The Long Way Around [15 Chirreb 4260]

The first mystery of academic life is how to find your classes. For your convenience and safety, there is not the least trace of organization or structure to the naming of classrooms: they are named after their decoration, or the artist who designed them, or some notable event that happened there, or the whim of the first professor that taught there, or any other way by which things get names. Neither is there any catalog of where classrooms are. One must simply know -- or, if knowing does not suffice, find someone who does.

When one is readily recognizable as a first-year student in the first week of classes -- be it by means of brilliant azure plumage that has never been seen before on campus, or by means of a woefully hung-over face and drooping tail -- one may perhaps be given very creative directions to ones' classes. I got to my morning's class a third of an hour late. So early? The three grinning Orren upperclassfolk had no special tricks to give a youngster who could fly; they had me circle the steeple on the administrative building seven times, and then sneak in through the dean's window. I consider myself fortunate here. Twillie, the Orren girl who came in right after me, had been sent through the messier parts of the plumbing.

Nestrune Kreslink is Crown Prince of Daukrhame, and a proud proud Rassimel is he. He refused to follow the senior students' directions: he strode, clothed, around the buttery, rather than going in the fur through it. Thery and some of her friends are plotting a suitable punishment for Crown Prince Nestrune Kreslink. By custom it must be delivered by the end of the week.

In all truth and clarity, the end of the week will not come too soon for me. I am taking all these pranks in good humor, more to avoid Nestrune's looming doom than because it comes naturally to me. Some other first-term students have been heard vowing that they will never do such pranks themselves: a vow that I will not take, though the academy would be a better place if everyone did.

The Long Way Around [15 Chirreb 4260]

The first mystery of academic life is how to find your classes. For your convenience and safety, there is not the least trace of organization or structure to the naming of classrooms: they are named after their decoration, or the artist who designed them, or some notable event that happened there, or the whim of the first professor that taught there, or any other way by which things get names. Neither is there any catalog of where classrooms are. One must simply know -- or, if knowing does not suffice, find someone who does.

When one is readily recognizable as a first-year student in the first week of classes -- be it by means of brilliant azure plumage that has never been seen before on campus, or by means of a woefully hung-over face and drooping tail -- one may perhaps be given very creative directions to ones' classes. I got to my morning's class a third of an hour late. So early? The three grinning Orren upperclassfolk had no special tricks to give a youngster who could fly; they had me circle the steeple on the administrative building seven times, and then sneak in through the dean's window. I consider myself fortunate here. Twillie, the Orren girl who came in right after me, had been sent through the messier parts of the plumbing.

Nestrune Kreslink is Crown Prince of Daukrhame, and a proud proud Rassimel is he. He refused to follow the senior students' directions: he strode, clothed, around the buttery, rather than going in the fur through it. Thery and some of her friends are plotting a suitable punishment for Crown Prince Nestrune Kreslink. By custom it must be delivered by the end of the week.

In all truth and clarity, the end of the week will not come too soon for me. I am taking all these pranks in good humor, more to avoid Nestrune's looming doom than because it comes naturally to me. Some other first-term students have been heard vowing that they will never do such pranks themselves: a vow that I will not take, though the academy would be a better place if everyone did.