#68, Learning: Special Treatment in the Order of Hermes
Originally posted here on May 20, 2022.
Where did your fictomere learn to do what they did? Alternatively, if your fictomere is a place, how and where do the people there (if any) learn?
Well, like many Mages taken in by the Order of Hermes, I was, in a way, selected by a Mage to be their apprentice, trained in the magical arts until I was granted the title of Master in my own right, and allowed to go on to take apprentices of my own. How it differs, however, is in
who selected me and why: after all, few Heads of Houses bothered to train apprentices directly, and Tremere didn't select me so much as he saved me from death's door and insisted that I needed to learn, and by the time he had tamed my desire to lash out at the world around me enough to take me to the Order proper, he'd grown attached and chose to teach me, himself. Additionally, while apprentices aren't
always teenagers, they
usually are, and I was well into my twenties by the time Tremere found me.
My years of apprenticeship to Tremere were... interesting. It's strange to think, now, that I was once so inept at magic that Tremere had to guide me through the basics, help me find what worked for me, and had to mark my success like I have marked the progress of so many apprentices over the years. I did well and progressed quickly--frighteningly so, he told me decades later--especially once presented with a fellow apprentice, Etrius, as a rival... I did not enjoy Etrius' presence, nor did he enjoy mine, and we never did learn to co-exist without friction.