Human joys and sorrows were never the same. Thomas only found everyone else in the villa unbearably noisy.
As the head of this Brotherhood, he did not live in the dormitories on campus. Instead, he lived at the Brotherhood's off-campus base—a villa whose architectural style carried a strong sense of history.
Organizations like Brotherhoods loved things with a unique sense of ritual.
They could strengthen cohesion, along with that smug sense of superiority that came from believing themselves special.
This included, but was not limited to, nicknames members called one another, uniform insignia they wore, bizarre rituals, absurd weekly team-building activities, and calling the person in charge the "head."
In Common Tongue, that word was rarely used for people. It was usually something like Goblin Head or Gnoll Head.
Still, that suited their position perfectly. Other than themselves, everyone else found Brotherhood members about as loathsome as monsters.
Thugs with a relatively high entry threshold and rather deep family coffers.
That was how most people viewed organizations like this.
Every now and then, they also accepted children from ordinary families as lackeys, putting on a game of mingling with the common folk.
Of course, the consequences when children from noble families and children from common families did outrageous things were not the same.
Some merely treated it as a game, while others gambled away their entire lives.
Yet what Brotherhoods did was fundamentally different from what pure hooligans and thugs did.
First of all, they did not act for profit, and they had exams to take.
After all, they were students.
The Brotherhood cared about appearances too. If a huge batch of members failed their final exams, would that not be humiliating?
Thus, at the end of every term, the Brotherhood held the one activity that could be considered remotely