Dis: Orientation—The Campus Tour
That’s it. Just “welcome.” There are no formalities, no rituals. You’re the first of this batch’s ten (not counting alternates and replacements) student-candidates to arrive....
Welcome
That’s it. Just “welcome.” There are no formalities, no rituals. You’re the first of this batch’s ten (not counting alternates and replacements) student-candidates to arrive. New arrivals can be spaced out along a week or two, sometimes as much as month apart. The hike, or crawl, or slither for the last segment just…takes as long as it takes. It’s different for everyone, and no one’s psychopomp has the patience to push, pull, shove, or drag their charge those last few dozens of miles. Also the actual distance is different for each individual student, depending on place of entry into the underground system and…a number of personal choices. You have to get your mind right.
Arrival order means nothing. Your tuition takes as long as it takes and ends when there is no point in trying to prepare you any further for your final examination. But you may as well get busy at your first opportunity. We will find unpleasant work for the idle. It is frequently of an educational nature.
Your escort made it here a few days ago to help prepare your facilities—which is usually the excuse they give when they are hugely bored of watching you drag your ass along and the end is in sight for them. Don’t take it personally. Psychopomps are constructed from the remains of failed candidates. They have no vested interest in your success or failure beyond simple spite. Maybe some shame. A little jealousy. Best to leave them to it.
Campus Layout
If you were expecting a map, there isn’t one. Technically speaking, you’re in the Dream Polities now, where geo-spatio-temporal relationships follow dream logic. Directions are not reversible. It will be anxiety-inducing at first, then merely infuriating, and eventually just tiresome. And then it will be Cartesian spacetime which will have a lot to answer for.
I’m saying you’ll get used to it.
Look around. You can see the major landmarks. The Tower. The Amphitheater. The Library. Just behind you, the Gate. Anywhere you are trying to find will be locatable in relation to these landmarks.
Student Housing
Until you’ve learned how not to sleep—and you will if you’re going to survive the academic process here for any length of time—a protected space will be provided for you to indulge in the habit. As you did not arrive with belongings of any kind, there is no reason for any space to be wasted for storage. Therefore dormitory space is minimal.
From the Gate, go between the Tower and the Library, keeping the Amphitheater to the far side of the Tower., and you will eventually see the Nest. You are welcome to occupy any unoccupied cell of sufficient size that appears to be in a suitable state of repair. Most will be a snug fit.
Periodically staff break down old cells and construct new ones from chewed paper and clay. If you care to make any modifications to a cell for your comfort, the materials that the staff use for maintenance are in various heaps around the back. Go nuts. But understand that any cell you customize may be occupied by someone else when next you return.
If you haven’t broken your sleeping habit and you’re found asleep elsewhere on campus—like the Library, or the student workspaces—the staff will collect you and place you in a cell of their choosing. Any unsecured study materials or notebooks that you thus abandon may be confiscated—possibly refiled, possibly claimed by another student or researcher—and you may well never locate them again.
I will say it again: Do not fall asleep in public. Do not (by falling asleep or otherwise) leave materials and unfinished projects in any space that has not been prepared and secured for your use. Abandoned materials and even your critical study notes will be tidied away.
Anything left in the cells will be collected and discarded or redistributed according to the whim of the staff or the next occupant. It’s best not to leave anything behind when you emerge.
But also: it’s best that you learn not to sleep, and learn it quickly.
If you’re wondering why the Nest has thousands and thousands of cells when there are so very few resident students, the cells are also used—primarily used, I should say—to incubate organic projects, churn out replacement staff, farm organs and tissues for repairs, provide space for recuperation for the injured and exhausted, for deliberate decompositions, and sometimes just for lengthy meditations.
While you’re in the Nest, try not to disturb your neighbors. Do not open any cell that is sealed unless you sealed it yourself.
The nearest building to the Nest is a communal bathing space for students. Geothermally heated of course, with access to Dark Water, both fresh and salt.
Formal Coursework
This will be detailed elsewhere. But as an overview, there are two hundred faculty members and merely ten contract-bound full-time students. To save themselves labor, some of the faculty will want to deliver their curriculum to the entire student body in one go, or at least to as many as possible. This means that there will be many group classes, especially at the beginning of your tuition, and especially covering basic core knowledge.
Be assured that the rest of the professors will be queuing up, waiting their turn to get at you.
It will be up to your professors, individually, to dismiss you from their courses when you can demonstrate to them that you have mastered the subjects in question. Success will take as long as it takes. Failure is not acceptable. You may be released for a break, or to take another course that could offer some insight or cover prerequisite or remedial material in greater detail, but you will come back and finish—or be subject to the consequences of breaking your contract.
Staff will locate you and tell you which professors will wish to see you, and when, and according to what schedule. Your professors and their assistants will tell you what materials you may require and give you pointers toward where to obtain them and how. The only excuse for missing any professor’s scheduled class will be that another professor already has you in their clutches and refuses to relinquish you.
It is not uncommon for students who still sleep to be hauled from their cells in the Nest by staff so they will not miss scheduled lectures and demonstrations. It is not uncommon for staff to be deployed in lectures to prevent the possibility of sleep for those students who still require such services.
Again, it is best if you learn not to sleep.
The Library
The Library will be hands-down your most used resource during your tutelage at the Oldest University.
It is the largest building on campus and quite conceivably the largest artificial construction anywhere. The fact that this Gothic pile of stone isn’t taller than the Tower should lead you to guess correctly that the bulk of the Library is underground.
The Library has quite the collection of books and written media, but the Library does not contain just media and recordings. There are also collections of materials, organic and inorganic, alive, dead, and undead, abstract and intangible, all meticulously catalogued and stored, all with the considerations and conditions necessary to preserve the reference item indefinitely.
Those of us who die, to whatever extent it is possible for us to die, in total or in part, are not buried or burned or entombed or otherwise discarded. If we are no longer repairable, we are dismantled and our various parts are filed away in the Library, and there many of us continue to serve. The ba collection is nearly as extensive as the collection of written media, with many of the catalogued items available for supervised consultation. Surplussed items can be made available for student projects and constructs—and, of course, University staff. Cultured samples of living (or otherwise regenerative) tissues can be obtained from the Library with sufficient lead time in exchange for rendered services or donated items.
You will need a guide to locate most reference materials, and the Library will happily supply you with supervision at all times. Many items in the collection are unique and irreplaceable and the penalties for damage to certain items through mishandling do not bear contemplation.
The Library itself is alive (by many definitions of the word at least) and alert and self-maintaining. Vigilantly and vigorously and mercilessly self-maintaining. In many ways, building and maintaining the Library is the very reason for our existence.
Do Not Fuck With The Library. What remains of you afterward will regret it.
Student Laboratories
You will frequently need a place to work on projects that will take a long time to complete. This place will need to be protected from those who might (inadvertently or intentionally) interfere—and other places nearby will often need to be protected from your materials and the results of your labors. Such spaces will be provided by arrangement by your professors, typically in the area of campus between the Library and the Tower on the side lining the Quad.
You may at some point be temporarily in charge of multiple spaces. Sometimes you will have to share with other students and researchers. At no point will you be allowed to clutter your spaces with irrelevant materials or hoard reference materials that others might need.
You will not intrude upon another student’s workspace without authorization. You will not engage in petty acts of sabotage in an attempt to manipulate class standings. Should your carelessness destroy rare materials, you will be assigned penance and also be required to replace anything wasted.
Also try not to allow your projects to cause structural damage to the facilities on loan to you or those of your neighbors. Whatever is left of you will be assigned both compensatory and punitive penance for carelessness. Your professors will make reasonable assumptions about the risks of catastrophic outcomes for the projects they assign you in an effort to reduce risks.
The Student Lounge
There are no such facilities. The original campus design called for a modest suite of rooms in a quiet building somewhere, and we built them and had the staff maintain them, but the students found themselves with no time to use them, despite the constant and occasionally distracting desire.
In the end we repurposed the space. It was deemed too cruel to keep the Lounge available. Like the torture of Tantalus.
Somewhere there is a memorial.
The Refectory
We keep stockpiles of all the dust and clay you can get down you in tidy piles behind the Nest. By the time a contracted student has completed the trip to our campus, this should be all one requires.
Should you experience uncontrollable cravings for other substances, an associate of the Professor of Undead Physiology will be happy to carve time out of your busy schedule to prioritize instruction for correcting the balances of your undead humours or…whatever the working model is these days.
Graze and snack if you must, but predation on fellow students or staff or anyone else under University protection is not tolerated. Remember that University protection is extended to much of the City and citizenry outside the Gate as well. Also “destruction of University property” and “waste of University resources” covers a lot of territory.
The Amphitheater
Whenever a large demonstration of any kind is required, whether by the professors (for the edification of students) or by a student (to exhibit proof of mastery of a concept to a professor) it will take place in the Amphitheater.
The Amphitheater is open at all times except for when it undergoes cleaning and/or reconstruction activities. Whenever there is any kind of demonstration scheduled, it will be open to the public. Students are encouraged to attend any demonstration for which they find they have the time in order to learn from the mistakes and successes of their fellows.
The Quad
The Quad is where events happen that are too small to warrant the use of the Amphitheater. Think group classes or small exhibitions and the like. The Quad has each of the major landmarks (Gate, Tower, Library, Amphitheater) at the four corners and is equidistant from all of them. There are six iterations of the quad depending on the arrangements of the landmarks. Do not expect the topology to make sense for a long while.
Sometimes there will be a temporary hall or a pavilion if the situation seems to call for it.
Regardless of exhibitions, the Quad is a public space and the public is always welcome. This includes the ubiquitous dead from our host City.
Faculty Offices
Faculty Offices are in the Tower, which is the taller of the two tall edifices on campus. Similar to the Library, it is also in Gothic style and of stone construction—though it largely resembles (at first glance, anyway) a termite mound that has recently been on fire.
The faculty have no problem with this comparison.
There are 201 suites in the Tower, which is one for each faculty member and one for the current headmaster, who is invariably the valedictorian of the previous batch of students.
A professor’s office is open to anyone and everyone who cares to visit when the professor is present. Offices frequently double as small classrooms and usually have seating for around a dozen students and standing room for a few more. No two offices are identical—no two suites are identical—and professors swap suites at whim, with no prior warning, when one requires a different configuration and another can be found who will volunteer to relinquish their own, all according to a complex system of favors granted and owed.
When you need to locate a particular professor’s office for whatever reason, guides will be made available from the endless supply in the main entrance lobby.
Faculty Workrooms
Not everything taught by a professor can be taught in an open classroom. When a specialty environment is required for a growing environment or a laboratory or a fabrication facility or operating theater or what have you, the faculty member in question will have access—frequently adjacent to their office, but also as necessary off in the warrens and caverns beneath the Tower. Workroom access by any but a professor is by invitation only, and then only by the invitation of the professor who is in charge of the workroom space.
This policy is invariably for the safety of the would-be visitor, but frequently the thing from which a visitor would like to be safe is the professor, who may be managing a very delicate project and would like it to remain undisturbed.
Not all workrooms are dedicated to teaching projects. Faculty are called upon to perform many kinds of research beyond the arts and sciences that are taught and are often employed in projects for the general improvement of the campus and the safety and long-term interests and investments of the school itself.
You will never require entry into a workroom into which you have not been invited.
Faculty Residences
Each of the 201 suites in the Tower also has attached a modest cloister cell where the professor (or headmaster) may repose in quiet contemplation undisturbed. In each there is a pallet and a desk and a chair—or whatever analogs to these things are suitable to the physiology in question. The desk has a single drawer for a notebook or any small items of personal value that have yet to be relinquished to the Library collections dedicated to such things.
These things are described here merely to satisfy curiosity. Until or unless you are a professor, you will never see the inside of one.
The faculty cells share access to a communal bath, about which your curiosity need not ever be satisfied.
The Store
The process of scholarship consumes much in the way of material, from taking notes and generating papers to lab-work and demonstrations. Materials that are not considered rare will be made freely available in inventoried stockpiles kept in numerous warehouse spaces both above ground and below as the nature of the materials in question require.
Campus storage and inventory is maintained by staff as an adjunct to the Library due to similarity in duties and requirement for organizational skills and talents. They are also in charge of ensuring that there is minimal wastage, and recycling and reconditioning whenever possible, and that appropriate prices are assigned to materials when necessary in order to assure that materials are not expended profligately or sold by desperate students in the City’s marketplace to make a quick buck.
Much of the material that would require purchase can be bought at fair market value in the City’s casbah marketplace, where it is in fact sold by University staff with license to do so.
Students will be issued an allowance for the purchase of necessary materials that require purchase. If due to carelessness or mismanagement of funds they require further coin, they can earn it by performing duties on campus—or they can try their luck selling services in the marketplace or to their fellow students on campus.
Any student caught selling University property in the marketplace (or elsewhere) without license will have all coin confiscated and also be assigned further punishments at the whim of the officiating authority.
Physical Plant
The University campus is a living organism in many ways, and this implies maintenance and growth: a steady influx of consumable supplies, processing and removal of wastes, management of energy and materials for special environments in workspaces and laboratories and special collections, as well as the quite literal heavy lifting when it is time to relocate equipment and materiel and personnel and reconfigure interior spaces.
The campus staff are also material assets of the campus inventory, constructed from scratch in many cases from whatever biology or technology made the most sense at the time, in any and every combination, but frequently reconstructed from failed students (entirely in accord with the standard contract that you have signed), retired and reconditioned damaged or discarded parts from faculty members, cast-off bits from a plethora of expired lifeforms, and the occasional volunteer or contracted indenture.
Students will often be awarded a brief (and quite educational) indenture to Physical Plant Operations as a punishment for an infraction. During these nearly inevitable episodes, the student in question will learn in great detail the value of the resources that were damaged or wasted through malice or carelessness or spite, and thus hopefully learn a greater respect for the efforts of the working staff whose job it is to produce and maintain these resources for the student’s benefit.
Campus Operations is indeed its own course of study that every student must master. However, the expectation is that nearly every student will have been intimately exposed to the intricate workings of every system by the time of the Final Exam through punitive indentures.
—
Hm. You look like you need a nap. Head to the Nest and claim a cell, and when you emerge, a member of the staff will be waiting to guide you to see the first Professor in your queue.
I am your Headmaster: living proof—or close enough to living as to make no nevermind—that the course load you face can actually be managed. Best of luck.