The Schola Viscera was once counted among the most unfashionable academic institutions in the known world. It was a ramshackle college built beside a pauper's field, dedicated to the study of the anatomy of humanoid races through dissection.

The college was no great calling. Its students were taken from poor backgrounds, while its clients were even poorer. They were scorned for everything: from the pale pink cloaks that they wore to hide the bloodstains, to the ghoulish way they lingered around graveyards and guillotines in search of fresh cadavers for study, a habit which placed their social standing shoulder-to-shoulder with necromancers.

Their "healing" arts were barbaric, carving open the body in order to fix it. Only the utterly destitute, too poor to seek the services of a chapel healer or alchemist, would be desperate enough to ask the pink cloaks for help.

The Schola's fortunes changed with the utilisation of thaumite as a ready source of arcane energy, which turned them from academic tinkerers to capable fleshcrafters overnight, able to warp flesh and bone at a touch. Though not loved any more than before, they are wealthy. Manpower has always been the one resource the Empire has in excess, and fleshcrafting is cheap magic, since it mostly alters what already exists. Together, this has allowed for the transmutation of the surplus population into more practical forms, such as weapons of war, furniture, or clothing.

Today, the Schola Viscera is a bustling flesh-factory. The centauri, created from the fusion of two individuals into a single four-legged beast, are now common in the fields and roads around the capital as productive beasts of burden or exotic mounts for the wealthy.

Aside from the imperial crafting duties, the pink cloaks continue their charitable work healing the impoverished wounded, as they always have. But grudges endure. Wizards have very long, good memories.