The Ilysium Academy

Chapter 1, Scene 1

The party will start at the Ilysium Academy, as part of a larger group that the Academy is subtly testing to see their potential links to the eldritch aspects of the world. They are doing this by detecing the Indus Frequency of each individual as they give them more mundane trials, which picks the player characters out from a crowd.

The Ilysium Academy towers over the rest of the Imperial City. The marble towers sparkle in the sunlight, dwarfed only by the Imperial Palace sitting atop its mountain. The grounds outside are busier than usual, with lines of commoners hoping for a chance at employment wrapping around the perimeter several times. You have all made it past the gate, at least, by virtue of your skills as well as the 'leverage' the Academy has. As you enter the largest of the towers, you are directed up a large spiral staircase. The bottom floors are devoted to teaching, but as you ascend you pass by more and more technologically impressive sights. Those of you who understand even some small modicum of technology would know that many of the devices being tested out in the open would put the best scientists of the Empire or the Trade Union to shame. And that is not even to speak of what must be being developed behind closed doors. Eventually, after quite a grueling climb, you reach your destination: a large, empty room, filled to near-bursting with applicants just like yourself.

There are 35 people who the Academy has selected to be potential members of this investigative team. Give the players a chance to describe their characters and possibly chat with some of the other applicants. They are all unaware of both what they would be hired to do and why they are in this room. Some have some theories, however, which includes:

What they're going to do

- They will be sent down into the Depths, to hunt caeligo.
- Being trained as spies and then sent to infiltrate the Imperial Palace, to gather irrefutable evidence of the Imperial Family's crimes.
- Going to be given Hyacinem implants and turned into demigods.

Why they're in this room

- The Academy is monitoring their thoughts and memories to check for spies.
- The Academy is going to close the doors, trapping them all for illegal and awful experiments.
- This room and all the people in it are fake. The Academy is testing the quality of the illusion.

Before too long, a set of doors you can barely see through the crowd opens, and people start filtering out of the stuffed waiting room. This new room fills up most of the floor, and unlike the barren room you just left, is lined with both equipment and Academics already scribbling notes onto thick pads of paper. Some of the equipment you might recognize, most you don't. A clean-shaven man in a spotless white, knee-legnth coat steps forwards and adresses the group. "You have reached this stage because the Academy is confident that your abilities could prove useful to us. However, not everyone is suited for the task at hand. These next trials are designed to determine who is the best fit."

There are various trials set up around the room. The applicants are not being made to try every test, just being measured in the ones they choose to attempt. All of the trials are testing more than the obvious, with machinery taking delicate readings of the applicants Indus Frequency, or IF. The player characters, due to being what the Academics would call "resonant individuals" and the esoteric would call "god-touched", give off a specific reading that is different than the rest of the applicants. None of the player characters need to fail at any of them unless they want to, but there is one for each at which they succeed greatly. Describe each of the trials, as well as NPCs attempting them with varying degrees of success, mostly minor successes. Players can pick one or more trials to attempt, and they roll to determine how well they do. If their character is skilled at the trial they are attempting, they cannot fail. Instead, the amount of successes determines how easy it is as well as how much of a reaction the machines reading the players' IF makes. On particularly high successes (>5), one of the machines shorts out, and a pair of Academics rush over to repair it. Allow the players to describe how they succeed their trials.

Trials

Athleticism

General feats of strength, agility, and stamina. Lighting weights, acrobatics or speed, and physical resilience.

Fighting Skill

Skill in hand-to-hand combat, either unarmed or with weapons, and skill with guns of all types.

Glibness

Talent with words, both spoken and in writing. Regardless of truth, how convincing your words are.

Practical Knowledge

The knowledge of how to use and repair modern machinery, without neccesarily knowing how it works.

Underworld Skill

Skills that are used in criminal actions, even if they are not neccesarily illegal actions. Stealth, legerdemain, etc.

Doctoring

Medical knowledge and talent. Ability to diagnose problems and treat injuries.

Academic Knowledge

Book smarts, on academic subjects like the sciences, law, technology, and politics.

Puzzle-solving Skill

Raw intelligence, wits, and adeptitude in solving mysteries, both mundane and eldritch.

Obscure Knowledge

Knowledge of lost or forbidden subjects, like of hyacinem and the Fullblooded.

Sorcerous Talent

Skill with each individual's sorcery, both raw power and creativity.

Sorcerous Knowledge

Technical knowledge of how each individual's sorcery works, as well as how they percieve sorcery as a whole.

Sorcerous Resilience

Resistance to reality-warping sorcery, especially mental effects like songblood, mindblood, and shadowblood.

---

As each of the character accomplishes their preffered trial, the perceptive can notice a series of devices on the outskirts of the room that light up. These are the devices watching for anything strange among the applicants, and the party members have tripped them. Academics in lab coats take notes all the while, watching each applicant intently.
The party members are the ones selected, with the clean-shaven Academic from earlier calling out their names and dismissing the rest. He introduces himself to the group as Soterius Ruso, and tells the group that he'll be their handler for the length of their employment with the Academy. He is willing to answer some small questions, but to talk about anything classified they'll need to go somewhere secure, his office.

Ruso's office is nearby, but it is behind a complicated two-layer door that takes a small amount of time to unlock, open, and lock behind the group. Inside is a fairly large office, with several bookshelves lining the walls. The books on said shelves all look pristine, their spines uncracked and pages neat. The surface of the heavy wooden desk is completely empty save for two things: a small lump of something that looks like glass, inside of which sits a perfectly preserved flower; and a large, complicated device that resembles a very intricate bit of watchwork. Bronze gears and steel springs mesh together, always moving back and forth in a mesmerizing pattern. It is ticking, but much slower than a timepeice would.

There are a few things to learn from the office, namely from the names on the books and investigating the device. High rolls with Academics can determine that the names on the books are all well-respected researchers on a wide variety of topics. Experts in history, law, and hemodynamics (sorcerous physics) can be identified, among others. Enigmas can identify that the majority of the books are discussing Hyacinem, from its origins to its legality and uses. Machinery can tell that the mechanism on the desk is very precise, but not counting regularly. Technology can determine that the device is measuring something, with high successes noting the resemblance of certain pieces to devices built to measure light.
The device is measuring Indus Frequency (IF), which is an anomalous radiation given off by anything connected to the Creator. Namely, hyacinem and other magic gives off this radiation in a variety of frequencies, which devices built to detect IF can determine. The Player Characters are individuals with the fairly unique attribute of being "resonant" with IF, which means that frequencies (sources of magic) that interact with the Player Characters are amplified in some unknown way. The existence of resonant individuals is a closely-guarded secret of the Academy, even more so than Indus Frequency itself.
Now that the party is in a secure location, Ruso is willing to explain the party's mission, as well as answer most questions the party may have. He is not entirely honest, however, with some of the information provided.

Important Information

Avidia Indus

A veritable genius, Avidia Indus is an Academic who has been at the forefront of many of the last technological leaps. Among her accomplishments are: perfecting Shadowblood Gems, creating the first Hybrid Gems, and being the first to develop a hyacinem-steel alloy. Most of those technologies are only rumors outside the Academy, and Indus' name is not attached to them. Only an Academic with a high Technology roll would be able to recognize the name.

Important NPCs

Minor NPCs

Hadrius Agorix

A slightly hunched, grey-haired old man. A professor of heat dynamics. Working the front desk.

Trait:

Mostly deaf

Sorcery:

Flameblood

Want:

Tenure

Flaw:

Doesn't respect non-Academics

Menenia Pompol

A minor noblewoman dressed in "peasant's clothes" made of fine fabrics.

Trait:

Doesn't want to talk to anyone who looks poor

Sorcery:

Stormblood

Want:

Adventure

Flaw:

Not used to not getting what she wants

Lenne Canti

A lightly scarred, brutish man with no less than four blades hanging from his waist.

Trait:

Speaks as little as possible

Sorcery:

Earthblood

Want:

Work away from Ilysium

Flaw:

Quick to violence

Eutychus Dannicus

A dirty, underfed commoner boy no older than 15.

Trait:

Stares at the people he's talking to, without blinking

Sorcery:

Mindblood

Want:

Wealth

Flaw:

Doesn't respect mental boundries, will listen to your thoughts

Sns (Sens)

An androgynous shiftblood with bright blue hair that covers most of their face.

Trait:

They speak with a lisp due to teeth shaped like fangs

Sorcery:

Shiftblood

Want:

Respect

Flaw:

Very rude to non-shiftbloods

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Her most recent project, studying the cause of hyacinem's sorcerous effects, found that the crystals gave off a strange, invisible, signal in fairly regular pulses. Avidia built a device to measure these pulses, and found that it was not just hyacinem that gave off this signal. She had discovered the Indus Frequency.

Indus Frequency

Most everything in the Blue gives off this strange signal that Prof. Indus had discovered. However, they all pulse at a different rate. Frequencies are measured on a logarithmic scale, where 2 is twice as fast as 1 and 3 is twice as fast as 2, so on up to 5. Aether gives off a pulse at an IF of about 1, which is what the device on the desk is ticking at currently. (This is a lie. Aether's IF is closer to 0.1, and the reading of an IF of 1 comes from the player characters.) Hyacinem's IF can be between 0.5 and 3.

IF Survey

The Academy designed a device to scan Ilysium for spikes in IF, which would point them towards the Empire's Hyacinem stockpile. Ruso has a map that shows the readings in every direction from the tower they're currently in. There is a spike in the direction of Fort Primus, the Imperial Palace, the Imperial Archives, and the Imperial seats of the various major Houses, which is all to be fairly expected. There is also a spike out in what seems to be a random direction. Those familiar with geography would know that there's nothing that way for miles and miles, not until you reach Lutonia. The Academy ran the test several times, to ensure that they weren't picking up a signal from a skyship carrying Hyacinem, and every time, they read a spike in IF when their device was pointing towards Lutonia.

Provisions

The Academy is able and willing to provide the party with resources to help them determine the source of this reading coming from Lutonia. That includes the device sitting on Ruso's desk, which is not a directional IF reader, but does detect variations in IF over a fairly large area; and a skyship if the party does not have one already. The Academy has already forged documents marking each of the party members as Imperial commoners, Clansmen, and even Oathbreakers, should they need to deal with the officials of whichever region they might find themselves in.

Concluding Remarks

Ruse will give each party member a document to sign before leaving. This is a contract of allegiance, and incorporates the 'leverage' that the Academy has on each specific character. However, nothing is hidden in the legalese, and a substantial payment is offered, again tailored to each character. If a character is hesitant to sign, simply have Ruso push a little harder on the leverage and/or the reward.
Give the party some opportunity to gather things they think they might need from the Academy and Ilysium as a whole before pushing them to head out towards Lutonia. The trip to the island will take about a week, and should not be all that eventful. Some opportunities to get interaction between the party members are:

The most direct path will take their skyship past the island of Liber, which the superstitious believe to be haunted. So is Lutonia, but the option is there to skirt the island - just in case.

One night, while most are asleep, the skyship's engine hiccups. A common malfunction, it will need some repairs. It is nothing too serious, nothing to require stopping along the way.

The party's skyship passes by a trading vessel bound. A message is broadcast, a typical greeting and request for a customary sharing of information. It can be declined, without any consequences.

Finally, before ending the session, show the players a little hint of the secrets being hidden from the party.

However, what this group of newly-signed Academic operatives do not see, is a small moment long after they have left Ruso's office. He is going over the contracts that each individual has signed, when a small device starts to rattle on his bookshelf. He stands, and picks up a small piece of the device, connected with a mess of cables and tubes. He holds it up to his ear for a moment.
"Yes? -- Yes, ma'am. And, might I add, some of the highest resonancy we've recorded. -- All of them in my office was producing a distinct frequency oscillation of at least magnitude 2. -- No, they were not informed. Are you certain that this is a good idea? With a resonancy that high, it could disturb ---- You are, professor. No, no ma'am. - My apologies. - Of course. - Yes. I will."
With that, he puts the device back together, and stands next to it for a long moment. Then he shakes his head, sighs, and sits back down at his desk.