frankly.

          “Well, you know those pictures of Odd-Ears that you showed me, Sage?”

         The Fox Woman nodded enthusiastically: “Yes! Odd-Ear pic-ures.”

         “If you remember, underneath them are a bunch of lines of characters that look like these:” Fritz tapped the page full of notes with the tip of his pencil: “That is writing. Its…. Hmm… like talking without using your voice. So, writing, what I was doing is like talking and when you read the words it’s like hearing someone talking even though they’re not around.”

         She bent forward and placed a finger on one of the sentences, the graphite smudging slightly under her fingertip. Bringing the smudge finger to her face to look at it closer she then leaned in a little bit more and the book and at the letters. Fritz noticed her tail swishing back in forth, stirring up the motes of dust from the floor. Then she unexpectedly turned towards him and poked at the page asking insistently:

        “How Fitz read ‘an writ-in’? Can Fitz tell Sage?”

        Fritz grimaced at the requests he should have expected to come from her. He suddenly realized he had placed himself in the major responsibility of teaching someone an entire section of something they would have learned over their formative years. It could take years to…

       Then again, her pleading look obliterated any notion that he could say no: “Oh, well… Sage it will take quite a long time for me to teach you. Maybe months or years and I am not the best at language or teaching. Are you okay with that?”

       “Mont’s? Years?” She quickly asked, clearly eager to learn more before she paused and then answered his question: “Sage wants to know.”

        He let out a humored sigh and smiled as he answered: “Months are made of things called ‘weeks.’ Weeks are a period of seven days, morning to night. A year is twelve months.”

        As he mentioned the word ‘days’ a small revelation was made to him. Time was also a good concept to teach and Sage clearly had some concept of time. So, reasonably, teaching her reading and writing along with time would be easier to conceptualize. He turned back to his journal and struck a line through ‘Day Four’ and wrote ‘Thursday’ after a bit of hesitation. It was a major assumption, but, he had to start somewhere.

        “For instance, each day of the week has a different name which then repeats.” Fritz said as he wrote each day of the week across the heading of the page. “The week starts with Monday and then ends with Sunday.”

       “Why?” Sage asked.

       It was a reasonable question, surely, but Fritz had never thought about that: “Oh, well… that’s kind of always how it’s been for Odd-Ears. I think it has something to do with the stars and how they follow a pattern throughout the year.”

      “Stars?” She asked again.

      “When you go out at night and you see all those lights in the sky? Those are stars.” He wanted to elaborate on what stars actually were, but, he caught himself. Only two of her questions had caused the ‘lesson’ to go well off track. Actually, what he really needed was to give her something to ‘do.’ She seemed like the type to want to practice something in order to learn it.

       “Say, how about this. Would you like to see how your name is written?”

       “Sage can writ-in now!?” She said excitedly, clearly enthusiastic at the notion that she would be shown how do something so readily.

        Fritz smiled again, picking up his book and then standing up: “Okay, well, let’s get to a room with a window so you can have some better light.”

        The room they settled on was the first one they walked into. It seemed to be a general sort of classroom, the tables arranged in a broad ‘U’ shape as if some phantom lecture was taking place. Despite the dreary downpour outside, there was plenty enough light from the elegant bay windows to write by. Pulling out a chair for sage he tore out a couple of pages from the back of his journal before placing them before his student and handing one of his extra pencils over to her.

        “Alright, so, your name is spelled like ‘S-A-G-E’ He sounded out as he wrote out the individual character, sounding out each one as he wrote them.

      She nodded

       “Alright, good, good. Now you hold the pencil between your fingers like this, right?”

        Fritz held his pencil and let Sage study his hand like a blueprint before she eventually had a good grip on the pencil: “And all you need to do is lightly press the pointy end against the paper, then you’ll leave a mark. And, if you feel like you’ve made a mistake, this pink, flat end will make the mark go away with a little bit more pressure.”

        She looked down at the paper but then she looked back up at him for a moment and Fritz realized that she was waiting for him to show her more. However, something held him back and he returned her stare with a very soft smile and a nod. He was curious how much she understood and how confident she was with new things. When she turned back to the paper he frowned as another thought - a peculiar one, this time - crossed his mind. For whatever reason he had asked himself if this is what it was like to teach a child. He’d never imagined going into teaching himself, though he had sometimes wondered what it would be like to have a child himself and how raising and teaching them would feel. It was a fleeting thought and the more he thought about he reasoned that wasn’t exactly accurate to Sage. She was much more than a child, both in maturity and understanding; that much was clear to him.

         He would have to take a moment to ponder the feeling, he had compromised with his subconscious. With that promise made with himself, he put the feeling away in his mind and he paid better attention to Sage’s first attempt at writing.

        She was very lightly brushing the paper with the tip of the pencil, leaving thin and light streaks as she tried to imitate the first character he had written. But, she seemed dissatisfied with that and awkwardly turned the pencil in her hands and erasing the near imperceptible marks. Remarkably, the results of her next attempt was a rather good looking start to her name and she finished it with a slow and deliberate effort. She turned with a smile and asked:

       “Like this?”

        Fritz nodded and laid a hand on her shoulder: “Yes. But, you can get a lot better at writing, especially writing faster.”

        He leaned forward and quickly scrawled out the alphabet in as neat of a print as he could manage as a man before writing down the name of each day. It wasn’t super overwhelming, just a matching and mimicking exercise, really.

        “Here, these are all the elements that make up all words. Don’t worry if you don’t understand them, I’m just trying to get you used to writing by copying it.”

        Sage’s ears flicked and she smiled up at him before returning her focus on yet another new experience and skill. She was so engrossed and so delighted to be shown another Odd-Ear thing, particularly a thing that had confused her until recently. Whenever she was flicking through that magazine and she saw the pictures being interrupted by these odd shapes a weird feeling of confusion and annoyance filled her. Why would Odd-Ears do this? The pictures were clearly more pretty and the faces of the Odd-Ears in them showed how happy they were. Now it was clear to her that the Odd-Ears could mark their voices on anything and soon she would be able to do the same.

       So engrossed in her thoughts and her new craft that she didn’t take notice of Fritz excusing himself and slipping out of the classroom. A little later did the fox woman realize his absence, but, she didn’t mind overmuch. What she had been given was exciting enough to occupy her till all the pages, front and back, had been marked with her practice.

        Fritz, on the other hand, was more keen on exploring his new home while he had the will and the energy to do so. He first wanted to rummage around the basement, reasoning that there must be some way to establish power in the building. He hadn’t seen the town at night quite yet, but, it made sense that the electrical miracle he saw in the city would be present here as well. Just like the city buildings; flicking the switches in the classrooms didn’t yield so much as a flicker of light. The problem surely had to do with the connection to the main power infrastructure and one would probably find those in the basement. Perhaps it was just as simple as replacing some fuses… however that was done; Fritz would have to figure out.

       The pitch black stairwell he was met with on the ground floor, on the other hand, convinced him he would have to start his electrician education some other day. He was a bit tired and rooting around in a dark, abandoned basement was something that would be there for him on some other day, surely. On another day without the gloom, with another light source and maybe a helping hand from Sage.

        There was a conveniently framed poster on the wall of the stairwell with a rather blocky diagram printed on it. At a closer look, it seemed to be the floor plan for the whole building, each floor given it’s own space, each room given a number and even the doors and windows were detailed. His eyes darted down to two basement levels, which surprised him a bit, but, he soon understood what this building was like. On the first ‘basement’ level there was what looked like a loading dock to bring in deliveries; the rear of the building, surely, having the floor exposed to the outside world. Beneath that was what he was curious about: janitorial rooms, laundry, garbage and the all important electrical room.

        “I hope there are wiring schematics down there.” He quietly prayed.

        The Chemist lifted the poster off the wall and popped the back of the frame out before fishing out the laminated plan. There was a self reflective, comedic moment sometime later as he was looking over the plans and leaning into every classroom he came across. For a moment he was transported back to the adventure series that he watched as a kid whilst fighting off fevers and chills. There were so many episodes that revolved around plans, maps and cyphers written on gargantuan parchments. For just a moment he relived one of his childish daydreams of being an adventurer exploring a ruin. He’d somewhat forgotten till now.

       As much as he enjoyed the brief fanciful perspective at his situation, his mind quickly switched back to the practical aspect of his task. It was less inspiring to merely be poking around a university rather than uncovering some long lost treasure. This isn’t to say that there wasn’t some value to each little glimpse into the previous bits of knowledge each class was centered around.

       There were the regular lecture halls and the standard classrooms with their student seating and professor’s desks. Then there were the odder themed ones. Of course there was the seamstress/fashion room that Sage was fond off. In the broad spectrum of professions there were ones that resembled kitchens, clean rooms for what seemed to be electronics, rooms populated by drafting tables, medical and biological equipment. There was a startling amount of trades and skill building environments, the most sentimental of which was his own trade.

        The Chemistry Lab.

         He was incredibly relieved his first hope was well founded but there was several dozen more blessing on top of it. It was no where a comprehensive and complete set - quite a bit of it was clearly missing - but the various windowed cabinets had a lovely amount of glassware left in it. There were pipes and gas lines that had valves at each and every station: natural gas to fuel Bunsen Burners and heating mantles as well three others. An Argon line with a bright green stripe on it, a line with a double red stripe, possibly hydrogen, and one with two different blue shades on it, seeming to be nitrous oxide.

        Fritz couldn’t help but be impressed at the setup and equipment, even in it’s partially looted state. Days and weeks he had to bitch and moan at his supervisors to even get half of the equipment the lucky students here got to learn with. Such is the way in those days of setting up a new energetics plant with novel explosive compound. Not the minister or his bastard jackals understood a lick of chemistry or logistics, preferring to go off of unverified, secondhand lists of materials that some auditor claimed to be all that was needed for such a complex. Everything was behind the time lines, lying that it was all being set up on time and with shoddy equipment creating an accident just waiting to happen. But there was no shortage of unlucky men to take the just consequences from ignorant and ego inflated Party officials. Everything that had happened to his life and the causes of his death was just some circumstance that could be quickly covered up and forgotten about in the bureaucracy of the state.

        Frankly, he was a ghost that death had yet to lay a finger on.

        It would take a lot of effort and hopefully some acceptable trial and error, but, he was sure he could get the classroom in a form of working order. This would have to happen after he managed to secure himself a good amount of food, water and tools. Anything to keep his mind busy and sane was how he would survive in the long run.

        Finally - having explored the last that the top floor had to offer - Fritz came across another janitor’s closet. It was much like the others with a few cleaning supplies and equipment, but this one had a steel ladder that lead on up to the roof. He had seen it on the plans and decided this would be the finale to tie up another rather exhausting day. The rooftop, like many large building, was cluttered with air conditioning units with their ventilation ducts and the drizzling rain was gurgling off into its gutter system.

         From here he could see across the large village, the forest peaking out from the wet gloom and - if he could trust the visage well off in the distance - he could make out the towering buildings disappearing in the low flying clouds. Another pang of sorrow hit him as he saw the slowly decaying state of the world around him. Part of him could have given anything to just see this place living and breathing as it once was not terribly long ago. It was an even more morose and tragic setting than the victims of any natural or man-made disaster that he had seen. The whole world seemed to be dead and he was the only one that even slightly appreciated all that had been lost.

          He took another moment and took a deep breath of the soaking atmosphere. Maybe tomorrow he would take another look at Sage’s kith and kin. There was some chance that there were more like Sage and maybe a chance to have people to talk to. He was a guest in their land, he thought as he ducked back inside and climbed back into the institute interior. Though, they didn’t seem to care for the town that Fritz had claimed for himself. If there was no need for diplomacy or no chance at more friendship he could at least see what kind of food was around for him to take advantage of.

         Even though it was a productive day he still didn’t have a great grasp of what he should expect from this world. There wasn’t enough answers to all the questions yet.