Professor Tobari
The veil between students and the Street. An authority figure who has seen what the journey costs and teaches the Tablet as curriculum.
Lore
Professor Tobari has taught at Citadel High for longer than most students' parents have been active. Long enough to have seen students graduate, walk the Street, and get collected — to have taught someone whose name they can no longer remember, whose face appears in no photograph, whose desk sits empty with nobody asking why.
Tobari teaches the Origin Tablet as curriculum. How they teach it is a subject of debate: do they present it as scripture, as specification, as warning? Students report different emphases depending on the year, as though Tobari's own reading of the Tablet evolves. Some suspect Tobari is a lapsed Nomonite — someone who once believed the Lisk's attention was everything and who now channels that knowledge into preparing students for what attention costs.
Tobari's strictness isn't cruelty. It's the calculated restraint of someone who knows that the enthusiastic kid begging to graduate early is walking toward something that might erase them from history. Every time Tobari holds a student back, they're making a bet that another year of preparation is worth more than the student's impatience. They've been wrong before. They've been right before too, but nobody remembers those students either.