Blue Heron Institute

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The Blue Heron Institute is a school for Practitioners operating in Ontario.<infobox> <title source="name"><default>Blue Heron Institute</default></title>

<image source="image"></image> <header>Basic Information</header> <image source="map"></image> <label>Type</label> <label>Location</label> <label>Inhabitants</label> <label>First Appearance</label> </infobox>

Location

The Institute operates out of a former church. They have a library, dedicated ritual space, and sleeping quarters.

Residents

Alexander Belanger serves as the headmaster and one of the teachers. The other two core teachers are Rad Ray Sunshine and Ms Durocher. Guest teachers also visit from time to time and include Mr. Bristow, Electra Miraz, the Ports, the Crowes, Mr. Musser, and Ms. Lair.<ref>“Raymond has been serving as a guest teacher for a year while pursuing other projects, but is returning this summer and fall, at the very least. We’re glad to have him. On the topic of guest teachers, I would like to extent my gratitude to Mr. Bristow, Electra Miraz, the Ports, the Crowes, Mr. Musser, and Ms. Lair, for agreeing to come this summer, and to anyone and everyone else who decides they can find the time. To others too numerous to name, I would extend thanks for the loaning of books for the student library.” - excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.5</ref>

The pupils are largely those who have been reached out to by one of the core teachers or who operate in the area.<ref name=":0">Most of the time, Mr. Belanger, Mrs. Durocher, or Ray will reach out to people with associated interests. Jorja’s family is really

interested in learning from Mrs. Durocher, who is maybe in the top ten

in the world when it comes to dealing with powers so big that humans really have no business meddling in them. [...] The other families are ones that have been here for a long time. They’re here because the Institute is close and it’s a good way to expand their knowledge. - excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.4</ref> There are 50-60 pupils total.<ref>Maybe fifty, sixty students were present. - excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.4</ref>

The new pupils as of summer 2020 are:

The Kennet Trio - blackmailing Mr Belanger
Brie - associate of Zed empowered by the Hungry Choir.
Jorja - ten, an already-powerful Caller who channels a powerful urban drug-spirit.<ref name=":2">“Jorja’s the third sibling to come. Her older brothers are already here.”

Zed pointed them out. The girl was ten, with hair about as straight and black as hair got, to the point it looked like it was wet, with the way it lay against her scalp. She was pale, and her clothes slightly mismatched for age, size, and type. She was the one who had run over to

greet the boy, with the large, gliding Other following behind, always

moving slowly and not catching up to her until she stood still for a little while, which was rare. To Avery’s sight, there were black handprints all over her, with the finger of one handprint hooked into her eye and pulling her eyelid down. Black veins webbed out from the handprints. “Callers. That’s caller with an a, not an o. Slang for them is Druid or Draoidhe, but I’m not sure how PC that is,” Zed confided. “Most druids tap into the big, old nature spirits. her family taps into

more urban things.  The black gutter, the glass prison, the chemical

lightning. Each kid picks one of these big, unrestrained lord spirits in the same general category, and then sort of taps into it for big, unrestrained, nasty practice.” “Spirits of drugs?” Avery asked. “Yeah,” Zed said. “My gentle verdict? Avoid.” - excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.4 </ref><ref name=":1">Tymon and Talos’s younger sister Jorja joins us, already an adept caller

of a greater Urban spirit.  She should be recognizable or even familiar
to those of you who attended guest lectures with their mother.  Dom, as
anyone familiar with the Driscoll family knows, is a beginner city mage
and historian, and we’re excited to see if he takes after his big

sister and parents. I’m also very pleased that a long-time colleague of

mine finally has a child old enough to send to classes here.  Talia

Graubard is a beginner Dollmaker. - excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.5</ref> Looking to learn primarily from Durocher.<ref name=":0" />

Talia Graubard - eleven,<ref name=":3">“Are the other newbies as young as her?”

“Yeah, kinda? Dom and Talia are ten and eleven, I think.”

- excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.4 </ref> a beginner Dollmaker.<ref name=":1" />

Dom Driscoll - ten,<ref name=":3" /> a beginner City Mage and Historian.<ref>“You’ve been coming here a while?” Avery asked.

“Three years. Dom is from a family of historians. They study patterns in history, to see if any accidental rituals emerge.”

“Accidental rituals?” Verona asked.

“I don’t know how much to explain, because I don’t know how much you know, and I’m not the best teacher. Uh, when non-practitioners do stuff, they can still create rituals. We call them accidental or emergent rituals. If you find a big enough or ancient enough one, you can tweak it or harness it. City layouts forming diagrams that influence economy? Big money, potentially. Patterns in, I dunno, wars followed by baby booms? That could potentially be a whole generation that’s special. They came here to deal with Ray, the guy I’m apprenticing under, so I’ve got the scoop there.” - excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.4 </ref><ref name=":1" />

Curriculum

The full list of classes is given in this Bonus Material.

History

The Institute was founded by Alexander Belanger, Rad Ray Sunshine, Ms Durocher and some others (Mr. Bristow and Mr. Musser), after they met at the site of a Deus ex Machina and defeated it together. It was named after one of the forms the god-thing projected.<ref>“Years ago, there was something on the horizon that clouded my Sight. It recurred as an image. A teenage boy dressed as a king, sitting in a chair with water running over him, repeating the same nonsense phrases over and over again. If I gutted a bird and pulled out its entrails for a simple fortune telling, I could find papers in the guts, with the phrases on it. It was… obnoxious. I traveled from Toronto to Winnipeg, met with other Practitioners who had run into the same problem, some of your parents, as a matter of fact. A company that managed and experimented with server architecture had rented out three floors of its building to a startup and had unwittingly played host to a group of technomancers trying to get users to engage with rituals they’d programmed. They abandoned their work, killed by Witch Hunters or run off by Others, and their work was deleted. As Raymond Sunshine would be sure to tell you, however, deleted does not mean gone. Just as you can pull something out of your trash bin on your desktop, their work was still there, gradually taking form, reaching out into the rest of the servers in the building until it could become a small god. After that, it started expanding out, until it was interfering with my Sight. [...] It had taken over the building and the running of the company that managed the servers. Within was a world of its own that would take a month to cross. I went to deal with it, and ran into someone else who was doing the same. A young lady who would be best described as being very interested in the most vast and uncontrolled parts of conventional practice,” He indicated Mrs. Durocher. “She had already contacted a colleague of hers from a previous errand, a man who was just then achieving notoriety for his first practitioner-facing website.” He indicated Raymond Sunshine. [...] Together with Mr. Bristow and Mr. Musser, we annihilated the god, shared out its power, and we drank together that night. For Mr. Sunshine, Mrs. Durocher, and myself, it sparked a close friendship that has lasted ever since. One of the things I hold most important about that experience was the epiphany I had, during that night of conversation and light drinks. It wasn’t the power that I was happiest with -and I was as power hungry as they come- but the moments I had been with other practitioners and felt purpose and felt like we were all better for those deals. Better informed, and we all know having the right information makes us strong. Dealing with other practitioners makes us safer, better equipped, stronger, and more capable of covering our weaknesses. That epiphany would eventually lead to us starting the Blue Heron Institute alongside Mr. Bristow, Mr. Musser, and others. We named it after one of the faces the god in the machine had worn.” - excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.5</ref> Alexander drew on favours from his family to help set it up.

Ray Sunshine spent a few years prior to 2020 engaging less with the school, serving only as a guest lecturer, but he returned to serving as one of the core staff in the summer of 2020.

References