Year Four, Draconic studies final paper

Ardath had a bad time trying to come up with the project that would fit the Draconic classes. Mostly due to the fact that her participation in this class was more of a nod in Kisjan direction than anything else. At the start she thought big. Like really big. Get a lot of tribes, info on the culture, resource management, cooperation between the tribes and then plug it into some mathematical theorems that she found interesting or dug upon in the years prior. Mostly would be based on linear programming, so a lot of equations, a knapsack problem and a maximum flow in the network.

And then it hit her. This *got to* be connected somehow with magic. Also the action at Untermauler’s office didn’t improve much. Out of the people she knew for sure to be dragon tribe descendants and considered her friends, one went missing for a while. So she had somewhat of a late start with the project.

Eventually she settled for letting go of the cultural aspect, assuming boldly best case scenario that the tribes *will* cooperate. She didn’t have much problem extracting information on how the things are dealt with in Bothotlo tribe of Sventisko and then just found a few people from Vutazon and Canar tribes and threw a lot of questions in their direction. She made it look kind and helped in exchange with what she was able but in the end felt like she came out better from it than her peers

(Persuasion 20)

Then she hit the dead end. She tried to find some additional information on either how the tribes work, what resources are at their disposal or highly sought after, but without any luck. Libraries seemed to be absolutely helpless against the current events or she just had a bad time finding anything. She also had a real struggle trying to gather any insight on, slightly forgotten since she was in Clockwork City, math that would lead to a conclusion in the paper.

(History 9, Arcana 13)

Slightly disappointed, especially by the mathematical part of the paper, she decided to go to a person she knew that was from the same place and had the same ideas put in his head way back when. And Cuan definitely was a go-to. She sat down with him, explained the idea behind, sorta brushed over the more unfortunate part of the research and popped ideas about the math behind it all. Fortunately Hilde was around and overheard the conversation. It turned out a little fairy had been picking up on stories here and there and quickly filled up the missing parts in the crossovers between the tribes and some resource management.

(Hilde’s History 19)

That put up the Clockwork duo for a success, even though math still was a little underwhelming to her, mostly due to triviality of tools used to solve the issue, the outcome wasn’t half bad. The question whether her Draconic teacher would get what was behind that and how well Ardath would be able to present and defend her statements is another whole story.