Chapter 33.1: The Professor

Penny woke to the sound of an argument, though she didn’t recognize it immediately.

At first it seemed to her groggy mind to be just some litany of random and infuriatingly high-pitched squawks somewhere beyond her. Maybe animals or something? A tantruming child? Through the waning fog of what felt like a year’s sleep, she grunted in its general direction and tried going back to sleep.

The sound continued, though, only getting louder with the passing moments. Instead of taking her absently back to sleep, Penny’s hazy feelings became more aggravated.

Without clear thought or intention, she opened an eye, expecting to see the person responsible for the racket and give them a long list of colorful words they needed to hear. Instead she saw nothing—literally, absolutely nothing. Penny blinked a few times, her wits growing sharper as her heartrate picked up, but the world remained black as oil. Where the hell was she? Gods, what had happened?

Beginning to flail, her left hand hit smooth stone, and she pressed herself against it, sitting up as she felt up the wall for any indication as to where she was or why she couldn’t see. Her hand hit a small switch, and with a low hum, two lines of white light flickered on above her.

With a gasp, Penny blinked again, now to keep out the light, not the darkness. As she did, the walls, bed, and door came into relief around her.

“Gods,” she whispered, her heartbeat slowing. “I need a drink already.”

Rata Sum, she realized, she was in Rata Sum. One by one, the events of the previous day came back to her, like dreams she had to work at remembering. She was in Rata Sum, where she’d come with Minkus to deliver Wepp to the peacemakers. Skixx, he had died, the bastard. There was a girl, an asura girl, who was now an orphan. Wepp, he was with them now. This other asura, Korki— Katta— Kikka, she was responsible for it all. Not Penny, Kikka. They were all with Jinkke now, Minkus’ sister. She’d found them rooms for the night in the school dorms.

Yes, that. That was where Penny was: a windowless room somewhere in the bowels of that floating city. That was why she’d woken up blind. With a deep breath, she pressed her face into her hands, rubbing them up through her hair.

How long had she been asleep?

Sliding herself to the edge of that cramped bed, Penny once again eyed the sterile room she’d only briefly assessed the night before. The room genuinely was small, offering just enough space for the bunk receded into the wall, a basin and toilet, and some shelves. It was intended as only the sleeping quarters for a single student who, as the asura had explained it, would spend the vast majority of his waking time in a lab identical to Jinkke’s just a few doors down the hall.

The barking match persisted outside, which Penny now assumed was some over-reasoned but unimportant disagreement between asura who didn’t know any better than to wake the whole gods-damned city with their morning racket. Done with it, Penny shot up from the bed. But before she could step out and give them her thoughts, the real smallness of the room hit her: she slammed her head into the low, stone ceiling.

Dancing back and forth and feeling for blood, the woman yelled a string of profanities to make a priest of Balthazar blush. Ironically, it had the desired effect, and through her own cries, she heard little feet and a far more subdued discussion move off down the hall, leaving her to grumble at the pain in silence.

Now stooping, she dressed, grabbed her things, and slipped out of the doorway and into the hall, still swearing under her breath. She didn’t know what time it was, but she was sure the others were getting to work preparing what they could for their forthcoming foray into the wildlands, and she wasn’t about to face their mockery for being any later than she already was.

She stretched as she walked, realizing afresh that for whatever reason, only the dorm rooms were built so short. The hallways and labs in this section of the city or school, or whatever it technically was, were more than tall enough for a human. Maybe even a norn.

Much as it had been the day before, the hall was lit by alternating sections of illumination cells and natural light coming in through those broad verandas notched into the outside edge of the city. Today, though, in the morning light, the sunbeams that burst in through the eastern-facing edge of Rata Sum outshined the illumination cells, painting broad stokes of yellow sunlight across the line of dorm and lab doors embedded in the long wall.

Penny blinked hard in the invasive light, but as she absorbed its warmth, there was a momentary easing in her already tight gut. Minkus, she thought, would like this.

She continued on, actually smiling a little, despite the dull throb at the back of her head. Just a minute later, she was outside Jinkke’s lab. Sure enough, the three asura were already there, chattering about something with a person she didn’t recognize, and farther inside, two more asura were also there, seemingly about other business.

“Penny, you’re awake,” Minkus chirped, bounding to her in the doorway. “Good morning.”

“Yeah, I’m awake. Mostly,” she said with a yawn.

Penny looked at the rest of the group, standing around the nearest workstation, which had been cleared of everything but Minkus’ documents. Jinkke was passing short, selective stacks of sheets to one of the new asura, explaining details for each one as she went. This new person was male and notably older than everyone else in the room. Peering through small, squared spectacles, he seemed to grip both Wepp and Jinkke’s attentions, even as the latter went on explaining her thoughts to him.

“What’s all this?” Penny asked Minkus quietly. “And who are the new people? Is this the professor person we’ve been waiting for?”

Minkus nodded. “Yes, that’s Professor Vaff. He just arrived, maybe—” He winced, thinking very hard about something. “Maybe seventeen minutes before you.”

Penny raised an eyebrow. “Seventeen?”

Minkus grinned, playing a little with his ear. “This city—Rata Sum—I think it brings it out. I spent many years trying to be very exact.”

“Sure.” Penny shrugged, then pointed to the other two asura she didn’t recognize. They worked at the next station on, apart from everyone else. “And who are they?”

Minkus followed her gesture, bobbing his head as if navigating past his sister, Wepp, and Vaff to the pair behind them. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Onn and Drixxi. Those are Jinkke’s labmates. We met them—”

Penny nodded, suddenly remembering the pair, and she finished his sentence. “In the Shiverpeaks. Right. I remember that one’s pissy expression.” Minkus nodded.

Before he could say more though, Penny made for the three at the nearest worktable. “Well,” she yawned, “let’s see what this professor has for us.”

As she and Minkus neared, Jinkke concluded whatever she was previously saying to the older asura and shifted her attention to them. “There you are. Minkus was convinced you needed more sleep and would appear when you awoke naturally. As so often is the case when it regards people, he was correct.” Her words to Penny were snappy, but they lacked some of the bite they’d had the previous evening.

“This,” Jinkke went on with an extended hand, “is Professor Vaff, Director of Transmaterialization and Interdimensional Research for the College of Synergetics.”

Penny followed her gesture, looking to the older asura, who stood only inches taller than the little blonde. He was definitely the elder in the room, a fact proven not only by the deep creases in the crinkly skin around his eyes and mouth, but by his generally slow pace of movement. Some of it might have been a characteristic thoughtfulness, but he also appeared to just be old and slow. Dressed in flowing, multi-colored robes, he temporarily removed his glasses and bowed, his silvery topknot bobbing forward with the motion. Unlike Wepp, this fellow still had all his hair, however gray it was.

Penny greeted him as formally as she knew how. “Uh, morning. Good to meet you— Professor, sir.” For all the times she’d used that title in mockery, this may have been the first time she’d ever met an actual professor. She winced uncomfortably.

“And a pleasant opportunity to meet you as well, Penny was it?”

She nodded.

“Excelsior. Jinkke was just explaining to me the circumstance you four find yourselves in. It is a curious situation to say the absolute least, provided that all of your conclusions are sound.”

Wepp nodded vehemently. “Oh, I am quite confident they are. We would need to be missing significant information to not be at least seventy-five-percent accurate in our drawn conclusions.”

“Perhaps,” the elder mused, glaring intently at the top page in his hand once more. “Seventy-five percent is a tolerable threshold for error, with the potential for noteworthy gains in the fields of magical history and psychomagical interfaces. But neither are my fields, and neither are yours, Jinkke, which makes it not worth either of our time as a field experiment."

“Of course, aside from it all having nothing to do with the transmaterialization studies you should be engaged in—” He paused, scrutinizing his student over the top of the page. From behind them all, Onn harrumphed, a clearly bitter agreement with Vaff’s reproof. But the professor ignored it and continued. “It also poses incalculable risks to your safety, all of your safeties, if even a quarter of your claims about the parties involved are accurate. This isn’t a task for students; it’s a task for peacemakers.”

“We tried,” Minkus said, lowering his eyes. “They said the wildlands were beyond their jurisdiction, and we had insufficient evidence against the Inquest.”

“By the Alchemy, then, for what are we paying them?” the old asura huffed. “If not for protecting our expanding territory, then— oh, never mind.” He rubbed his chin, letting his eyes roll once more over the page in his other hand. “Perhaps I could petition for the involvement of a Synergetic field-research team. Even I recognize this as a potential discovery the college would revel in getting their—”

Penny hadn’t intended to join this conversation, preferring to cross her arms tight and leave the maddening debate to the people who enjoyed that sort of thing. But before she’d given it an ounce of thought, she was talking, cutting off the rest of the professor’s recommendation. “We’re doing this ourselves. The peacemakers don’t want to help, and we don’t have time to wait for a bunch of scholars to debate it. We have too much skin in this to sit back.”

Minkus took a half step in front of Penny, adding, “We’ll also talk to the Vigil at their outpost. I hope they can help.”

Vaff still eyed Penny curiously. “Indeed.” He didn’t seem offended by her interruption so much as he was intrigued by it, but his attention quickly shifted back to Jinkke. “I still advise against all of this, progeny, but it seems you are all set on your predetermined course. At that, however, I still don’t grasp what you expected me to contribute to this project of yours?” A slight grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. “I am much too old to be adventuring with you.”

Jinkke’s shoulders curled forward, and she took an unusually long time to select her words.

“Well, you see Professor, it’s not your expertise we need, or your accompaniment. We’ve come up against a roadblock in our efforts to employ these outdated designs to our advantage. Namely, we have zero collective knowledge of this substance.” She shifted her sheets and pointed to the page they were all familiar with, the one with diagrams of golem head-casings and a reference to what they still needed. “Professor, do you happen to have any notion what Seer essence is?”

Vaff studied the page, squinting to see its contents through the spectacles teetering on the edge of his nose. He shook his head. “I’m afraid not. But again, we’re discussing something beyond my field of expertise. Perhaps you should speak with Professor Klipp at Dynamics. I understand his work in derivative alchemy, while a little haphazard, is second to none.”

Jinkke pursed her lips, clearly struggling to decide how to say something she really didn’t want to. Penny quietly enjoyed the show.

“Yes,” Jinkke said, stammering a little, “we— may need to pursue that avenue. But that is also not why I approached you, specifically.” She flashed a glance at Minkus, who gestured happily for her to continue. “Professor, my brother is of the belief that— well, he believes the old legend that Synergetics secretly houses some ancient, forgotten artifacts of the golemancer Zinn somewhere here in Rata Sum. Of course, I insisted that—”

“Legends, you say?” Vaff mused, putting a finger to his wrinkled chin. He swept a considering glance across everyone’s faces. “And where might progenies such as yourselves have heard such legends?”

Jinkke scowled at the professor with that calculating expression Penny had now seen on so many asura faces. In fact there was something of it in each of their expressions, as Vaff settled his attention back upon his student. The two eyed each other warily, like gamblers playing an unexpectedly high-stakes hand. Minkus bounced with excitement watching the two, but Penny just shook her head, wondering if it was too late to return to that claustrophobic dorm room and go back to sleep.

“We were told the story as progeny,” Jinkke admitted, still scowling at her professor skeptically. “And, of course, it floats around the college halls from time to time; half the students must have heard it by now. But it’s just a ridiculous myth students pass around to sound more knowledgeable than they are, isn’t it?”

Vaff continued to play with his chin, letting his eyes wander back down to the copied pages in his hand.

“Professor?” Jinkke asked again.

All eyes were on the old asura, including Jinkke’s labmates, who’d both stopped their work to actively listen to the conversation. Even Onn’s interest seemed to be piqued beyond his constant expression of ire.

Vaff groaned like straining timber and swept a final glance past Wepp, Penny, and the two students across the table. He seemed to finally make some unspoken decision. “Smoke and sparks, progeny. Of all the questions to pose and all the circumstances in which to pose it, why did you pick this and now?” Though flustered, he also had a hint of pride in his voice as he rubbed a hand across his eyes. 

Jinkke blinked stupidly, and suddenly Penny was glad she wasn’t in bed after all.