Move move move.

Speaking and gesturing seems to be the Done Thing here, for spellcasting. So, he makes a grand flourish and utters some Latin-y syllables.

The chairs arrange themselves into four columns and three rows. In front of each, a large study desk appears. Normally he makes furniture out of ivory, but it seems like the Chelaxian style is black and red — all of them wearing robes mostly having these colors. So, he instead uses deep red precious coral to make the tables.

He makes them big, with indents for inkwells and a shelf at the bottom to store books. On the front is the student's name in curling Taldane script, the tables arranged alphabetically with Alfons in the top left corner from his perspective, and Zefir at the bottom right. He adjusts the height and size of the chairs and tables so that they fit the proportions of the students. The table legs are shaped so as to look like humanoid figures propping up the table with their own head and palms.

The chairs have their mother-of-pearl be removed, and they are changed to red coral as well.

He'll also change the wall, floor, and ceiling materials, turning them into polished black shell. At the front is a 'blackboard' of white skin containing chromatophores. At the top right, he has the date appear in black. In red, he has "Derek Bloodsinger's Fleshlore Class" appear, with the names of the students arranged in a grid mirroring the seat placements.

Forming furniture takes several minutes or more for him, but he formed the tables and blackboard while the students were introducing themselves. It wouldn't do to have it take too long!

Okay, she gets why they decided to hire a twenty-five year old who doesn't know how spellcasting works as a teacher. If such a thing could be learned...

His instinct upon seeing anything new and magical is to cast, "Detect Magic."

"Oh, I didn't catch what you were saying."

He probably should not be casting when it's not explicitly authorized.

"I was casting Detect Magic, Bloodsinger."

"Oooh! Tell me what you see."

There is no aura to be found.

Huh???????? What is he supposed to say??????? Is Derek hiding the aura of his spell? Is he supposed to break through that protection?

For lack of a better response, he just says, "Nothing, Bloodsinger. I cannot detect any magic."

"Well, that accords with my expectations." Derek is not upset. He has always thought of Carnation as something very visceral and nonmetaphysical. Not magic, but simply highly exotic biology.

"Anyway, please sit at your assigned seats! If I misspelled any of your names, please tell me."

He seems to have gotten them all correct, because no one says anything. They move to their seats and sit.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, I forgot to get you all writing materials too. Give me a few minutes, alright?"

He'll create a well beside the inkwell indentation and fill it with sepia ink, and then add a growth that adds more when it gets depleted, plus a cover. He creates a couple of dip pens made of shell with spiral grooves, shaped and sized for the students' hands. Then, in the shelf beneath, he creates a quire of vellum.

"Alright. Feel free to use these at your leisure. Don't worry about damaging anything or using things up, since I can just repair them or make more. And it's fine if you prefer to use your own materials."

Why is the teacher being this nice accommodating? She is just a first-circle wizard and she cannot fathom why she is being given? Assigned? the products of these conjuration spells...well, not conjuration, since Alfons said there was no aura, but maybe Alfons doesn't know how to cast Detect Magic properly or interpret its results. How you survive Ostenso Academy like that, she has no idea.

How much would a table like this cost, on the open market...?

She is not going to get her hopes up because she knows the other shoe will drop. It always does.

"My typically planned class structure for all of you will have theory in the morning from 10am to 11:30am, then lunch for an hour, then labs or practicals in the afternoon from 12:30pm to 3:30pm. 

We will have class from Moonday to Fireday. There is no class on Starday and Sunday, though I may organize optional activities on Starday.

I've been given an office, and I'll have a sign outside of it which will tell you whether or not I'm free. You can drop by to ask me questions if I am. Alternatively, you can write questions and put them in the mailbox also outside my room, and then I'll write my answer on it and get back to you...oh, I should set up fingerprint-lock shelves for you all. I'll do that later. I only sleep a few hours every other night, so I have quite a bit of free time.

I will be scoring people and organizing examinations weekly, on Firedays. On odd weeks, the examinations will be practice only. They won't count towards your score, but I'll mark and give feedback on them so you can improve. On even weeks, they will. I may organize additional examinations or ways to earn or lose points outside of that, but that will be the main place.

The top scoring students will receive prizes. Most likely, I'll award youth, beauty, restoration, or parures and raiments. Or a combination of the aforementioned.

The bottom scoring students...I have been told that it is customary for Chelish schools to have the bottom scoring students be whipped by the top scoring ones. I don't know if I'll do that, but I should probably arrange for some sort of unpleasant thing to happen to them, because it's Chelish custom. Where I was born, we did not do any such thing and I was very unmotivated in school and did mediocre. I wouldn't want any of my students to do mediocre. I would feel so ashamed. I might make it an objective metric based thing rather than a rank based thing.

Maybe I can have them undergo one of the painless tortures I've been working on? Er, to be clear, I am mostly going to be teaching painful tortures to all of you, but my current interests have to do with painless tortures."

The names of the students move from the middle of the board to alphabetical order on the side of the board, with the heading of "SCORES" at the top. Everyone is listed with a score of 0 at the moment.

That's only twenty-two and a half hours of class time a week. Is that really sufficient? No one asks this kitbag question.

What do beauty, youth, and restoration entail.

They are used to Starday class and are confused why it isn't an official class day. Especially given how there may be """"""""""optional"""""""""" activities. Which are probably where the bonus points are going to be from.

Also, what is a painless torture??????????? How is it torture if it's painless?????????????? No one asks this question either.

Derek has the capacity to sense the body of animals down to the level of proteins, but only if he has his tendrils in them. Skilled as he might be at reading others on Earth, he cannot defeat the bluff of Chelish people with skill ranks.

He is not going to be able to answer their internal questions!

"Is that everything? That's everything, right? Am I forgetting something?" He looks at Conrad and Damian, still standing at the corner of the room.

"I think that's everything."

"I should say before we start that it's a truism in biology that 'the answer in biology is always yes'. That is to say, for any categorical you might have, there almost always is something which breaks that rule. For example, birds can fly, except for all the birds which are flightless." The blackboard shows a drawing of a penguin.

"Fish cannot breathe air, except for all of the fish that can." The penguin turns into a lungfish.

"I'm here to teach you the generalities of things and phrase things as rules, but you should always keep this in mind.

And that, since there is a lot of stuff to cover, that I will be teaching a lot of what you might call lies to children. Not lie lies, but like, oversimplifications which aren't perfectly precise or accurate but which are generally good enough in most situations. In my world, these topics would be covered over four years or more, not four months. So we are really on an accelerated schedule, here. I might increase class time for this reason...but I don't want to overtax you all."

The exams are probably going to consist of figuring out where the teacher was lying and where they were telling the truth.

She will diligently take notes.

"The smallest unit of life is the cell. It's the smallest thing that could be considered to be alive...okay, I keep wanting to interject because there are edge cases, but I already forewarned you of that and it would be too distracting to keep going. So...I'm just going to try to refrain from doing that and then only say so if it's important in that situation, or if you explicitly ask.

And as a tangent to that tangent: I am never going to punish you for asking questions. I may refrain to answer, or brush it off or delay it, but I'm not going to...well I'm not going to say I'm not going to get mad at you for doing it, because I don't have control over my emotions, but I'm not going to take...adverse action against you for doing it. I don't want to disincentivize behavior I like."

They are going to interpret that statement as being of biology in that it has exceptions and is not an absolute truth.