Champion of Vernius

You wake up in the first morning light of a fall day. You are John Smith. You are 21 years old and in the fall semester of your third year of college. You don’t know it but you are about to have a very strange day.

It starts innocuously enough, just like any other day of your life at college. You roll out of your bed and get up, bleary eyed. You shuffle out to the kitchenette that connects your bedroom to the little two couch living room that makes up your dorm. You make a strong cup of coffee and start to eat breakfast. You hear the front door to your dorm rattle, open, and then shut.

“Morning John,” says your roommate, a young and attractive man about your own age with short blonde hair and a chin so sharp it could cut glass, setting his bag down.

“Morning Mark. How’s Ben doing?” you ask with a mouth full of food.

“Oh, Benny’s good,” Mark replies, the corners of his mouth tugging up in a smile as he pours some coffee for himself.

“You know,” you huff, “I feel like you live with him more than you live with me these days.”

“Yeah,” Mark chuckles, rubbing the back of his neck, “I’ve been over at his place a lot, haven’t I?”

“Just about every night for the last week,” you state while taking a sip of coffee.

“Are you complaining?” Mark shoots back, fetching his own breakfast.

“Oh not at all,” You say, mouth full of food, “I’ve been having so many college parties here since you two started dating, it’s great⸮”

“Oh is that so?” he asks dryly.

“Definitely,” you reply.

“I assumed,” he sighs, dramatically looking around your small dorm-apartment with its landlord white walls, “with so many girls that this place is like the Playboy Mansion.”

“Of course, bunnysuits and all,” you chuckle.

“I didn’t know you were into playing dress up,” he snorts and then clears his throat, “but if I were you, I'd start making calls and chilling the champagne then.”

“Oh?” you ask, eyebrow cocked, “why?”

“Benny invited me to go camping this weekend,” he smiles. You resist the urge to roll your eyes at the very lovey dovey hearts dancing in his eyes as he says that.

“Is there a particular reason why you’re going camping just a few weeks before midterms?” you ask.

“Well,” he shuffles around in his seat as he eats, “it’s migration season and he’s picked out this cute little campsite next to a lake with a whole bunch of hiking trails and good swimming and that he told me is quite famous for birding and―”

You hold up a hand and Mark stops mid-sentence.

“I agree, it's terribly romantic,” you say, standing and putting your dishes in the dishwasher.

Mark rolls his eyes at you and scoffs.

“So aside from partying with a whole bunch of hot college girls in bunnysuits, what are you up to this weekend?” he asks.

“Eh,” you groan, “I still have the project I have with Alice for the department that I’ll probably be working the weekend on again.”

He clicks his tongue and says, “the one in the archives?”

“The same, “you nod sagely, “and the sooner we’re done the sooner she’s out of my hair.”

“Hey, John,” Mark leans in, “If it is really that much of a problem, you can tell your advisor that you need more hands, can’t you?”

You click your tongue.

“Bold of you to assume that there are any hands offering help,” you sigh with a tinge of venom in your voice.

“Fair enough,” Mark sighs sympathetically.

“Yeah,” you agree, gathering your school supplies, “well I’m off, see you next whenever I see you.”

“Catch you on the flip flop” Mark calls as you walk out the door, school bag in hand. You walk to campus, which is only a few short blocks from your dorm apartment. The streets are starting to fill with college students, as well as the ecosystem of other townsfolk that run all the sorts of necessary services that keep a college town running in middle America. Barber shops that offer terrible but cheap haircuts. Thrift stores with stacks of furniture decorating their parking lots. All night fast food and corner liquor stores. And the ever present advertisement for these dorms or those apartments in town for new students to lease. All the usual noise of your morning commute, and thankfully still early enough that there is no loud bumper to bumper traffic, no fear of being run over by some student on their bicycle hauling ass to class.

You pass dozens of other college students heading to or from Poly State University, as written in the wrought iron archway that you pass through as you enter campus.

You make your first class with time enough to spare. You’ve only been here at college proper for a couple months now, after spending two years in your hometown junior college picking up your grades from the disaster that was you going to your hometown high school, and you make it a point that you are the first one into the classroom every morning.

Your morning lectures pass quickly, hurriedly almost, students and professors alike egging the weekend to arrive. You overhear during one lecture period a couple of guys who exclusively refer to each other as “bro” talking among themselves about their plans for going to Thirsty Thursdays at the Old Towne Bar. Part of you wants to judge them for going bar hopping on a Thursday night, but you can’t hide that you wish that you’ve been near enough to get out of your ritual of wake, school, work, sleep repeat, but alas, no joy.

Maybe if you finish work early on the weekend though, you can still make happy hour, just once. You sigh, aware of just how much of a longshot that is all things considered. For a reformed party animal going to a school famous and infamous for its party culture, it is a bitter pill to swallow for certain.

The lunch hour comes and you walk to the school canteen. After grabbing a smattering of food from the counter, someone waves at you out of the corner of your eye.

She’s short, maybe five foot three on a good day with long slightly curly blonde hair, a big smile, and tan skin. Her bust is large and uncontrolled, jiggling around as she waves at your approach.

Beside her sits another girl, sitting hunched over the table with a book in hand. You know that if she sat up straight that she would be five foot and eleven inches tall, which is only an inch shorter then you are. Her skin is pasty white, her figure is willowy. Her hair is dark and a rat’s nest of fluff, maybe combed on a blue moon but otherwise left to its own devices to curl and knot.

“Hey Marcy,” you say, sitting down next to your little sister and her best friend.

“Hey John,” Marcy beams at you.

“Hey,” Kathrine, your sister, says looking up from her book for a second. There are dark rings under her eyes.

“How are my favorite freshmen doing?” you ask.

“Ready for the weekend!” Marcy laughs.

“Reading for midterms,” Kathrine answers simultaneously, eating a sprig of celery.

“Save me John, she’s trying to make me learn things!” Marcy groans theatrically.

“Isn’t that what you went to college to do?” you scoff.

“I mean, sure,” Marcy shrugs, “but, you’re also supposed to get new life experiences, right?”

“Sure,” you reply.

“See,” Marcy says, “he agrees with me, so chill.”

“I’ll chill when I’m ready for midterms,” Kathrine grumbles, chewing.

“That’s what you said about the exit exams, and you spent like all senior year studying for them,” Marcy retorts.

“Yeah, and?” Kathrine replies.

“I mean,” Marcy says, “that’s no way to spend your college years.”

“Don’t you lecture me about how much I should or should not be studying, what do you do in class all day anyways? Underwater basket weaving?” Kathrine replies, eyes narrowing.

“Underwater basket weaving is a skill and so is psychology!” Marcy huffs childishly. “Just because it doesn’t have the magic word engineering on the end of it does not make it useless.”

“Sure if you say so,” Kathrine scoffs.

“Besides,” Marcy instigates, “isn’t John in the anthropology department? That’s like a social science too, you know.”

“And he’s been dead to me ever since he declared his major,” Kathrine sighs, shaking her head, “mentioning being dead, how’s the Alice Project going?”

You suck in a breath and sigh.

“Well,” You say, swallowing your food, “I’d guess we’re about halfway done,” Kathrine blinks.

“Didn’t you say that last week,” She asks flatly.

“I swear up and down that the archives are bigger on the inside,” you shoot back.

“Are they now?” Kathrine snorts, flipping her page and taking another bite of celery.

“That whole subbasement is a rat's nest, literally and figuratively.”

“Literally?” Kathrine asks, thick brown eyebrow furrowing.

“Yeah we found a family of rats living in a box of old reports. But thankfully the biology department lent us an animal cage to use. That was a wild day of rat catching in the library,” you chuckle dryly.

“Gross,” Marcy groans, sticking out her tongue.

“Wow,“ Kathrine states. “Did you name the rats?”

You blink at Kathrine pointedly.

“No we did not,” you say, “we kinda just gave them to the biology department when we returned the cage.”

“With the rats still in the cage?” Marcy questions, looking a bit mortified.

You shrug

“Yeah.” You answer.

“Huh.” Kathrine comments.

“Like , that’s so gross,” Marcy says, squirming, “can we change the topic?”

“Gladly,” Kathrine starts, “I want to hear more about how this place is bigger on the inside.”

“Every time we think we’re done,” you say, slowly eating your food with a far off look in your eye, “we find more stuff to tag and categorize in there. Always more stuff to tag. Stuff inside of stuff. Stuff on top of stuff. It’s nuts.”

“With Alice of all people there yanking your chain,” Kathrine muses.

“Don’t remind me. It's basically just me and her working on it these days,” you groan, “It’s honestly painful.”

“You could quit, it’s not your job or anything,” Marcy says, “like isn’t it extra credit anyways?”

“If only,” You complain, “I was volun-told to do it by my department head who is also going to be my capstone advisor next year. I don’t really get to say no to him if I want to get a diploma and a good recommendation for graduate school.”

“Can’t you just, like, get another advisor?” Marcy asks.

“Marcy,” you respond, “how many professors are in the psychology department?”

“I dunno, maybe 20?” Marcy shrugs.

“Four,” you say, “we have four professors in my department and three of them are adjuncts.”

“Not even real professors,” Kathrine chuckles.

“Which leaves Professor Hubbard basically running everything, I’m not about to ruin all the goodwill I have made with him so far this year because of a stupid ex.” You grumble.

“Stupid enough to beat you to college,” Kathrine snickers.

You give Kathrine a look of disdain.

“By two years no less,” she adds, smiling and looking back at you.

“Speaking of which,” You say, ignoring Kathrine’s instigations and stacking your dishes to leave, “I guess it’s time for me to face the music.”

“Good luck,” Kathrine says smiling a saccharine smile.

“See you later, John,” Marcy says and waves you off as you leave the canteen.

You decide to take the long way to the library from the school canteen to clear your mind and also to mentally prepare yourself for the task ahead. All the while college students dilly and dally about the place. You walk by clubs tabling, advertising adventure, different faith groups, a pair of sex-segregated bible study groups, foreign culture clubs, book clubs, and intermural sports of all stripes. You walk past the three story brick halls of freshman dorms, the gates to the city park, and then back around to the Poly State Library.

It is a massive, squat building of brick and steel four stories tall and as many deep underground. You check your phone before you go in, since there is still no coverage inside this bunker of a building. You’re a little late already, but you’re completely fine with that. Today can’t get any worse, really. You walk past the check in desk, the demure librarian busy with students checking out books. The elevators in the lobby disgorges a school of students and you get on. You press the button labeled “B4” for the fourth basement floor. Just as the doors close some poor girl runs into the elevator with you.

“Three, please,” she says, doubled over, hands on her knees, and panting.

“Oh, sure,” you say.

The girl pulls out her phone, looking at the time, and sighs.

You get a better look at her now that she is distracted. She is short, maybe about five foot two inches, with bright ginger hair tied up in braided twin tails. Her face probably would be pale if it wasn’t for all the running she apparently has been doing turning it bright red. Jittery is the word that comes to mind, her clothes disheveled from running, and generally quite ungirly. You can smell the aroma of sweat on her skin.

“I’m late,” the girl mumbles just loud enough for you to hear over the whine of the elevator, “but maybe I can still make it before they start.”

The elevator slowly descends into the subbasements below ground level. You have to suppress a grin of schadenfreude knowing that this girl chose the worst elevator to get in because it's heading all the way down first. Eventually the elevator dings and you get off, leaving the jittery girl to enjoy the long, slow ride back to the surface world by herself.

You walk through the yellow-light halls of brick and linoleum floors to the door labeled in fading colors “Anthro. Department Archives”.

“You’re late.” You hear before you have even closed the door behind you. Alice is sitting at an old wooden desk piled high with papers. Her glasses catch the light from the desk’s reading light but you can already feel her eyes glaring daggers at you. You set down your bag and roll up your shirt sleeves. You pull out a manila folder fat with papers from your bag and strut over to the desk.

“I redid the full catalog for P through to SA. Where do you want it?” you ask. Alice grabs the folder, frowning at you.

“I’ll put it in the directory,” she says, tugging it out of your hand.

A thank you would be nice, you think to yourself.

“Are you going to start again on aisle 23 again today?” she sighs, shuffling more papers around the desk and then looking up over her glasses at you.

“Unless you have something better for me to do?” you ask.

“No.” Alice states, going back to her paperwork without giving you a second glance.

As you get out your cataloging equipment you side eye her. Her brown hair is up in a bun and every so often she brushes her bangs out of her face and readjusts her thick rim glasses. A picture perfect geek you think.

You huff, wondering what it was you ever saw in her that made you want to date her. She leans down, opening a drawer on her oversized desk and shuffling something away. Through her cardigan, her breasts rest against the desk, jiggling with her moves.

Exhibit A, or rather DD, you think to yourself, eyebrows raised. Even if you didn’t miss her, you can admit to yourself that you miss those. You leave Alice to her business and make your way quickly to aisle 23.

Aisle 23 is a mess of artifacts and boxes of papers and reports. The ancient shelves reach clear to the ceiling 15 feet high, each one tiered and absolutely packed to bursting with academic detritus acquired over a century and a half. You are quite sure that before you are done going through it all you will find the mummified corpse of the last group of undergrads who were sent in to clean this place and never got out. You shiver at the idea of being down here in the yellow light and humming of incandescent bulbs waiting for the sweet embrace of . You find the spot where your cataloging left off yesterday, not even half way down the length of the aisle.

You climb the ladder that you stole from a supply closet in the social sciences building and sit on it, picking up your clipboard, dust mask, pen, gloves, flashlight, and bag of catalog tags and zip ties.

You look down the aisle each way, each end seeming infinitely distant with all the jars, binders, boxes, bags, bugs, specimens, and artifacts that you have to tag individually. The system of just name, year, and description is bad. It meant that you had to know what you were looking at. As an undergraduate student with hardly a day’s worth of training from your boss who is also your ex, you don’t.

But now there is talk in the department of a new computerized catalog system, which the school is threatening to buy and foist upon the department. But the department still wants a paper catalog of the archives in the old system. It’s great, you think, being told by the department to continue working down here off the record and on the down low, redoing the archive to the old system as part of some petty conflict between academic and administrators who’ve probably been working here longer than you’ve been alive.

You start, gently pulling down an ancient, dusty mason jar of something opaque. You turn the jar over, and find a pre-existing label: water.

You sigh, tagging it as water and write down a spit-balling year of 1900 before setting it down on the tagged side of your workspace ten feet off the ground.

It’s hours later when you’ve decided to have a short break from cataloging. You climb down from the ladder and pat yourself down of accumulated dust and dirt. You wander back over to your backpack. You pull out your sack dinner, just a couple baloney sandwiches and some fruit.

“Hey,” Alice says to you, sitting up at her desk, “how many times have I told you no eating in the archives?” She frowns at you. Sitting at her desk, wearing her turtleneck sweater, thick glasses making her look bug eyed, she looks like an old librarian rather then a 21 year old young woman.

You look at her and blink, wondering how badly does she want a reason to scold you.

“Wasn’t planning on it,” you say, picking up the chair and lunch and sitting right outside the door.

Alice mutters something under her breath as the door swings shut behind you. The lights hum down at you as you start to chew away. The clock in the hall says 5:00, which means happy hour at the Old Towne Bar is just ending. You groan. You don’t like the bars, but you would happily spend all night in one if it meant not being here with her doing this work.

When your dinner is finished, you get back to work. The monotony of the work drives you crazy. Sometimes there’s something interesting, but more often than not it is something asinine and boring: another annual report on the status of this or that study into some community or culture. A multitude of “anthropological” studies about Africa and Asia written by “explorers” from the Victorian Age that are just somebody’s memoir about boning their way across a continent rewritten as an academic report. Which would be fine if they weren’t all thumping 400-page doorstops that somehow find themselves on the top shelves every time.

You yawn loudly after having made all of twelve feet of progress tonight down the aisle in about six hours of hard work. That is two whole six foot sections! That’s not bad!

Back when you had a dozen people working down here at the beginning of the semester, you did that in a couple of hours. Now you are lucky if you do that in a day. You sigh and check your phone. It’s a quarter to eight. You decide to call it a night. You start to descend the ladder, when something above you rattles the shelves.

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OOC: Game/Score aspects have been turned off for now, but make sure to take advantage of the customization options!