Atennesi Cohen has had to be many things to survive his peers' scrutiny for over a century and a half. Wary is one of them.
But a snake with a mirror for a head suddenly appearing in his office and sweeping its mirror-face at him? That, he wasn't prepared for.
And then they are in his office. "Atennisi! And, uh--" says a woman who was sitting in a chair to the side going through some papers.
"This is Belamaveth," says Atennisi. "I trust her implicitly."
"Okay," says the woman, taking this in stride. "Pleased to meet you, Belamaveth."
Handshake! "I haven't seen you before, you need a tour?"
"Okay!" she says. "Getting-around tour or getting-a-feel-for-the-place tour?"
"Okay!"
She leads Belamaveth around, pointing out notable classrooms and offices and things. Once they're done with this building she points out gardens on the way to the next building.
The gardens are, as a frequent playground for biologically-focused mages, extremely pretty and even more eclectic.
Organic things are so easy to work with when you know how they work, which she does!
Onward!
Here are some lecture halls, here are some laboratories for general chemistry, over there is a laboratory for work dangerous enough that it wants to be a little ways off from other stuff and also regularly magicked to remove dangerous traces of toxic chemicals, over this way is a dormitory hall, and of course wherever there aren't paths or trees or buildings or other uses of space there are gardens. Some of them are for magic experimentation, some are for decoration, but most of them grow edibles. It is a flying island, after all, and even with magic it's a good idea to grow more food rather than less.
It's nice to see the place for real. She steadies herself with magic as she trots along.
The island is beautiful. The University itself is planned out in a spiderweb pattern that is both convenient for its inhabitants and aesthetically appealing. The rest of the island, which she isn't actively on a tour of but can see intermittently, is less carefully-planned but still guided enough that the miscellaneous eclectic elements harmonize rather than clashing oftener than not.
"It is! Where're you from?"
"Never heard of it," she admits. "What's it like?"
"Trees are nice! They've got a good output-to-land ratio, in terms of like fruit and stuff, so there are a lot of them on the island. It's not a forest but I've never seen so many trees in a ground city."
"Most of the trees in Woodsail are for, uh, wood, not for fruit, but it's nice to have lots around," Belamaveth agrees.
"Trees take too long to grow for lumber to be a good use of space here, I'm pretty sure. A fruit tree keeps producing fruit for a long time."
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