Professor Gousse is a tall aarakocra with ash-gray plumage that looks soft at a distance and razor-fine up close, each feather edged in white like frost on old stone. His wings are long and clean-lined, but the left wing bears a faint scorch-mark shaped like a crescent door, and when he walks he does so with the measured tilt of a man used to tall towers and unstable floors. His golden eyes are sharp and unblinking, yet the expression they give is not cold so much as perpetually distracted, as though he is listening to five conversations in three planes of existence. He wears fitted scholarly robes tailored with deep slits for his wings, embroidered in silver thread with constellations, summoning circles, and tiny notes in the margins that only appear when he turns. The surprising contradiction is a pair of polished brass reading spectacles perched on his beak, despite the fact that he can read a page from across a room.