Records: Wandstone Academy

## **Founding the Academy**

There had been plans to open a magical academy to the public, in the London area, for some time. In fact, there was already a quiet "Royal Arcane Academy" that was nearly synonyous with the RANP that hosted it. In that case, the RAA was limited to scholars and academics that were working on other natural philosophy (scientific) challenges, and the magic was a powerful tool to ask smarter questions and find better answers.

A public academy was particularly tough. In this case, the students had to be literate first, if only to read the warnings that were necessary once they were away from the controlled environment. Reading wasn't necessary to grasp the basics, especially of something as intuitive as wandism, but it was absolutely necessary to navigate the hazards and toxicities of advancing their craft once they'd graduated with the basics.

## History Class

Among the operations classes was a history class: based on scholarship and academics of the ROM, magic had been discovered and developed a few different times in the history of the world. This included instances of Merlin, c. ~450 AD, and evidence of magic in ruins that were determined as Mediterranean colonies of Atlantis.

The ruins were the key part, and not as anthropology but as health and safety. Every time a knowledge of magic developed past the basics of arcanokinetics, people found ever more creative and powerful ways to blow themselves to kingdom come. It was a thousand-fold Promethean-level warning.

One of the keys of the public academy of magic was where it was. The London area was an absolutely essential point, if only for political purchase in the world. London was half the size of Paris, at the western edge of the known world. Just as the RANP itself was growing a reputation for changing the world, a public-access arcane school needed to be established England – if anything for the sake of elevating the surrounding halo of social causes.

Critically, however, it couldn't be *too* close to London, if only for the sake of London itself. A major case of having one's cake and eating it, too, the level of fire hazards of from an arcane academy – especially in a city as ridiculously flammable as London – was incalculably high.

Then there were questions of size, real estate, and so forth that clinched the decision to put the academy just beyond the northern walls of the City of London – placing it in the Clerkenwell parish. In this case, true suburbs and some areas of developing ill repute, what might've once developed into Finsbury instead became (almost instantly) known as *Wandstone*.

### **Timing is Everything**

Prince Rick wished he could've taken credit for the timing, but it was simply when things came together. A CCC team had been built *especially for Wandstone*, and they were putting on the finishing touches of construction just as Rick arrived in London to assuage the still-jittery post-Teardrop locals.

Built in the wide-open neoclassical style that the Crown Architect had been promoting, it evoked a timeless element that echoed more toward the legends of Atlantis than Merlin. White stone, with wide-open spaces, greenery, and a great deal both subterranean and multi-story, the design alone reached into history to evoke the future.

When it opened for its first public class in January, Merlin, Reborn, was there to open the school and teach the ceremonial first class.

Wandstone itself was the next major step to empower and encourage London still recovering from post-traumatic stress.