Morty is, predictably, having an attack of Diedrick’s. If you asked his schoolmates they’d probably say he does nothing else, but honestly it isn’t even that much of the time, it’s just the only times anything interesting happens to him.
Anyway, his latest cardboard box is raring to go. He hits the button and it explodes immediately. When the smoke clears, though, someone’s standing there.
"I'm glad I got you instead of someone who would have been more put out about it!"
Morty leads her to a small marble bust set into the wall, pulls on it, and runs a card on a keychain over the screen thus revealed. A bookshelf slides away, revealing a staircase leading downward, which Morty takes two steps at a time. They come out in a small vault, Morty once again almost falling on his face. He gestures grandly. "Welcome to the Homer Gallery! We're required to show this to all incoming students, because it contains gifts from culturally significant alumni you have no knowledge of whatsoever because you're from another universe."
"Noises of appreciation are strictly optional. There are only two I'm required to explain. The first is this." He gestures at a life-sized portrait of a handsome, aristocratic-looking man posing before a bust of Vlad the Impaler.
"This man," Morty says, pointing at the painting, "is Lord Paramount. He's the current ruler of the sovereign nation of Wallachia, which he conquered with his bare hands. He's also an alumnus and a substantial donor, and one of the terms of his support is that we show incoming freshmen this portrait. So, behold."
"The other is this." He turns to gesture at a pile of gold. "A precognitive named Gabriella Guzman, also alumna, made a truly absurd amount of money through real estate and stockbrokerage, and decided to donate exactly a metric ton of gold, to be displayed by the portrait. You don't strictly speaking need to behold this one, she just wants you to know how obscenely rich she is."
This strange device, labeled "Professor Ripper's Quasar Gun", and this walnut-sized diamond, unlabeled, are both magical. The rest appears to be mostly dross.
"That is... let's see... the Tear of Medea. Ancient artifact, fairly evil, grants fabulous magical powers to its wielder at the cost of their empathy. Generally bad news."
"I wouldn't know, I'm not a magic type. Medea apparently didn't have much empathy herself, based on the stories about her, so it might have been intentional, or it might have just been a side effect she didn't care to patch."
"Ooh. That sounds like a very worthy project. Mrs. Carson will probably want to wait until you're confirmed to be able to do that kind of thing on a smaller scale, though, the Tear of Medea is pretty big and pretty bad in general."
"That's how it works for most mind-affecting artifacts like that. If you use them too long they can have some lasting adverse effects, but they say that's because if parts of your brain are altered for long enough the rest of the brain starts adapting to it and it doesn't adjust well to those parts coming back online."
"Makes sense. So once I'm allowed to it shouldn't be hard to test it when I think I've got it—well, I guess someone without empathy could lie about it..."
"I think for something like that they'd get an empath in. Can't lie to ESP - not without practice, anyway."
"Oh that solves it neatly, then. What other things like this are there, at a smaller scale?"
"Oh, there's tons of cursed artifacts lying around museums and stuff. Probably most of them are less of a big deal than the Tear. We keep it here because it's safer here, right under Mrs. Carson's office, than in some museum behind regular bulletproof glass."
"-guns! A new concept. Guns are an invention that shoot little metal bullets at high speeds, usually to kill people and things. Bulletproof glass is strong enough that you can't use a gun to break it open and take whatever's inside. This glass is bulletproof, but as I said the main protection for this vault is being near Mrs. Carson."
"The word 'bulletproof' is used in a lot of contexts to just mean 'very strong', since humans have been using guns to kill each other for a very long time. I think one of the first superheroes called himself the Bulletproof Man."
"Yep! He was a TK superman with a strong enough telekinetic field to repel bullets. At least the bullets of his time. We have stronger guns now, he would no longer be comprehensively bulletproof."
"Huh. Cool. I could probably make myself bulletproof, if I knew more about bullets."
"Neat! There's also bulletproof fabrics you can use to make an armored costume, that's what most supers who don't have a TK field or high Exemplar rating do. Anyway, wanna get out of here and continue the tour?"
Morty leads her up the stairs and replaces the marble bust in place, causing the vault door to vanish again. He then goes over to the receptionist's desk, tripping along the way. (There's a weird flicker of magic when he does, almost lost in the noise of his power and the ambient magic of the campus.)
"Hi Ms. Dawson! Kaede needs an ID, can you print her one?"
The receptionist nods and taps some buttons on her keyboard. "Here you go, hon," she says, taking a small laminated card from a whirring printer. The card has a picture of Kaede's face on it, with text reading KAEDE, FRESHMAN, NO TEAM AFFILIATION.
There's some further whirring, which sounds somehow confused, and the printer spits out another card. This one has a different picture on it, but the same text.
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