Spiral Academy
One of the four Great Academies of the Scarlet Empire, the Spiral Academy is the birthplace of bureaucrats, satraps, ministers and all manner of those who keep the Thousand Scales in smooth, seamless operation. Though it is physically the smallest of the Academies, it boasts one of the largest student bodies, boasting up to 250 students at any one time, and usually filled to capacity.
Of the four Academies, the Spiral Academy is also the only one located in the Imperial City itself. It sits in the bureaucratic heart of the Imperial City (and thus, the Empire), the Thousand Scales district. A pair of massive, square towers rise from a relatively small set of courtyards and gardens. These ten-story towers flank one of the major thoroughfares of the district - unlike the other Academies, it gives no impression of being remote or distant. It is undeniably part of the pulse of the city's infrastructure.
The school embraces a philosophy referred to as the Four Arts: referring to the four highest arts that any of the students of the Academy can aspire are calligraphy, poetry, music and Gateway. Each of these arts symbolize the traits deemed most desirable in an Imperial servant: penmanship and clarity of written communication (calligraphy); mental acuity and memorization (poetry); the ability to gauge an audience and express oneself well (music); and the ability to think critically and tactically, and to execute plans (Gateway).
Teachers
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Student Life
Even before they are accepted, students are given rigorous testing to determine how strong their affinity for the Four Arts are. These tests, which involve both artistic and academic rigors, determine which Creed new students are assigned to: the Creed of the Brush, the Creed of the Mantle, the Creed of the Bell and the Creed of the Stone. A student remains in the Creed he is fitted into for the whole of his academic career.
Accolades and high marks are not given to individuals, but to Creeds. This is believed to teach the students of the Spiral Academy that their individual victories matter little - it is only the success of one's organization, ministry or bureaucracy that counts. Low marks and failures are likewise given to the Creed, and it is expected that each Creed shall deal with failure on the parts of its members according to their own traditions, from the public humiliation and shunning of the Sanxian Creed to the more violent beatings administered by the Stone Creed.
Each Creed is run by a Prefect, a seventh-year student who is effectively the head of his Creed. The Prefects can also appoint Year Ministers, who act as managers within their Year. First-year students are never appointed a Year Manager; they are instead the direct responsibility of the Creed's Prefect.
- The Brush Creed: The student who shows excellent penmanship and written communication skills is assigned to the Brush Creed. They are known as quiet, studious sorts who eschew excessive boisterousness and nonsense.
- The Mantle Creed: The student who demonstrates a strong mind capable of great reasoning and memorization usually ends up in the Mantle Creed. They value reasoned diplomacy and debate, and hold emotional outbursts as undignified.
- The Sanxian Creed: The student who shows an understanding of the emotional states of others, and the ability to play those states like an instrument find their way into the Sanxian Creed. They are gregarious and warm, always the life of the party, and look down on those who they consider cold and aloof.
- The Stone Creed: The student who demonstrates a tactical mind and excellent planning skills ends up in the Stone Creed. The Stone Creed is self-assured and even sometimes brash, known for their tendency to take charge in situations, and they hold those who do too much talking and not enough acting in contempt.
The Spiral Academy is largely project-oriented. That is, its teachers assign three-month projects to their students, spending one week at the beginning of the year instructing them in the skills they will need to succeed, and the specifics of the project, and then turning them loose to develop their own work ethics and seek out the answers to problems they encounter. Such problems, discoveries and learning are dutifully recorded in a student's Project Log, and at the end of each month, their progress and learning is reviewed.
At the end of the project, the student's successes or failures are tallied, and recorded in the records of their Creed, to be rewarded or punished as the Creed prefers. A student is permitted to be found wanting on no more than one project per year. Any more than this results in expulsion from the Academy, in shame (although even those who fail the Spiral Academy are often better-trained than other bureaucrats, and go on to find bureaucratic work in more ordinary circumstances).
Layout
Down the middle of the Thousand Scales District runs the Jade Way, a large road that is one of the defining streets of the Imperial City. At the edge of the district, furthest from the Imperial Palace rise a pair of dominating, square towers. Each of these towers is surrounded by courtyards and gardens, and well walled-in, with single double-doored gates that face one another across the Jade Way piercing them, and providing access to the double towers of the Spiral Academy.
The northern tower is the Four Arts Tower, a name that speaks to the Spiral Academy's philosophy of scholar-bureaucrats. The The Four Arts Tower is filled with libraries, offices and classrooms, and is where the students of the Spiral Academy attend classes and work on their projects. The uppermost stories of this tower house the private quarters of the Academy's teachers, and the topmost floor is the office and living quarters of the dominie.
The southern tower is the Gentle Rest Tower, the student dormitories. The lower floors are guest quarters and the mess hall. The second floor is the large common student room, used for large symposia and other public gatherings, with four entrances to the Creed Halls on the floor above. This third floor is divided into four large gathering halls, one for each Creed, where students gather to study, relax and associate with one another within their Creed. Above this floor, the student quarters begin. Each floor is divided into four different wings, one for each of the Spiral Academy's organizational Creeds. Each year, a student is assigned a room in one floor higher than the one he had last year, in the wing assigned to his Creed. The topmost floor is divided into four spacious suites, for the Prefects.
Various footbridges connect the towers, crossing over and above the Jade Way below. First and second year students are forbidden from using these bridges, forcing them to often rush from their dormitories to class through the crowded day-business on the Jade Way.
Defenses
The defenses of the Spiral Academy are, largely speaking, the defenses of the Imperial City. There are Black Helms posted at the entrances of the Academy grounds to keep out those who do not belong, and a Black Helms patrol checks in with the sentries once an hour (and can be fetched by runner in a few minutes). At night, the libraries of the Four Arts Tower are locked by the Key-Steward, who acts as major domo for the Academy, though Prefects have copies of the keys by rights, and a variety of copies of the keys have been made over the years (and sometimes even taken away from the school when a student graduates, and turning up in the possession of a member of that family newly arriving years later).
Secret Societies
Not only is membership in the myriad secret societies that infest Dragon-Blooded society tolerated in the Spiral Academy, it is practically required. Where other Academies see conspiracies beyond the control of the administration, the Spiral Academy sees the weaving of contact networks that is perhaps the central lesson the Spiral Academy seeks to instill: Nothing matters as much as who you know. Some of the best-known (but least-acknowledged) societies active in the Spiral Academy include:
- The Jumosh Brotherhood: An active brotherhood composed of those who deeply value information and what it says about communities. The Jumosh initiates are notorious for their "double copying" habits, in which any information that crosses their desks gets copied into their coded journals for sharing within the Brotherhood. The Jumosh are known to be recruiters for the All-Seeing Eye.
- The Diligent Inksmen: Scribes and accountants, the Diligent Inksmen are a secretive order of calligraphers who revel in cypers and code-breaking. Like the Jumosh Brotherhood, the Inksmen have ties to the All-Seeing Eye. They rarely actually become members of the Eye, however - most often, they pull small salaries for the whole of their lives as informants for the Eye.
- The Sau Fang Banner: All throughout the Threshold hang the banners of satraps from every House. On anywhere between a third to a half of them hang a tassel of white silk - the Sau Fang Banner symbol. The Sau Fang is a fraternity of Dragon-Blooded who all occupy positions of leadership in some capacity. The majority of them are satraps, or juniors in the Foreign Office preparing to be made satraps one day. The Sau Fang recruit from the Spiral Academy, seeking those who have natural leadership, and guiding them to the right instructors and mentors who will help shape them into the future leaders of the Dragon-Blooded Host.
- The House of the Nightingale: A forbidden society within the Scarlet Empire as a whole, the House of the Nightingale is a criminal brotherhood. Its members become mob bosses and kingpins, both in the Threshold and on the Blessed Isle, playing a careful game of balancing legitimacy while dominating the criminal enterprises in their locales. The House of the Nightingale recruits most of its members from among the business-minded students of the Spiral Academy, particularly those with a bit of shady history or criminal inclinations, which its membership watches for, and sometimes encourages in their classmates.
- White Veil Society: A deeply secret society whose very existence is only a rumor, the White Veil Society is more conspiracy than social club. They are information-gatherers and influence-brokers. Those who demonstrate a gregarious nature without being domineering, who show wisdom in their ability to keep their mouths shut and who others turn to for advice and assistance are the candidates for the White Veil.
Academic Year
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THE SPIRAL ACADEMY Of the four secondary schools located on the Blessed Isle, the Spiral Academy is the only one that sits at the heart of the Realm itself. Its massive marble walls tower above other buildings in the Thousand Scales District, and its grounds are secure and heavily guarded, for the never-ending fl ow of reports, tallies and accounts that fl ow through the hallways of the Spiral Academy are truly the pulse of the Realm. For all that its students are looked down upon by graduates of the other three academies, the destruction of the Spiral Academy would likely be a fatal blow to the Realm, especially in the Scarlet Empress’s absence. Not that any individual within the academy is of singularly vital import to the Realm’s welfare, but the destruction or corruption of the sheer quantity of vital information held within its walls at any given time would be a devastating blow to the Imperial Bureaucracy.
By necessity, the Spiral Academy is not physically large. Space is of such a premium within the city that even an institution as vital to the health of the Realm as the Academy must constantly justify its need for the space it does occupy, and expansion would be nigh impossible. Compared to the sprawling grounds of the House of Bells or even the austere accommodations of the Cloister of Wisdom, the Academy is diminutive. Physically, of the four secondary schools in the Realm, only the Heptagram is smaller.
Yet, the Spiral Academy’s 240 aspiring apprentice tallymasters and would-be bureaucrats outnumber the student population of any of the other academies, and the sparse living accommodations necessitated by their close quarters allows little to distract the studious from the tasks before them. Together, they process a veritable mountain of Realm paperwork each year, handling—in the guise of “apprenticeships” and “experience-building”—a sizeable portion of the mundane tallying, accounting, number-crunching and report processing that keeps the Realm functioning. As the students are not paid for this work, which is incorporated into their scholastic program, the Imperial Bureaucracy keeps its overhead very low and has amassed signifi cantly larger coffers than it would without the Academy’s free paper-pushing labor.
The Spiral Academy is administered by the Right and Responsible Offi ce of Offi cial Education, headed by the Minister of Education, Sesus Valtor, an un-Exalted son of Sesus Magel and Cynis Parovar. Valtor inherited both his mother’s head for politics and his father’s business sense, and both are inordinately proud of their son’s position, even if he was not deemed worthy of Exaltation.
