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1 (3.6%)

It was fun for a long time but towards the end it just started to drag

6 (21.4%)

I wish I could have joined in.

17 (60.7%)

Total Members Voted: 28

[Eric Blank]

I'd think rock salt was their preferred source of salts as well. Being near the ocean, you'd think you'd find some evaporate deposits somewhere.

[Reudh]

"Goddamnit!" He shouted angrily, extricating himself from the tumbled over barrel that had caught itself on, and rolled under him when he tripped on it. In anger, he kicked the wooden lid, splitting the crappy and rushed wood top in two, and spilling out a white, coarse pigtail bag filled with small dark beans, the latter spilling out a tiny sample onto the floor.

"Wait a minute..." he mumbled, reaching down and grasping one of the tiny dried beans from the floor and giving it a closer look. "Is this?........"

He scratched it against the hard stone and brick floor, and relished in the delightfully welcome and familiar scent. Somebody had found coffee. Oh lord, there *was* a god!

"We had coffee this whole time, and nobody told me?!" He shouted rhetorically into the gloom, before grinning like a madman, and scooping up the coarse bag over his shoulder, like a demented mockery of santa claus.  Take THAT you scurrying little bitches! he thought to himself excitedly. Oh yeah! Some dark roast coffee, and I can beat your little bitch asses at the sleep deprivation game! Hah!

Cackling like a madman, he hauled his treasure off to his quarters. He'd pervert his titration burette and alcohol burner into a scientific grade drip style coffee maker, have a hot, revitalizing cup of delicious coffee, then slip his special magic gloves on for a nice midnight stroll to get some seasalt. He grinned. Things were looking up.....

[Yay, someone remembered the coffee harvest! ]

[EDIT: Snipped for Gizogin.]

[wierd]

Weird kicked back in the coarse wooden ladder-back chair that serviced his personal study desk, and inhaled the lovely scent steaming off the ceramic mug in his hand.

He had needed to smash up the beans in a mortar before brewing, owing to the lack of a coffee grinder, but the result was sooo totally worth it. Keeping an engineer away from his coffee for as long as he had been was a terrible thing indeed. He'd have to make inquiries to find out who he should thank for finding the wonderous treasure he was now enjoying, and thank them properly.

Draining the last of his second large tankard of fine hot dark roast, he blew out the alcohol lamp, slipped on his now well worn gloves and a heavy labcoat gizogin had given him over the prior months. It wasn't a really good substitute for a full length coat for use against the cold, but dressing in layers with it on top made it serve admirably as a wind breaker. Blowing out the lamp on his way out, he wandered up toward the fortress entrance.

He had expected a guard, but who was standing there took him a bit by surprise. There, in the dark night air and gloomy moonlight, stood none other than Lana, Gizogin's half-sister, looking worriedly out into the gloom, her golden hair reflecting the hues of the moon's silver light from the sides of her dark hood.

"Lana?" He asked guardedly.

"What do you want?" She asked irritably.

"I was gonna go out to the ocean to get some salt." He said in a bewildered tone. Something was eating on her, because she wasn't usually crabby like this. "But is something the matter?"

She looked at him sternly. "You tell me." She said crossly. "I've been popping across whole nations the past few days on errands for my..brother....." she trailed off, almost in a whisper, paused for a moment, then resumed again with authority. "I haven't eaten well in months, nor had a break, and.." she trailed off again. "..I feel that my...father... is gonna show up."

"I guess we both have problems..." he muttered under his breath.

"What are you taking about?" She demanded crossly.

"..I haven't slept well in months." He started. "Can't. Not safe. Fucking mutant rat monster bastards digging in the damned walls all the time, breaking shit, fucking with my head whenever they can.. but enough of that.." he paused a moment ad looked back at Lana's cold glittering eyes in the moonlight. "I can cook you something, if you haven't eaten well. I don't blame you for.."

He broke off as Lana started giggling.  "You crazy beared idiot..." she chortled. "Do you ever stop being so thick?"

"Thick?"

"Look, I appreciate the offer, but I'm a half-demoness. I don't really eat normal food."

"Ooh...." weird breathed. He had practically forgotten about Lana's unique pedigree. In this place, being some kind of magical creature was practically commonplace, and easily dismissed... as bizarre a thing to say as that was.

"Right.. so, unless you can be willy wonka, and conjure up your candies using obscene amounts of magic, I don't think you can help."

"Catch a sunrise, and sprinkle it with dew?" Weird chided, before double taking. "Candies? How did you.."

"I've been keeping an eye on a lot of things lately...." she said wearily. "Your helping poor hugo out the way you do..." she recomposed herself. "Let's just say I haven't rested easy since I felt ...dad... stirring."

Weird didn't like the idea of being spied on, but it was a fair enough cop, if what she said was true, and he doubted she would have a reason to lie. She didn't seem like that type.

"Well, it's not a rainbow baked into a pie... but I was planning on boiling a whole lot of ocean water, and dragging the dried salt home."

"There you go being idotic again.." she murmured.

Weird looked at her crossly.

"I meant with *these*" he said holding up his gloves.

"And what exactly are you gonna do with those?" She asked dryly, a hand on her hip.

Weird grinned, made a gand flourish, and let the subtle music of the afterlife course and rebound in the enchantments, feeling them come alive and pulse with power, before releasing it in a grand and spectacular display of bright magical fire.

"This."

He turned and faced Lana again with a wry smile. "Sure you wanna stand here in the door?"

[WillowLuman]

HugoLuman had to agree with Wierd: they certainly were ugly. Their fur was patchy and dotted with either scutes or open sores (too small to tell), their eyes red and shiny even in the minimal light, which probably meant they saw about as well as he did. There were 5 rats in the doorway, looking at him, cautious yet curious.

How to begin? Human speech might not be the best idea for gaining their trust. Maybe let them start first? But how to elicit a greeting? Or to understand it? Astral telepathy, perhaps. Though he'd gotten a bit rusty...

The foremost of the rats emitted a very purposeful series of squeaks, chitters, and hisses towards him. HugoLuman reached out his mind, and tried to understand.

[Gizogin]

[Reudh, you really didn't need to quote wierd's entire post...]

Lana regarded her strange companion with newfound curiosity.  That little display of magic had been mostly special effects—real fire was distinctly harder to call up than a bit of heat and some flashing lights—but there was real power there, too.  Even from that short burst, she could feel the energy flowing through the air.  It was delicious.  It was strange, too; from what Gizogin and X had told her, wierd was a necromancer.  Necromancy was a completely different school of magic from elemental manipulation, and it wasn't a type Lana could normally feed on.

"Where did you learn to do that?" she asked, with perhaps some of her hunger coming through in her words.  If wierd noticed, however, he didn't let on.

In fact, he remained infuriatingly nonchalant about the whole thing.  "Oh, that little trick?" he asked.  "It's nothing special, really.  Funnily enough, your brother played a large part in making it possible." 

"You're enjoying this, aren't you?" Lana chided, but her tone made it clear she wasn't angry.

Wierd gave her an innocent look.  "I don't know what you mean," he answered.  "Anyway, as I said, I'm going to get some salt.  Why don't you come with me?"

Lana looked at him curiously; wierd didn't usually take kindly to others intruding on his work.  She supposed he must have had some ulterior motive.  Maybe he just wanted an extra set of hands to carry salt.  Regardless, she could use the diversion, and she wanted to find out more about how he was using magic like that.  "Sure," she said, and the two of them set off for the ocean.


Gizo X was becoming increasingly annoyed.  These crystal fragments were proving to be far more frustrating to analyze than he'd suspected.  The material was nothing he'd seen before, and the crystal structure defied all sense.  To make things worse, he thought he'd detected a trace of magical energy, possibly even a consciousness, but every time he tried to get a lock on it, it disappeared.  Mita was proving less than helpful, and he didn't have anything else to go on.

He straightened up from his measuring devices in disgust.  This line of thought was getting him nowhere, and he had other duties to attend to.  Maybe he would continue working on it later, but for now he was just wasting his time.

[wierd]

"Here, I'll show you.." he said tugging off one of the gloves, and feeling the bite of the cold winter air hit his exposed fingers.  "See the gaudy nasty looking bauble in the middle there?"

"Uh huh..." said Lana, leaning in.

"It's based on X's work. Somehow the tinman got his hands on some musty old tomes on socery, and cooked up a means to collect magical residue, and repurpose it. It's how he works his little tricks. It's really quite clever."

Lana gave him the "I don't want to talk about that person" look, and he took the hint.

"..anyway, I have a real problem trying to work with conventional sorcery. Takes me from refreshd to lethargic almost instantly. I don't have that problem with necromancy though. That's a whole other animal, and it flows as natural as a clear running stream. I can call the dead all day long."

"That's not surprising." Said Lana, "most higher soceries are like that. Limited by who can use them, and how, but unlimited within their spheres of influence."

"Really?... anyhow, I came up with a clever idea of my own. Even necromancy leaves...residue. I can practically smell other beings with necromantic powers in fact. So, I did some little experiments, and modified X's little toy, so that it could absorb and repurpose that residue. Basically, this crudely drawn glyph around the ugly thing essentially force feeds it, by doing nothing but circulating my necromantic powers around and around inside it. As far as enchantments go, it's pretty worthless, other than the fact that it greatly adds to the amount I can safely handle all at once."

Lana took the glove from his hand gingerly, and looked it over with supressed interest.

"So, it's like a prosthesis, for the magically challenged?"

""That's not the way *I* would put it..." he said, snatching it back. "In the wrong hands, all the dead for miles could start walking."

Lana let out a clear and jovial laugh at that. "I suppose it could!" She giggled. "So, you use those to recycle the residue from your higher power, and funnel it into other magical forms?"

"That's the gist of it." He said with his wry smile creeping back up. "Comes in really handy when I need a lot of magic, and need it in a hurry. Controlling it takes care though.. these are prototypes, and weren't really meant for actual use..."

"They aren't dangerous are they?" She asked cautiously.

"Dunno. I try to avoid using them, except when I know I am going to need them. Be that as it may..." he said wearily. "They've gotten a LOT of miles on them lately. Way more than I would have liked. The next set I make will have some limits put on them."

The worried look on her face momentarily abated, replaced with a kind of almost predatory inquisitiveness.

"So, these ones.. don't.. have any fixed limits to what you can pull through them?"

Weird didn't like the question. "Only what the physical materials can actually put up with. I think I've pushed them close to the breaking point a few times... I don't like that. It's a design flaw."

"So, how much CAN you pull through them?"

Weird felt like a bug under a hotlamp. "I fired all the bricks in the fortress with them..." he muttered, before trying to grow a backbone. "But only because we didn't have enough wood to spare to fire them properly."

Lana smiled. "Ok, I really want to see this." She grinned. "Ok, I'll go with you. Lead the way."

Maybe getting Lana to join him wasn't such a good idea, but at least it meant he wouldn't be giving flaming enimas to sqealing night creatures on the way there and back.

"Allright, Let's go."

[WillowLuman]

[I think that perhaps the purest form of magic, the magical singularity if you will, is the ability to directly change the world through will alone. Someone using that kind of magic would be able to do anything, as long as it didn't strain their will to breaking point. They will fire to appear in their hand, and it does so. They will a corpse to move, and it does so. All they have to do is extend their will into the vacant vessel. But how to make the transition from hermetic or patron-based magic, or willpower limited to within a sphere, is likely known by few, if any. Theoretically one could enter a positive feedback cycle of using one's willing their will to be stronger, but that might result in a kind of metaphysical fork-bomb.]

[wierd]

[The effect I was going for was more "capturing the naturally decayed "entropy" energy of other spells and magical employments. Once a spell fires, the energy does a task, but isn't destroyed. That energy kinda floats around like stale air. The device X made is a vaccuum cleaner for that energy, and uses a mundane power source to repurpose the entropic/wild magic it sucks in. Mundane power, like what his body runs on.  Weird modified the design to accept magic on both sides. The glyph is just a roundy-round for his innate necromancy. Power goes inside the circle, and does the circuit, then exits as entropic energy, directly next to the vaccuum. The other part of the glyph provides the power needed to convert the entropy into a useful from, and shunt it to the user.  The construct is dangerous, because there aren't any "checkvalves" on that backflow. If it is too much for the user, it could well be deleterious. Like putting a finger in the light socket.]

[WillowLuman]

[I know, just musing. What I described would be sort of like a magician's Carnot engine. Only, being magic, it might well be possible. Just bugger-all if anyone knows for sure.]

A connection. Their minds were wary, but not expecting an approach from this (for lack of a better word) direction. The sounds did not change, but their meaning became suddenly clear, as if superimposed over the image of the senses. "What is it?" the rodent seemed to ask.

"It devoured the evil. Maybe it consumes and disperses the power."

"But it might be one of Her's"

I am not.

[Gizogin]

[My head-thoughts on magic are that it can be divided into three categories, based on where the actual power comes from.  Divine, which comes from gods and demons; this is where Lana gets her magic from, and why she can sling around so much of it.  Necromancy also fits into this category, which is why X can't detect it.  Natural, which comes from ley lines and the environment; this is what X uses.  And lifestream, which comes from living things, especially sapient beings like people.  Lana feeds on this kind of magic (this is what actually sustains her; divine magic allows her to cast spells and teleport).  Each has its own benefits and drawbacks, and the rules are different from one type to another.]

[These are just my ramblings.  Take them as you will.]

[wierd]

[Regardless, weird is theoretically "immortal", since he's a necromancer. 3rd type of magic might have unfortunate consequences for him, like lichifying him.... but the experience wouldn't be "fatal"]

[Still, the basic ideas behind leyline energy, and the "entropic magic" concept I floated, are prefectly reconcilable.  If that energy isn't scooped up where does it normally go? One could argue that it builds up and flows around in a natural progression, from the innate influences of the region's geography and the locations with people (specifically sorcerers) in them. Likewise, if you want to make life and death magic more complicated, you could also claim that lifeforms that are alive, but which don't particularly have a "soul", (a plump helmet, for instance) have lifeforce energy that also transmigrates. The transmigration of souls between the world of the living and the world of the dead is a similar natural, constant flow. It could just be boiled down into how you choose to look at it, and might be better described more clinicaly, when looking for energy of a specific "character". It could well be that all magic and lifeforce are essentially the same things, but with different characters imposed by how the are being used, or were last used. Eg, say, a rocknut plant might be influenced by the seasons overhead in a magical manner, and less a climatological one, which would explain the consistency of being unable to grow them in "winter", even in tropical regions that lack a winter. Etc.  In that respect, converting magical residue from one form to another could have very profound applicatons.]

[WillowLuman]

[I'd always thought caverns would have a form of seasons, as the air currents cycle through them. With their sheer size they wouldn't be able to help but have weather from gas exchange and turnover. Maybe the seasonal variation in cave plants is related to different points in their life cycle / biological clock?]

[I guess there are as many systems of magic as there are belief systems, each with its own rules: Some are like Risk, some are like chess, some are like table tennis. And then you also have just plain non-magical superstitions, but in a fantasy world it can be hard to tell them apart. For most kinds, though, it looks like someone acquires initial magical-ness (through ritual, secrets, study, blessing, etc) and then how far they go on the power ladder depends on some internal force (cleverness, strength of will, passion, fervor of belief, etc). Example: druid learns first steps of nature magic, becomes more powerful druid through passion for nature, study of plants / animals, currying favor with a nature deity, training willpower and focusing it on bending nature, etc. Going on this, a 'clever' mage would probably find sources of energy that could be rearranged to better suit his or her purposes.]

[In the end, though, magic is nebulous and variable as thought, and I suspect anything goes if it sounds halfway-plausible; as long as it doesn't break the willing suspension of disbelief of the universe itself. You can violate conservation of energy as much as you like if you distract the universe with theatrical enough gestures, impressive enough incantations, or dazzling-enough special effects. Metaphorically speaking. The powers that be, literally speaking, wishes we wouldn't and is trying to kill us.]

[Oliolli]

Oliolli took a deep breath. He rose to his feet, and let the breath out. He opened his eyes. The room was pitch black, with no interior decorations, at least not yet. The room was about as perfectly a square as squares got in dwarven fortresses. He stood in the middle. He grabbed his sword, and swung it around a few times. There was a shimmering light coming from near the blade, which grew stronger as he swung the blade. That 'aura' was not to be touched: it was where the blade truly ended. After taking a few more swings in different directions, sparring against imaginary opponents he returned the sword to it's sheath. His turn for guard duty would arrive soon. He walked to the side of the room and followed the wall until he felt the door. The door opened quietly - obviously superior or masterwork quality. To his right was a pile of rubble, still blocking the way to the city ruins, and to his left the hallway that eventually led to the surface. Oliolli took another deep breath, and left for the surface.

[WillowLuman]

The sky began to fill with clouds, covering the stars in velvety black. Soon, little downy specks began floating down, lightly dusting the grass. By morning, the ground would be muddy, with patches of brownish slush everywhere.


Now the rats looked directly at him. "Then, what are you?"

A friend, perhaps. HugoLuman lowered his head down to the floor, to bring his eyes to their level. Depending on your intention.

[wierd]

[Usually fungi aren't interested in aything except 3 things: nutritional content available, amount of moisture available, and ambient temperature. This is how japanese mushroom farmers can get shiitake to flush constantly, and year round, when normally shiitake is a seasonal springtime only mushroom. Same with white and brown crimini mushrooms (normal storebought mushrooms, and protabella mushrooms, respectively). "Shroomers" make use of this too to culture psiloscybe mushrooms for their hallucenogenic properties. (Ironically, many of the cultivation processes developed by shroomers can be used to start ordinary edible mushroom spawn from a freshly collected sample fruit body. I've used their "hydrogen peroxide" tech to start shiitake from a storebought mushroom, for instance. Worked like a charm. Inexpensive, and easy.) As such, the restrictions on cave flora, where humidity and temperature are always constant, would have to be based on available bionutrients, or some other nutritional source.]