#/ anyway just some ideas for the school; lune helped with the never-ending staircase!

[astarab1aze]

➥ Belegerande's School for the Arcane: Features (1)

the school nestled into the mirewood of belle valley is a mysterious one indeed, fraught with everlengthening, everchanging hallways, corridors, atriums, grand archways, stairways, and many more of such that lead nowhere; wrought iron draped in vines and brachio tendrils, magnificent courtyards and personalized reading nooks for all the little bookworms, mystical wallpaper with printed animals and flowers that move, paintings that watch your every step, dark corners and empty rooms, spidery stained glass and doors of intricately carved wood; classrooms lined with skulls and bones from which necromantic knowledge can be gleaned, all well-versed in the ways of death magic, a hint at the ancestor worship once prevalent among nightfolk - now reduced to pettily cackling at students who don't pay attention; lantern rooms, blue rooms, red rooms, whole and isolated libraries, glass rooms, study rooms, ornate bathrooms, well-stocked supply closets for every alchemical need; walls lined with trophies of alligators, crocodingos, beholders, red wolves, snallyghasters, frogmen, and more, specimen jars and skeletons, skins and pelts, oddities, anatomical diagrams, wrought iron light fixtures and creepy crown molding; and plenty more.

but there are some aspects of the school's grounds that stick out a fair bit more than the rest, such things that a student would first babble on about as soon as they could. from the bottle tree to the frog butlers, the talking skulls in the mudriver shallows, the stained glass staircase that never seems to end, the verdant entrance to house la fey, the clock room, the pygmy fey living in the tree in the central courtyard, the inverted tower beneath the greenhouses, the doll room, and more!

the frog butlers function as a sort of p.a./alarm system for belegerande's, allowing the headmaster to give morning announcements while students are shuffling off for their first classes; their secondary function as an alarm system was first put into place as a means of notifying anyone nearby of intruders, but these days, they serve best to catch students sneaking out. the frog butlers, upon sighting a troublemaking student, will begin to scream like screaming bullfrogs - just inordinantly louder. they are located all throughout the grounds and are sometimes easy to miss.

the bottle tree is an old, very large willow tree near the greenhouses on the eastern end of the school, adorned in hanging glass bottles filled with notes, letters, and wishes. it's long been a tradition at belegerande's that each year's graduating class leave a few bottles for the tree, over time creating a stained glass portrait in the grass should the sun break through the willow branches at just the right angle. this small tradition is more or less a goodbye and an imparting of hopes, plans, and dreams for the future. it can come across as a little pretentious, but the tradition stands. any caught attempting to take the bottles down or harming the tree will, probably, have a few branches swing glass at them. there's a rumor the branches will close in and trap the person inside, or strangling them - one of the two.

the never-ending starcase is a stairwell comprised of stained glass, spiraling in a double-helix going both up and down as far as the eye can see. the staircase begins on steps of glass steadily tapering the higher up you go, seemingly bringing the stair to an end, but it opens back up again, this time with stained glass surrounding the stairwell, and this repeats ad infitum. it can and will quite literally go on forever and is very easy to get lost in, with no visible entrances or exits or ways to get off - unless you already know exactly where you're headed. for years, this stairwell has long been used by the adventurous types happy to get lost, or the firskier types who want to take their romance to the next level, as teens do. sneaking off to the staircase because no one's going to go looking for you, but everyone's got a pretty good idea of what sort of trouble you got into in there.

the clock room is an...unfortunate place to stumble upon. it's full of clocks, which, on the surface, seems utterly harmless - but the clock room is different. clocks of all shapes and sizes line its walls floor to cieling, wall to wall, some standing alone in clusters, some hanging from the cieling, and the size of the room goes on and on. no discernable exits, and you cannot go back the way you came. the constant ticking in the background is enough to make one begin to lose their grip, imagine how long it takes for the heart to sync up with every stutter and twitch of the minute and hour hands. a few minutes will feel like hours, even days, but the room inevitably spits you back out into the hallway because...you're not a clock.

the inverted tower hidden beneath the greenhouses is an old and decidedly ancient place, considered a relic from the days alistair belegerande first settled in the area. built of carven stone and iron. said to be where alistair's private study was located, but it was flooded long ago, now caked with mud, moss, and full of water. the potential it goes deeper than just a few tens of feet is high, considering alistair's wealth of secrets. the entrance to it has since been boarded up and built over, hidden by the school's ever-expanding, everchanging halls. if a few students are brave enough, they might uncover a secret or two for themselves.

the doll room is a room located somewhere within the school nearest house scrivener, decorated in numerous colorful fabrics, streamers, and other such party favores - and dolls, of nearly every make, some cursed, some possessed, and some friendly. much like the clock room, it is almost entirely filled with dolls, with some hanging from the cieling, sitting on near endless shelves, tapdancing across the floor, there are simply dolls everywhere. some cracked and dirty, many from different time periods, some clean and untouched, some burned or otherwise damaged, and all are there to protect yet another school secret. who would willfully walk into a room of dolls that watch, haunt, and curse your every step? scream, howl, and yell at you? trip you on their strings, trick you into all manners of things--

the pygmy fey living in the live oak tree in belegerande's central courtyard are no larger than a half-pinky's length. they skitter about the roots sticking out of the soil, in and out of their little homes; students offer the pygmy fey miniature furniture and bits of food when they can, even shrinking full-size items into 'family size for pygmy fey' and leaving them on the roots for them to find. aside from that, students and faculty are not in any way allowed to go near the pygmy fey as they are too small to survive any possible upsets, let alone even a single person's step in the wrong direction. these fey have been living in this tree since twenty or so after the school's founding and are thus protected permanent residents. they have tiny wings alternating between butterfly, bee, moth, and dragonfly styles, though there are some, particularly males, who don't have any at all. in any case, it's best to leave them be - a fey curse is always a particularly nasty one.