Out of all the institutes dedicated towards the study, practice and research of the magical arts, Ūwilazala Academy is arguably the most prestigious in this world, and certainly the finest in the entire western continent of Occasus, even if - technically speaking - it actually occupies its own pocket plane separate from the universe that merely most easily accessible through a linkway found in an Occidental country. Aspiring mages from all across Occasus and occasionally beyond converge at the extradimensional campus of tertiary education to be personally tutored by globally renowned wizards, gain access to its vast archives or to make use of its state-of-the-art facilities. From sagacious sorcerers who have played parts in saving civilization, to wicked warlocks bent on conquering entire kingdoms, there has been no shortage of many famous (and infamous) alumni Ūwilazala can indeed claim to have had on their student roll at one time or another.
One such undergraduate was Silfr Ståldóttir, a young lady from a remote northern nation named Snjórland who seemed to embody some of her homeland's archetypical features: cold and distant in character, yet possessing a captivating natural allure beautiful for those able overlook these foibles, only she did not go out of her way to make doing so easy. She would one day become a witch of ill repute known by the epithet of 'Snow-Caller' feared by the common and noble folk alike who lived in the regions peripheral to the unhallowed, tenebrous territory of Erdeuelu, but at the present of this particular tale, she was still a mere student of spellcraft, albeit one of extreme talent. Talent, however, no matter how gifted, can only carry one so far without the training to supplement it.
Let it be known that Silfr was certainly a creature more suited for the night than the day as one would probably be able to determine from her non-existent tan; her skin nearly pure white in pigment and appearing all the paler in stark contrast to her long, fine tresses as black as raven feathers that framed features looking almost sickly from her noticeably sunken cheeks in conjunction with this pasty flesh. Unfortunately, Ūwilazala's courses at that time did not accommodate the nocturnally inclined, and Silfr was only at her most active after sundown (speaking relatively, for she always seemed so lethargic regardless of the hour one may have found her). When she first started her studies, she was able to suffer through her timetable tolerably enough, but as the months steadily trickled by, she found herself able to commit less and less to such a schedule adverse to how she regularly lived. Often, she would either find herself unable to make it to the morning lectures for catching up on what little sleep available to her, or have to retire to her dormitory by noon to recharge her depleted spirit, and that was on the days when she bothered to show up at all. Her neglect for attendance came to a head when close to an entire fortnight once passed without her showing face for any of her scheduled classes! She was fortunate Ūwilazala Academy was very lax when it came to attendance, not considering it a vital factor for qualifying its students so long as they are able to pass each exam at their respective appointed times, although such assessments had a reputation for being so frightfully complex, that missing out on even a single class on any given subject could set back a student exponentially in achieving the minimum marks required to keep enrolled.
It was when Silfr was sitting in on a droning class on runology and found herself nodding off that she at last decided appropriate action should be taken to remedy her chronic somnolence, if for nothing else but to save any blow her ego may suffer from letting anybody witness her drift off in the middle of a crucial seminar and call her cognition into question, praying to her eerie deity later that day for nobody to have noticed, and wishing malison on any who did. At the next opportunity following the offending catalyst, Silfr dedicated herself to browsing Ūwilazala's vast library in search of a method to bypass her acute lack of energy, although incantations for breaking laws of conversion or time were not quite comprehensible to her as of yet, forcing her instead to turn to the possibilities of potions; a subtopic in which she had dabbled in some before. Alas, the brewing processes for the majority of the solutions she came across thus far in the athenaeum were far beyond her current level of expertise in that field, or the ingredients required to concoct them were simply far too rare or expensive for her to easily obtain, however, she would eventually happen across a certain musty textbook in an obscure corner of the alchemical archives, its cover faded and appearing to not even possess a title, and its binding starting to fall apart, seeming as though nobody had checked it out for a fair few decades - if not a century - at the point of Silfr's discovery.
She was not hopeful she would find her answer in such forgotten volume (although she was not hopeful about most things by and large), but she was also desperate, and as she was leafing through the frayed, yellowing pages of the tome, quickly glancing at the irrelevant concoctions they contained such as hair removal cream for reptiles or eye-drops for earthworms, she happened across a recipe for a medicine which seemed able to supplement her meagre energy reserves just enough to keep her awake to cram in some seriously intensive studying until the exam season was over if regularly ingested according to its description. All the ingredients were something she could gather herself without too much effort or be able to afford on her student wizard's budget bar one single unusual element: 'the seed of a male with no carnal knowledge previous' were the book's exact words specifying this apparently essential component to provide the potion's rejuvenating energies. Her eerie deity seemed not without its sense of humour, however this was still the most feasible option that humourless Silfr was able to find, and she was committed to do whatever was necessary to keep her place at the Academy. It was merely a question of
how
she was to obtain this particular ingredient.
She certainly did not doubt there would be a shortage of sources within the Academy itself, as mages were oft bookish, scholarly types stereotyped for not leading the most exciting of sex lives. True, Silfr may have had several sexual liaisons of her own with some of her fellow students and one member of the faculty in the six or so months she had thus far spent her time staying at Ūwilazala, though she was an outlier in more than one sense of the word. Finding a virgin male should not have been an issue, especially among those close to her own age, although being able to determine who and who was not a virgin was a different story, and if there was an available spell which allowed one to divinate from a glance those who had not experienced coitus, she was not aware of it. However, while Silfr had not gotten to know anybody at the Academy to any significant capacity, she still had her suspicions about some she was dimly familiar with, the first coming to mind being one whom she shared her classes with: Percy McDuff.
Percy McDuff was another future graduate, albeit of one of lesser renown than Snow-Caller, whose biggest claim to fame is perhaps being the unintentional instigator of the Grand Explosion of '21 that shook Beag Hill and its surrounding area - a landmark obscure to the world at large save for that singular incident - although that story holds little relevance here. Percy was a young man who matched Silfr in age and height, although not quite in magical might in spite of his spotless attendance record. He was not a bad-looking boy, although with his scruffy brown hair, hand-me-down pointed cap of red velvet adorned with golden stars and moons, his shabby robe of matching colours, and horribly unfashionable spectacles with circular lenses that magnified his doe eyes and always sat slightly askew on his nose, he looked every bit an absent-minded scholar in the making. While he was far from unclever (as Ūwilazala students tended to be), he was socially inept, having not appeared to have established any sort of meaningful friendships in his time at the Academy which Silfr had noticed, and not for lack of trying unlike the Snjórlander who was of the belief the only person on campus who could truly understand her was her own self, although she was prepared to make a rare exception to initiate communication with the young man.
The day following her discovery of the solution to her setbacks, Silfr made the exertion to drag herself from her dorm in time to attend an afternoon lecture on conjuration theory after staying up until the wee hours of the morning holding a one-woman seance to contact with a spectre haunting the Academy's south wings. Like clockwork, Percy was also present, himself sitting in a row partway between the first and the middle benches with only his books and quill as company, while Silfr herself seated far closer to the rear of the room in solitude, remaining virtually motionless the entire hour while keeping her piercing gaze firmly fixed on the back of Percy's head like a hawk eyeing its prey on the very off chance he would leave the room early for whatever reason, while Percy himself remained in utter oblivion to the designs his classmate had in store for him.
Upon the lecture's end, Silfr stealthily stalked Percy out of the room with footsteps so silent, some might have mistaken her movement for gliding, following the unaware male until they were both climbing a zig-zagging stairwell that did not see too much traffic at that time of the day, and also narrow to the point where you would be brushing shoulders with anybody who came down the other way. It was then that Silfr made her approach, quickly coming up to Percy on his right side while he was climbing the steps at a more steady pace.
