Oddly enough, I don’t have many characters that are defined by their professions as scholars or work as teachers and instructors. Of Silm characters, Tacholdir the pin boy is the clearest example, being the writing/reader/language tutor for generations of Edain and elves. And thinking about want he’ll do after being resurrected at the start of the Second Age, the concept of him continuing that job, this time teaching Sindarin and Taliska to elves in Valinor or Tol Eressëa really appeals (Tacholdir is one of the few of the ten that I have clear and plot-y ideas about their second life).

Otherwise I have to turn to my original fics. 

Urwin from Rose Red is the ex-priest who works as the personal tutor-caretaker-retainer for Tadeo, the third son of an important warrior noble family, because the man that originally took him in and gave him friendship and a reason to care was an illegitimate cousin of the family. Urwin becomes the mentor for the heroine, Rohese, who is betrothed to Tadeo. That setting also has a lot of mentors and village priests/confessors – the village priest that takes in Gislin and raises the boy before moving to the village next to Tadeo’s family castle is another- and as the clergy is the educational system, lots in Urwin’s backstory.

But the funniest academic OC of mine? I have to go back to Earth is Screaming, where the main character is an anti-villain that destroys his city (mother’s ex-city of which his father’s family has vowed to destroy and a cursed sword to make each generation miserable until that happens, if to be technical) but not before accidentally becoming quasi-immortal by triggering an old magic where a person can become the localized guardian spirit/personification of a piece of land by dying and placing some of the soul in the land and any nearby animal. Aka the haunted cat story. It takes him a few decades to reform his body separate from the cat, by which point the female secondary protagonist has also realized she’s not aging. Fifty years later they’re stopping a reconquest of the ruins of their hometown, then wander around the next few centuries finding things to do under sometimes false identities: pretending to be a normal couple, rescuing orphans and entire slave populations of mines, sacking more cities, convincing the other that the sacking of cities and plotting the downfall of kings isn’t a nice thing to do, temporarily halting the war-like advance of a new religion, hiding from more powerful demigods, writing down what really happened through all the history they’ve lived through, propagating the deification of the woman as the goddess/saint that holds back the feline demon, watching very melodramatic plays (ballets, operas, you name it) about their first lives, and commissioning oil paintings of themselves posed as the historic/mythic selves. Two thousand years later, give or take, the haunted cat guy is working as a mysteriously tenured professor at the local college, the one that teaches antiquities and is fluent in more than just the well-known extinct languages (and will go into hour-long bitching rants about other academics’ terrible accents) and knows most of the heroic epics by heart and specialized in the last days of the city of Kassen. Who mutters through working the newfangled slide projector that he can never keep his images in order, screams about misconceptions about the leaders and life back then (and sputters uncontrollably when one of his students agrees that of course the real prince wasn’t romantically involved with the folk heroine because she was a dancer and there was no way he would have been angry enough to plot to destroy the city if he was regularly getting some, even if the trashier operas suggest otherwise. Professor is unsure whether to fluke the brat or praise him). Who brings old documents and copies of them to class, has an old oil painting (one of those ‘tasteful’ nudes of some model posing as Goddess Isha holding the cursed sword) that looks remarkably like the professor’s wife (the graduate students wish they knew her opinion about that painting, very nice lady the professor’s wife, very long-suffering obviously), and on the last day of finals brings this prop-sword which he claims to have bought from the production company the last them they did the opera of the Fall of Kassen (very catchy tunes, toss-up between the villain monologues or the final lamenting aria of the Cassandra-like dancer girl which is the best and most memorable song) and shows it to the class (it’s not the real cursed sword; that was a myth and always this one has dull edges). This is his last gig before the equivalent of the Great War starts. After that the two go to ground one last time.