Session 24: Academic Alarm
As I return...yeah, one of the reasons I had trouble posting these were b/c they turned into huge long monsters, so I’ll be trying to keep ‘em a little shorter. This one was already partially written when I got back to it, so...I failed to do that this time, lol.
That said: Hey, remember the first time we went to Sturmhearst? There’s a lot you can learn at college!
Vigdor, staring directly into the void, takes some Staring Into The Void damage. Shosh whacks him on the back of the head. Jolted out of his wonderment, he carefully shuts the door to Macker’s lab and turns to her. “What the FUCK was that?!”
“I dunno! The void! If you figure it out, write a paper on it!”
“SO, THERE IS A REASON YOU SHOULDN’T WRITE A PAPER ON THAT-“ Gral blurts behind them, coming back with Valeria. Every eye on the Eyegis peers around for flesh-hounds, which thankfully seem to be absent.
(Vigdor immediately rolls to see if any of the eyes have tear ducts. Some do. None of the eyes match.)
Gral gives a quick explanation of the Key’s deal, and how telling Sturmhearst there’s portals will make them an easy target for the Key’s knowledge-peddling. We gotta close this thing!
“Can’t you just do a guitar solo about it?”
“Not one this big! And there’s definitely more portals around.”
Valeria and Gral examine portal; so does Vigdor (he rolls bad and takes 1 taint)
We all examine the portal. The last one, we disrupted the thing that was keeping it open, but now we don’t know what’s sustaining it. And last time we had to go THROUGH the portal to do it. At least this one’s less elaborate.
Those of us less arcane-inclined search the room and find some Incriminating Documents. Like a boss, your humble writer searched the Discord channel and found ‘em. I could copy/paste, but here’s the tl’dr:
1. A project status update for research led by Macker, developing a medical procedure for “extracting curse-spawned infection of the central nervous system.” Notable: the brief mentions that a) the patients in question cannot be moved from their current location without the infection progressing; b) the patients are physically fit and have military training; and c) the infection is fungal in nature.
That’s….telling. Who is he trying to save from the Growth? Military training – could these be Crusaders?
2. A hurriedly scrawled note. “Eric- Prof vanished, must have taken the package with him, I can't find it. CoEth after us. I’ve grabbed what I can, will head to Prof. Merkam’s Lab to join others hiding there from White Coats. PS: Stay out of MM dissection lab.”
That’s where the research assistant must have gotten off to, at least.
3. A friendly letter in different handwriting than the other two. It’s addressed genially – “Dear Matty,” and it’s full of genial encouragement that the answer’s always out there, and how the writer’s found some things on their travels that just might be the key to solving Macker’s problem! The letter says samples and research notes are enclosed – as well as ways to get more. Best of luck!
Cheerfully ominous! Clearly this is from whoever’s been leaving those oh-so-helpful care packages, like the one Bjork found. We STRONGLY suspect Professor Twombly.
….let’s go back to that second one. The rogue TAs have a secret hideout?
Vigdor remembers the legend of Professor Merkam, who died some 20 years ago, and was executed and buried under Gallows Hill in Mornheim. Yikes! She was disbarred from the College of Science for violating proper guidelines – dosing students with mind control potions, etc. She had a bit of a following, and fled to the vast network of tunnels under school when she was trying to escape authorities. The tunnels are usually used for storage, or extra labs – but there’s lots of stories about what’s lurking down in the catacombs. She hid out for like five years until the authorities hired some knights, led an expedition, and had her rooted out and executed for crimes. Nowadays, her old lab is where the sickest keggers are thrown.
We marvel at how intense one’s research must be to require a hit squad. Apparently, “professor” can also mean “serial killer mad scientist cult leader drug dealer.”
The tunnels are even WORSE than the campus for navigability. Vigdor’s only been down there once, and he was blindfolded and pretty drunk at the time. He’s gonna go back to staring into the void curiously, which is definitely a red flag about his impulse control and decision-making process. Congratulations, have a splitting headache and several more taint.
Anyway, where do we go next? Heated discussion ensues; what if we arouse the suspicion of the nefarious Ethicists? To be fair, it seems the Ethicists are taking draconian measures as an anti-Key protocol, so maybe they’re not that bad. But we DO like a good rebel hideout.
We slip out of the lab, past the silent owl-masked guard. Shoshana does finger guns at him behind his back.
Valeria has an invite to go talk to the Ethicists, which we’ll use as an in, but as we go we might as well check in on our botanist friend Professor Ulmus – who was mentioned by name in the research brief about the fungal infections.
We head to the lighthouse, which has been repurposed into an admin hub, where we knew she was headed. Holy shit, this was designed by an actual architect, it’s much more straightforward. As we walk past a dining hall, Shoshana cranes her neck to see if the bird-masked students peck their food. Disappointingly, they do not. Vigdor casually mage-hands himself a bread roll. Past the man-go club, the Sturmhearst U press office, and into a well-appointed waiting room-
SLAM. A tall woman with an ibis-like mask storms out, absolutely livid.
“WE WILL HAVE WORDS LATER. I WILL SPEAK TO THE DEAN! FIRST I WILL FIND THAT SNIVELLING EXCUSE FOR A SCIENTIST AND I WILL MAKE HIM WITHDRAW HIS RIDICULOUS REQUEST; I AM OUT HERE TRYING TO FIND REAL ANSWERS AND-“
(A sly perception check reveals Quercus’ boots sticking out from behind one of the decorative tapestries.)
Ulmus whirls, hearing our footsteps. “YOUUUU- oh, greetings Kyr! You haven’t happened to see a man from the College of Science, wearing a bit of green, portly, beak like this?” She gestures in the rough shape of a bird beak. “Answers to Professor Hubert Quercus? I would like to speak to him about an academic matter.” Despite her opaque lenses, we get the distinct sense of her eye twitching.
“Did he, uh, interfere with your meeting with the bursar?”
“He has…TENURE. He put in a request for expeditionary funding, made some rather astonishing claims. Such that I believe he may have been…exaggerating the aptitude and utility of his mission. Whereas I have a perfectly PRACTICAL mission I would like additional funding for! So I believe if the two of us TALK, we can come to a SOLUTION that would not involve escalating this to the Deans!!!!”
Vigdor regards her warily. “Does that solution involve bashing his kneecaps in?”
“It doesn’t have to,” she snips, pulling out a thermos and daintily sticking the tip of her beak in.
We inquire further, and she’s happy to expound. “Since you left Bad Herzfeld, the local clinical situation has deteriorated. The locals are either listless or rowdy. Meanwhile, the collection of flora is as miraculously high as ever. We could expand the annex - turn it into real proper research station and bring in more professors! We’d make great strides in medicine and other fields as well. Mr. Duu, I recall you expressed an interest in soil studies! If there’s something in the dirt – Curseborne or not, ther may be a rational and potentially reproducible effect we could use!”
Gral’s eye twitches behind his mask, because that’s not how orc names work, but. “Uh, it’s definitely Curseborne, and there’s a contagion-“
“Yes, obviously. But if it works by putting additional nitrogen in the soil, for example, we can recreate the effect on our own! In short, we will do science! There’s a lot we can learn! Even if what we seek is simply a way to destroy such fungus, I’ve created some antifungals, fungicides and such.”
Gral sees an opening. “Isn’t there already a study here about fungal curse-based infection? By...who was it...Matthias Macker?”
“Ah yes, I was hoping to check in with him while I’m here. He requested all my notes on eliminating the fungus from living tissue, especially in the central nervous system.”
This is a touchy matter and she’s hunting a tenured asshole, so we’ll talk in a more private space – the nearby man-go clubroom will do nicely. As we leave the room, Shoshana pops the curtain with a quick elbow right where she estimates a portly professor’s midsection to be. Ulmus turns like a hawk at the sound of his undignified squeak.
The well-cared-for man-go room has a floor patterned like a man-go board, and Valeria immediately takes a strategic position. On the wall, there’s a picture of a bunch of scholars with their masks off, in front of beautiful Aurentium harbor, for what was apparently the Drakes’ Tower Club Centennial Tournament. And yep, there he is – much younger, with a shorter beard and neater hair, but unmistakably the strange man we saw at the inn. Sure enough, the placard lists him as Professor Trevor Twombly.
Ulmus joins us, her palpable glower frightening off the last few straggling students. She uses her cinder quill to light a tea candle and fix herself a calming tea. She clearly hasn’t gotten the upgraded quill lava.) We hear someone sneaking poorly in the hallway, and politely ignore him.
We break it to Ulmus: We’re looking for clues about the disappearance of Prof. Macker. She didn’t even yet know he’d disappeared, so this is a shock to her. But she’s got details on that highly suspicious project of his.
“Yes, he was working on the viability of a rather extreme procedure; the combination of a fungicide and surgical extraction to cure a fatally severe infection. He’d been sent a cadaver with the condition.”
“From where? From who?”
“…I can’t say I know.” An insight check reveals that no, actually, she does not know who the client is or where the cadaver’s from, but she knows more than she’s letting on. With a few more questions and a high persuasion check, we find out: She doesn’t know who sent the corpse, but Dean Damrosch of the college of science does, and she was the one who put Macker on the project in the first place.
“The client was able to get a meeting with the Dean directly, so they were either already involved with school or had money. Could be both. She deemed it was worthy of Macker’s skills, and whenever he requested a consult, he was allowed to put her name on the request, which carries a lot of weight.”
More gentle interrogation doesn’t net us more useful info about the mysterious project, though she’s happy to help. She doesn’t know about the Ethicists’ quarantines, either, having been out of town for so long. She puts down her tea, and dabs the end of beak, where we’re pretty sure she’s hiding a straw. “Now I’m going to find my colleague and attempt to discuss things with him.” She strides out dramatically, her cloak billowing in imaginary wind.
Next, ethicists!
We grab a nice lunch at harbor market. We have a short rest as Vigdor recovers from his Looking Into The Void headache, and Shoshana Chill Touch snipes a seagull, after being assured that seagulls are acceptable targets. Across town, we find a whitewashed building: Sturmhearst College of Ethics, the door minded by two white-jacketed owl mask guards.
They’re pretty surprised to find a paladin marching up to them and politely requesting to speak to Professor Sorbus, you see, she has an Invitation. Turns out he’s still on the main campus, “supervising experiments for ethical violations,” but Dean Chidor’s secretary or the Vice-Dean might be happy to speak to you, if they’re free-
We’ll wait outside a bit while they find someone suitably kind-of-important to greet a Kyr. Meanwhile, we’re distracted by a cart full of long, heavy, corpse-shaped burlap sacks being discreetly taken in the back entrance of a building that looks like it’s been recently renovated. Vigdor goes over the the cart, trying to bluff his way into knowledge by looking like he works here. Except, y’know, he’s wearing black and they’re all in white, and he starts attracting the attention of burly guard-types until Shoshana goes over and drags him off.
After a while, and a few matches of man-go between Valeria and Vigdor, Professor Sorbus bustles up to us with a rather nicer demeanor than we’ve previously seen. “Ah, hello, yes! When I invited you, I assumed it would be tomorrow, my apologies for making you wait. Professor Quercus has mentioned meeting a silver dragonborn knight and her companions – though my colleague I do not recognize from the stories. What brings you to Sturmhearst?” he asks us, politely, though there’s still an edge of discerning analysis in his pleasant tone.
After we get through the pleasantries, Valeria gets down to business: “We’ve been seeking out places afflicted by the Curse, and it seems Sturmhearst is so afflicted. That’s what you’ve been targeting, right? That’s why you’re locking up labs?”
With an excellent persuasion check, Sorbus sees a colleague in the fight against the Curse from the highly trusted Order of the Rose, and doesn’t see the need to deny it.
“I see. We have…a lot to talk about. Yes, some aspect of the Curse – we were warned several years ago; the Dean of Ethics told us to step up our operations, that the Curse had come in new form. Not werewolves or zombies, like everyone is so quick to think. This happened around the time Headmaster Twombly went on sabbatical. The College of Ethics has always operated somewhat independently from the other colleges, and the Dean informed us we could not unreservedly trust the scholars of Sturmhearst.
“He was cagey on details, but we are to keep an eye on suspicious people and disappearances. Anyone discussing opening of gateways or arcane methods of travel is a high priority. When anyone disappeared suddenly from the labs, we would quarantine those lab rooms and question anybody who’d been working in them.”
Valeria nods. “That sounds very similar to what we’ve seen elsewhere. In the last place that had, uh, similar problems, we were able to question a painter who had disappeared like that. Is there anyone here who we might be able to talk to?
He glances toward the asylum. “We have managed to, er, acquire a few. Some flee to the catacombs or the countryside to avoid us. Some disappear entirely, and those are the most concerning of all. The unifying factor in all those who we’ve been tracking is an obsessive drive toward their research – and receiving mysterious packages.
“You’re Dr. Gavril, right?” he says, eyeing Vigdor’s highly visible prosthetic. “Have you spoken to Professor Hjalmar Bjork recently?”
We sure have. Why?
“That arm of yours is not purely Jotunn construction. On a hunch, I asked the librarians to report anything that came into their collection unexpectedly - sudden appearances that don’t match the records. One of the additions they flagged was a case of blueprints and arcane theorems, checked out by Bjork. Those blueprints served as a basis for that arm and that leg. I examined them myself and couldn’t make heads nor tails – they’re in a language none of our linguists have ever seen. Bjork had to use translation magic to read them. “
“Given recent events, I have concerns. So I have to ask: have you seen Professor Bjork recently, and how did he look?”
We tell Sorbus that he looked well, and was very troubled about having received such a package. In fact, he was the one who pointed us here to help.
Sorbus’ posture relaxes a bit. “He is a good person, and a powerful spellcaster. I was concerned when he left the University so suddenly. I am rather glad to hear he’s not corrupted.”
Do we trust Sorbus? Screw it, we’re gonna trust Sorbus.
Gral addresses the elephant in the room. “Uh, on our way here, we ran into someone interesting. He said he’s been traveling a long time, and, well, it’s a long story, but we saw a picture where he was the old Man-go Club President – Headmaster Twombly?
Sorbus looks up sharply, shoulders stiffening. “You believe you saw him, do you? But he is on sabbatical. Where, precisely, did you meet him? If he’s returned, I must tell the Dean at once!”
Returned? Not quite. We explain about the portals we’ve seen, and how one could shortcut all over Valdia with the map and route Twombly gave us. If he’s been using gateways, his “sabbatical” might be mostly into the portals, which tracks with how manic he looked.
Sorbus sputters. “I – I’m going to have to get you a meeting with the Dean straight away. Is there anything I can do for you in the meantime?”
“We want to talk to Eric Pelbort, if we can,” Shoshana says, remembering Macker’s teaching assistant.
He can do that for us. Pelbort’s in the asylum, and the Dean will meet us there. We go in, and – huh, it’s not a horrifying Victorian madhouse! We’re pleasantly surprised. There’s ethicists and black-coated medical doctors going around with files and charts.
Vigdor did a rotation here, once, but the vibe is way more hostile than the last time he was here. A lot of patients appear to be sedated. There’s a lot more orderlies present and a lot more people in secure cells. There’s locked doors. Shoshana is decidedly uncomfy.
An orderly escorts us to a simple room, with a bed, a chair, books and papers. The man inside has the same ashen skin, sunken eyes, and spindly fingers we noticed on the imprisoned painter back in Holzog, and his eyes are bloodshot red. He is drawing something.
“Oh, uh, hello? Yes? Am I being called back to work? I have some ideas,” he tells us eagerly the second we walk inside.
Everyone introduces themselves. “Dr. Vigdor Gavril, I studied under Dr. Macker many years ago.”
Pelbort immediately hands him the papers he’s been scribbling on.” If you can deliver this to Dr. Macker, he’ll find it very useful. I’m sure he’ll return soon.”
Vigdor takes it. At a glance, it’s gibberish, formulas scrawled on top of each other and crossed out and rewritten. Shoshana, intuiting that Vigdor’s gonna want to look at these with Twombly’s glasses, as he’s been doing with everything he can find and repeatedly taking taint about it, hides the glasses in her skirt pocket. If he wants to look at Key things he’s gonna have to get handsy with the Claws first.
We ask the ailing TA if he’s, uh, ~been anywhere else~ recently. “Just here, mostly. They took me here after Dr. Macker went away. We’ve been working very closely together here, but he certainly talked about going elsewhere to find answers to the problem we were working on.”
“Yes, your study. Word is you ran into a bit of a roadblock?” Gral asks gently.
“Yes. The patient’s survival, specifically. Professor Macker insisted on it. I had some ideas – there were so many things we could do AFTER the fact that would ensure quality of life, given a Revivify spell or something similar, but Professor Macker insisted they had to actually survive the procedure. That’s what he was working on when he disappeared.”
We ask about mysterious packages. “Oh, yes. We were quite stuck, and a package appeared on the Professor’s desk, with formulas, plant samples, a strange metal canister full of an odd goo the consistency of mayonnaise with restorative properties. Macker examined them, consulted with other professors – and then that was when he went missing. I was in the library, looking for potential leads, and next thing I knew these ethicists were informing me Macker was gone and that I was supposed to come with them.”
“D’you know where Macker’s other assistant, Greta Ruble, is?”
“No. Greta was less involved than I was, but she was quite diligent and useful. Does she still have library access? I’d like to requisition a few books.”
“Uh, maybe later. Can you maybe tell us more about what, exactly, the patient needed to survive?”
“He was developing a new procedure,” Pelbort volunteers. “It was a very invasive surgery to remove a Curse-based infection that was inflicted on a group of noble soldiers.”
“Which soldiers?”
“I couldn’t tell you what nation they were from – all sorts of races, human, elf, Dragonborn and more. We did suspect that they might be paladins – orders of the Rose and Hammer, predominantly. I mean, it was never officially confirmed in what we were told, but we can read between the lines. One cadaver they brought in had a tattoo of a rose-wrapped sword, for example.”
“Who brought in these cadavers?”
With a good persuasion check, we get better than just “the dean” again: “Oh, the client! Yes, they were an author. They’d worked with Sturmhearst University Press before; that’s how they got a meeting with the Dean. I don’t remember the name, but I’d heard of a couple of their books. They weren’t an academic author, just a popular one. I don’t really read a lot of popular fiction.”
Shoshana, chilling in the back of the room, waves Valeria over. “Hold on, I have a theory.” She rifles through Valeria’s bag until she finds her prize, pulling out the copy of Tales of the Peacock Knight.
“Oh! Yes! That’s the guy, that’s the book he wrote!” Pelbort agrees. “Knew I’d recognize it, everybody’s reading that thing. But I don’t have time for popular fiction.”
We look at the cover. The author is one Francis Dandle. (Yes, the DM confirms, the name implies he’s the Dandelion/Jaskier to the Peacock Knight’s Geralt.)
Huh.
Pelbort is rambling now, about specific applications of healing potions and magic during or after the procedure and why they would be difficult to apply, when there’s a polite knock on the door. An ethicist in a tailored white coat and a silver mask peeks in.
“Oh, Dean Chidor!” the Key-corrupted researcher greets him. “Have you received my petition? I’d like to leave, I’ve got lots of work to do.”
“They’re still processing it, I’m sure you’ll be out any day now,” the Dean says kindly. “Eric, are you remembering your art exercises?”
He grumbles. “They don’t help me think about the project at all!”
We leave poor Eric to his art exercises and head to Dean Chidor’s office to talk more privately. It has a nice balcony and everything. “I understand you think you saw the headmaster? Forgive me, but this is rather important: where was he, and how did he look?”
We give the town and the name of the inn. He looked human, played Man-go exceptionally well.
“Oh, good, he’s still himself. He’s always loved that game. I could never get the hang of it. Did he seem rational and lucid?”
“Lucid, yes,”
“Hm. Did he give you anything?”
We explain the map, and the flesh-hound attack.
This clearly rings a bell for him – our insight says he feels deeply guilty about something, and is trying to figure out precisely how guilty he should be.
“Were you a personal friend of Professor Twombly?”
“Yes, all the Deans knew him well.”
“Do you know what happened, before he left? Before the portals opened here?” Gral asks gently, and crits his persuasion check.
The dean visibly crumbles. Like the last lock falling off a Phoenix Wright character.
“You – you understand. You’ve encountered them before, y-you say you’ve closed portals before – please, you must help. I don’t know what more I can do.”
He sends Sorbus out of the room. “You understand, I’m trusting you with something incredibly sensitive. But you say you’ve seen these portals before, and I’m so, so far out of my depth. I am a philosopher and psychologist, not an experimental researcher!” he cries.
The poor man shakes like a leaf, stress pouring off him in waves. Once he finally gathers himself, he takes a deep breath and begins to share his story:
“Several years ago, the top faculty of the Unversity had gathered to discuss mobilization towards the defeat of the Curse. While meeting in Twombly’s quarters, something spoke to us. I realize it sounds quite unbelievable, but I heard it, as did Twombly. As did all the other deans. A gust of wind blew through window, disturbing a ring of keys on a hook, and we could hear words – meaning – in the sound. Linguistically phonemeless communication. I’ve heard your Allsoul has been recorded to speak in such a manner,” he tells Gral.
“Whatever it was, it said it would give us the knowledge we so desperately needed. If we agreed to open our minds to it, it would guide the school in saving Valdia. Battling the Curses, it said. I have gone over every word of that exchange in my mind since, wondering how we were so easily misled, and why it referred to Curses in the plural. I should have known it counted itself among that number.
“But at the time, the Curse was only known to be werewolves and demons and undead and the occasional report of ents or living pumpkins. It was not jangling keys and mysterious voices, so you have to understand where we were at the time. We were one of the few institutions remaining in Valdia! We were desperate for solutions, and this one was offered on silver platter.
“We didn’t trust it; we did not achieve the highest academic ranks in the nation by acting like idiots. So we discussed the offer. It was a terrible idea, we knew it. But how often are you given chance to save a nation, maybe even the world?
“We reached a compromise. The Headmaster thought of it. The voice had made its offer to all of us, but knowledge can be shared. One of us would take the deal and then share the knowledge they were given with the others, who would distribute the information as needed. And the person who made the bargain could be kept closely watched, observed, monitored for any signs of corruption. …We didn’t know,” he sighs, regret in every line of his face.
“So we did it. We drew straws, and Twombly drew the short one. I approved of this plan twice. First when it was proposed, and again when our leader drew short straw. Dean Damrosch would become interim headmaster, and I would be responsible for reviewing every communication Twombly sent us. He went on sabbatical, and we kept him away from thaumaturgical supplies. All he had was chalk and paper.
“For a while it worked. He seemed himself! We chatted, we played Man-go - he stomped me, as usual. And he would pass along things he wrote. Formulae, equations that let us construct fascinating devices. His work allowed us to militarize. Those brass towers that have kept Penitents from our doors and so much more are all thanks to those breakthroughs. Honestly, we thought we’d outsmarted it.
“Then one day I walked in, and Twombly was gone. He’d left a note, saying he had exhausted what knowledge he could procure here in his room and that he was going to do further research in the field, stopping in when he found anything useful. And if I would please feed his cat. The balcony of his quarters looks perfectly normal from the outside, but that door doesn’t go to the balcony anymore. I think you can imagine what happens if you look out onto balcony from the Headmaster’s quarters.”
“Yes. Some of the beds in this asylum are taken by the ethicists we sent in there to find him, in fact.”
He shudders. Valeria reassures him they made the best decisions they could with the information they had. He is not especially comforted.
“It became clear after that we couldn’t trust the rest of the school. They had been working with his notes quite eagerly, after all. He has continued leaving those packages for different professors, getting them aligned with that Curse.”
We show him our map and glasses, which he refuses to touch.
“I’m not sure which other deans I can trust. The College of Ethics has had to take a far more stringent approach than ever before. The University is doing important work against the Curse, I couldn’t shut it down even if I wanted to. And if I did, I’d have a riot on my hands. But we’re trying to keep an eye out for any signs of corruption and get those affected to the asylum before it’s too late. Symptoms are obsessive devotion to one’s work, which is…generally encouraged among faculty and the graduate students, to be honest. So it’s not an especially great metric. And no one at the school trusts us. Though we’ve managed to get a couple before they went too far, like Professor Westman, who’s been making our guards-“
“Making guards?”
Immediate flopsweat. “Ah, er, one of our earliest projects after the Headmaster went on sabbatical, we made a formula, we call it the Green Stuff – er, it allows for a far more economical method of producing…flesh golems? Westman spends his days sewing body parts together, I try to stay out of it. I have a rather fragile constitution.”
Ah.
That explains a lot.
…Ew.
After a bit of waffling about Fun Uses For Flesh Golems, we ask about the escapees in the catacombs. Unfortunately, they’ve hit a snag: the ethicists, being on a separate campus and all, don’t really know how to navigate the tunnels. And the catacombs are traditionally place for shenanigans among students.
We’re gonna need to find the hardest-partying frat bro on campus if we wanna get down there.
While two foreigners, a hick, and a guy who actually studied instead of partying try to figure out how we’re gonna do that, we’ll cut session.
Fun Fact! The deans of the colleges – Dean Elana Damrosch (Medicine), Dean Javier Mendoza (Engineering), Dean Chidor (Ethics), and Dean Tahan (Science), are named after the characters of the Good Place. We couldn’t resist having Chidi be our ethicist. Dean Mendoza is, of course, a pyromancer.
