Fantasy RPG Forum - Standing Trials

It was always nerve-wracking, Faith considered, as she looked at the books around her. She had to prepare the last of her arguments for her thesis in order to meet with the professors from the Institute of Science, where they would question her and clarify whether her thesis was accepted for her Licentiate. She had wanted this since the moment she had met Malcolm Krome in park in Andaris and he had told her about the university. A place, filled with people who wanted to learn? It had been a dream then, and when she had told Jamal of that, he had immediately beaten her and she had not been allowed food or sleep for two trials. That hadn't been the worst of it, though, he'd sent her to the University grounds, to speak to the people there, to find out what she was missing and to ask them about their lives, their studies. To know what she would never have, to see who she could never be.

There, she had met Tristan Venora. He had bought her, from Jamal, and he had introduced her to more kindness than she had believed possible. Of course, he'd asked at the University if his slave could attend and he was told no. So, he'd hired her a tutor and Faith had scampered to that tutor's house. Of course, he had been one Padraig Augustin and the rest, as they say, was history. From his first words to her, you're a slave she recalled with a wry smile, the two of them had fallen into the easy banter which still underpinned their relationship. And now, here she was, a married woman with three children and a professor - about to be chancellor - in a university. This trial, she was preparing for the final presentation of her thesis and sometimes, Faith could barely believe it.

Yet, it was true.

Her history, her academic history at least, had been about pushing boundaries. Diseases which were considered incurable and separating blood, putting blood into people, and then there was the plague-curing and the impact of ether and the Spark on the blood of mages. She had been studying this throughout the War and it had, now, all fallen into place in terms of the rest of her research. It was a part of her thesis now and Faith recognised the irony of the fact that her learning had been solidified by the most difficult experience of her life.

"Alright," she said, softly. "Time for a last read-through."

She would need to defend this, after all, when it was time to face the professors, the dean and the chancellor. She would be lying if she said she wasn't nervous because she was. But, Faith was more than used to dealing with emotions and, frankly, nervous was a walk in the park. So, she got on with what she had to do. She picked up her book, in which was her thesis, and Faith began to read.

Faith didn't really need to read it again, of course. She had a perfect memory and so could recite the whole thing if required to. But that wasn't the point. She did need to feel confident and this was part of that process. She was very much aware of her own processes for learning, ad she knew that confidence, for her, was key. So she read and re-read, but she knew that in and of itself that would not be enough. One of the things which was very true of Faith was that she tended towards self-criticality and she had worked with that her whole life to try and make herself better at what she did. Whatever it was. This was no different and so she moved on to the next step in what she needed to do.

For that, Faith pulled some parchment and she looked down at it. In her mind she picture Argus Hamilton-Smythe, the professor at Scalvoris who had been unutterably vile to her. If he had taken the time to read this, which he wouldn't have, then what criticisms would he level against it, Faith thought. What would he say, and do, and how would he critique it? That was a place for her to start and so she began to look at her thesis with a more critical eye. With her head lowered, she could hear Hamilton-Smith's voice as he doubted what she wrote, considered the unlikelihood of her experience. He would adopt a passive-aggressive tone and be generally difficult and Faith lifted her hand and pinched the bridge of her nose.

"This isn't right," she mumbled and then shook her head, before frowning down at her work. No, that wasn't right, she knew. Most academics weren't like Hamilton-Smith. Most people weren't. He was a difficult man who had an axe to grind. Faith knew that there was no way she would have ever done anything right as far as he was concerned, no matter what she did. So, Faith decided that she needed to approach this differently. Rather than remember it - she needed to forget it. To grade it. As though it were not her work at all, but one of her students. That would be the best way to revise it.

So, just like when she was grading a research paper, Faith took some parchment and she put a chapter heading on each one. She started, as she always would, at the concluding chapter and she began to read. Where there were questions of clarity or correction, she noted them in the book itself. Then, where she had actual questions which she could ask, Faith noted them on the parchment. They were questions which, if she was the examiner, if she was the one questioning the student on this thesis, she'd ask. Surely, she thought, that was a sensible way to do it? In fairness, by the time she got to the end of the conclusion she had a list of seven questions which seemed about right. There were others she could have written, but Faith knew that they were already answered in other places. So.

Once she'd done the conclusion, Faith went back to the introduction chapter. Then, it was the methodology. For each, she wrote carefully thought out and worded questions - but it also gave her another means of proof-reading, a way to check that her work made sense. She knew that, sometimes, there was a tendency to read what she expected to read, what she thought she'd written. In many ways, this exercise was teaching her better skills of proof reading too. After the methodology, she reviewed her literature chapter, then the results, and finally the analysis. When she was done, she had a list of questions per section, which was a good step forward, she thought.