Thunder Pear Magic Academy
To: The International Committee of Magical Education Oversight
From: Sesslevort Eldenmist – Professor of the Unseen and Unknown, Wizard of the Seventh Tier
My fellow mages, as my latest missives have gone unanswered, I fear communication has been cut-off, else you must be bogged down in fending off dangers cataclysmic in nature. In allowance of the former, I hope you will forgive me for retreading ground from prior communications, to ensure all who read this are fully informed of the situation.
Much as it pains me to admit, the plight of my institution was one well known to the mage world at large, even before our newest predicament. Castbury University has been hit by the same skepticism toward the arcane arts that has plagued the enrollment at every mystical institution over the past century. With the electric glow of progress purging so many shadows, driving away humanity’s collective imagination of all that laid unknown beyond their sight, there are fewer and fewer places for them to find magic, let alone gain a talent for it. Thus, our numbers have shrunk with every passing year, and with it the tuition they can offer to keep our institution afloat.
That was why, at first, the announcement of sale seemed like a blessing. A new owner, one willing to infuse Castbury with fresh funds, allowing us to repair and upgrade our facilities. With fewer mages in the world, presenting a desirable place of education is the best tactic for all of those in our enterprise to entice draw deeply from that limited pool. It was with a sense of hope that we met our new employer, even with warnings that he could be eccentric. After all, there is hardly a spell-caster worth their robes that would not be called as such. However, in meeting the owner of Thunder Pear Publishing, I have been forced to recognize that there is peculiar, and there is eccentric.
To begin with, I do not entirely believe the man to have a single speck of magic at his command. When I politely suggested he display a show of his power at the initial meeting, Mr. Hayes responded by proclaiming he would transform beer into urine, then produced a can from his pocket, rather than any interdimensional space, and guzzled it down. After he finished his drink, I inquired if he intended to do anything more impressive, and he responded by throwing a sandwich (also from his pocket) directly at me. The act was so shocking I didn’t even raise a shield, gaining a splat of tomato across the chin as a result. While I sought to compose myself, he looked to the crowd and asked if they’d ever seen anyone do that before. When informed that they had of course not, he lifted his thumb upward and asked “Guess that makes it pretty impressive, right?”
Would that such simple shenanigans were only the cause of my concerns, however. Mr. Hayes has shown complete disregard for Castbury’s history and traditions. He ordered the removal of our founders’ portraits from the grand entrance hall, having them moved to a historic wing of far less prominence. One might expect him to raise his own image in their place, a proper display of power and authority at the very least, but no! He has instead put up portraits of more recent graduates, ones still living who have achieved some minor measures of distinction. After pressing him for days on the matter, the only justification offered was “Old shit has value, but it goes in the museum. Upfront, we celebrate the people actually coming out of these halls.”
Perhaps, such a notion would be tolerable, had I greater confidence in the level of education being provided to said people, yet here too Mr. Hayes has left his pervasive influence. The floating signs meant to occasionally confound, teaching the students better critical thinking, were replaced with static ones that merely point the correct direction. As it weren’t bad enough that Mr. Hayes has forbid the allowance of testing potions on students as punishment, he also amended the curriculum to include more “modern” products like a hangover cure instead of a tonic to ward off scurvy, and a tincture to alleviate anxiety in place of one of the twelve poisons they were set to learn. Even in the spellwork itself, Mr. Hayes has amended the schedule to provide far more time to the silly flippant utility magics rather than the true powers of elemental destruction.
Then we come to the matter of the campus itself. Once a foreboding grounds of stonework and iron statues, it can hardly be recognized now amidst the newly planted grass and trees. Every dormitory has been upgraded with needless soft luxuries like mattresses made of some foam rather than enchanted straw, and those strange boxes the mundanes use to heat food, as well as greenery for their courtyards. At one point, when Mr. Hayes gathered our most talented students along with Professor Aquilin and began to discuss construction plans, I thought he was adding a moat to Castbury, something befitting an institution such as ours. Sadly, my hopes were once more dashed when I discovered the true intent was the creation of something called a “Lazy River”, a thin pool of slow moving water that circles the entire campus. Although Professor Aquilin has argued that this satisfies the technical definition of a moat anyway, I am quite certain moats are not intended to have giant inflatable floats and inner tubes drifting inside of them.
Thorough a case as I present, the lack of response from this esteemed committee does create some worry. If, perchance, you have heard from my fellow educators as well, please permit this small digression to address what I suspect was the thrust of their counter-argument. Yes, admittedly, Castbury’s enrollment has risen considerably in the year and a half since Mr. Hayes took ownership of our institution, but I would caution against using one metric alone as proof of his methods. Certainly he does create a sense of the novel that some students would be interested to explore. Last weekend, for example, Mr. Hayes organized a tournament where used beer kegs were fashioned together into enchanted warriors by teams of students, then set against one another in combat. Spectacle, nothing more, and when his antics grow stale so too will our numbers decline, only we will no longer have Castbury’s long reputation of stalwart tradition to draw in prospective students.
I humbly thank you for your time, and hope to hear that an official investigation will be commencing soon. As I must now set my quill aside and go oversee Mr. Hayes’ activity of the weekend, which is a food fight where the food has been enchanted to do mock battle with the students, please understand that is with the upmost respect that I say deliverance cannot arrive swiftly enough.
Sincerely,
- Sesslevort Eldenmist