Day 5, afternoon. Dusty?(Turn 19, 3rd of day)
A breeze seems to be blowing clouds of dust in from the south.
That was an actual fireball! Yay!
Celebrate with some jumping around and cartwheels.
Collect and eat some more pears. Look around for more kinds of food to gather. Collect some short straight wooden rods, like a foot in length, and a longer straight branch similar to a quarterstaff, a bit longer than Alice is tall.
While doing this, try to store more heat energy from the sun on my skin, like before. Can I keep it around in my mana indefinately?
After all this, drag back some more wood for the fire. Tomorrow will be a busy day.
Name: Alice
Description: Roughly 11 years old, with unusual blue hair. Not known as a mage, but has demonstrated spontaneous abilities in the past. Has vague memories of both successes and accidents related to said abilities in the past.
Status: Mildly Chilled
HP: 9/10
Hunger: 8/10
Mana: 2/10
Inventory: A uniform of thin yellow unusually light cloth. Reasonably sturdy despite that. Three sealed packages of pure water. A paper notebook and pencil. An Axe. A knife. A basket. An empty water package. A wooden whistle.
Current Location: Near the Shack
Skills: Basic Foraging, Basic Chopping
Spells and magical knowledge: Can sense magic inside herself easily. Cannot sense someone else's mana, unless it enters her body.
There are three kinds of magic inside me. The Blob, which sits there and doesn't do much, the Flow, which reacts to physical movement, but is more of an automatic function, and the Sparkles, which seem to go with the flow and have the potential to do things.
Can cut off a bit of the blob and let it disperse within herself.
Talking and moving while trying to shape the blob can assist in the shaping of it.
Can move heat from one object to another, or between parts of an object, quite easily.
Can store heat internally.
Can make temporary physical constructs from mana, at least ones containing energy. (the fireball)
6Those are some really impressive cartwheels!
6There's not too many pears left, now. Things get gathered, and left by your tent. You also stub your toe on a root. Ouch!
Lose 1 health. Hunger is full. Locations updated.2While wandering, you don't spot any new forageables.
3Same as before, taking heat from sunlight seems to be beyond you, but taking that heat as it impacts your skin is certainly doable. More importantly, you figure out how to make a kind of loop with your magic, keeping the heat moving in a circle indefinitely. At least until your control slips, and the construct falls apart. At least you manage to recover most of the energy?
Lose 1 mana.4Dry wood gets gathered, stacked in with the existing piles near the smoking hut and the campfire.
All this physical activity has sure made you hot and sweaty. Your hand doesn't feel nearly as bad as before!
Name: Nathan
Description: A thin, reedy, middle-aged man. He's easily excitable, and seems almost happy about this magic learning project. He has the impression that he was apprenticed to a harsh master, who held him back and kept him as an apprentice for long enough to frustrate him. He doesn't remember having any particular specialty, and suspects he spent a lot of time traveling to remote areas.
Status: None
HP: 10/10
Hunger: 6/10
Mana: 9/10
Inventory: Wearing plain white robes.
Current Location: The Northwest Forest
Skills: Basic Teaching
Basic Construction
Basic Chopping
Spells and magical knowledge: Can sense his own inner mana without meditating.
Can slowly move a small amount of mana from his core.
Can maintain a small loop of mana near his core while moderately distracted, likely until pain.
Can control two loops of mana, one in either hand.
Noticed stable mana control, allowing initiation of spells in seconds instead of minutes.
Can control own mana that is not currently attached by a string.
Is able to spin mana core to replenish mana, but will cause mana madness.
Cannot reclaim finished spell constructions without collapsing them.
Focus is the key to construct strength. Finished spell constructs retain the strength of the focus used to finish them.
Mana exhaustion remains even if mana is recovered.
Discovered physical/body mana. This mana causes minor fluctuations in blob mana.
Spell Concept: Separate - Can slowly break rocks down into coarse gravel, by focusing on the image of breaking things down, and on what is in a rock to separate. Doesn't seem to work on wood.
Spell Concept: Combine - Can join gravel back into pebbles by focusing on the image of combining similar yet diffuse materials. Inefficient mental image. Doesn't seem to work on wood.
Spell Concept: FIRE - With a mental image drawing parallels between a stick and a fire, can inspire mana to motion and heat up a stick until it begins to smolder. Obviously inefficient, as it costs 3 mana.
Spell Concept: Motion/Splitting - Shape mana into a blade and use a mental image of pushing, moving, and splitting. Can cut a finger's width into a branch before losing cohesion.
Proto Spell: Magic Edge - Shape mana into a blade and use a mental image of pushing, moving, and splitting. When mentally anchored in place relative to my fist and physically swung, it is far more efficient than when treating the edge as an independent effect. A blade focus has no apparent effect. It glows, slowly bleeding off energy into waste heat and light.
Spell idea: Mutate Magic Edge into a light spell.
Spell idea: Magic Edge might be affixed to my second mana type, instead of my fist?? Improve control and try to enchant blades for others.
Slowly spin my core again, only aiming to gather 1 mana total this time. Try to notice and catch the wisps instead of absorbing them. I'd like to pool the collected external mana together in a string and practice my Magic Edge spell with it, or uselessly release it if that's too much.
Try not to get carried away and go over 10 mana. I'd rather release it uselessly than go above 10.
4The only conclusive findings you've come to are that pulling external mana into one's core for later use is entirely possible, and that this exterior mana should definitely not be controlled directly. Not only does trying to directly manipulate it give you piercing headaches and the feeling that snakes are writhing under your skin, but the stuff is also basically impossible to finely shape. Orders of magnitude harder than your personal mana, and the few wisps you manage to grab with your will rapidly dissipate beyond your grasp. Learning to perceive the external mana without directly manipulating it does seem entirely possible, as you draw a few wisps into your core you find yourself beginning to see them just before they enter rather than right at the barrier.
Gain 1 mana. Lose 1 hunger.Eli's cat ears seem to be trying to whisper secrets to you.
Name: Aaron
Description: Vaguely foreign, with red hair and a slightly-taller-than-average stature. He feels rather certain that he specialized in enchantment and fish. And that this was not what he signed up for.
Status: Fine
HP: 10/10
Hunger: 10/10
Mana: 9/10
Inventory:
-Practical cloth-and-leather clothing
-Solidly-built, ornately-carved fishing rod that may also be an arcane focus
-Serrated knife
-Straight knife
-Hatchet
-Flint and steel
-Basket
-0x Bluegills (being dried)
-0x Cooked Bluegill Fillet
-0x Medium Fish
-0x Large Fish
Current Location: Genesis Field
Skills:
-Intermediate Fishing
-Basic Foraging
-Basic Construction
Spells and magical knowledge:
-There is a ball of magical energy in me
-I can make the ball exude tendrils of energy
-Snapping tendrils is a Bad IdeaTM
-Direct mana contact doesn’t really work
Well, I have these mana tendril things, I guess. And I think I saw somebody cutting stuff without directly cutting it. Or, well. You get the point.
Let’s see if I can figure out how to stab stuff with my mana tendrils? I mean, if it can interact with stuff, then it seems like the key would just be to make the tip pointy...
Also, the magic is in my body. Can I... I dunno, use it to reinforce my body? I think I have a rough idea of how muscles work, they’re kind of like tendrils, could I use the magic tendrils as extra muscles?
3With a good bit of fiddling, you do manage to manipulate a tendril into having a point. It still doesn't seem to interact with the physical world, but you do manage to make it do something, at least. The tip of the tendril shimmers to your eyes when you focus on trying to make it split and apply force.
6Still too new to things to even be able to confirm if it's possible, you at least grow massively more skilled in manipulating the energy. You also become able to see that body mana that Nathan was talking about, which kinda seems like on some level it already does what you were thinking of? You can't really control it, though. Also, running mana through your body for extended periods of time leaves part of it feeling numb and tingly.
Lose 2 mana, 1 hunger.
Name: Danni
Description: A late teen/early twenties catgirl with black hair wearing simple, dark brown linen pants and lighter brown linen shirt. Has vague recollections of grinding grain and feeding animals and livestock but doesn't seem related to magic at all.
Status: None so far
HP: 10/10
Hunger: 10/10
Mana: 10/10
Inventory:
-simple knife
-crochet hook
Current Location:
Skills:
Spells and magical knowledge: none
Is it too late to join in? And how are we doing new adds, make actions for previous days or just drop-in at this moment?
(You're welcome to join. There's no bonus turns for late comers at the moment, just drop-in. Knowledge is relatively easily transferable, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem. Like Aaron, here, you'll be able to catch up to what Nathan is able to do fairly quickly.)
You wake up in a dust cloud, which is rather unpleasant as far as waking sensations go. Spitting dust from your mouth, you find yourself in a grassy field near a campfire and a rickety wooden shack of some kind. There are people nearby, fiddling with their hands and muttering under their breath.
The genesis field:
A very grassy area
A rickety shed: (Basic tents, blankets, padding. Simple tools such as swords, knives, axes, shovels, pickaxes, all in limited quantities. Torches, linen, etc. etc. Nothing obviously magical, though.)
- 1 broken knife
- small pile of shiny
rocks
- 3 bits of smoked meat that should really be eaten soon
Alice’s tent
- Bundle of short, straight sticks
- Quarterstaff length branch
Nathan’s tent
Meat smoking tent
- 11 meals worth of various deer bits. Done and smoked, as of turn 11.
- 12 medium fish, done and smoked as of turn 18
- 1 large fish, done and smoked as of turn 18
Scrapped high quality training dummy (the poor thing)
Amon’s small pile of straight sticks and small logs of varying lengths, a basic wood and leaf bed.
River heading from North to South on the West edge
Three very small piles of different sized firewood
Large pile of green large branches
Large pile of leaves and small branches
Five body length logs
Cooking fire
Rope and wood swing, on the edge of the forest.
The Northwest forest:
A small cluster of pear trees (about 3/4 stripped of fruit)
Felled younger tree
Four medium tree trunks
Seven adult length logs
The Northernmost foothills:
Shiny rocks, boulders.
The edge of the world
Southern badlands
Clay beds near the river
Southmost glass/something desert
The edge of the world
Dangerous(?)
Western swamp
Mosquitoes in the trillions
Westernmost jungle
One more turn, and then the nighttime turn. Unless told otherwise, I'll just skip past nights as I have been doing. If anyone wants to stay awake (beyond basic guard duty, if you want to do that,) they'll get a -1 to all rolls tomorrow but will get the extra turn. Just specify in your next action post.
Sorry for the delay in updating, 'twas finals. They have now been finished. Something I'm curious about, do y'all reach each others' turns or should I be including details like Danni appearing in the turn posts for people who are in the area to notice?
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Topic: Roll to learn magic (5/8) Day 5 (Read 17450 times)