I found myself quite busy searching for faculty, leaving me with very little time to actually spend on Drazvok getting things ready. I went on two tours around the coasts of the dwarven continent, with each tour taking two months. The purpose was to meet up with various individuals who were recommended to be faculty so that I could interview them. Since I wouldn't have unlimited positions available, I wanted to be quite particular with who was hired. At least doing the interviews on Kembora were relatively fast, and only needed to be done once. We're currently still on track to complete all the academy's construction before this particular school year, including the staff hiring, so I've given Kao the go ahead to also start a search for students.

The reason I ended up going on two tours was essentially just due to the speed that information could spread on the dwarven continent. The first round of interviews likely missed individuals in the more remote areas of the continent. While two separate trips taking two months of time for me traveling around was expensive resource wise, I wanted to ensure the highest quality individuals for the positions we had available. During the first round, I did end up filling a quite a few positions and removing them from the pool, which concentrated the applications in the second round to the remaining fields.

The first tour started a month after the new year, and I began in the dwarven capital of Korsask. The interviews there took fourteen days, which isn't that surprising given it used to be the home of their royal academy which was largely destroyed in the war. Many of the intellectuals fled well before the situation became dire, and carried what things they could with them from the academy, but a lot of documents were lost. I waited until I traveled the whole continent and returned back to Korsask before I made my decision, and I ended up filling a large number of the dwarven studies department with applicants from there.

I was careful about the selection though and had a brief meeting with Kao before my final decision. I had two problems that I wanted to avoid. First, I wanted to avoid causing brain drain in Korsask by taking away too many talented individuals. Second, I wanted to avoid creating an in group of professors who all knew each other from the dwarven royal academy and who would be inclined to try to run things the way they used to.

Kao's response was pretty even handed. Currently, their academy is destroyed and they're still focused on rebuilding and restructuring a lot of their society. Realistically, the intellectuals aren't really contributing much in the current situation. Worse, according to Kao, many of them are actively being detrimental to a lot of the new adaptations they're making to technology that we've been introducing. Every intellectual I take generally reduces the political power of that faction as a whole in their capital, which will help him temporarily with pushing some reforms.

What Kao wants is for me to expose them to a lot of my ideas and methods, which will hopefully reform them. After the first two batches of graduates finish our academy on Drazvok, Kao then reserves the right to bring up to half of the intellectuals I recruit now from their capital back to the dwarven continent. Basically, if the students we produce aren't skilled enough, and they've finished their reforms and repairs, then he'd like some of the intellectuals to resume their previous duties, hopefully after their attitudes on some things have changed.

A lot of the faculty I'm hiring aren't just instructors either. We're also hiring scribes, assistants, and a pair of translators. I wish we were able to find more than just two dwarvish to demon translators, but they're in high demand and there are very few of them. For every instructor I hire, I'm hiring two direct support staff. That's also ignoring the extended support staff that will be doing tasks like cooking and maintenance.

As I did interviews, I made some adaptations to my department plans as I saw fit. The dwarven studies department, for example, had a few additional positions that I created in order to allow certain staff to be hired because I saw value in the individual who would fill that specialty role. I previously just had planned for a single dwarven history instructor. That role was split into two different roles, ancient dwarven history and contemporary dwarven history. This was after I interviewed a fairly old dwarf who had quite the extensive knowledge about ancient stories. He took it upon himself to save quite a number of books that were stored in the royal academy where individuals had written down those stories, and he recounted quite a few of them fairly accurately from memory. Enough so that I thought he'd be a valuable addition.

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Most of the instructors aren't just teaching courses all the time either. The reason I'm hiring scribes and translators is to get all this knowledge copied down. For explicitly the ancient dwarven history instructor, I plan on having him only teach one of the two semesters a year, and granting him time to either copy down the stories he knows, or if we have a planned trip to a portion of the continent, granting him leave for his off semester to go gather more stories from the dwarven continent itself.

There are some other positions that I created at Kao's recommendation, like high-society manners. While this will technically fall under the dwarven studies department for now, and is being taught by a dwarf, in the future it'll likely end up falling under a broader political science scope. Within the dwarven studies department, we currently have 11 instructors, and 24 supporting staff after both tours of interviews were completed. There are quite a few peripheral courses like dwarven mythology, dwarven crafts, and dwarven skills and classes which relates to their leveling system.

The equivalent demon studies department was significantly smaller, having only four instructors, two of which were dwarves. Since Kembora is a relatively new nation, we don't have a lot of history to tell. So, we don't have a direct instructor for Kemboran history. We have a dwarf who will teach a history of demon invasions, and during one of their courses, we'll have a guest lecturer for one or two weeks that will talk about the history of Kembora. We'll also have two instructors teaching the demon language, though they're actually split into two categories.

One of the demons from Kembora City hall will be teaching Kemboran, which is our variant of the demon language, while a dwarf from the mainland will be teaching the mainline demon language. Due to my introduction of various English words, the borrowing of quite a bit of dwarvish, and the hybridized written language that's naturally arisen, Kemboran is different enough that I want both taught.

The last demon studies instructor is the demon who I've been tasking with studying the various prestiges and evolutions of demons. While their collection of information is fairly incomplete, I think understanding demon physiology in that regard is important enough to have it's own course.

We've ended up with three relatively small departments for engineering, mathematics, and sciences. Within engineering, there were a few positions that I created that I hadn't anticipated, so including myself there are six instructors. I'll be teaching multiple advanced courses on machine design and safety. Two members of the mechanics team will be joining on as instructors. The first will be teaching about mana engine sizing and maintenance, while the other will be teaching factory maintenance and repair. The two unexpected positions were filled by dwarves. One will be teaching mine design and safety, while the other will be teaching agricultural layout and design. The final position is on hydrological engineering, and will be taught by one of the demons who oversaw a decent number of the construction teams, and will cover various water management infrastructure.

When Kao put out the call for instructors, he provided a list of positions we were looking to fill, but also put a note that anyone who believes we're overlooking a potential position of value should come pitch the idea. That was essentially where the two dwarven positions came from. The mining one made a lot of sense, and I was surprised that I'd overlooked it. I was quite focused at the time on thinking of engineering as all the various things I'd introduced, and not the practical engineering of infrastructure.

The agricultural layout and design position handles picking the best plots of land for particular plants or animals, and sizing things to not overwhelm workers in advance. The dwarf who pitched the idea worked previously under one of the dwarven lords in a remote valley with harsh terrain, and honed the skill over decades to ensure that they used their available land as best as possible.

After hiring those two dwarves, I created and filled the hydrological engineering position, based on the amount of water management engineering projects we did. Ultimately, I may end up having to assist in some of the curriculum in their course, since I was the primary architect for most of those projects. Considering the benefit those projects have given over time, however, having multiple skilled individuals capable of overseeing more projects like artificial tide pools, dams, and aqueducts seemed like a good idea.

The mathematics department, by comparison, has three dwarves staffing it. There were quite a few applicants, but only one caught my eye. One dwarf from Korsask seemed to have a pretty good grasp of mathematics beyond arithmetic, so he was selected to handle higher mathematics. The other two dwarves were the best among those remaining at doing arithmetic, so they were selected for that. I'm likely going to have to teach quite a bit of mathematics myself during my engineering courses, based on what they can teach. The two teaching arithmetic will likely be quite busy teaching much of the student body, while the remaining dwarf can at least handle algebra and geometry well.

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