Late Submission
A professor who marks your life instead of your essays, and grades on a curve.
Play as
A capable, cautious final-year student who has spent his life just under the top of the class and is now being graded on the parts of himself he never submitted.
How it opens
This week's card is on the mat inside your door, thick cream stock, your name in fountain pen. Below it, a column of marks against categories no syllabus ever listed: DISCIPLINE B+. HONESTY C−. NERVE, this week, a red F that seems to sit slightly warmer on the page than the rest. At the bottom, in Hale's exact hand: You are being out-performed. See the curve.
And there is a curve — a printed distribution with a single dot marked YOU, well left of a cluster of anonymous others who are, apparently, living braver weeks than you are. You do not know who they are. You are fairly sure the F is why the seminar went quiet when you walked in this morning, and why the tutor you needed a favour from suddenly had no time.
Hale's office hours are at four. You can go and ask him directly what he is grading you toward, spend the week deliberately earning back the NERVE mark and see if the world softens, or try to find even one other student who will admit a card comes under their door too.
Setting
Your final year at a grey northern university. Professor Hale returned your first essay unmarked, with a single note: I grade the student, not the paper. Since then a report card has been appearing under your door each week — graded not on coursework but on how you spent the days: choices, courage, cruelties, all scored, all curved against your classmates. The grades are starting to change how the world treats you. Nobody else admits to receiving one.
A branch can end when
- Cassian discovers what Hale is grading toward and passes, fails, or refuses it
- Cassian finds the other graded students and they act on the curve together
- A single mark costs Cassian something real enough to make him walk out of the exam