"Yeah, Field Marshal Kroft will hear you out, she's a good one even if I can fault her choice of subordinates."

The Hall of Summoning stands out even among the varied buildings of the Acadamae. Rebuilt after the conflagration that finally claimed the life of Lord Volshyenek Ornelos, the Immortal Lord who founded the Acadamae, it is one of the largest structures in all of Varisia, surrounded by three even larger concentric binding circles and with many more inside. Should another host of powerful devils appear inside without the Immortal Lord to sacrifice himself in destroying them, the circles will contain the devastation to their interior. 

It must be important since it's the biggest place around here. And the summoner woman was the local Dean- She's not terrible with names so much as deliberately careless- But she'll explore over there eventually, when she mostly has Prestidigitation down and has made a couple of really low grade Fly wands and reclaimed her good one from Seska.

At the time she arrives, Messida will be in the middle of a lecture in the largest room, a few hundred students in the audience, standing on the back of Zarthorask to move between several floating bubbles displaying illusions of the different planes.

The display is of the Material enclosed by the elemental planes in one dimension, at the midpoint on the spectrum between the Positive Energy plane and First World on one end through to the Shadow plane and Negative Energy plane on the other in another dimension, all enveloped by the Ethereal plane that gives way to the Astral that separates the Inner planes from the afterlives of the Outer planes. 

Her lecture turns out to be on all the ways that this already-complex model is oversimplifying reality. She summons the least resident of each plane that Zarthorask walks her over to, and then asks each of them a question that reveals some new nuance of the structure and the illusion updates. The Astral teems with demiplanes and the flow of souls; the Styx winds between the lower planes; the Dreamlands exists within the Ethereal, and the nine layers of Hell are bordered by the Maelstrom and nested so that visitors have to pass through each one in turn, but not so for the seven tiers of Heaven. There are natural portals that form between some pairs of planes but not all of them. Most of the planes are infinite except, for some reason, Axis. 

Many students are visibly despairing at the prospect of having to recall all of this information for their exams. 

This is dense enough that she won't work on a scroll or ink as she waits. The Spirit Plane is accessible from here, sort of mostly, she checked. Is it the Dreamlands? Is it a way of staring sideways Astral? Is it related to the First World?

She'll have to see what kinds of experiments determined these planar properties and repeat them. 

(She takes notes and speculates about what sorts of things different sorts of findings would imply.)

Hmm.

...She decides that she wants to figure out a Plane Shift ritual circle and switches to doing some of the theoretical guesswork on that between lecture notes.