I Am The Greatest Femboy Mage

Elian quietly followed the old woman, who was his best chance at not being lost in the large campus area, to the registrar’s office. The inside of the main building somehow managed to be more impressive than the view he had gotten outside, the entrance hall being an impossible size that one couldn’t have guessed from from the view.

The ceiling stretched high enough that Elian could barely make out the details of it, the great old pillars holding up the great hall steadfast even after having been there for centuries. Rowan Vale walked with purpose through the hall, giving nothing other than a passing glance to the vastness of it as she lead him to one of the hallways on the east side of the chamber.

They walked for a full two minutes, a terrifying amount of time to walk inside of a building, before she motioned to stop in front of an unassuming door.

She gave the wooden door two solid knocks.

"Come in" Came the tired voice of an old man from the inside.

Rowan Vale gently opened the door, motioning for Elian to follow her.

Contrary to the expectations set by the old mage, the whole process took less than thirty minutes. The only trouble that Elian ended up finding was from his own cause, because somehow, when he checked his trunk, he had forgotten the stamped paper of his father approving his stay at Lucenhall.

The registrar, a small, harried man who introduced himself as Master Colm and then never looked up from his stamps again, didn’t seem to find this remarkable. He processed Elian’s paperwork with the specific efficiency of someone who had clearly seen far stranger first-day disasters than a poorly packed trunk.

"This is your dormitory assignment,"Colm said, sliding a folded slip of paper across the desk without ceremony.

"East wing, third floor. You’ll be sharing."

"Sharing," Elian repeated.

"Most first-years do." Colm finally glanced up, taking in the staff, the haircut, the general fact of him, with roughly the same interest he might’ve given a chair.

"Something wrong with that?"

"No." There was, potentially, everything wrong with that, but Elian wasn’t about to explain the specifics to a man who was already reaching for his next stamp.

Vale, who’d been leaning against the doorframe through the entire exchange with the patience of someone who’d sat through this particular thirty minutes more times than she cared to count, finally pushed off it.

"That’s the easy part done," she said, once they were back out in the hallway.

"Sparring gear next, then opening ceremony. You’ll need it before I put you anywhere near the east yard."

"I don’t suppose the school just has spares lying around." He said as he followed behind her.

"It does. Whether any of them fit a build like yours is a different question."

She said it without any particular judgment, already walking again, apparently expecting him to keep up without being told twice a second time.

"We’ll find out."

Elian adjusted his grip on the staff and followed, trying and mostly failing not to think too hard about the word sharing still sitting in the back of his mind.

The armory was just as big and vast as the entrance hall, which at this point, the palette exhaustion had kicked in for Elian, and all that was in his mind was when all of this walking will finally be over. Because maintaining the levitation he casted on his luggage was starting to catch up to him.

Rowan Vale lead him through the various sections of the armory, most displaying rudimentary weapons, basic conjuring staff and other items that students who didn’t have an artifact already might have found useful, leading him to a specific room where the rough shape of an armour was etched into a board hanging above the door.

The door swung open before Vale even got a hand on it, revealing a barrel-chested older man with a beard that looked like it had personally survived several wars, sitting on a stool surrounded by racks of leather and plate in various states of assembly.

"Marren," Vale said, by way of greeting.

"Vale." Old Marren didn’t get up. He looked Elian over once, top to bottom, with the flat, assessing stare of a man who’d fitted several thousand teenagers for armor and had stopped being impressed by any of them a long time ago.

"This the Valcourt boy?"

"This is the Valcourt boy."

"Heard about the staff." Marren’s eyes flicked to the Everbloom, unbothered, then back to Elian’s face. "Heard about that haircut too, for that matter. Whole east wing’s already talking about it."

Elian felt his ears go warm.

"Is it that interesting."

"First-years are always interesting for about a week."

Marren finally hauled himself up off the stool with a grunt, moving toward the racks.

"Then someone else does something stupid and everyone forgets. You’ll live."

That was, Elian decided, possibly the most reassuring thing anyone had said to him all day, delivered with all the warmth of someone reading out a grocery list.

Marren pulled a set of practice leathers off the rack, held them up against Elian with a critical squint, and immediately put them back.

"No."

"That was fast," Elian said.

"You’re built narrower than the standard cut. Everything here’s sized for broader shoulders. Most first-years, especially the noble ones, come in built like their fathers."

Marren was already moving down the rack, muttering to himself.

"You’re built like nobody in particular. Which means we improvise."

"Wonderful."

Old Marren pulled a second set off the men’s rack, held it up against Elian’s shoulders, and put it back down with the same flat lack of ceremony as the first.

"No."

"Was that a new no, or the same no from before?"

"New no. Different reason."

Marren moved down the rack, muttering something about growth charts nobody had updated since the founding of the school. He tried a third set. A fourth. By the fifth, he’d stopped bothering to hold them up at all, just glancing between the leathers and Elian’s frame and setting them straight back down with the air of a man solving a puzzle that refused to cooperate.

"You’re narrower through here than anything we stock," he said, tapping a spot roughly at his own shoulder.

"And shorter through the torso than the smallest cut accounts for." He continued. "I built this batch according to what has been the trend over the years, where all the young men show up looking like they’d be future blacksmiths."

"I can’t help that."

"Didn’t say you could." Marren stood there a long moment, arms crossed, staring at the men’s rack like it had personally wronged him. Then, without any particular fanfare, he turned and walked to the other side of the room entirely.

Elian watched him go, mildly concerned. "Where are you—"

"Women’s rack runs narrower through the shoulder, shorter through the torso. Better proportions for someone your build."

Marren said it exactly the way he’d said everything else so far—flat, practical, entirely unbothered—and pulled a set off the rack without so much as a pause to consider whether this was a remarkable thing to announce out loud.

Elian opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"You’re not going to make things weird about it," he said, which was less a question than a hopeful confirmation.

"Why would I."

Marren held the leathers up against him, nodded once, apparently satisfied on the first try in a way none of the men’s sets had managed.

"Leather doesn’t care what it’s labeled. Fit’s fit."

Vale, still leaning in the doorway with her arms crossed, let out a small whistle that might have been amusement.

"He’s not wrong."

"I know he’s not wrong," Elian said, his voice pitched a little higher than he would have liked.

"I’m just..." He stopped, not entirely sure what he was, actually, beyond faintly stunned that the most anticlimactic reaction to any of this so far had come from the gruffest man in the building.

"Try it," Marren said, already holding it out, entirely unmoved by the moment he’d apparently just had without noticing.

"Screen’s behind you. And don’t take all day, I’ve got a line of second-years coming through after the ceremony who actually know their measurements."

Elian took the leathers behind the screen, and this time, when he stepped back out, they fit exactly right on the first try—closer through the shoulder, sitting properly at the waist... and his lower body, especially around his thighs, nothing pulling or gaping anywhere it shouldn’t.

Marren circled him once, grunted in approval, and turned back to his shelves like the whole exchange had been exactly as unremarkable as he’d insisted it was.

"See," he said, not looking back. "Fit’s fit."