Homework

Izzica frowned as she turned over the skeleton in her hands. It was one of a small rat’s, about the size of her palm and made of brown glass, faintly translucent but dark enough that she could make out details, more or less. With a gentle tug, she pulled one of the legs out of socket- the glass was strong enough to handle her touches, thanks to a handful of Translation sigils carved into bits of granite set at key points, but glass was still glass, and there was only so much strength you could Translate out of so little stone into comparatively more glass.

Izzica turned over the glass leg in her hands, before setting it down on the desk and starting to sketch it on a sheet of paper. She wasn’t much of an artist of course, but she didn’t really need to be one- a few blobs of approximately the correct shape would suffice as bones, once she’d labeled them with a few strokes of her quill pen. That done, Izzica pulled a book down from a shelf over her desk, flipping through illustrations of organs and cutaways, before finally coming to an illustration of a skeleton- a human skeleton. She slid her pen over the book, careful to avoid accidentally inking the page, frowning a bit as she compared the diagram with that of her own.

A Mystery of Diartis, indeed. Why are the bones so similar? 

Theoretically, that was the point of her current assignment- to hypothesize why bones between such differing creatures as rats and men followed the same patterns. In old days, one might theorize that the gods had gotten lazy and just shrunk down the molds, but modern thinkers knew better.

“Unfortunately, no gods means it’s on my head to think up the answers.” Izzica scratched her head, staring at the book and her sketches. Religion was difficult. Most modern thinkers said that the gods had always been nothing more than primitive people doing their best to explain things with bad or lacking information, and yet they still used the names of those gods to divvy up all the unanswered questions and mysteries of the world, same as those primitive people. The Huntress’s name was used for questions of biology, like these bones, Izzica was herself considered a mystery of Omura, the once goddess of love now relegated to questions of people’s minds, Translation itself had been moved from a holy magic into the same place as why things fell, under Zulbos’s domain.

And that just gives me a different mystery. One of Kethonik, I think. Even when we stop worshipping, why do we still pay attention to the gods?

Izzica frowned, then shook her head to clear it. It was too easy to get distracted, when there was a big world full of mysteries crying for her attention. Unfortunately, mysteries had to wait while she dealt with her studies.

Izzica shoved the book aside, before sketching another round of blobs, this time roughly in the shape of a skeletal human leg. A few arrows pointed between similar structures- the thin bones on the sides of the calves, the myriad of bones making up feet and toes, the little knob at the knee that Izzica could swear she bumped every time she fidgeted at the desk. Do rats ever bump their knees? I wouldn’t think so, they’ve got their whole body in front of ‘em when they crawl about. Why even have that knobby bit? The… Izzica paused to check her textbook. Patella. Is it still a patella if it’s a rat, not a man? Who came up with that name, anyway? Did we get it from another language, since if it were Angalis it’d be called the “stupid knobby knee bone”, or did someone pull that name out of their…”

Izzica paused, then shook her head again. Too easy, far too easy to get distracted. Despite it even being a subject she liked. It wasn’t Translation, where for work she’d be running around carving sigils and hopefully not cutting wrong in such a way that instead of transferring hardness it transferred heat and set the table on fire again, but it was still more exciting than listening to a Professor drone on about grasses on the Unclaimed Steppes for three hours followed by a writing a paper trying to determine if Maize counted as grass.

Having run out of arrows to point between her two rough drawings, Izzica sighed and started scribbling underneath. “The rat and the man have similar legs, yet one walks on two while the other on its arms-” She frowned, then scribbled the last bit out. “-while the other on fours. The legs are comparatively long, so it may walk a distance-” Izzica frowned. It would help if she had a rat on hand to walk for her, or at least a glass skeleton with more joints, so she could try moving the bones around instead of just one big lump for each leg. “-walk a distance at a time. This is why they are so difficult to catch by hand.” She presumed, at least. There were few rats in the university, at least in the parts she’d seen- something about a school on a floating rock tended to keep them away, she supposed, be it whatever nonsense Mystery kept the island in the air, or perhaps all the money that flowed to it from the city below.

“The rat has long legs to be fast to avoid predators. This allows it to not be eaten by larger creatures. Therefore long legs for being fast are important.” Izzica paused, tilting her head. She could only avoid trying to come up with an explanation by spewing repetitive dribble for so long, and even this was pushing it.

“Rats, rats, sneaky rats…” Izzica tapped her quill pen against her chin. Why were the professors asking this of her? Sure, she was a student at the university, theoretically that meant she was smart, but it didn’t always feel like it. Not when professors started asking about things they didn’t have an answer to. “Rats themselves, they are…” Izzica muttered, then paused.

“Rats have man-like bones because they were themselves men once, obviously changed by some strange Translation, transferring their man-ish traits into something else, and replaced with beastlike traits.” That had to be it! It asked more questions than it solved of course- Translation didn’t work that way, as far as Izzica knew, and rats had been around forever, probably long before men started Translating properties from one thing to another.

But it didn’t really matter, or at least so thought Izzica. The world was confusing and complex, after all, so what was a little bit more nonsense?