After morning chores one Tirdas, Wystan sat down next to Azuyia with a loaded plate and a thin glass bottle of orange-red liquid along with his ale. They were served additions to the usual potatoes and eggs with biscuits and gravy, a shipment of seasonal smoked meats and cheeses in from foreign dealers, so the repast was lively.

"Looka what I bought off that charcuter from Cyrodiil, Zu! Holstrom pepper sauce all the way from the rain forests."

Azuyia grumbled and poked at her plate.

Oh man ... this is gonna be good!" He twisted the pewter stopper on the pale green bottle of Imperial blown glass, held it over his potatoes and drizzled lines of the reddish-orange liquid. He loaded a fork and ate.

"WhOOOOAAAAHHH!"

Novices sitting next to him actually stopped their conversations a moment, watching him wave his hand in front of his mouth as he managed to swallow the forkful, then down an entire tankard of ale in one gulp. Wystan's face lit up, and he looked like he was breaking a sweat even in the Sun's Dawn wind off the fields.

"Starting early, Wys," the genial Leofric quipped. He was on his way to building a comedy legend there at Southall ever since he had actually gotten the magistra to laugh at one of his stand-up supper jokes. On the stout side and mammoth skinned to the timeworn comments at his expense, the butcher's son from Rorikstead routinely had the entire refectory in tears at his vulgar stories delivered oratorically as he stood on one of the tables. Many had told him he ought to moonlight in one of the capital mead halls or seriously consider bardic lore.

"Mmgruf that's fkn hot," Wys managed to cough.

"And he shook hannnnnnnnnnnnnnds ... with the sheriff!"

Leofric laughed and returned to his scandalous lampoon of a thinly disguised jarl and his Dunmer bed warmer. Raynu stood at the back wall of the refectory with one hand to her mouth. Among the thirty-six present one or two knew of the royal figure behind his monologue, exchanging nervous glances a moment, then busting out laughing along with the rest. Raynu glanced inside the door to the collegium once, then resumed her somewhat straightfaced posture.

"Oh, grow up," Azuyia grumped as the tenor rose to an uproar when Leofric stood on the table and acted out certain portions of his story.

"Morning too, there, sunshine," Wystan blinked his tearing eyes. "What's eating you," he asked, flipping her untouched plate up slightly.

"Got woken up again," she glared down the table at Lavinia Cybo chattering at several female novices with perfect smiles amidst the din.

Vinia was that breed of Imperial who did not necessarily stand out from the crowd and yet established herself early on in the novitiate as the one to beat. She was around five-nine and wore her tawny long hair in a silver ring with moonstone inlays, not exclusively among the novices took the time to apply carmine and garnet dust, and had somehow acquired her novice robes at least a size tighter than usual. Vinia had that type of round face that screamed health and energy. Quite a few novices of both sexes vied for her attention, and just as many despised her for one reason or the other. Azuyia had no opinion of her personally, and did not give a hoot about the gossip. It was the way she had answered at a bench in commons, one day, that had set Azuyia's mind in motion.

"It's just that, Vinia, the other day I was up for a seven-hour stretch at the grounds. I've been at the codices ignes all week. Could you …" she had entreated.

"What, sweetie," her dorm mate asked .

"Keep it down a bit when you come in," Azuyia whispered, "I mean, you and Ylena have been talking pretty loud at night."

Vinia kept smiling, and ran both of her hands down her long ponytail after tightening the ring, arching her back and holding the pose.

"Oh, we do have fun," she yawned and stretched her arms above her head, keeping them there a moment.

"Yes, Vinia," Azuyia persisted, directly annoyed that she was not turning to engage her. "Great. And between your flopping your entire body down a couple hours before chores, and her carrying on at your stories I am losing two or three hours of sleep! D'ya mind?!"

Azuyia had learned that Vinia came from a well-to-do family of peripheral courtiers living on the coast of the inland sea surrounding the island of Imperial City. Her father Marius had been the first generation of their family line to acquire a surname on the Imperial register, Cybo having formerly been just his family shingle outside the warehouse doors for his shipping business in Anvil on the southern coast of Cyrodiil, stylized from the commonplace cybaea for a merchantman. To the ancient families on the Imperial City riviera this new name had elicited a few laughs in the salons twenty years prior, but nobody was turning down invitations to lay on his peach Akaviri silk couches and eat Daggerfall oysters off gilded cloisonné. The family business had been awarded guild status by Titus Mede's censors, recognition of the Cybo ships that had aided in materiel and troop transport along the coasts of Hammerfell, Cyrodiil, and Valenwood during the Altmer invasions from Summerset Isle in the early 170s. In less than a decade Marius had built an international network of warehouses and financed a sizeable fleet, and had moved his growing family to a not inconsiderable villa on the riviera. They had arrived, there, a ferry away from the City itself, and thus it was time to announce themselves to the society season. Marius bought a nomen, a name for himself, through the censors who recorded ancestries in the capital temples to the divines. It was whispered that his election to civil tribune had also been acquired with so many gold septims.

Vinia had spent her candidacy from a suite of rooms on the second floor of the Fletchersgate mercantile exchange arranged for her in advance of her trip to Falkreath, and had slept those six hard months on clean cotton sheets shipped in with her trunk of Alik'r and Black Marsh unguents, picked up and dropped off by one of the thane's carriages each day. Presumably fed in the same style, Vinia was one of the more vocal novices on that first full day of nervous indoctrination in the study halls, contributing her opinion to the delight of several who would become her cohort at refectory and commons. It somehow did not surprise Azuyia when she got her response.

"Dear," Vinia replied without turning her head, waving across the commons, "your milkdrinker hiney can deal with it," she then turned her head as she got up to go talk, "I ... am going to live a little." She danced her shoulders and torso, fluttering her hands, turning her head to the side and pursing her lips as if to kiss the air.

"I hear a skooma habit makes it hard to stand still," Azuyia said. For that she got a lethal stare from Vinia, and a silent turn of the back as she walked off.

"Soooo," Wystan coughed one final time before getting up to refill his tankard, "why dontcha do something about it," he said with a wink.

Over the next few weeks Azuyia started to take walks into Fletchersgate on her rest days. She had not been off the Collegium grounds at all since the snow fell, and besides the stir crazies wanted to browse the apothecary's shelves. She had gotten to know Runa, the alchemist, and traded information that she had so far about herbs and roots, listening mostly since the other had grown up in that very shop with her mother and father, who had since retired. It was one of those Sundas afternoons they were sitting around talking when Vinia walked in.

"Afternoon."

Runa got a look and a sniff as the diplomat's daughter breezily handled bottles and bundles of dried plants on the shelves. She called over.

"Hey, could you c'mere a minute," she motioned across the hearth-sized dealer's room.

Runa, having served customers since she was a little girl, graciously stood up. "I see you don't have much in the way of scents."

"We have plenty of lavender and snowberry, take a look," the alchemist indicated the baskets of parchment-wrapped squares and ceramic jars.

"Tsk-tsk, nuu-nuu-nuu," Vinia chortled and shook her head, "not hand lotion. I'm talking Alik'r stormwood. Got any?" She angled her head and narrowed one eye a bit.

Runa answered politely, "Stormwood's pretty rare in these parts, miss. We only carry what travels here regularly, or we can make ourselves. We could ... look into an order, perhaps?"

"Oh, swelll, miss. Add a bottle of Cherrol bronzer to that? Send the chit over to the thane, too, they'll have the payment arranged." With that, Vinia strode back out.

Runa, who had the timeless draw born of a cheerful disposition and the face of the wild steppe, turned around blithely and said to Azuyia, "I ... hate those Imperial vahies," she spat the outrageous Nordic slang that would have any woman in Skyrim drawing a sharpened blade should anyone use it in her direction. Azuyia laughed, and stayed with her to talk into the evening.

After first lectures and practice on a sweltering day in Sun's Height, Azuyia was hanging out with Denthryd as he had a pipe in the shade. Just then the front door of the Collegium swung open and Vinia groused out followed by their Argonian colleague Aranei-Ta.

"But Vinia, you look great! We must ..," Aranei-Ta, a novice from the western pampas regions of Black Marsh exclaimed at the back of the other who was cursing as she disappeared down the hill towards the stream. In a class of thirty-six just past the halfway mark of this intensely contained program, and that after the previous candidacy, everyone at this point knew something about everyone else. So this new affair puzzled Denthryd in his recreational haze, and he hurried behind the brisk strides of his colleague.

"Hey, Zuyi," he asked when they got inside, "Vinia into scales now?"

"Nuupe," Azuyia chuckled and held his hand, hurrying him around several bends in the Collegium corridors, looking for Wystan. Finding him with another of his winsome study partners, she motioned him up excitedly and indicated that he should follow. She led the other two to a short padded bench set into wainscoted walls outside an extra meeting chamber in a side nook down one of the passages. Checking to see that it was locked and peeking into the darkness of the crack below the door, Azuyia stood up and motioned them to sit. Putting her hands on their shoulders, she cracked up and quietly told them how she and Runa had had Vinia's order intercepted at the Cyrodiil border.

"She knows someone who knows someone in the Falkreath customs house. Sent an alternate order to Black Marsh and had them switched, then stamped at the Skyrim border and received in Fletchersgate pro forma."

"You gotta be joking," Denthryd shook his head, grinning. Wystan was hysterical, clapping and kicking his feet.

"Nuupe. Put essence from an Argonian female into every one of her lotions and creams, oh! Worked out a deal with Lef to drip it all over poor Nei-nei's bed. The guy must be stupid, ha, she'll be dancing for him until the 'bronzer' passes out of her system, oh, six months after she figures it out," she busted out laughing. "I saw a copy of the Argonian Maid on her bed when I went back for a minute this morning!"

"Remind me not to cross you, Zuyi," the Eastmarcher chuckled. She got up and gave him a cheeky-cheeky, getting an amused look, and skipped off down the hall.