The Scientist

Chapter 2. some pretty smart shit

The Academy was an unique entirety. One that Kal had never quite understood entirely.

There was a great mansion at the end of Sophia's St. that no one really bothered to notice. It was just a unimportant figure in a by-passer's view, like the students going in and coming out every day.

It wasn't lowkey though.

The whole mansion was crafted out of light coloured stone with two grand pillars shaped like trees framing the entrance, their roots and branches crawling pale golden on the walls. At winter they were plain, they would blossom as soon as the sunlight would get warm again. The branches reached higher above the first two stories and eventually they formed a round window, the centerpiece of the facade. The window was designed out of shards of glass, forming the map of the world. At night it would reflect celestial patterns based on the Moon in the sky, and poor astrology obsessed students would study the patterns by themselves until the morning. It was said to represent the view that the Gifted had over the world, looking towards the magnetic north. It's official name was the Magna Via, but it was usually referred to (creatively) as "the Globe".

The Academy was square shaped. The North Wing was the one with the Globe and the tree pillars in the front. The head master's offices and the ceremonial room were located there as well as the cafeteria and student's - and teacher's lounges, not to mention the great auditorium. The East Wing was mainly classrooms and a few smaller auditoriums. Newly renovated with a new locker system in the main hallways. The library took over most of the West Wing but there was also a planetarium there, and an atelier of some kind. The East Wing was basically just an enormous botanic garden/a greenhouse which to the students had a very limited access outside of classes.

And the whole building was surrounded by small gardens and plains (mainly on the back yard) to isolate it a bit and to offer room for sports and "mind exploring".

The matter of mind and the use of thought were the main things about magic, or as it was more correct nowadays to say "being gifted". Because it was all old news for the normal people, there was nothing that science hadn't had already explained. For example the traces of electricity in living organisms, foretelling by counting the odds, GMO, magnetism, the human anatomy on a cell- and nanoscale, the function of brains and their relations to electricity, gravity and it's relations to mass, material and it's states of matter. 

There was basically nothing that the scientists had not altered and played with, changed it's appearance or structure, directed electricity through it to made it move or to restart a heart, by using machines and generators. The difference was that the Gifted only needed some power of will.

There were so much exceptions that the rules hardly made any sense when you started to think about your specialities within your power, but of course power had it's... historical guidelines.

It had been said that the first Gifted had lived in Ancient Greece, in the city of Athens. For hundreds of years they had practiced in silence there, to understand the connections between all life and death. It was a guy called Eupheme who first divided the abilities between Gifted by the understanding over material (physicists) and the understanding of mind (psychics).

But the Gifted had already been quite... arrogant back then. It was a treasured ability over all, to have such control, and for a small group of people only.

In some years the Gifted moved to west, to Rome, and formed a community there. In few years they had founded the Academy.

It was a quite complex time, since the Gifted still had had a very strong relationship with religion. Of course there had not been that clear knowledge of naturalness over all, but it had been thought that the Gifted were given a lot of power over life. So they used it. They whispered themselves into the halls and thrones of ceasars and senators, into the ropes of priests and oracles. Soon the brutality of the Roman culture got into their head, they were on the very top of the Roman Empire with a very twisted understanding over power and humanity.