Etruvian Academy for Scholars

In the early hours of the morning you find an expensive looking envelope with bronze filigree within your pocket. Opening it, you discover it to be an invitation to attend the Etruvian Academy, a famous institution of higher learning where mystical marvels are discovered, rediscovered, and created. The invitation specifies a nearby meeting place roughly a month from when the letter is opened. Deciding to take a chance, you make your arrangements and go to the designated place.

Waiting for you is a floating carriage pulled by a pair of majestic griffins. They look at you with an uncanny intelligence and nod their heads as though giving permission. Boarding the carriage and getting comfortable, the griffins screech eagerly and take off, the carriage lifting away from the ground smoothly.

The transportation continues without rest all through the night and into the morning, the repetition of the fascinating conveyance only broken by the blurring of the landscape far below. Soon, though, you start to see dozens of other carriages identical to your own all heading towards a glittering, bronze shape on the horizon. A shape that is quickly resolving itself into a sprawling city upon a vast, otherwise empty grassland. Etruvian, the city of wonder.

The carriage makes a graceful landing in line with all the other ones and the door to the side opens on its own. as you leave, The carriage takes off again behind you, vanishing amidst the floating spires of the city as another lands nearby, disgorging it's passenger. Before you stands a massive campus built as much in a vertical as lateral fashion with towers of stone, bronze and steel reaching towards the sky, bridges and chains spanning the distance between in a chaotic web. Atop the tallest structure stands a glowing bronze sphere with several smaller spheres moving along tracks in great, looping arcs.

As you gaze about at the fantastical structures, a polite, effeminate cough breaks you from your reverie.