OFFICIUM VARRO
Varro’s Rooms · Scholar’s Quarters · Academia Imperialis, Nova Romae
"I have had these rooms for sixty years, with interruptions. I am attached to them in the way one becomes attached to a place that has seen a great deal of one's thinking done in it. The attachment is not sentimental. It is more like the attachment a tools finds for a workbench. The bench has my marks on it. I know where everything is."
Three connected spaces in the oldest wing of the Academy’s original charter building: the working headquarters of Gaius Caecilius Plinius Secundus Aethermarchensis — known as Varro — eighty-seven years old, the Empire’s most significant living scholar, author of De Diis and Descriptio Aethermarchae, holder of the Academy’s only non-faculty standing access to the Sectio Restricta, and the person who knows more about the approaching Rift XIII than any other scholar alive. He is here approximately a third of the time. The rest he is elsewhere. When he is here he works from before dawn and his housekeeper has given up trying to moderate this.
In 1200 A.P. three unsent letters are in the unlocked middle drawer of his study desk. They represent three months of Varro trying to decide what to do with what he knows. He has not yet decided. The players, if they reach this room, will find them.
Purpose / Function
The three rooms function as Varro’s residential and working quarters simultaneously: he does not maintain a separate residence in the city when he is at the Academy, having made a decision sometime in the eighth decade of his life that the distinction between living and working was one he no longer found useful to maintain. The outer room manages the boundary between his work and the world. The study is where the work happens. The bedroom is where he sleeps, which is less often than his housekeeper considers medically advisable and more often than his correspondence implies.
Design
Three rooms, connected in a line: outer room facing the corridor, study behind it, bedroom at the rear. First-floor position in the original charter building, which means the study’s north-facing window looks onto the corridor between the charter building and the Bibliotheca. Varro has partially blocked this window with a shelf of reference texts, on grounds that the corridor view is not useful and the shelf space is. The study’s south-facing window overlooks the Academy’s central courtyard; he works facing this window.
Entries
The outer room’s door from the corridor has no lock — Varro’s position at the Academy means his security is institutional rather than physical. He is here a third of the time, and when he is absent the rooms are accessible to anyone in the Academy who can reach the charter building’s first floor, which is most of the institution. He relies on the fact that most people who would want to enter his rooms would rather not deal with the consequences of his finding out, which have historically been significant. This has been sufficient for sixty years. It may not be sufficient indefinitely.
Sensory & Appearance
The outer room: paper, old lamp oil, and the faint smell of the preservation wax from the Bibliotheca that permeates the corridor outside. The study: the same, plus the particular smell of ink that accumulates in a room where a great deal of writing has been done over a long period. The maps’ density is visible before the content is legible; the overall effect is of a room that has been organised according to a principle of maximum information density that has been operating for six decades. Visitors who know what they are looking for find it. Visitors who do not find it overwhelming.
The bottom drawer’s lock mechanism: a small brass device set into the drawer face, requiring a specific sequence of three depressed points in a non-obvious order. There is no visible keyhole. Varro designed it himself and has never shown it to anyone. He considers it sufficient security because the notebook’s contents are in cipher regardless, but he finds the lock a useful indicator: if it is not in the sequence he left it, someone has tried.
Denizens
Gaius Caecilius Plinius Secundus Aethermarchensis (Varro), eighty-seven. Present approximately a third of the time. When present: visible from the study window by anyone crossing the Academy’s central courtyard, usually before dawn, usually still there at mid-morning. His current work — the synthesis — is the most significant scholarly project in progress in the Empire and the one he is writing as though he may not finish it, which he considers accurate and which produces in the writing a quality of precision that his earlier work does not have. Gaia Pulveria, fifty-eight, housekeeper, nineteen years. Enters the outer room to clean. Has never been in the study without Varro present and never attempted to be. Knows him well enough to report, to anyone who asks with the right credentials and the right reasons, exactly which days he has been in residence and which he has not.
Contents & Furnishings
The maps: forty-three annotated maps of various regions, the most significant being the four covering the Sixth Permutatio site and its environs, with annotations that, taken together, constitute the most complete privately-held geographical analysis of that site in existence. The cipher notebook in the bottom drawer: its contents are in a cipher Varro developed himself over twenty years of use, complex enough that even someone with both the notebook and time would require significant cryptographic skill to read it. The Living Goddess’s answer is in there. So is the full text of what the centaur oral history fragment says that Arrak’s translation renders as ambiguous and which Varro has concluded is not ambiguous at all. The three unsent letters: see DM Notes.
The small stone from the Sixth Permutatio site: grey, smooth, the size of a fist, from the lowest stratum of the excavation. It is not native to the surrounding geology. It is the same material as the architecture found at the site. Varro picked it up in 1160 A.P. during his only visit to the excavation, pocketed it without logging it, and has had it on his desk ever since. In the past six months it has begun, very slightly and only when he is working by lamplight, to be warm.
Valuables
The cipher notebook. The three unsent letters. The annotated maps. The stone. The personal correspondence archive in the bedroom cabinet. The Sectio Restricta access credential, which is a physical token — a small engraved disc — kept in the study’s top drawer with the writing implements, which means it is in the same unlocked drawer as the magnification lens and has been accessible to anyone who entered the study for sixty years.
Hazards & Traps
No physical hazards. The professional hazard of being in this room without Varro’s knowledge is considerable: his awareness of the state of his possessions, including their position, is exact, and he has noted and investigated three previous unauthorised entries in sixty years, with consequences that are still discussed among senior Academy staff. None of the three involved the notebook or the letters or the stone, and each involved someone who had underestimated the degree to which an apparently chaotic room can also be a precisely calibrated one.
Special Properties
The stone from the Sixth Permutatio site: as of six months ago, warm to the touch when Varro is working by lamplight. He has tested this under different conditions. It is not warm from proximity to the lamp; it is warm from proximity to him during active concentrated thought. He has not yet decided what this means. It is in the notes in the cipher notebook, which means it is not in any document a player can read without breaking the cipher.
Alterations
The rooms’ physical structure is unchanged from their 700 A.P. original. Every alteration is Varro’s: the partially blocked north window, the additional shelving installed across three walls (a negotiation with the Academy facilities staff conducted fourteen times over sixty years), the custom lock mechanism on the bottom drawer, and the large map table that replaced the standard study table in 1162 A.P. on his return from the southern continent, which required removing the door to get in and which the facilities staff have noted in their records as an object they will need to remove the door again for.
Architecture
First-century construction, 700 A.P., in the original charter building’s oldest wing. The rooms are the original size, never subdivided or extended; their proportions reflect the founding generation’s expectation of what a senior scholar’s quarters should be, which is adequate and no more. Sixty years of occupation have made them something the architecture did not design for: a working environment calibrated to a specific mind, whose every departure from standard configuration represents a decision Varro made for a reason he remembers.
Defenses
No physical defenses beyond the corridor’s standard Academy security. The outer room has no lock. The study’s writing desk bottom drawer has the custom mechanism; all other storage is locked only by the bedroom cabinet’s standard key, which is in the study’s top drawer. The primary defense is reputation: the consequences of Varro discovering an unauthorised entry to his rooms are, historically, professional and social rather than physical, and have proven more effective as a deterrent than any lock.
History
Varro first occupied these rooms in 1140 A.P. at the age of twenty-seven, as a newly appointed Doctor at the Academy. He has held them continuously since, with absences for fieldwork totalling approximately twenty years over sixty. The room’s current configuration — the maps, the map table, the blocked window, the shelving — has been stable since his return from the southern continent in 1162 A.P. The cipher notebook was begun in 1143 A.P. and has been added to continuously since. The three unsent letters are the most recent additions to the study’s significant contents, drafted in the past three months and left in the unlocked middle drawer in a location that is, he is aware, accessible to anyone who enters the room. He is aware. He has not moved them.
The stone from the Sixth Permutatio site: warm to the touch during Varro’s periods of concentrated work, for the past six months. Not warm from the lamp.
Documented in the cipher notebook only.
Access
No lock on outer room. Study and bedroom: unlocked but protected by reputation.
Bottom drawer: custom lock mechanism.
Bedroom cabinet: standard key in top drawer.
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