[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/qSXKgkY.png[/img]
[sub][@Nanaya][@Estylwen][@AThousandCurses][@Sifr][@Psyker Landshark][/sub][/center]
The situation was evolving in a favorable direction.

Valen Leuvalt was intent on portraying himself as the villain in all of this, the epitome of aristocratic pride and prejudice. Even if he had exaggerated things, he had still presented himself as the singular enemy to all other students here. By aligning against him, then, Ciara, Iraleth, and now Hildegunde, had all presented themselves as individuals who cared for their fellow students. Even students as rotten and pathetic as the lot that stepped forth with claims of [i]virtue[/i], and those three now became their champions. Otis would not have stepped forth, of course. A Fireball was one of the simplest destructive spells out there, a weapon that was only leveraged for mass destruction against the masses.

Against any competent student in the arcane studies, however, it was one easily severed. To perform such movements so slowly, to leverage it as only a threat, revealed the red-headed noble’s intentions. Otis would not have acted until the ignition. Otis too, cared not for the fates of swine.

But he would take a step forwards, nonetheless. The heel of his boot clacked with a resounding echo, the elevation of the stage he was on giving him the ability to look down upon Valen. Amber met crimson, distinct and divergent legacies intersecting upon the academy that unified all. The Strigidae had no words for him though, and after holding that gaze for a moment, it diverted towards the shield-summoner instead, the one that the bespectacled boy had held in such high regards.

[b]“That is enough.”[/b]

The signs of rebound were evident. He clearly did not have an Ethos suited for transporting the incapacitated, not in the same way that Otis did.

[b]“Take your seat and do with it what you will.”[/b]

And from the wings of the auditorium arrived a familiar form. A Mannekin, holding with it a wooden seat. Its limbs clicked and whirred, steel strings in its chassis guiding its motor movements with an artificial precision, as it strode towards Rio, lifting the seat out for him to take. The Strigidae’s silence had not just been one to impose pressure upon those desperate few, not just to categorize those who would make it, and those who would not.

He had been simulating the spellwork necessary to seize control of the Mannekins inside his own Workshop, repurposing them as servants who could retrieve those chairs for him. Hidden off in the back of the auditorium was that open Door, the cosmos from which the Mannekins that Ciara had thrown in returned, a new puppeteer grasping their strings.

[b]“Little time remains. Those who remain incapable of acquiring a chair, form three orderly rows, and stay [i]silent[/i]. Come up when your name is called. Your position in those rows do not matter, but if there is any effort to forcibly take a seat from those who were [i]gifted[/i] one, I will cease this process until the perpetrator is removed from the premises. This goes for all further threats of violence and disruption.”[/b]

He had originally planned on simply arriving to the auditorium first and then barring all entrances with the entirety of the seats in the auditorium, the sort of scheme where by forcibly entering, the students would have destroyed their own chances of admission. It was only owing to his companions’ presence that Otis’s plan had diverged so much from its original form.

[b]“And I will remind you. This year, you did not earn your seat. But if you fail here, next year you may be able to.”[/b]