The best days of your life.

Charlie had finished up his class at the bell. He had been substituting for a botany teacher who was otherwise indesposed. Charlie enjoyed teaching. He had decided to teach this class as preperation for his first Necromancy class on thursday, dipping his toe back into the world of teaching

That was one of the things he liked about teaching botany. It hadn't really changed, especially at this level, in decades. Medicine, yes, that was ever advancing, but botany was relatively static, a far cry from when he had lectured anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, over a century prior. For one he didn't have a dubiously acquired corpse in front of him, and he wasn't teaching a bunch of stuck up doctors things he had learned over a millenia prior.

He had started to scrub off the board, delicate anatomical drawings of various plants, each labelled and acompanied with an assortment of arrows, topped with a description in Charlie's immaculate copperplate handwriting. Charlie enjoyed drawing plants. It always reminded him of a book he had written, back in the seventh century, on various plants and their uses. He stopped for a second, looking around the classroom. He spotted someone, a student he had met a while back, a certain gryphon, who had begun to pad out of the room. A gryphon, who was looking slightly worse for wear.

"Erm, Evander right? would you mind staying for a little bit." Charlie called out to the gryphon.

@Jacques

"Please, call me Charlie" said Charlie with a smile, before sitting down on a chair so he could be at head heights with the gryphon

"Are you alright?" He questioned, with what he hoped was a kind smile. Charli was trying his best to be nice now. After all the incidents the last term, the bonfire, Storm, Jason Chang, he had decided to make a positive change for the better. He had spotted Evander's wings when he had been passing out notes, the odd bald spots. Evander had mentioned that some alchemists had been stealing his feathers. Cheap bastards, you could get thunderbird feathers for a little bit more, and they did the job just as well, you didn't need to attack a student. Charlie had brought it up to the alchemy department and one of the teachers had, rather coldly, told him that they would find the students responsible, and deal with them. Clearly they hadn't managed it yet.

"Have the alchemists been assaulting you again? I've mentioned it to the faculty, but it doesn't seem to have stopped. Would you like some of that feather cream i mentioned?"

It was a natural cream, designed for birds of prey, no magical element. It could be brought at a petshop in town, because Charlie wasn't going to give another student a magical, homemade medicine, not after Jax.

@Jacques

Charlie blinked for a moment, surprised at the gryphon who had lept onto the desk. Evander had seemed so calm and reserved in general. This feather issue was clearly getting to him, the damage was quite extensive.

"Okay" said Charlie after a moment, standing up from the table and walking over to the computer at the front of the room. "I'm making your problem my problem. I'll make sure that the security team don't forget about it."

Why did people need to harm students, thought Charlie, although he knew exactly why. Laziness, in this case, and maybe prejudice. Despite the great mixing pot that the academy, and the island in general, there was still interspecies bigotry, especially against those who didn't look humanoid. Charlie had faced some himself, and apart from the odd comment, someone who Charlie believed was with the Campaign Against Evil had been giving him pathetic threats, which included a pile of free rat corpses on his doorstep, and some mild graffiti telling him to 'Bewhere'. Could they at least spell correctly?

Charlie thought for a moment, trying to remember what the school had told him about how to handle situations like this. He was skating on thin ice as it was. As much as he loved teaching, he hated all the red tape.

"Did they suggest a spell that would detain anyone who touches your feathers or some sort of protective barrier?"

@Jacques

"Come on lad," said Charlie, looking at the now tearful Evander, before rooting in his desk and pulling out a packet, and returning to sit on a chair next to Evander. He opened the packet and offered it to Evander "I'll sort it out, I promise. Would you like a chocolate digestive? I might suggest a few methods that might make those bloody alchemists more adverse to feather theft."

Charlie had a kind smile on his face, but, behind his glasses, Charlie's eyes glowed with anger. This was a safe school, where students could learn in peace. Everyone was welcome here, as long as they obeyed the rules. It was a widely known fact, which had passed into rumour amongst students that Charlie had been... well... evil. The rumours often centred around admissions of attempted omnicide. Rumors that, unfortunately, were true. The school had even employed him, so long as he obeyed the rules. Which, on the whole, he had. How hard was it for others too?

"Right. I'm going to go down to the alchemy department and give those children a piece of my mind."

Charlie stood up from the desk, and his glamour flickered, and went out. Where his hand had touched the desk, there were black burns in the wood. Bugger, he thought, this rubbish again. But the sight of it next to Evander's scratches calmed him down somewhat. This was not a place for threats. There were different ways to deal with this. Like finding out whatever the head of alchemy and his chief staff were currently researching, and buying up all the neccessary ingredients for their work for the considerable future, and thus ensuring that all their work ground to a halt until the feather problem was resolved. Charlie was calmer now, and his glamour flicked back into operation.

"Sorry about that. But first, have the security team been over the cameras with you to identify these morons? Or are they using some kind of cloaking magic?"

@Jacques