by Aaron Brown | Feb 9, 2015 | Recursions
Since its inception, the Estate has faced the problem of what to do with gifted, quickened, and special children that they identified in the course of their investigations. Parents and guardians could be bribed with promises of a better education or even “junior” Morrison Fellowship Prizes, but what to do with the children? They were too young and untested to work at the Estate. They knew too much to allow them completely unsupervised childhoods (that’s how they got on the Estate’s radar in the first place). The recursion known as the Schoolhouse was the answer to their predicament. The Schoolhouse was created by fictional leakage, built on stories told about places of learning over the centuries, from a sacred fire where youths were taught the rites of hunting and gathering to modern dreams of science laboratories unconstrained by public education budget cuts; the Schoolhouse has seen it all. The Administrator of the Schoolhouse has to power to rearrange the architecture itself, to pick and choose from the hundreds of variations the best learning environment for each subject crafted from millennium of the dreams and hopes of eager students. The Administrator, with the help of the Estate, has chosen cutting edge science labs that would not look out of place in Anime high school, soaring Baroque conservatories for the music department, a scale model of the Globe Threatre for the drama department, and a Greek gymnasium for the PE teachers and students. The Schoolhouse goes out of its way to be a perfect place for parents and administrators. The Estate has named the current incarnation of the Schoolhouse the...
by Aaron Brown | Feb 2, 2015 | Recursions
It started with a chance meeting place: a roof to get out of the rain, a warm meal after a cold day, a drink after a dusty road. Strangers could meet and become friends, sharing a drink under a peach tree. Pilgrims could gather before setting out together, and whet their whistles before telling each other stories. Although over the years it had many different signs on its door, and had been called many different things, it became known only as “The Tavern”. The first written record of The Tavern may have been in the Romance of Three Kingdoms. At least the proprietor will tell anyone who will listen that the stumps in the courtyard are the same peach gardens where the Shu Han was formed by three patrons. Later, Chaucer’s pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales meet in an inn (called the Tabard). After having a cameo appearance in the Lord of the Rings as the Prancing Pony, the idea of characters in adventure stories meeting at an inn or a tavern become ensconced and clichéd. But stories kept being told, and the recursion, known at the time as simply ‘The Tavern’, gained in power and population. Adventurers, wanderers, rogues, and borderline alcoholics, all eventually found themselves in The Tavern – and left to go on many adventures following old wizards, or mysterious maps. As The Tavern grew, the public room became bigger – but more and more rooms to the Hotel were also added; for those adventurers whose companions didn’t all arrive at the same time, or (in frighteningly increasing numbers) for cynical adrift old men, and for femme fetales who had been turned down by wanderlust adventurers. Always tied into recursions that follow Magical laws, The Tavern never had...
