Head of House: Brian Ross
History: When Aeolus selected the four Winds as his first Heads of House, Eurus alone of the Anemoi refused the appointment, unwilling to afflict the students of the East with his characteristic unluckiness. Refusing the deathbed request of a wizard is no easy thing, however, and Eurus soon found himself accepting the post, if only to escape the curses of Aeolus that increased his misfortune a hundredfold. Before long, Eurus’s ill-fated squalls blew witches and wizards from the far-flung reaches of the East to the front doors of the school – and legend tells that along the way, the students were met with all manner of dreadful omens, from windburn to the sudden appearance of unavoidable cracks in the ground that caused their mothers to send Howlers about their back pain.
Unremitting, Eurus’s ill fortune continued to afflict Brubu House, even after the Wind had entrusted the House to a succession of later leaders. The students insist that black cats pursue them and that Brubus have suffered more dragon injuries while riding the tempest-winds than any other House. (The University’s chancellors have long ceased to remind Brubu House that the black cats are a long-standing Pampero prank and that the number of Brubu dragon injuries is actually lower, proportional to the number of Tempest Cup wins, than the other Houses’.) The House steadfastly refuses to keep mirrors anywhere near their common room for fear of breakage, and if a student strikes a match three times, the House sends him or her to sleep in the hallway.
Over the years, however, Brubu students have devised myriad strategies to avert the chaos and bad luck that plagues them, many of which have proven wildly successful. The most commonly known example is feng shui, designed to bring harmony to one's surroundings and to discourage oni and black cats alike. More significantly, Brubu students are known for being detail-oriented planners who battle the unknown through careful preparation. They have contributed to a number of organizational products and methodologies, including the abacus and electronic calculators, the time-turner, talking reminder calendars, the sundial and later, the modern timepiece. They also have a marked affinity for canning, preserving and pickling – as they say, “just in case.” Professors never have difficulty recognizing the students of Brubu, if not by the ever-present array of color-coded schedules, then by the three-metal shamanic bracelets that all Brubus wear to stave off demons.
Because of the general peril in which Brubu students find themselves, many collect good-luck charms and amulets: Brubus know how to charm rabbits' feet, three-leaf clovers and dragon figurines. They are also often purveyors of bottled genies, salt to throw over one's shoulder and henna tattoos of hamsa, and Brubu students can be counted on to warn you – often in shrieks sufficient to raise the dead – when you're about to walk under a ladder or step on a spider. Usually, Brubus will spend their holidays searching out qílín, baku, and other lucky creatures – with a knapsack full of protective wares, of course. In that, and in their dedication to auspiciousness, the students of Brubu truly are the progeny of Eurus: dedicated, careful travelers of far-off regions, always ready with a map of the winds and a lucky horseshoe.
Dragon: The Chinese Fireball, the Dragon of the East known to emit clouds of flame.
House Colors: The orange of the leaves during Eurus’s autumnal winds and the scarlet of the Chinese Fireball.
Tempest Cup Record: 1241, far more than Aeolian University’s other Houses, even powerful Matanuska. The Brubu students are adamant, however, that this is nothing more than the consequence of many a blown-out arrangement of birthday candles.
Notable Alumni: Cai Shen, who guards prosperity; Melvil Dewey, who classified books; Sejong, who invented an alphabet; Chimata-No-Kami, who administers crossroads, byways, and footpaths; and Benjamin Franklin, whose kite summoned the lightning.
Achievements: Creating beautiful shrines to the Seven Lucky Gods; planting the world’s largest field of lucky bamboo; mastering legions of ifrit and djinni; and enchanting the first movable-type printing press.
Unusual Fact: While Pandora wasn’t a Brubu, she did find a box in which thousands of Brubu students had enclosed their terrible portents – and which a particularly doomed Brubu student misplaced.
Brubu House - | - Kohilo House - | - Matanuska House - | - Pampero House
Head of House: Skyler Hijazi
History: Although Aeolus well understood the unfettered spirit of Zephyrus, he entrusted one of the University’s four houses to his guidance, all the while anticipating that the responsibility would ground the great Wind. Instead, Zephyrus used his gentle breezes for persuasion, luring to Aeolia those graced with his own wanderer’s heart. Enticed from majestic, desolate mountains, from shores both wild and temperate, from islands lost in the eternal sea, students of the West come to the University of Aeolus. Windblown, they turn up at the University’s door – but not before they’ve dallied with the Pali winds of the Pacific, danced with the dust whirls of California, and ridden the wild Chinooks, the greatest of the snow-eaters, down the Rocky Mountains.
From the time of the Taotao Mona, Kohilos have fashioned their own trails, twisting and unexpected, by the radiance of the sun and the sheen of the moon. Students of the House have spent years migrating with the Absarokee and charting the ocean’s currents with the Tongan King, in time returning to the University wretchedly behind in classes, but with breathtaking tales to tell – of the astonishing cities of the Navajo, the Min Min lights of Australia revealed as particularly playful hinkypunks, the Animagus Kalamainu’u disguised as a lizard goddess. Kohilos have always excelled at that which interests them – and overlooked that which doesn’t. They flourish in Herbology, for example, their drifting journeys teaching them profound knowledge of plants, flowers, roots and herbs. Potions, too, appeals to them, with its many applications, but to Transfiguration they devote little time, unwilling to disturb the nature of living creatures. (After millennia of having their lessons met with such unwavering indifference, the University’s Transfiguration faculty have tried several times to discontinue the lessons, to no avail.)
Kohilos’ manifest independence, greater than a hunting bird on the wing, not only tries the University’s faculty but tests the Kohilo students themselves. Ever friendly, easily diverted, enduringly serene, Kohilos tend toward idealism – some might say naïveté – in always expecting serendipitous endings. Lamentably, generations of Kohilos have learned a deeply harsh lesson in inadvertent outcomes: The House is honor-bound to alleviate the continual turmoil in the Pacific Region after its experiments raised many of Polynesia’s islands from the depths of the seas (to the delight of South Seas navigators) and created the tumultuous Ring of Fire. (Fortuitously for Kohilo House, the University has not yet verified that the students have polished the very same spell for casting north of Australia, producing gnarly swells for those looking to exchange winds and a broom for a few hours of waves and a surfboard.) None of the Houses, though, can match the skill that a Kohilo student directs to that which catches her eye: a new dialect of Mermish, earth ready for spring planting or the movement of the great western herds.
Whether Kohilos follow a calling through to completion, or abandon it to study the movement of Micronesian traders or to visit the Menehune of the Hawaiian forests, Zephyrus’s tranquil legacy always guides his students’ journeys. (Kohilos accede to Zephyrus’s less celebrated roving as well; while their flirting knows no limit, none have had such infamous exploits as Iris, Podarge and Hyacinth.) Their individualism, hampered only by persuasion, delineates the house. Kohilos are boundless and free, wanderers of the world, spirits of the wind.
Dragon: The Antipodean Opaleye, the beautiful, placid valley-dweller of New Zealand.
House Colors: The purple of the majestic western mountains and the iridescent of the Antipodean Opaleye’s scales.
Tempest Cup Record: 207, which the University’s chancellors find distressingly low but seems to bother the Kohilos not at all. In fact, on the few occasions when Kohilo has won the Cup, the University’s faculty, Cup and Opaleyes in tow, generally have had to track the truant Kohilos to ocean waves and mountain peaks.
Notable Alumni: Tagaloa, who brought fire to the West; Paka’a, who commanded the winds of the sails; John Muir, who preserved the western wilderness; Maui, who stopped the sun; and Ansel Adams, who could never get his Muggle camera to color the pictures quite right.
Achievements: Waterproofing the canoes of Polynesia and the Pacific Northwest; developing Fizzing Whizbees from the Australian Billywig; planting the California redwoods; and a great honor, being invited to dance for rain with the Pueblos.
Unusual Fact: The noble mustangs of the West are descended from Bailus and Xanthus, the horses that Zephyrus sired for Achilles.
Brubu House - | - Kohilo House - | - Matanuska House - | - Pampero House
Head of House: Joanna Goldstein
History: When Aeolus charged him with one of the University’s four houses, Boreas didn’t invite the northern climes to Aeolia so much as challenge them with his gales. The rampant fury of his blizzards tore through forests, around mountains and over seas, from Thrace to the Polynia – and the courageous adventurers of the North dared to answer. They tracked the Knik Winds from Palmer and the landlashes from Cape Wrath, and arrived at Aeolian University unbowed, powerful, formidable and a little frostbitten.
Goaded by Boreas’s fierce winds and guided by the North Star, Matanuskas soon commanded many of the world’s great expeditions, founding an ancient and notorious tradition of conquest. They mapped the mountains of Thrace in little time and progressed far into the Arctic Circle, discovering in the icy wastelands of Thule a toy factory, run by a peculiar wizard from whom they learned beautiful woodworking. Matanuska Leif Eriksson discovered the vast bounty of the New World, though the information soon drove many Matanuska students, unable to let any journey lie, to endless quests for the rumored Northwest Passage. William Edward Parry, a Head of the House, first attempted the North Pole, and Robert Peary, another proud Matanuska standard-bearer, achieved the goal nearly a century later. At that point, however, having thoroughly explored the regions of the North, Matanuska House soon began conquering the great challenges of the other Houses’ territories, from Amundsen’s attaining of Pampero’s South Pole to Hillary and Norgay’s climbing Mount Everest deep in Brubu’s Himalayas. It was at that point that Chancellor Singh firmly reminded Matanuska House of the relentless adventuring of Batu Khan, how Baghdad to this day will not entertain Matanuska wizards – and all those years wasted on Brubu’s construction of the Great Wall to keep overzealous Matanuskas out.
Despite their love of quests and daring, new horizons, great mountains and infinite seas, every Matanuska remembers the great principles charged them by Boreas: brave the winds and your duty, protect the great treasures of the earth, and always leave a Matanuska flag. Every Matanuska remembers that their first duty is to Hyperborea, the land beyond the North Winds, home of eternal spring and protected by the bitter expanse of Thrace. Every Matanuska feels the inexorable draw of Valhöll, lit by the glinting lights of the Aurora Borealis, and the duty owed to Óðinn upon the coming of Ragnarök. Matanuskas even remember the ancient traditions of the bogatyri and Ilya Muromets’s great deeds, not to mention his talking horse. (Matanuskas have been searching for talking horses on school holidays ever since.) The great statue of Haldjas in the common room serves as a daily reminder that duty, loyalty and protection are the vital precepts of Boreas’s House.
Intermittently, as with all educational institutions, plans go awry, great challenges unanswered. Though Matanuskas such as Paul Bunyan have made their way even into Muggle lore, the epic poems of the House have been known to skip some of the House’s most infamous exploits: the Snow Queen’s abductions, Jack Frost’s explosive rages, the Flying Dutchman’s bargain and even the utterly foolish untying of the third knot. Despite the occasional misdirection, though, the gales of the House run strong and true. The House knows extraordinary power, and its obduracy and rage are tempered, like the steel of their weaponscraft, with an unwavering sense of responsibility. Adventure commands the House of Boreas, but duty and the stars always bring Matanuskas home again.
Dragon: The Hebridean Black, the defiant, spiked Dragon native to the Scottish isles.
House Colors: The blue of the ice, snow and power of the North and the black of the Hebridean Black.
Tempest Cup Record: 809, a truly respectable number, in which the MacFusty clan takes great pride. Though a MacFusty has never attended Aeolian University, the family takes wild, unbridled pleasure in presenting their formidable Dragons for the gales and fury of the Tempest Cup.
Notable Alumni: Chione, who commanded the snow; Nastasia, who had the heart of a warrior; Ymir, who founded the great and terrible frost giants; Ilmarinen, who conjured his own winds; and Brynhildr, most famous of the valkyrjur.
Achievements: Defeating the kraken; breeding the celebrated line of flying reindeer; mapping the maelstrom; and astonishing magical craftsmanship, from weapons to wood carving to leaded crystal.
Unusual Fact: Matanuska House has been hiding a portion of the North Pole in their common room for centuries, to the great confusion of navigators in the area.
Brubu House - | - Kohilo House - | - Matanuska House - | - Pampero House
Head of House: Sue Upton
History: Despite Aeolus’s hope that Notus would tame his sly and clever nature, Aeolian University has welcomed more than its fair share of tricksters, mischief-makers and thieves – all tempted from the south by the heavy cloak of Notus’s thunderous storms, impenetrable mists and whirlwinds of sand. While only a few members of Pampero House have been truly Machiavellian (Machiavelli, obviously, being one), the students have shown a near-universal penchant for scheming, plotting, planning and the occasional bout of underhanded dealing. As the tales tell, any Pampero would happily give up an owl in the hand for the chance to snatch a half-dozen from the owlery later.
To the eternal frustration of the University’s chancellors, the students of Pampero House have shown little inclination to change their ways. Many methods have been tried over the years: detention, kitchen duty, even the suspension of all field trips after the Triangle Incident and the resulting annual apology to the governor of Bermuda. Nothing has worked, and indeed, the Chancellors often find themselves at odds with Pampero Heads of House, who unanimously find their students “witty”, “ingenious” and “quick” rather than “devious”, “lying” and “somewhat annoying to international dignitaries.”
No one can deny, however, that Pampero students, whether blown in by the Abroholos of Brazil or the Harmattan of the Sudan, routinely occupy the top slots in their classes. Rumor has it that the wisdom that the Queen of Sheba acquired from King Solomon is still stored in an amulet in their common room, and that students touch it for good luck before exams; the University has repeatedly tried to dispel this as nothing more than conjecture, but the sly grins of Pampero students in response to questioning reassure no one. Some of the world’s most famed mysteries can be traced back to Pampero House’s intellect: the pyramids of Egypt, the world’s prevalent crop circles, the unexplained Nazca Lines. In fact, whenever a professor sets Matanuska students to deciphering Stonehenge or Kohilo students to explaining the statues of Rapa Nui, the snickering that fills Pampero’s common room leaves little doubt as to their origin. Unfortunately for the globe’s scholars, Pampero students steadfastly refuse to explain the meaning, if any, behind these great wonders – or what on earth they did the year that Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu and Kumari Kandam sank beneath the waves of the world’s oceans. While that last charge is as yet unproven, tales point all fingers toward unusually reckless squalls of Pampero activity that year.
Generally, Pampero students tend to be harmless, though their mischievous tendencies and superior intellect tend to drive the other students to distraction (such as when they remagicked the Matanuska common room password, and the mighty adventurers of the north spent three undignified weeks sleeping in the hallway). They are brilliant puzzle-solvers, having created most of the world’s riddles. While fond of pranks, they tend to be thoughtless rather than malicious, rule-benders rather than breakers, too easily caught up in the tempest of the game – and their charm almost always leads to quick forgiveness. Above all, they are inveterately curious and given to exploration, not only of the enigmas of the world, but the world itself.
Dragon: The Peruvian Vipertooth, the smallest, swiftest and wiliest of all Dragons.
House Colors: The yellow of the Southern summer sky and the copper of the venomous Peruvian Vipertooth.
Tempest Cup Record: Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pampero House has never won the Tempest Cup, though they have come close on numerous occasions, only to succumb when a prank cost them last-minute points. This may be for the best, however, since the winning House’s prize, journeying with the tempest-winds, entails riding the House’s dragons – and Peruvian Vipertooths have a marked taste for humans.
Notable Alumni: Eshu, who taught the Yoruba; Huehuecoyotl, the coyote Animagus of the Aztecs; Kon, who confounded the Incans; Imhotep, who turned his magic to medicine; and El Jacho, who spends his days drawing Puerto Rican visitors astray with his “ghostly lights.”
Achievements: Taming the Sphinx; befriending the Sirens; inspiring many, many Muggle stories of tricksters, from Anansi to Brer Rabbit.
Unusual Fact: The Lighthouse at Alexandria, built while the University still resided on Aeolia, resulted from the astronomical number of ships and sailors lost to Notus’s mist.
Brubu House - | - Kohilo House - | - Matanuska House - | - Pampero House