Author's note: This is for Argentum_LS who's stories (particularly 'Never ever' and 'Ace in the Hole' - both somewhat tangentially) gave me the idea for this. Although I was alive in the 80s, I remember very little of that decade, have never been to Europe (or America) and am not, unfortunately, much use with a sword anymore. All errors are therefore mine, and I am happy for you to constructively point them out!
Academy Vignettes
Getting recruited was always going to be the hardest part. He had a shiny, new identity that would pass just about any scrutiny. He had a shiny new degree in ancient languages that he had actually earned (again). What he did not obviously have was a way to bring these, and his interest in and dedication to history, to the attention of someone who could do something about it.
It wasn't like he could wander up to a Watcher, introduce himself and ask to join a society he wasn't supposed to know about.
The usual way of getting recruited wasn't exactly open to him either. Unexplainable close encounters with his own kind tended to result in at least a covert sounding-out by the Watcher community. Of course, being close enough to an inexplicable healing for a Watcher to see and notice him also meant being close enough for the Immortal involved to feel him and possibly come looking. He wasn't concerned about getting away from the hypothetical other Immortal - after all, he'd been getting away from challenges without drawing steel for almost two centuries. No. Depending on how good the Watcher involved was, though, he could end up with a Watcher, instead of becoming one. Not an ideal outcome at all.
We are, however, discussing the man known at the moment as Adam Pierson, a man who thinks five or six moves ahead of the average Chess Grand Master.
Rewind three years: A young man with a mop of dark hair walks into 'Shakespeare & Company' in the middle of the day in Paris' Left Bank. He asks the man running the place in fairly fluent but appallingly accented French about a book, several decades out of print. It is, and always has been, an English-language bookshop, but that doesn't mean it's clientele are not usually French. "Are you English?" asks the bearded man behind the counter. The other's eyes widen slightly in surprise, "More or less. You're American?"
As months and years pass, the Englishman drops in from time to time; sometimes looking for the obscure and out of print, sometimes for historical reference material and sometimes for a chance to speak his own language without causing the surrounding French to look down their noses. The two men progress from merely speakers of the same language - polite strangers, to 'Adam' and 'Don' and detailed discussions of the former's studies and the latter's most recent and favourite acquisitions. In accordance with the 'Shakespeare & Company' focus on hospitality, Don agrees at one point that Adam can store some of the old papers he has found and collected safely in the shop's basement.
Return to what is, for the current purpose of the story, the present: All right, perhaps the identity wasn't quite so shiny and new as we made out, but at less than a thousandth of his lifetime thus far, it certainly still felt new to the man wearing it.
Adam drifted in to 'Shakespeare & Company' at a bit of a loose end. He had never mentioned plans for after his degree - there would be a ceremony in a few days and then he'd be off to… where? Don hoped whatever plans his friend had made weren't set in stone, "Hello Adam, just the person I wanted to see. You doing anything this afternoon?" Adam shrugged, and Don whisked him off to a local cafe bar. "What are you drinking?"
"A beer. I'll get it," protested Adam, but Don carefully placed a leather-bound book in front of him.
"Look at that - I want your opinion," he said, and worked at catching the waitress' attention. By the time the drinks arrived, Adam was engrossed - the beer was almost warm by the time he noticed it. Don smiled a little, his round face anticipating the other's reaction, "What do you think?".
"It's a fake," declared Adam, "A very good fake - possibly a very old fake. A fairytale." Don shook his head slightly,
"What makes you so sure?"
Adam began his list, but his mind was elsewhere: how had they gotten hold of Consone's journal? Carelessness on the Spaniard's part, probably. That was why the papers entrusted to Don's cellar were so terribly jumbled, and unidentifiable. "The Spanish, to begin with," his mouth was saying, "It's too old for the dates it purports to cover. And the dates themselves: someone writing a journal over nearly fifty years and there's no evolution of penmanship, no indication of the onset of arthritis or changes in eyesight or, I don't know, development from a more childish hand? Especially in the 18th century. It might not have been in one sitting, but the person who wrote this did it in a short space of time. Otherwise he'd have changed, aged." He took a long drink of his beer in satisfaction. Don tipped his head slightly to one side, "What if time passed, but the writer didn't change? What if he was always the same age?"
Now they were getting somewhere. Adam narrowed his eyes, "That's not possible." He looked again at the book, "What are you saying, Don?"
And Don had explained everything. The existence of Immortals. The existence of Watchers. His own role as a Watcher. The importance of truth, and the equal importance of secrecy. To 'Adam Pierson', a whole new world was opened up. To the man behind that identity it was merely the fall of the next card in a long-planned sequence.