Gudersnipe School

From The Coursebooks Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Gudersnipe School is the name of the Gudersnipe Foundation's cheif educational facility. Officially called Gudersnipe Assassin's School, its primary modern roll is as the Crimson Blade's top millitary academy. Students also carry out research and serve in a wide variety of rolls.

The school takes the absolute best and brightest, the finest minds from all over the multive-verse, trains them to peek physical capacity, provides them with access to the sum total of all human and most alien knowledge, gives them unlimited resources, and then just sort of sees what comes out the other end.

Areas

School Proper

The School Proper is a complex that consists of three dimensions subdimentionally-linked. These three consist of two Flat dimensions and a Finite dimension. One flat world is entirely filled with a structure that is the Gudersnipe School. The other flat-world, a sort of "Back yard" to the building, provides a wide variety of non-simulated environments for training purposes. The third finite dimension is only around one and a half light years in length, with so solar systems but several small stellar bodies. This area is used for starship production, basic testing, and fleet revision and storage. While some births exist within the school's structure, most school ships are built and services in the space facility.

Often times, "School Proper" is used to refer specifically to the flat dimension where the students are actually housed and where lessons take place. This derivation is mainly to draw attention away from the other two zones.

The School Proper uses Time Dilation to provide students inside the school proper more time to study and train. It is also theorized that the school abuses the GATE and differential time rates between various distant regions to let its students effectively be in two places at once. All tolled, an education at Gudersnipe School will take a young person away from home for a period of only a few years, but they will experience roughly three centuries worth of training in that time.

Layout

Though the student population is small by dimensional standards(only about eighty million) the school proper consumes a massive amount of space. It is divided into four quadrants, each named for one of the cardinal directions. Structurally there is no division(one can easily cross from one quadrant to another without noticing) and resources are distributed evenly between all four areas.

Space is divided between dormitories, teaching facilities, workshops, laboratories, storage, and recreation, and much, much more, with the vast majority of educational space dedicated to hands-on training areas. The school also houses the Foundation's cultural anthropology museum, containing artifacts and documents from countless extinct civilizations. Many, many people-groups now exist nowhere else but small corners of that secret museum.

Location

The School Proper's actual location is shrouded in extreme secrecy. Most outsiders speculate though it is in the Utops Cluster, that it is underground, etc. With dimensional navigation being what it is, the Foundation still keeps any information related to the school proper as a very, very closely guarded secret. Only a small handful of individuals have the means, either technologically or magically, to reach pocket dimensions, and the school will not tolerate any incursions.

Satellite Campuses

The school has properties and facilities all over the verse, so the distinction of the School proper is an important reference point.

Utopia Gregaria

Utopia Gregaria is home to the most well-known satellite campus, with over three hundred berths on permanent standby. It is regarded as the "home base" or anchor point for the school's fleet.

Other Important Elements of the School Proper

Central G.A.T.E. Hub

The School Proper contains the nexus for the entire GATE system as well as the core technologies that allow it to function. Even with access to hubs and interfaces elsewhere, the technology cannot be reproduced without the core components at the school proper.

Cultural Anthropology Museum

The School Proper contains a massive cache of artifacts from countless cultures, collected over the ages and stored in climate-controlled catalogues. Many long-lost cultures exist nowhere else but the museum.

The museum is divided into four distinct parts: The Displays, The Library, The Archives, and The Stacks. These are organized into separate levels, and are housed within the School Proper.

The museum includes many floors in a simple grid-pattern, with artifacts stored in a display-style environment. A vistor could casually stroll through the endless environments, and see examples from a great many cultures and nations, most now gone.

The floors, partitions, support columns, and ceilings are all white. This allows for the use of very little visible light, but keeps the spaces well-illuminated.

In addition to strict climate control, the displays themselves are usually contained in time-dilation fields, thus ensuring that little, if any degradation will occur on items thousands of years old.

Displays

While not open to the public, this part of the museum is laid out with display cabinets, tags, and countless carefully preserved artifacts. The full history and notations on each can be found in the Archives. While the displays house an uncountable number of items, they are still largely confined to bits and pieces of cultural or religious importance.

Items in the museum are confined to things that are either:

  • Rare, being extremely difficult to find, even within that culture
  • Important, either historically or culturally significant
  • Unique to the specific culture or species in question.

After a civilization reaches a certain level of technological development, they undergo a process Gudersnipe culturalists call "tendency towards the mean"; with certain specific technologies and behaviors developing that have little to no difference between the different groups. For example: "All cultures eat, but what they eat, how they prepare it, and how the store it may be vastly different. So, food preparation and the rituals associated with it are important. Conversely, nearly every culture, once it develops electricity, develops television. The technology is always virtually identical, and it generally doesn't play an important ritual or historic role. The tools a culture cooks with can teach us things about that culture. A TV generally cannot."

So, the museum will have quite a bit from the Mage Wars and from the early histories of many areas, while souveniers from the more technological eras tend to be relegated to The Stacks.

The Cultural Anthropology Museum also includes the only known artifacts from the Marcon Alliance, including hundreds of scrolls containing their records and history, as well as the only complete copies of their religious texts.

Library

Possibly the only library in the verse to rival the Library of Arindell is the library within the school museum. It contains millions of books, scrolls, and other documents captured from countless governments and nations all over the verse, all throughout history. Much of it has even been scanned and incorporated into the school's massive database. Very few documents are deliberately excluded, such as those on the Marcon Alliance or others which may somehow compromise existing governments.

The library of the cultural anthropology museum is considered the most likely resting place of The Handshake Document.

Gudersnipe Assasin’s School Library, Ultra Mega Hella Tera Giga Crazy Super Rare Books Archive

The inner-sanctum of the school library, this section contains books found nowhere else in the known worlds. Among the most notable pieces, what are thought to be the only surviving copies of the Marconians' holy book, the Bravkar, and countless books printed in Ancient, plus thousands of hand-written volumes from the Age of Darkness and the early First Chaotic Period. The Foundation has always focused on acquiring books that could be "useful", which means the collection focuses on maps, atlasas, sciences, and books of magic.

Every book in the collection, whether legible or not, is known to be of much more than scientific importance. Normally, access to the collection is heavily restricted, open only to Instructors, and typically only with oversight. Hunter Jusenkyou was a fan of pilfering from it, with several volumes in his personal archive having belonged to the collection.

Counter-Insurgency Special Enforcement Handbook

One of the most classified documents in existence, this handbook details how to cripple or destroy most Foundation equipment. On many ships and vessels, a few simple systems can interact in a destructive way. This is engineered into the system on purpose, in order to allow the assets to destroyed in an emergency.

One example appears in Half the Fun, from The Inclination to Destiny, wherein Capital-class ship is crippled by putting the stop-light engines into diagnostic mode, then initiating a system purge: two things an operator would never do, but when combined are enough to damage the critical system.

The handbook is available only to Gudersnipe Students, though completely fictitious copies are routinely circulated. The real manual exists only in print and is kept always at the School Proper. Students must memorize any pertinent details if they wish to take the information off-campus.

The Archives

The Archives and The Library are heavily connected, with the latter more accurately known as "the part of the Archives that's just books". The Museum is confined to articles of cultural significance, the Library is about documentation, and the Archives are just a storage for anything and everything deemed "of value".

This includes, but it is not limited to: samples or prototypes of technology, scientific experiments, biological samples,


The Stacks

The Stacks is an informal name for the lowest floor of the museum. This one is largely devoid of display cases, open(save for support pillars), and while it does contain some objects sorted by groups, the overwhelming majority of it is just endless isles of miscellaneous things and stacks of bins.

The isles of The Stacks are so long that Rayleigh scattering causes the distance to merely fade into blue, without a visible horizon. This is the only known space within the school where this effect is possible, and those who have scene it typically describe it as "maddening". The ceiling is quite low(only about 12 feet), and the floor and ceiling are made from cement. Much like the museum, the environment is deathly still and dustless, all of which add to the deleterious effects.


Trivia

  • Sector 34 is the blanket code-name for the School's germ-warfare program, though most of its efforts are focused on containment.
  • Velenem was invented at the request of the Foundation.