[h3]The Magic Exam[/h3][hr]12:00 PM, August 7th, 1210PW. 58 Degrees Fahrenheit. Sunlight leaking through heavy cloud cover.[hr][color=f7976a]Presenting, the Valkenhaut C1! Why's its nose so short? It's simple: We moved the engine to the back to free up space for the rest of the car. Feel the freedom of parking your C1 in spaces too small for your A19, or any of our competitors' products! We streamlined the C1's shape too, so your fuel efficiency will be [b]THROUGH THE ROOF![/b] Go to your local Valkenhaut outlet now, and support the Empire with your purchase! [sub][sub]MSRP 400U, one year warranty guaranteed upon purchase.[/sub][/sub][/color] - Valkenhaut Advertisement on all Imperial newspapers and radio channels, Summer 1210.[hr]

Lunch passed uneventfully, at least compared to the previous day's breakfast. Many of the staff members in the lunchroom were visibly relieved - dealing with cafeteria squabbles in the middle of placement exams would've thrown off their entire rhythm and left the students unfocused. And focus was absolutely necessary for the next steps.

A short, swarthy man with a dirty blonde buzz cut and an Institute logo emblazoned upon his uniform stepped into the room from the front entrance and approached the staff tables in the Unoctocan quarter, where he whispered something to Administrator Malkin. The gigantic lobster nodded to him, then nodded to Professor Volkova, opting not to speak through his mouthful of rice and fish. Volkova had the announcement papers anyway, and she quickly shoveled her salad down her throat, staring at a clock on the wall. The instant the second hand struck 11:59:30, she picked up her megaphone, stood up, and made her way to the entrance. At precisely 12:00:00, she reached the front of the cafeteria and made her announcement.

[color=c4df9b]"All new students, please make your way to the street outside the cafeteria. The Magic exams are starting now."[/color]

[hr]

The crowd gathered in front of Laboratory Building 2, and Professor Brovak opened the door on the western side of the building leading into a long, tall hallway with blast doors along the left side of the hallway. Each blast door had a number on it and a clipboard hanging on a nail with a list of timeslots. The clipboards showed that every one of the laboratories had had space reserved for the exams. At the middle of the entrance hall, Brovak stopped and turned around to speak to the crowd, text floating above his head as he spoke. Those with innate Vision talent would notice that he had nothing to do with the text - rather, it was conjured by Administrator Malkin.

[color=7ea7d8]"The Magic test will be twofold. You will first demonstrate your current magic skill to your assigned professor in the main rooms of each laboratory. Afterwards, you will be directed into the testing chambers deeper within, where you will use your magic along with any other skills you may possess in combat. You will be evaluated for the potency of your magic, your potential for learning magic, and your creativity in using your magic. Professors, take your students, please."[/color]

The shuffled shuffled about some and went to their respective laboratory doors, and Volkova raised her megaphone, along with a list of students and their assigned rooms and professors for testing. There were still roughly three dozen new students taking the tests, and it took a short time for her to make her way through the list. Floating text appeared above her head as she spoke, and students wandered over to their doors as they were called out. She went in alphabetical order, or at least as close to it as possible with the cultural name variations.

[hider=Assigned Doors][color=c4df9b]"Bayamaar, Berke. Door One, with Professor Emilya Vance."
"Belladonna, Jesse. Door Four, with Professor Hans Vance."
"Bitter-Tooth, Honehe. Door Two, with Administrator Malkin."
"Breckenridge, Alexander. Door Three, with Professor Xander Thorne."
"Coridell, Bawen. Door Six, with Professor Robert Brovak."
"Frysa, Mycona. Door Five, with Professor Zayid Leere."
"Katann, Ohon. Door Four, with Professor Hans Vance."
"Kishimoto, Rikka. Door Two, with Administrator Boorkat Malkin."
"L'ilisht? ...Am I saying that right? Door Six, with Professor Robert Brovak."
"Martin, Louis. Door Four, with Professor Hans Vance."
"Milit, Joseph. Door One, with Professor Emilya Vance."
"Mortimer, Mallory. Door Five, with Professor Zayid Leere."
"Murdoc, Lucannus. Door Three, with Professor Xander Thorne."
"Naugna, Jhin. Door Three, with Professor Xander Thorne."
"Oharra, Yrhen. Door Four, with Professor Hans Vance."
"Steel, Mark. Door One, with Professor Emilya Vance."
"Steiner, Elyse. Door Five, with Professor Zayid Leere."
"Voll, Magnhild. Door Six, with Professor Robert Brovak."
"Mionrashk ar Wahaca. Door Two, with Administrator Boorkat Malkin."[/color][/hider]

[hr]

Once the sorting was complete, each professor introduced theirself to their six assigned students, then unlocked their respective laboratories' blast doors and stepped inside. The rooms were sparse, with no equipment or furniture of any sort save for a table on the right side of the room from the entrance, a second, heavier blast door directly across from the room's entrance, and a noisily shaking cube covered in a black sheet in the far corner on the left. Along the lefthand wall, to the left of the covered cube, were a series of Unoctocan military species-universal Gaaspazeten-G2 gas masks - heavy hoods of rubber infused black cloth that draped over the wearer's head, with a pair of huge 'windows' acting as eyeports. A hose hung down from a space roughly four inches below the space between the eyeports, with a ring of slightly more rigid material covered in clamps at the bottom and three securing straps at different positions along the 'neck' area for adjusting the hood to the head. A grey canister with a pair of clothing clips mounted to its side hung at the bottom of the foot-long hose. The canisters were labeled with the volume of air they could safely filter corresponding to roughly 1200 breaths for an average size human, or roughly an hour under minor exertion.

The aluminum tables in each room were populated with a stack of blocks of different colors, sheens, and compositions, along with many bottles of differently colored gases. The blocks and bottles were each labeled with their respective element, and those versed in chemistry would recognize every element from hydrogen to xenon in sequence. The other known elements were too rare and expensive to bother stocking each laboratory with each, though a number of "common" non-elemental materials were also present, like wood, water, and the like. On the bottom shelf of each table were a series of clearly magical artifacts of different types - one stone tablet reeking of foul energy, one gearbox that continued spinning without a visible power source, a bowl of slime that squished around in circles as though it were alive, a book with very little obvious trace of magic, a salad fork with no obvious oddities, and a pen sitting in an inkwell atop a piece of paper. The professors each gave their students roughly the same speech (with some variations), to the tune of: 

[color=f7976a]"Step forward one by one and demonstrate what magic you already know. Even if you do not know how to harness your magic, we will assess your magical potential based on the energy your minds put out. Don't bother trying to impress me: save your strength for what lies beyond the other door. You are free to use any of the materials on the table in case your talents require other objects."[/color]

[hr]

Once the students had shown off their magic (or lack thereof) and the professors had jotted down their performance in their clipboards, the professors spoke again, this time saying something to the tune of:

[color=f7976a]"Alright. Now that that's done, on to the combat test. Inside that room, you will have to defeat one of the most dangerous breeds of Monster in the Deadlands. Does it sound bad? It should. These creatures are responsible for the vast majority of deaths on Deadlands exploration expeditions, and it's important that everyone know roughly what kind of threat wildlife can pose to research teams, frontier towns, nomad tribes, or anything else that regularly encounters them."[/color]

With that, the professors ripped the black sheets off of the cages in the corner, revealing a much smaller creature than many students would expect bouncing about the thinly wired cage wildly. It didn't seem very dangerous at first glance, but those who knew anything about the Deadlands knew otherwise. The creature was vaguely insectoid, two feet long and brown-carapaced, with four compound eyes each sitting atop a foot-long eyestalk, a short and round jawless mouth, and six large, segmented legs tipped in tiny, hair-coated feet, the rear pair of which were significantly larger than its four forelimbs. The bodies were not segmented in the same way as normal insects, though, and their 'head' sections seemed to blend into their upper torsos perfectly, which explained the need for eyestalks over fixed mount eyes. Every so often, they would flip open the back of their carapace to reveal a set of buzzing wings as they tried to fly upwards and escape their cage. Outside of the buzzing sound of their wings and the rattling of the cages, the creatures were completely silent, and their eyestalks flailed about wildly, staring directly at each person in the room in turn from behind the wire mesh.

[color=f7976a]"This Monster is called the Ashhopper. These Monsters live in the dense mushroom jungles of the Deadlands, where they live on a steady diet of slime mold, and an intermittent diet of ash and charcoal after forest fires. They are relatively harmless to us, but they are still the number one killer of explorers and researchers for one reason: They steal and eat the gas mask cartridges that Humans and Chimeras need to survive in the Deadlands. The pure carbon in a filter cartridge is a great enough meal that a small Ashhopper can grow in size several inches and push other, smaller Ashhoppers out of their territory."[/color]

With a press of a button, the second sets of blast doors opened to reveal the inner experiment chamber, which had been flooded with exotic plantlife, almost all of which looked particularly dangerous to the touch, either by merit of looking toxic, or by merit of looking extraordinarily sharp. Glasslike tufts of crystalline, blueish-purple transparent "grass" sprouted from clumps of earth surrounding the bases of the trunks of shroom trees of a strange, twisting breed that no students save for those who had been to the Deadlands had ever seen. A few gigantic 'flowers' with bulbous, spongelike, and sickly yellow-green-white 'heads' surrounded by bright red leaves wilting and creeping along the ground 'coughed', spewing a puff of spores upwards into the air inside the room. Overall, the room smelled faintly of almonds, dirt, and decaying plants, with a tiny hint of the smell of rotting flesh emanating from the spongy plants. The room's main lights were off, but the bioluminescent parasitic vines creeping along the trunks of the treelike fungi lit the area in faint shades of pink and purple. Hiding places were everywhere. It looked almost exactly like the few photographs of the Deadlands that had made it back to the Empire, save for it very much not being black and white.

[color=f7976a]"During the test, you will put on one of the Gaaspazeten-G2 masks on the wall -- I'll check the seal for you -- and you'll enter the test chamber. Your job is to kill any Ashhoppers in the room. If you [i]fail[/i] the test, you'll know the instant your throat starts burning and you start to lose consciousness. It's not lethal like it is in the Deadlands, but it's definitely not fun, and the gas used will even effect Monsters to keep things nice and fair. I recommend that you try to win before your filter expires. You there, you're up first. Put your hood on and step inside."[/color]

[@FlitterFaux][@Avant][@Etranger][@Rekaigan][@hagroden][@HokumPocus][@pkken][@Queentze][@Jay Kalton][@ghastlyInc][@liferusher][@Illiren][@MULTI_MEDIA_MAN]

[hider=GM's Note:]I'd prefer it if y'all pinged me on Discord to work out a chatplay collab for the combat aspect of the magic test. That'd make getting through this thing a lot easier and faster than just bouncing back and forth in the IC for days. ;)[/hider]