"Yeah, Field Marshal Kroft will hear you out, she's a good one even if I can fault her choice of subordinates."

The Hall of Summoning stands out even among the varied buildings of the Acadamae. Rebuilt after the conflagration that finally claimed the life of Lord Volshyenek Ornelos, the Immortal Lord who founded the Acadamae, it is one of the largest structures in all of Varisia, surrounded by three even larger concentric binding circles and with many more inside. Should another host of powerful devils appear inside without the Immortal Lord to sacrifice himself in destroying them, the circles will contain the devastation to their interior. 

It must be important since it's the biggest place around here. And the summoner woman was the local Dean- She's not terrible with names so much as deliberately careless- But she'll explore over there eventually, when she mostly has Prestidigitation down and has made a couple of really low grade Fly wands and reclaimed her good one from Seska.

At the time she arrives, Messida will be in the middle of a lecture in the largest room, a few hundred students in the audience, standing on the back of Zarthorask to move between several floating bubbles displaying illusions of the different planes.

The display is of the Material enclosed by the elemental planes in one dimension, at the midpoint on the spectrum between the Positive Energy plane and First World on one end through to the Shadow plane and Negative Energy plane on the other in another dimension, all enveloped by the Ethereal plane that gives way to the Astral that separates the Inner planes from the afterlives of the Outer planes. 

Her lecture turns out to be on all the ways that this already-complex model is oversimplifying reality. She summons the least resident of each plane that Zarthorask walks her over to, and then asks each of them a question that reveals some new nuance of the structure and the illusion updates. The Astral teems with demiplanes and the flow of souls; the Styx winds between the lower planes; the Dreamlands exists within the Ethereal, and the nine layers of Hell are bordered by the Maelstrom and nested so that visitors have to pass through each one in turn, but not so for the seven tiers of Heaven. There are natural portals that form between some pairs of planes but not all of them. Most of the planes are infinite except, for some reason, Axis. 

Many students are visibly despairing at the prospect of having to recall all of this information for their exams. 

This is dense enough that she won't work on a scroll or ink as she waits. The Spirit Plane is accessible from here, sort of mostly, she checked. Is it the Dreamlands? Is it a way of staring sideways Astral? Is it related to the First World?

She'll have to see what kinds of experiments determined these planar properties and repeat them. 

(She takes notes and speculates about what sorts of things different sorts of findings would imply.)

Hmm.

...She decides that she wants to figure out a Plane Shift ritual circle and switches to doing some of the theoretical guesswork on that between lecture notes.

Dean Vost's lecture continues.

"The question you should now be thinking is, how do we know that this planar model is the correct one? You can order your summons to tell you the truth, but only as they know it. They may be ignorant or misinformed."

She demonstratively summons a Lantern Archon. The floating orb of light bobs apprehensively at the sight of her bound qlippoth.

"Tell me truthfully the most important secrets of Heaven," Messida commands.

"This one does not know such information. I would not be available for summoning if I did," it replies, sternly but in a child's voice, its light fluctuating with the words.

The lecturer turns back to the audience. "The answer is that we can validate claims about the planes through experiment. Imagine an archmage who could summon any number of creatures at once. They could test claims about the population of a plane by summoning creatures from it until they emptied it out and could summon no more. But this can only prove a plane is finite, not disprove that it is infinite, because there is always a bigger number. You do not need to be an archmage to experiment with this yourself; summon a creature, without any specific one in mind, and check whether the individual you summon is one that you have personally summoned before. Such a coincidence should be impossible if they are sampled with equal odds from an infinite population."

To the summon, she asks: "Tell me truthfully, what is your name and have I summoned you before?"

"This one is addressed as Nolari. You have not summoned me before, to the best of my knowledge."

"My own area of research is into the planar essences. As you should already know, creatures you summon from the outer planes are resistant to most material harms. It takes great force, precision, magic, or specific substances to damage them."

With a wave of her hand, one of her apprentices stands up and summons a lemure, a roiling mass of gelatinous flesh out of which wriggle half-melted limbs and a tumorous face, which quails before the audience. He beats it with his staff, doing nothing to it, then jabs at it with a silvered spear that makes it recoil and hiss in pain.

"And yet, these creatures can harm their planar opposites, formed as they are from opposing essences."

A Hound Archon is summoned next, muscular and dog-headed. Orders are barked in Infernal and Celestial, and the two attack each other viciously with claw and bite, both wounding each other before the lemure is destroyed and fades away. 

"Devils, daemons, and demons of the lower planes can all harm the angels, agathions, and azata of the upper planes, and vice-versa. The same does not apply across the Lawful or Chaotic planes; from this one could infer that the Good-Evil axis is more fundamental a division."

Some in the audience gasp at this claim; from the hushed exchange of whispers and Messages, this is apparently both theoretically and theologically contentious.

The lecture continues with more combats between summoned creatures, illustrating which ones can injure each other. These are often violent animalistic fights, but the audience seems largely jaded to them. A cluster of students wearing pentacles grow stony-faced as the Lantern Archon's beams of light consistently harm every target, apologizing every time, while Messida enthusiastically explains the significance of this as a tool for benchmarking durability and as a piece of evidence on the nature of Heaven.

At the conclusion of the lecture, her steed descends.

"I bound Zarthorask here in part as a way to probe the true nature of the Abyss. Qlippoth are more primordial entities than demons; they pre-date them. Where a demon is formed from a soul, these emerged spontaneously from the raw essence of the Abyss. They are therefore a more pure sample of the plane, uncontaminated by mortal dross and sin."

The gongorinan clenches its limbs as it is attacked by a hell hound and a gray-striped catlike silvanshee. The claws of the Good celestial can find no purchase on its carapace, but the Lawful hell hound's bite leaves visible dents and scratches. The students who have been paying attention react with surprise at this outcome. 

"I mentioned that this is an area of active research. This does not mean it will not be on your exams. In our next lecture we will cover the elemental energies and how they relate to the planar essences that your summoned creatures are formed of. Before then I expect you to cast multiple summons to repeat these displays and come up with your own tests in anticipation of what I will be demonstrating next. Dismissed."

The illusions of the planes vanish, and some first-year students come out with mops and Prestidigitations to clean up the mess left behind. Most of the students get up to leave for their next lesson, clustering into groups on the way out to talk about summoning weak creatures into buckets of acid or fires to see how they are affected, or chatting about the implications of what Vost said. Some linger, gathering the courage to approach the dean with questions.

Interesting. It reminds her of how some, but not all, kitsunes have the innately-magical component of their toughness completely bypassed by maple wood of all things. Like her. (Good thing spells work fine.)

She never got an explanation for that besides puns from Tamamo. She did find out the limits of what makes a tree "maple"; a property of the sap.

.......Seems kinda mean, these demos. She still makes a table of results. And wonders what the results with Spirit World entities would be.

She summons a ghost fox in the corner with one of her amulets. "Would you be willing to do some violence tests?"

The ghost playfully snarls and yips. Sinnah scratches its chin. "Good girl."

"What kind of a fox is that?" Nella asks as she approaches, having noticed Sinnah during the lecture. "Celestial? Fey?"

"We just call it spirit. Not from any of those planes, I want to find out where what I call spirit fits in the cosmology. It was more expensive to call here than on Tirra... They aren't really individual and may be an aspect of Her. Tamamo, I mean."

The godpronoun doesn't go unnoticed!

"Like some kind of very weak avatar? If it's more expensive to call here, maybe spirit overlaps with wherever your world is in the cosmology, like the ethereal over the material? What's the spirit plane like, does it have gravity?"

Her snub-nosed cat familiar emerges from her robes to curiously sniff at the ghost fox, ears pressed back.

"Yep, it reflects the material of Tirra quite strongly. Though the spirit does not really have... Space. It's more a series of scenes and transitions all connected than a set of places. Influenced heavily by... Metaphorical weight? Old battlefields are scarred in the Spirit. Famous monuments are there. It's easier to cross over at graveyards or important temples. Terrain shows up the same, if unreal and dreamlike."

Scritchies scratches. The ghost fox makes a noise of contentment.

"Sounds more like the Shadow plane, then..." she says thoughtfully. "What did you summon it for? Other than pets, and seeing if you still could."

She scoops up her cat and gives her some attention so that Lady Marcatella doesn't get envious.

"Got curious about damage interactions with other summoned entities. Maybe I was a bit hasty to do so, though."

"Oh? Are you thinking it would be disrespectful to Tamamo? I can summon a few creatures for it to attack if you'd like to only study that side of the mystery."

"Oh, she's up for it." The fox makes bites motions and gekkers. "Just that I didn't have anything immediately lined up. Tamamo only really finds a few things disrespectful, mostly hypocrisy and restrictions of freedoms on the unwilling."

"Hold on, let me summon a dretch for you -"

"Not in the lecture theater, ladies! Your eagerness is commendable but Dean Delmore has the hall next and you know what she's like."

Her first instinctive reaction is you can't tell me what to do. Her second is they'll ban me from the library if I set anything on fire.

The second one wins. It usually does.

Usually.

Sigh. This is why she has her own tower, in the middle of nowhere, where nobody will complain if unauthorized guests are on the receiving end of interesting and creative wards.

She picks up the ghost fox.

"I don't, but I'll take your word for it. I want to see more summoning and planar-related spellforms now..."

"In the evening I have a class on teleportation effects, in one of the smaller classrooms upstairs."

"In the meantime, how about I find you someone who can show you a Secluded Grimoire or a Planar Inquiry, in exchange for a look at how you summoned your fox?"

"Sure, I guess. Though, actually, I really should get back to the reason I came here... Have you heard any gossip about another Tirran kitsune? She'd be - smaller than me, very good with illusions, probably stick her nose into trouble."

"Not that I've heard of in here, nobody has been out of the Acadamae much since the king died," Nella says.

Messida snaps her fingers and points at an imp dusting a bust.

"You there, have you heard of anyone matching that description? Imps are dreadful gossips," she adds as an aside, not caring to lower her voice for the benefit of the one she just asked.