4E 200 The magical year begins.

Thus Raynu accepted the job of magistra adept at the sanctioning of Southall. A minor affair on the season by Imperial City standards, the blessings by the Akatosh acolytes, and attendance by Jarl Siddgeir and his Altmer steward Nenya themselves for a moment drew a half-day's influx of curious Falkreath villagers and townsfolk. Not a civil function per se beyond the tax on mundane supplies headed off the path to support college operation, nor a part of the cyclical calendar for Nords, there wasn't a revel or feast, just a boring, crowded occasion and an anticlimactic meeting of four inside the shut front doors.

She had for the previous seasons, then, when not on the bare edge of exhaustion managing thirty-six rowdy novices, had access to the collegium library and antiquities. Most importantly, she had had an expert and a master on site, whatever her misgivings about their respective backgrounds. The years went by fast even for a Bosmer. Six novice classes graduated with a high success rate, ninety-eight percent to be exact. The only ones not making it through were a combination of natural causes like illness and family issues, one or two brassy hardheads who quit in a huff, but mostly a commendable success. Raynu went into all of this knowing there were no awards for pushing students through the system other than her continuing guidance by the best in the country, and avoiding the too-real accidents resulting from incompetent flame instruction did not entail applause.

This first morning of her seventh year turned into one of those, a hectic first day after a vigil herself having been kept up late by her two seniors' long, long conversation. A couple hours of sleep, a run into town to see the hired cooks on their way, checking the cellars and larders against her inventory, the requisitions receipts from meat, cheese, wine, and flour merchants, hundreds of small items and decisions whilst groups of excited youngsters milled around the commons just inside the front doors exclaiming and gossiping. Then she personally handed out and directed the work assignments, made rounds overseeing the morning's chores, took a trip back to the kitchens from the fields (wondering, all the while, what a centuriana from the southern legions was doing other than standing there looking official). Raynu had successfully gotten everyone up and out of bed, into the fields, fed, and was looking forward to a couple hours on the sidelines with a stealthy teacup of brandy while the domina and adepta introduced groups to the study halls.

On one of the informal side tours she had been with the Mistress and seven students who had eagerly pushed to be the first in the conjuration vestibule, a circular room on the far side of the main building down a set of stairs.

"Now here," Tatiana Meda started to say as she herself opened the double doors leading into the room, we have our conj ..." She stopped for the briefest moment, turned gracefully and let out a breath with closed eyes. "Ray-nu," she said in a quietly firm voice and tossed her right hand up as she walked back up the stairs past seven novices in various states of laughter, shock, and disbelief. As she had opened the doors, they were treated to the sight of two fellow novices in the middle of the floor, and not tracing a thaumaturgic circle with the pigments, mind you. The young woman and young man, both healthy Nords, embarassedly hustled their trousers and shirts back on, pushed boots on feet without footwraps, pulled robes over their heads in the awkward silence punctuated by a few giggles.

Raynu had one of those moments where one asks if this job is really worth the headaches. She still had to contract out on novice rest days to make tinctures, gather herbs for Fletchersgate apothecaries, walk miles sometimes after her normal shift. Southall Collegium was not an Imperial City guild and she was not a recognized tradeswoman moved up from her apprenticeship; the place paid her, besides room and board, in clean laundry and any necessary medicines, all she could drink, and a pittance in gold septims. She was adjunct help in reality, like the cooks hired from the villages, a furnishing for Winterhold's three-mage station there in Falkreath. She quits, and they'd have two hundred adept petitions stream in the door from all over the continent.

She did have her own private room, but it was just a timber-walled space with enough floor to allow a novice's cot, a conversation table with two chairs, an end drawer with ceramic wash basin, and a small wardrobe. Not that she had anything much in it, she had grumbled at the end of this most amusing first day of the 200 class. The expensive Cyrodiilic gowns and ensembles she had imagined having by now were, apiece, often more than she had earned in six years including the rural contract work.

"You! Get your arses down to convocation, now!" She turned to the other seven, "You ... go to commons, I don't give …" The two lovers had pushed redfacedly through the group and were jumping up the steps back to the commons when Raynu called out loudly, "And Domina will be with you shortly." Their pace slowed. She walked in the conjuration room, pushed the doors closed behind her, and collapsed onto the lowest bench there along the wall, leaning her back against the next one and taking a long swig out of the brandy she had concealed in her robe. Raynu was ninety-five years of age, so you might say she was approaching thirty and wondering where her life was going, making her coin chaperoning audiences around the mysteries of magicka, and now she had to go sit in on another tired pre-War custom where lovers get "the talk," and write out two letters of remonstrance. They don't pay me enough for this, she griped silently, getting back on two sore feet and heading out of the room.