Saint Cyprian Academy Of The Magical Art's

You remember that St Cyprian thing I posted? Well I've finally got a story to go with it! That Bullying a Dragon thread was for this, specifically the first few chapters. Anyway there's two cousins a witch and a warlock, their mother's are also empowered while their father's are mundane. Anyway all their lives they've had for most part supress their magic but now after years of waiting and pining they are finally old enough to attend the illustrious Saint Cyprian Academy Of The Magical Art's. However sadly the school's reputation is not entirely deserved. Also one of their friend's follows them and tries to pass as a warlock. Looooooooooooooooooooong post ahead so sorry about that, but could anyone suggest ways to make the school even more horrible? And Saint Cyprian is intended to be a Hogwarts homagebut does the setting sound interesting on it's own right. I'll add some character profiles soon, please comment!

A school for witchery in Australia, well the dimensional gap that the school resides in is located there; this gap is kind of like a gigantic room, the sun and the moon are the same enchanted sphere that hangs from the roof by a string, the stars are apparently painted onto the ceiling, in fact the school grounds are based on an old matte painting that brought by one of the school founders from a member of The Syphilis Ridden Italian Artisan League, the painting still hangs in the school canteen and if anyone touches it the ghost of the artist will burst out and give the poor git grief. The school itself is very much in appearance a typical Australian traditional boarding school, if it was run by ancient, (upper limit three hundred and fifty years old) mad, sadists who are hideously magically powerful. The entry to this school is concealed behind a shop door in the main street of this dull and mundane country town. After one has gone through the door of the shop one finds oneself on the top of Threshold Slop which is part of the grounds of St Cyprian’s. The shop front itself has an enchantment that prevents people from really being curious about the shop (but this is also helped along by the fact that the shop is very dull looking) also if a mundane (or pyromaniac or hangmen as some bitter young warlocks and witches like to call the non-magically gifted) person even notices it and goes in; if they expect a shop they get a shop with outrageous prices that sells expired milk. Every once in an while a mundane with an open enough mind makes their way onto Cyprian’s grounds, what happens to that person depends; mostly their memories are blanked but once in a blue moon a mundane intruder may gain employment as a librarian, or a gardener or a teacher of some of the more ordinary classes like art, history, literature, stuff like that, (sometimes they hold special elective programs like mundane magic tricks or medieval weaponry... that was popular with the first years) since witches and warlocks can just use witchcraft to create any amount money they tend to become very wealthy. An even rarer end result is that the intruder goes mad, so damaged that not even the greatest mentalist can repair their shattered minds. One such individual is William “Bill” Alanson who found the school when he was ten... in 1963. He is now under the delusion that St Cyprian is a good old fashioned British comprehensive school; he is apparently quite chummy with fellow madman Headmaster Anderson. There is also some Therianthrope staff to help with the outreach program for such beings, see below. A person who used the door would find themselves overlooking the school which resembles a large manor house built in a faux gothic style, which despite being very large is much bigger on the inside (this is called the Smith Principal, previously called the Tennant Principle, before then the Ecclestein Principal, from 1996 to 2005 the Mc Gann Principal, before 1996 it was referred to as the Mc Coy Principal, starting in 1984 the Baker Principal, from 1981 onwards the Davidson Principal, and this is getting a bit drawn out).

Due to the very, very, very low magical population (so low that the first thing a young warlock is taught about love is to make sure the object of his affections is not too closely related) there are only a little over a hundred students at a time; there are some who say that the student body is small because once in a while a student enters the school and never comes out... there are a disturbing amount of ghosts who appear to have once been students wandering the halls. Starting age is twelve and most (the ones who haven’t been squashed, burnt, washed out, drowned, and smashed) graduate at eighteen.

Very much like a traditional well established mainstream boarding school in Australia however with a very different history and purpose. The school was founded very early in post colonization Australian history for the children of recent magical immigrants and is a much respected school. St Cyprian’s does not have a stable floor plan and is prone to changing without warning (sometimes the staffs have to give students the day of just to find the classrooms) and has many rooms and features that seem to serve no discernible purpose, these include the squalor room which is apparently the filthiest and most diseased place on Earth, if you breath it’s air for more than a few seconds you’ll probably defecate your own organs, a door that is either an entrance to a girl’s toilet (quick note on St Cyprians toilets, due to the ready availability of invisibility magic all female students thirteen and over are given a whacking stick to wildly wave around until it make contact with some sick bastards nose, some of male students do wonder why only girls get a defence weapon...) or a link way to the bottom of the Mariner Trench, Pandora’s Box which is a box that randomly appears in different parts of the school and offers unwary students inciting objects if they reach in it slices the hapless individual’s hand of. The school provides a “things to look out for manual” that’s thicker than the large print edition of the complete works of Charles Dickens. Now in fairness to the St Cyprian’s builders the interior’s chaotic fluctuations do have an upside, the school can incorporate new structures into itself, for example the school long ago installed modern plumbing and bathroom facilities into its infrastructure, however once in a while a student will be rushing to the toilet and instead find a room full of chamber pots.

St Cyprian’s has an interesting admittance exam, in which a perspective first year student must enter the trial room; the trial room reaches into the child’s mind and remodels itself so it can best test the students’ abilities. The way the student deals with their challenge gives the teachers an idea of what subjects the student should focus on. This room is also used at the end of the school year to assess the students’ ability to put what they’ve learned to use.

Saint Cyprian offers special courses in the animalistic brand of magic that is the exclusive domain of therianthrope, along with training meant to help them keep their full human intellect, conscience and all that jazz while transformed. As of today the school has about twelve therianthrope (beings with the power to switch between human and bestial forms at will) students, mostly Tel Basta or as popular culture calls them, were-cats.

For approximately forty five years the school has had a warlock named Zachery Anderson as its headmaster, but the school is basically run by the vice headmistress Justina Smith. You see around twenty years ago Anderson and Smith were lovers but apparently Smith threw an epic arcane hissy fit and inadvertently (or so she says) obliterated the headmasters sanity; nobody is entirely sure what caused the row, some say they disagreed on how student discipline should be handled, others insist it was on whether or not it would be good for themselves and the school if they married… most people who know Justina well think it was about the colour of the floor tiles. Zachery has long since stopped becoming involved in the running of the school and is now basically confined to his studies 24/7. His insanity has mutated and morphed over the years, he started out with dangerous homicidal tendencies which today has mellowed to what can only be described as funny schizophrenia; he thinks he’s George III (which doesn’t help on the madness front) occasionally speaks backwards, believes that he’s the headmaster of Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wears a dead badger as a hat. Since Zachery is not fit to administer the institution Justina has mostly taken over the running of St Cyprian. With her school policies of hexing random students just to be on the safe side, making offenders serve out detention as what can only be described as a “squidgy” and other stuff that the Victorian school system would consider barbaric, Saint Cyprian goes above and beyond in producing capable sorcerers; it churns out alumni whose magic can handle anything and anyone, that is after all what you can expect (or not expect) at Saint Cyprian’s Academy Of The Magical Arts.

edited 29th Jul '10 7:28:31 PM by Zolnier

The school itself is very much in appearance a typical Australian traditional boarding school, if it was run by ancient, (upper limit three hundred and fifty) mad, sadists who are hideously magically powerful.

You mean they normally aren't?

Curse you, Round The Twist and Team Fortress 2, you've lied to me again! >: |

You were under the impression that boarding school teachers were magic? Also forgot to mention but the school remodels itself once in a while to modernize it's facilities, like updating the plumbing, although sometimes bits of the school manifest's featurtes from it's past, many poor student have gone to to the toilet only to discover that the bathroom is now a room full of chamber pots.

edited 27th Jul '10 2:55:01 AM by Zolnier

Could anyone suggest a term the witching community could use to refer to criminal witches and warlocks?

edited 28th Jul '10 12:17:20 AM by Zolnier

^^ That the Australian ones were, yes!

All Australians are magic, how do you think we survived the great War Of The Australian Sterotypes?

edited 27th Jul '10 11:24:46 PM by Zolnier

I need help with a title?

Well, before you do anything else, you have to lose that apostrophe.

Sorry If I'm being dense but why?

EDIT: Typo

edited 29th Jul '10 2:21:53 AM by Zolnier

(The apostrophe in Art's, not in Cyprian's.)

The apostrophe indicates a possessive; "Arts" is a plural and therefore doesn't need one.

Thanks for the correction.

Since Latin is getting old who thinks that French and Celtic would be good langauges for magic incantations?

edited 29th Jul '10 6:05:27 AM by Zolnier

Don't the Aborigines use magic? I know that if we had Potter-esque wizards in Canada, at least, there'd be some magical folk who'd try to smoosh European learning with the local variety. We do it with food and winter preparations all the time.

As for a title, all I can say is no long poncy sentences, no cutesy puns and no single words weighed down with artificial meaning to sound deep; you want your book to stand out from the other bandwagon-jumpers, surely?

Maybe Australian Indigenous languages could provide some magical incantations, it is implied that practioners of Australian witchery (an art of magic that springs from two hundred years of English witchery mingeling with a diverse assortment of forgein styles of the occult,) have almost stamped out Aboriginal magic, witches and warlocks tend to be quite xenophobic. Although there are people trying to recreate the nearly extinct practises.

edited 30th Jul '10 12:49:16 AM by Zolnier

Maybe I should just call the book Saint Cyprian's.

edited 29th Jul '10 7:26:35 PM by Zolnier

Could anyone suggest some meaningful names that I could use? Ones to do with the occult.

edited 30th Jul '10 12:54:13 AM by Zolnier

I truly wish I could help you with titles, but every one of my stories is a single word weighed down with artificial meaning to sound deep. I haven't named my werewolf story, because I can't think of a single possible title that didn't have something to do with werewolves and I didn't want that fact to be obvious from the title.

As for incantation languages: Don't use French. Way too many people speak it (imagine if your book was translated into French). I think the rarer the language, the better the effect—making Celtic a good idea—but you also put yourself at greater risk of Critical Research Failure (although it's less likely that anyone will notice).

Hey I don't mind single word titles layered with artificial deepness! And you now how Hogwarts had the Four Houses, I wan't to deconstruct that, any tips?

edited 30th Jul '10 8:01:19 AM by Zolnier

Would it make sense for St Cyprian's to have a science class? If so how would they teach it without ending up with a lot of confused student's who are left to wonder why they've just been told that violating the conservation of mass and energy when they did it four times before lunch?

EDIT: Typo.

edited 30th Jul '10 5:49:30 PM by Zolnier

Melissa and Deborah are nice, normal-sounding names that mean 'prophetess'.

There's also Falda, an Icelandic name I believe, which means 'wings' or 'feathers', can't remember which.

Quirin is the name of a stone that supposedly shows you what other people are dreaming, and has a handy nickname in Rin.

Kai means 'to open' or 'unseal', as in a portal or a spell (or a door, if you want to be boring).

Arthur has all the associations you know about already in addition to meaning 'bear'.

Math is a good one; read up on The Cursing of Gilfaethwy sometime, it is seriously messed up .

Iphigenia) has an interesting history. When Agamemnon was going off to fight the Trojan War, the weather was so awful that he could not set sail, and when he asked of the gods why this should be so, the oracle, petrified that he had not recieved an answer, made up one about Agamemnon having unwittingly killed a sacred deer of Artemis. To make up for it, the oracle claimed, he must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia, whereupon he did, and sealed his post-war fate; his wife killed him the second he returned. The name itself, if clouded by a nickname like Genny or Genie, makes for pretty good foreshadowing, if you're looking to tell the kind of story that requires a dead body to further someone's goals.

The stone Jade is said to strengthen weak hearts and divert lightning from one who wears it, so it's a good name for a girl with a protective instinct. And apparently if you pour a poisoned liquid into a jade cup, the cup will crack.

Leslie means someone who dwells in a grey fortress, so it's got that Mad Sorceror's Beautiful Daughter feel.

Isadora means 'gift of Isis', and you don't get much more magical than that. Has associations with dancing, too, so maybe a little bit of Red-Shoes action somewhere along the line?

Ludmilla means 'strength of the people/the multitude', which would make it a good name for a highly-skilled necromancer or zombie queen - let us not forget the wise words of moviebob: "If Hogwarts is a school of witchcraft and wizardry, why do these books have exactly one kinky goth chick who doesn't even go there? Lemme tell ya something; if I attend a school of witchcraft and anything and I'm not surrounded by nihilists with lip-rings, black dye jobs and fishnets? I'm asking for my fucking tuition back."

Sorry I can't think of more male names; people usually have more fun with this kind of thing when naming girls.

As for deconstructing the house-system, I'm not sure of the best way to go about it; I've never attended a North American private or British public school, and so I don't have any experience from which to draw upon little in-jokes that people who have can giggle knowingly at. Maybe you can say that the school used to have houses, but during the last magical war the lot of them started acting almost like gangs, obsessed with 'protecting their own' and harassing each other, so the idea was abandoned? Maybe there are still kids whose parents think in terms of houses, who encourage their spawn to do so as well; "That Kassandra you mentioned in your last letter strikes me as the very ideal of a Raulston girl. You have my blessing to pursue her," and so forth.

It would make sense for math and science and the normal topics to be covered, I think, unless you have magical universities. And even then can't some magical formulae be written with higher maths, anyway? I mean, if they have any bearing on reality at all.

Just a imagine a magical sex ed class! Oh and I really like those names.

edited 30th Jul '10 7:12:11 PM by Zolnier

Should the characters use wands?

Maybe staves would be better. I mean, think of the film adaptation; how many really great fight scenes were there in Harry Potter? Can you think of one?

Now, do you remember Gandalf and Saruman dukin' it out? Shit yeah.

I wonder what could be some physical differences between mundane people and sorcerers? Oh and the film version Order Of The Pheonix Dumbldore vs Voldermort, FUCK YEAH!

edited 30th Jul '10 10:24:49 PM by Zolnier

What could be a good way of justifying rule magic when witches and warlocks use Inherent Gift?

edited 31st Jul '10 2:44:49 AM by Zolnier