Ninety-seven questions
Her curiosity genuinely cannot be contained. But she always says the rule out loud first: you may answer none of them. She has never once broken it.
Master of the Clock Tower, Free City of Kaleidoscope
Evelina Logos
Evelina Astraea Logos
“Fascinating! I can’t read a single symbol of the mana on you — wonderful. Things I can’t read are my favourite kind.”
- The Clock Tower
- Archmage
- Kaleidoscope
- Called
- Evelina
- People
- Human
- Age
- Not disclosed. The rumour inside the Tower is that asking earns you homework.
- Affiliation
- The Clock Tower, Free City of Kaleidoscope
- Office
- Master of the Clock Tower, First of the Twelve Seats, Archmage
- First appears
- Chapter 1 — The Kaleidoscope mana incident
- Role
- Back-line formula analysis / high-risk burst
- Fond of
- Very bitter black coffee, other people’s raw records, small errors nobody can explain
- Not good at
- Remembering meals, knowing what things cost, and pretending not to hear when someone worries about her
Spoiler-free
Evelina can see the line in a spell formula that does not hold. What looks to everyone else like a seamless array looks to her like a page with a typo in it — and she will reach out and strike the wrong stroke through.
She runs the most consequential academic institution on the continent. Magitech standards, accident assessments and spell notation all come out of here. But the moment she meets a phenomenon she has not seen before, the Master of the Tower evaporates: she leans in, her eyes light up, she races through three hypotheses in one breath, and only then remembers to ask, “ah — did I interrupt you?”
Every apprentice in the Tower knows one thing: an unexplained small error at the end of a report gets a reply from the Master far faster than ten pages of flattery.
How she got here
She was born in Kaleidoscope, a free city that asks nothing about your birth or your faith as long as you can pay the fees and pass the exams.
As a young woman she took one of the Twelve Seats with a paper nobody could follow, and spent the years since turning a loose old academy into the continent’s standards authority. A caravan can cross three borders today on a single certificate because of the work she did then.
Her patent income is enormous. Almost all of it goes into the accident fund and observatory maintenance. She herself has close to no idea what ordinary things cost — the Tower buys her food and clothes centrally, and her companions find this endlessly funny.
In 987 ST a large mana incident struck Kaleidoscope. She ended the chaos with overwhelming counter-formulae, and picked one person out of the crowd at a glance: someone whose mana statistics did not belong to this world.
Traits
The sugar at the bottom of the cup
Her black coffee is frightening. Her assistants keep slipping a lump of sugar into the bottom of the cup. She knows, and she has never called it out — she has even defended the sugar on the grounds that “the variable already exists; removing it arbitrarily would be poor method”.
The top floor that does not exist
The Clock Tower’s official plans contain no summit observatory. It has been folded into a space outside the city. As for what is inside, nobody who asked has been given an answer.
Timeline
- Not public Born in the free city of Kaleidoscope
- Not public Takes one of the Twelve Seats, the youngest in the Tower’s history
- 975 ST Succeeds as Master of the Clock Tower
- 978 ST Chairs the drafting of the continental standard for spell notation, still in use
- 981 ST Founds the magitech accident fund, paying compensation and rescue out of patent income
- 984 ST Completes the spatial folding of the summit observatory
- 987 ST Ends the Kaleidoscope mana incident, and meets the Stranger
Ties
- The Stranger (you)
- The first research subject in her life she cannot reproduce, and the first person she has seriously asked “do you want to know?”
- Selene
- An academic rival across civilisations. They argue the moment they meet, then schedule the next argument.
- Aethelind
- The person she disagrees with most about magic, and therefore the one she most wants to be proven wrong by.
- Claria
- They clash constantly over the ethics of research on living things — and together they can take a miracle apart into medicine anyone can use.
- The Tower’s apprentices
- She thought she had given them freedom. She found out later that “the Master is always right” had already stopped many of them from reporting failure.
Voice
- First meeting
“Fascinating! I can’t read a single symbol of the mana on you — wonderful. Things I can’t read are my favourite kind.”
- Introducing herself
“Evelina, Master of the Clock Tower. I have ninety-seven questions for you. Relax — only three today, and you may answer none of them.”
- Small talk
“The sugar at the bottom is not mine. …And you may not remove it. The variable already exists; taking it out would be poor method.”
- Setting out
“Wait — I redrew the map. The old one had three errors; following it costs you a day. Right, let’s go!”
- Combat start
“Let me look at your formula… ah, found it. Line four. You wrote that in too much of a hurry.”
- Ultimate
“Everything, hold still — I am going to read the rules of this place again from the top!”
- An ally falls
“Stand up! I have done the arithmetic, you can still stand! My calculations have never been wrong — and they are not allowed to start now!”
- Receiving a gift
“For me? …Then I have to record it. Date, source, and my current emotional state. …Hm. Doesn’t fit on the line.”
- Late at night
“You’re still up? …So am I. Let’s stay up together, then. Tomorrow’s me can regret it on both our behalves.”
Drawn from the KTM2 WorldDict. Only the public layer of each entry is published here.