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The thirteen-year-old Palamedes was sitting folded up sideways on Cam's bed in the tiny room. He looked up from from his tablet, asking "Do I want to be a doctor?"
Cam was sitting on the floor leaning against the side of her bed. She twisted to look up at the young scholar. "Of course you want to be a doctor," she told him. He had hunger for every qualification he could ever acquire, which had redoubled with his growing devotion to Dulcinea, heir of the Seventh House, and his conviction that if he could make Warden by age fifteen, he'd be able to unlock paths of study that might arrest her tragic illness.
"Or rather," she asked consideringly, narrowing her eyes suspiciously. "Why would you NOT want to be a doctor?"
He looked down to meet her eyes squarely. "It's horrible," he told her, shaking his head wryly. "Truly horrible. A crime against the qualification system."
"Stop the dramatics and tell me," she told him impatiently, raising a hand imperiously and gesturing commandingly for him to pass her his tablet.
Instead he swung round to sit over the side of the bed and began to lecture, paraphrasing the regulations he'd been examining unforgivingly. "As you know Cam," he began, and she elbowed him in the leg.
"As you know," he repeated heavily, determined to practice his explanations, "Here in the sixth house, a doctorate has waxed and waned in prestige over the centuries compared to the other qualifications and appointments which people can achieve."
Cam sighed ostentatiously and settled in for a lecture. "At the moment, as has commonly been the case since our founding, a doctorate is supposed to represent a large body of notionally original independent study, typically conducted over several years, and often culminating in the presentation of a specific thesis in a dynamic debate before a quasi-adversarial interview panel," the boy continued.
Cam glared at him. "Yes, that. 'Usually held by, and leading to, more senior scholar roles and wardenships.' Hence why it's very you, but you don't have time to pursue it when you could be outperforming in ten different courses at the same instead."
"Ah," began Palamedes, raising a lecturing finger, but was interrupted as Cam elbowed him again.
"Oof," he complained. "Sorry. Can I go on? This bit is actually interesting."
"You may go on," permitted Camilla graciously. She turned and scooted back, facing the scholar as best as she could in a limited room.
He shook his hands loose in his cuffs and wiggled them illustratively like someone about to produce a rabbit out of a hat, and declaimed. "There are seventeen different sets of criteria which have been established as constituting the examination for a doctoral qualification. Eighteen if you include the Lyxaform Qualitatives. Five require a minimum time period, and probably wouldn't count towards for my score allocation for at least three years, and so wouldn't make me eligible for the most important posts any earlier. Eight of the remainder require prerequisite courses I wouldn't qualify to undertake until I was already a Warden, unless I delayed most of the other courses I need to take in the next few years. One counts as a doctorate for the purposes of prerequisites but doesn't count as ANY course points towards future qualifications and eligibilities."
"So..?" she prodded him to continue, subtracting rapidly from a running total in her head.
"And the remaining three of seventeen are very niche, but still extant, combinations of conditions where I could in theory meet the prerequisites, fulfil the necessary courses and research, and qualify me to gain a doctorate which would count significantly towards earlier eligibility for Wardenhood, with less total time taken than earning the same number of points through separate courses."
"But...?" she prompted dutifully on cue.
"But, unfortunately all three of them would either require research started specifically for that qualification, which would need to replace the independent study I'm already doing, or require a different set of lower-level prerequisite courses which I would need to do in addition to my current tranche of courses. Either of which would put me behind schedule for meeting the necessary warden prerequisites as early as possible."
"But that's ruled out all of them," objected Cam, who had perfected counting rapidly to seventeen when bantering with her scholarly friend. "What's the good part?"
"Ah," explained Palamedes smugly, drawing his legs up to curl around him, out of punching range. "Only if you don't count the Lyxaform qualitatives, which, on this occasion, I do."
She looked at him boggled. "Surely you can't..."
He chucked with self satisfaction. "Maybe I can't. But maybe I can. They're eccentric, sure. Often stigmatised, or recklessly unwise. But if they haven't been expressively repealed, they're still on the books. And the one for doctoral examination is still there."
She looked from him down to her own notes. And back up to him. And back down. "And, what, exactly does this one entail?" she asked, suspiciously.
"The course itself is fairly straightforward. It was originally proposed as an accelerated path for people who were already doing independent research, with a lot of debate about exactly what abilities needed to be demonstrated to constitute comparable expertise to a more standard doctoral program. There's a list of specific courses. Most of them I have already, or could pick up. One big one would need to take the place of extended spirit communation, but that's doable if it's worth it, I can fulfil those prerequisites another way.
Cam tapped her fingers impatiently. "And the final exam?" That was often where the Lyxaform Qualitative regulations went off the rails the worst.
He laughed. "That's what I was laughing about. You'll never guess."
Camilla stood, straightening her legs from a sitting position in a single fluid fighter's motion, rising literally to the challenge. She paced one, two steps one way, and one, two steps back studying the floor as if she was thinking hard. "Hm," she considered ostentatiously, ticking off the points on her fingers. "Can I guess? Let's see. Firstly. It's a ridiculous bizzarium requirement. Secondly. You love outdoing everyone else on those. Thirdly. You're laughing."
"Conclusion:" He cowered back from her dramatically pointing finger. "You, scholar, have somehow already fulfilled this requirement, probably through massively overachieving some eccentric requirement in a non-standard way, for some other course you already completed ten years younger than anyone else."
He clapped her a couple of times, and she bowed ironically. "It doesn't count if you guess that broadly," he added protestingly.
She just shushed him. "Let me have my glory. Better yet, stop clowning and tell me what you actually did," she told him. They both laughed, Cam leaning back against the door and stretching her cramped legs.
Palamedes sighed. "You remember when you were in that cavalier seclusion? I was studying with Boa Hexates. She was into a lot of controversial bone-magic theorems that she dug out of the archives. Left here by a wandering ninth ascetic a couple of centuries back. The techniques were moderately interesting, and between them fulfilled a large portion of requirements for five different courses I need to take at my current level, including Bone Morph Resonances."
Cam made a "hurry up" gesture. Palamades gave the sigh of a long-suffering friend. "She practised constructing animal skeletons from parts of different skeletons. It was supposed to show that you really understood the skeleton if you could construct it from parts that didn't contain a thanergetic mirror of the original form. One of the most interesting were snakes because you really could just add a few extra spinal vertebrae and get a longer snake."
"But," he continued dramatically, "it also created a skeleton construct which was significantly more difficult for another necromancer to affect, which arguably has applications if you ever manage to get engaged in a necromantic duel."
"Which you don't. That's what I'm for," agreed Cam.
"But if I ever did, better that I'd win," countered Palamedes.
Cam considered that for a second. "She made us wrestle them," put in Palamedes helpfully. "Me and Koats Seeze. You know, the morbid one. He was also studying with her. She made one of us raise one of those snakes, ingredients be damned. And the other had to try to take it apart again. A lot of it had to be done with your bare hands. Or fists. Until you could unravel the thanergy."
Cam was staring at him. "Honest. Honest to God," he told her.
"But you're a--" she began.
"A necromancer. I know. I didn't say I was especially good at the wrestling part. But I did it."
"But you're the--" she began again.
"The finest necromancer in my generation. I know. Now, now I've seen how it's done, I could take one of them apart from across the room. But for better or worse, I didn't figure it out without taking it apart bit by bit the hard way first."
She was staring at him. He always had some story that topped the previous story he'd told her. "And I MISSED this?" she asked him pointedly. "You, Palamades Sextus. Choking out a giant bone snake. You did this, when I was away?"
"I did do this when you were away," he confirmed neutrally. Neither of them could decide if she'd wanted to be there to protect him, or for the entertainment.
Belatedly, she remembered why they were talking about this in the first place. "And the Lyxaform Qualitative examination rubric. What exactly did it need? Was it..."
"Fighting one of these snakes?" asked Palamedes. "Which I could now do trivially? Yes." He helpfully highlighted the place in his notes, and she carefully examined the surrounding qualifications and point totals.
"It does, indeed, seem to be another, eccentric, combination of requirements which comprise the prerequisites for an anomalously early doctoral certification," she informed him drily.
"According to the record, it was supposed to demonstrate a combination of tenacity and raw necromantic talent in areas students aren't expected to already have trained in. In fact, it was inevitably a bad compromise between different members of the Lyxaform committee who had divergent incompatible visions of how it would work"
"So, wait," she told him. "Can you actually do this? Can you really get those points with a few weeks of study and a hilarious ritual combat that you're actually already expert at? I'll sell tickets, although it would have been much funnier before you learned how to do it effortlessly. But if you can, you could save almost a year in your study plan..." she trailed off calculating.
"Oh. No," he told her. "All that is completely true. But one of the smaller perquisite courses was actually disbanded a hundred and ten years ago, I checked over the annotations while I was explaining to you. There's no record of replacement being instituted, so the entire branch of study is probably completely incompleteable now. It should have been automatically removed from the regulations in the overhaul, but it didn't get flagged at the time. It turns out it doesn't help me at all."
She threw a cushion at him, knocking him backwards onto the bed.