Set, like a large collapsed pudding with turrets, on one side of Sator Square, Unseen University is Ankh-Morpork's traditional seat of higher magical learning (a seat with a lot of middle-age spread. A really large seat, in fact. It's amazing how large, actually... Oh, you get my drift). Instead of playing with the edges of reality these days, the faculty seems to be rather playing with the edge of where one meal ends and the other begins. They've left the edge of adventure and confined themselves to the edge of their plates. Not that this isn't a good thing all round...
I absolutely love the Unseen University faculty. They're my all-time favourites (next to the City Guard characters. And Gaspode. And Death and Susan. Quoth the Raven and Alfred. Er. . . but they are my favourites. Really).
"Yeah!" said the Dean, now in the grip of a wild, unwizardly machismo.
"We're mean! Yeah! Are we mean?"
The Archchancellor raised his eyebrows, and then turned to the rest
of the wizards.
"Are we mean?" he said.
"Er. I'm feeling reasonably mean," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
"I'm definitely very mean, I think," said the Bursar. "It's having no
boots that does it," he added.
"I'll be mean if everyone else is," said the Senior Wrangler.
The Archchancellor turned back to the Dean.
"Yes," he said, "it appears that we are all mean."
"Yo!" said the Dean.
"Yo what?" said Ridcully.
"It's not a yo what, it's just a yo," said the Senior Wrangler, behind him. "It's
a general street greeting and affirmative with convivial military ingroup and masculine
bonding-ritual overtones."
"What? What? Like 'jolly good'?" said Ridcully.
"I suppose so," said the Senior Wrangler, reluctantly.
Ridcully was pleased. Ankh-Morpork had never offered very good prospects for
hunting. He'd never thought it possible to have so much fun in his own university.
"Right," he said. "Let's get those heaps!"
"Yo!"
"Yo!"
"Yo!"
"Yo-yo."
Ridcully sighed. "Bursar?"
"Yes, Archchancellor?"
"Just try to understand, all right?"
Ridcully the Brown, aka the boss from hell, is quite well known as the University's only gung-ho health and nature nut. He's considering a memoir entitled Up the Ankh with rod, paddle and Viper Mark II Crossbow. He's obsessed with getting fitter and faster, whilst killing as much of the natural fauna as possible. He's unkillable, which, when he's jogging past the windows of the other wizards at four in the morning, whistling cheerfully, is quite a galling state of affairs. It's just that he's so infernally happy about it.
Mustrum Ridcully was, depending on your point of view, either the worst or the
best Archchancellor that Unseen University had had for a hundred years.
There was too much of him, for one thing. It wasn't that he was particularly
big, it was just that he had the kind of huge personality that fits any available space.
He'd get roaring drunk at supper and that was fine and acceptable wizardly behaviour.
But then he'd go back to his room and play darts all night and leave at five in the morning
to go duck hunting. He shouted at people. He tried to jolly them along. And he
hardly ever wore proper robes. He'd persuaded Mrs Whitlow, the University's dreaded
housekeeper, to make him a sort of baggy trouser suit in garish blue and red; twice a
day the wizards stood in bemusement and watched him jog purposefully around the
University buildings, his pointy wizarding hat tied firmly on his head with string.
He'd shout cheerfully up at them, because fundamental to the make-up of people like
Mustrum Ridcully is an iron belief that everyone else would like it, too, if only they
tried it.
"Maybe he'll die," they told one another hopefully, as they watched him try to
break the crust on the river Ankh for an early morning dip. "All this healthy exercise can't be
good for him."
Stories trickled back to the University. The Archchancellor had gone two rounds bare-fisted with
Detritus, the huge odd-job troll at the Mended Drum. The Archchancellor had arm-wrestled with
the Librarian for a bet, and, although of course he hadn't won, still had his arm afterwards. The Archchancellor
wanted the University to form its own football team for the big city game on Hogswatchday.
Intellectually, Ridcully maintained his position for two reasons. One was that he never, ever
changed his mind about anything. The other was that it took him several minutes to understand any new
idea put to him, and this was a very valuable trait in a leader, because anything anyone is still trying to explain to
you after two minutes is probably important and anything they give up after a mere minute or so is almost certainly something they shouldn't
have been bothering you with in the first place.
There seemed to be more Mustrum Ridcully than one body could reasonably contain.
I just know you've met the perfect Librarian. But have you considered one with four hands and a penchant for bananas? The Librarian of Unseen University is an ape. Not any old ape: a orang-utan, in fact. (Never use the M-word. He hates it. If people call him a monkey he goes absolutely. . . oh no. I didn't mean it, it just slipped out, I won't ever... AARGH! Ow! Ow! Ow!)
... he bangs your head on the floor. I knew I shouldn't have invested in those slate tiles...
It was eight in the morning, a time when drinkers are trying either to forget who they are or remember where they live. The other occupants of the Mended Drum were hunched over their drinks around the walls and watching an orang-utan, who was playing Barbarian Invaders and screaming with rage every time he lost a penny.
Of course, no one's allowed to know his real name (it's Horace Worblehat - do you blame him?), as they could turn him back into a human (a highly overrated species). He prefers to mooch around on his knuckles, uttering only the occasional ook of mild reproof when one of the magical books eats an unwary student. He loves playing organs, especially those made by Bloody Stupid Johnson. He's a rock-'n-roll fan, and once played in a band (in an alternate past that didn't really happen - or something like that). He's a master of the L-Space time portals. And he just loves what passes for arcade games in good ol' Ankh-Morpork.
The stranger picked up his most recent glass and wandered over to
the Barbarian Invaders machine.
It was made of clockwork of a complex and intricate design. There
was a suggestion of many gears and worm drives in the big mahogany cabinet
under the game, the whole function of which appeared to be to make rows of
rather crudely carved Barbarian Invaders jerk and wobble across a rectangular
proscenium. The player, by means of a system of levers and pulleys, operated
a small self-loading catapult that moved below the Invaders. This shot small
pellets upwards. At the same time the Invaders (by means of a ratchet-and-pawl
mechanism) dropped small metal arrows. Periodically a bell rang and an Invader
on horseback oscillated hesitantly across the top of the game, dropping spears.
The whole assemblage rattled and creaked continuously, partly because of
all the machinery and partly because the orang-utan was wrenching both handles,
jumping up and down on the Fire pedal, and screaming at the top of his voice.
The Bursar
The Bursar is perhaps the most sympathetic character at the University; he's certainly the strangest. Originally he was just a rather timid soul whose job no one else seemed to want, as the idea of adding figures all day didn't appeal. But with the advent of Ridcully, the Bursar's mental state started to deteriorate considerably. Ridcully tried to "get him out of himself", mostly by dressing up in horrendous masks and leaping out of dark doorways at him. And, of course, he's not partial to shocks. Or the undead. And so he became incurably insane {*crash of thunder*}.
It was a complete mystery to Mustrum Ridcully, a man designed by Nature to live outdoors and happily slaughter anything that coughed in the bushes, why the Bursar (a man designed by Nature to sit in a small room somewhere, adding up figures) was so nervous. He'd tried all sorts of things to, as he put it, buck him up. These included practical jokes, surprise early morning runs, and leaping out at him from behind doors while wearing Willie the Vampire masks in order, he said, to take him out of himself.
Of course, the other wizards at U U came up with a fairly clever means of overcoming the Bursar's hallucinations: dried frog pills. Yes - one of those poisonous tree frogs, actually. Instead of curing him, however, they make him hallucinate that he's completely sane. It works rather well. (Of course, some tweaking was required. At one stage, for example, he hallucinated that he was a bookcase). Even though he's now hallucinating that he's a Bursar almost all the time, he does hallucinate that he can fly, leading to dark urban legends of giant bats flying around U U. Which doesn't really please Ridcully that much...
The wizards of Unseen University set great store by big, solid meals. A man couldn't be expected to get down
to some serious wizarding, they held, without soup, fish, game, several huge plates of meat, a pie or two, something big
and wobbly with cream on it, little savoury things on toast, fruit, nuts and a brick-thick mint with the coffee.
It gave him a lining to his stomach. It was also important that the meals were served at regular times. It was what
gave the day shape, they said.
Except for the Bursar, of course. He didn't eat much, but lived on his nerves. He was certain he was anorectic,
because every time he looked in a mirror he saw a fat man. It was the Archchancellor, standing behind him and
shouting at him.
The Dean
"Oook."
"You? We can't take you," said the Dean, glaring at the Librarian. "You don't know
a thing about guerilla warfare."
"Oook!" said the Librarian, and made a surprisingly comprehensive gesture to indicate that,
on the other hand, what he didn't know about orangutan warfare could be written on the very small pounded-up remains
of, for example, the Dean.
"Four of us should be enough," said the Archchancellor.
"I've never even heard him say 'Yo'," muttered the Dean.
He removed his hat, something a wizard doesn't ordinarily do unless
he's about to pull something out of it, and handed it to the Bursar. Then he tore a thin
strip off the bottom of his robe, held it dramatically in both hands, and tied it around
his forehead.
"It's part of the ethos," he said, in answer to their penetratingly unspoken
question. "That's what the warriors on the Counterweight Continent do before they go
into battle. And you have to shout - " He tried to remember some far-off reading " - er, bonsai.
Yes. Bonsai!"
He's also known as Two Chairs, a comment on the size of his, er, seat. Ridcully isn't all that fond of the Dean. Mostly because the Dean has a rebellious streak. In Soul Music he even made himself a black leather coat with "Born To Rune" on it. A seventy year old who acts like a teenager. A rather macho, decrepit teenager, but anyway.
The Dean started to mutter urgently under his breath, and then screamed.
"I've gone blind!"
"Your bonsai bandage has fallen over your eyes, Dean."
The Senior Wrangler
* The post of Senior Wrangler was an unusual one, as was the name itself. In some centres of learning, the Senior Wrangler is a leading philosopher; in others, he's merely someone who looks after horses. The Senior Wrangler of Unseen University was a philosopher who looked like a horse, thus neatly encapsulating all definitions.
I have no idea. He seems to be rather boring and over-full of trivia. A typical wizard, in fact.
Guess who? Yup, Rincewind. He tends to prefer to withdraw from the world these days, and stick to wizarding quietly in a room somewhere. With piles of harmless rocks and non-magical books. Nothing vaguely scary at all. Of course, every time the disc needs to be saved from catastrophe, Rincewind knows he'll be forced to be involved. To avoid this, he's taken to volunteering. Really. Clever. Isn't. It?
Most quotations taken from Reaper Man, Terry Pratchett (1997) Victor Gollancz, St Edmundsbury Press Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. The Librarian quotes are taken from Soul Music. One of the Bursar quotes is from Men at Arms. The first one.