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Author Topic: The Forgotten Art: Approaching the Nexus  (Read 272523 times)

Xantalos

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Re: The Forgotten Art: Disgust and Confusion On The Wizardly Way
« Reply #3120 on: November 29, 2014, 05:49:34 pm »

I sense a fortuitous coincidence in spells!

+1 Mind! Changes noted in character sheet; took Fraction Lard.

The DUNKER just then notices Pete about to commit faticide.

Hey wait, Pete! They said they could upgrade this thing! I - we could get more magic potency!
Besides, what did they even do to deserve smiting? Didn't you get the leyline juice? Plus that sandwich was pretty good. Where'd that come from?


Spoiler: DUNKER (click to show/hide)
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Sig! Onol
Quote from: BFEL
XANTALOS, THE KARATEBOMINATION
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((The Xantalos Die: [1, 1, 1, 6, 6, 6]))

Harry Baldman

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Re: The Forgotten Art: Disgust and Confusion On The Wizardly Way
« Reply #3121 on: November 29, 2014, 06:12:02 pm »

"It's not really 'us people', really. I don't think most of us actually know eachother. I'm John, recovering alcoholic, pleased to meet you."

he turns to Pilton

"So what's with the matchbox? Mister Lee used a magazine. Is it different for every wizard, or does the specific object used not really matter?"

"Hey, uh, John. Likewise, I guess? I'm Tracey," the woman says, scratching her head. The name tag on her uniform matches, you notice.

"And I'm Kermit Q. Pilton, marketing genius and local arch-mage," Mr. Pilton says.

"Really?" she asks curiously.

"No, not really. But the name's legit, at least," he shrugs, becoming a touch morose for a moment, then turning to you. "As for the matchbox, that's the way I picked from the start. Seemed unconventional and stylish, see. My inner voice certainly liked it. And it's got its perks, as you could see just now, like I can give somebody magic without them needing to push their face into a book or whatever. Plus, if you don't tell a person that you can put any matches in the matchbox and they'll turn magic, there's a chance they'll come back to you and keep asking for more. If they're not particularly sharp, of course."

He turns to Tracey again. "Not that I would withhold information from people without a very good reason, of course."

"With all due respect, it's the very good reasons that I'm afraid of the most right now," she says.

Hey wait, Pete! They said they could upgrade this thing! I - we could get more magic potency!
Besides, what did they even do to deserve smiting? Didn't you get the leyline juice? Plus that sandwich was pretty good. Where'd that come from?


"Two words, fellow pilgrim - last gasps. These profligates are not to be trusted, and honestly the world will be a better place without them," Pete explains. "I would not listen to their pleading. They can smell their death."

Just then, Hungry Pete barely dodges a set of green sandwiches flying haphazardly in his direction.

"You see! They'll try anything!" he says. "Even spouting blasphemy such as improving upon the design of God!"

"IT'S NOT THE FUCKING DESIGN OF GOD!" the shouting from the middle sphere intensifies, sounding rightly pissed off. "IT'S ALL ABOUT THE SURROUNDING LANDSCAPE! I CAN SHOW YOU THE PLANS!"

"Oh, he's definitely burning first," Hungry Pete says, his mind set on setting somebody on fire with his mind, it seems.
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Xantalos

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Re: The Forgotten Art: Disgust and Confusion On The Wizardly Way
« Reply #3122 on: November 29, 2014, 06:28:14 pm »

What about if God's design is perfect and stuff, but he needs believers to build it for him upon this plane? He could be an unwitting holy agent and stuff!
Plus more power, Pete. More power. It's in me now like donut withdrawal. I deeply desire it, man.
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Quote from: BFEL
XANTALOS, THE KARATEBOMINATION
Quote from: Toaster
((The Xantalos Die: [1, 1, 1, 6, 6, 6]))

The Froggy Ninja

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Re: The Forgotten Art: Disgust and Confusion On The Wizardly Way
« Reply #3123 on: November 29, 2014, 06:44:22 pm »

"Cool cool. Let's get this mad party up and running in dentureland bro."
Get this mad party up and running in dentureland

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Re: The Forgotten Art: Disgust and Confusion On The Wizardly Way
« Reply #3124 on: November 29, 2014, 09:27:34 pm »

Larry scratches his head.  Science, in general, wasn't his strong point, but wasn't Mercury a hot planet?  Like, close to the Sun or something?  One of the closer ones at any rate.

"Uh... you're near the Sun here right?  Why not just use sunlight?  Solar or whatever that crap is."
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HMR stands for Hazardous Materials Requisition, not Horrible Massive Ruination, though I can understand how one could get confused.
God help us if we have to agree on pizza toppings at some point. There will be no survivors.

Parisbre56

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Re: The Forgotten Art: Disgust and Confusion On The Wizardly Way
« Reply #3125 on: November 29, 2014, 09:57:44 pm »

Check to make sure nobody else is in the room. Then take a nice cold shower. Then try a match.

Spoiler: Eta (click to show/hide)

Harry Baldman

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Re: The Forgotten Art: Disgust and Confusion On The Wizardly Way
« Reply #3126 on: November 30, 2014, 05:30:29 am »

What about if God's design is perfect and stuff, but he needs believers to build it for him upon this plane? He could be an unwitting holy agent and stuff!
Plus more power, Pete. More power. It's in me now like donut withdrawal. I deeply desire it, man.


Pete looks quite annoyed now.

"I have a question, then. Does the finger of God feel, how did he put it, 'upgraded' to you?"

As he asks this, the middle sphere suddenly starts to glow, then decomposes before your very eyes. The fat guy, his hands no longer bloody, stands up from the ground.

"It's not upgraded yet, dillweed. We need a bit more time," he explains. Hungry Pete gives him a dirty look.

"Back to captivity with you!" he says, aiming a hand at him. A few angels coalesce around the fat guy, clutching him painfully with their spiky claws.

"Ow! Fuck, that hurts!" the fat guy shouts. At the same time, the sphere with the lady inside it glows as well, and she immediately emerges, looking just as pristine as the fat guy.

"Guys, how about we stop this whole nonsense right now?" she says. "I think it's pretty clear Jesus-freak here isn't going to listen to reason."

"None of your so-called reason, that is for sure!"

"He isn't, yeah," the fat guy says. "But maybe the other guy will? Seriously, dude. Leylines. We can upgrade 'em if we get some more resources."

The woman twists in place for a moment, and seems to undergo something like binary fission, as a non-identical person begins to bud off her, though something appears to go wrong in the process, leaving her with a half-formed though nevertheless highly attractive twin conjoined at the hip.

"Well, shit. That didn't work very well, did it?" she says, and her stunted twin shrugs ambivalently.

"I do hope you are not about to be tempted into profligacy by this crew of incompetents," says Hungry Pete, and as he says this about twelve people in puffy shirts appear behind the three other wizards, looking very delicate and filling the room with a soft fragrance and lyrical atmosphere.

"This is really not going well for us, is it? I knew we should have put more things outside to keep people out."

"Ha! Whatever defenses you could conjure, faithful pilgrims could easily-" Hungry Pete begins, but then a green sandwich sails through the air, striking him square in the eyes. He cries out and begins rubbing his eyes. "That was a good shot! But it is too little, too late!" he says, seemingly not quite blinded by the strike. Before he can manage to do much else, though, a hole suddenly appears beneath him. Pete tries his best to avoid it, but it's a bit difficult to do so when both of his feet no longer have solid ground beneath them. He narrowly manages to grab onto the ledge. "Ack! Help me!" he shouts, and his twelve-man squad immediately moves over to help.

"Look, dude," the fat guy says, looking at you. "That guy is batshit insane, and we're not. I've got a plan to help us get a lot of magic from this leyline, and he clearly doesn't. Can we work something out involving you helping us, or should we three just vacate the premises and come back later when you raiders have lost interest? Because let's face it, we aren't really kitted out to fight either of you at the moment."

Larry scratches his head.  Science, in general, wasn't his strong point, but wasn't Mercury a hot planet?  Like, close to the Sun or something?  One of the closer ones at any rate.

"Uh... you're near the Sun here right?  Why not just use sunlight?  Solar or whatever that crap is."

"It gets pretty hot on the daylight side, yeah, but not really enough to melt rocks, you know? Not enough to make glass or do metallurgy stuff, just enough to be a pain in the ass if you build surface installations out of Earth goods, especially with the temperature fluctuations. If I had some lenses, then maybe we'd be in business, but there's no glass, as mentioned. Can't cross heavens, either, since I'm just a regular dead guy, and a lower-rung one at that, not any kind of angel-type."

"I was kind of lucky to meet that engineer guy up here, in retrospect. Otherwise I wouldn't know a quarter of this crap."


Check to make sure nobody else is in the room. Then take a nice cold shower. Then try a match.

You don't see, hear or smell anybody else in the room. Your alarm is similarly undisturbed. The bathroom is no different, and you make quite an exhaustive search.

The cold shower is immensely unpleasant, and makes you want to retreat to the warm bed again, but you do feel significantly more awake now. Awake enough to try some interesting magic!

[Mind roll: 6-->3+1]

Though it occurs to you that lighting a match in a hotel room and then hallucinating for a while with no thought devoted to fire safety might not be the greatest idea, you figure nothing too bad can happen in the space of a few minutes, right? Well, you hope, at least. It'd kind of suck if you got back to reality and you were on fire or something and didn't notice before you had third degree burns or something.

In any case, hallucinations of power ensue! Once again, all is dark, and opening or closing your eyes basically does nothing. You spin around a little in the seemingly gravity-deprived area, and find it to be rather expansive, since you can't touch any edges. With this in mind, you search about for something useful, and are duly rewarded when your foot lightly touches something. Spinning and twisting in its direction, you manage to grab onto it with your arm - it's slightly furry, and also rather warm. Not moving, though, you notice, or breathing, either. You run your hands across its surface. Has four legs, a thin tail, a small udder and no head - probably a cow, you decide, or some off-brand derivative at any rate.

Strangely, the stump where the head should be seems to be completely hollow, the cow seemingly being a set of rigid skin and nothing more - curiously lacking in good judgment, you decide to reach your hand into the stump to test this, and do find something in there - a switch, hanging in there without any obvious form of support, its frame completely immovable while the switch seems extremely sensitive, a property you discover when running your finger over it immediately flips it, and for a moment you, despite keeping your eyes closed, observe the shadow cast by you of all people as the hollow cow begins to glow brightly. Your shadow is the only part of your surroundings that does not hurt your eyes, and it feels strangely animate and alive as it moves independently of you, demonstrating secrets that did not quite occur to you before, but seem perfectly obvious in retrospect.

Spoiler: Your Spell Choices (click to show/hide)
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Parisbre56

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Re: The Forgotten Art: Disgust and Confusion On The Wizardly Way
« Reply #3127 on: November 30, 2014, 12:04:28 pm »

Goodify? Is that a real word? Well, I guess if magic says it is...
Hm... no, I won't be taking any of those spells.
Although the goodify one sounds interesting. Wonder what would happen if I washed with goodified shampoo.
Still, I have an idea...


Get dressed. Then very slowly open the door and take a peek outside. If all is well, slowly and carefully make my way outside. If successful and nobody intercepts me, then make my way towards the nearest place that could give me access to a computer and the internet. It's time to do some magical research and perhaps post my findings.

I am assuming I do not have any internet capable devices like smartphones, right?


Spoiler: Eta (click to show/hide)

Toaster

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Re: The Forgotten Art: Disgust and Confusion On The Wizardly Way
« Reply #3128 on: November 30, 2014, 12:05:53 pm »

Larry grunted.  "Oh.  Huh.  Can't you, like, trade with someone from another heaven?  There's salsa angels and cheese angels and smut angels, so why not eighteen wheeler angels or whatever?"
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HMR stands for Hazardous Materials Requisition, not Horrible Massive Ruination, though I can understand how one could get confused.
God help us if we have to agree on pizza toppings at some point. There will be no survivors.

Xantalos

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Re: The Forgotten Art: Disgust and Confusion On The Wizardly Way
« Reply #3129 on: November 30, 2014, 12:23:50 pm »

Hmm. On one hand I really do want more power, I'm choosing that either way. On the other hand, Pete's been really helpful in getting here. Plus he's really good at killing people. Let me see if I can convince him one more time.


Hey Pete! What if we just let them try it out to redeem themselves? After all, you've proven they can't stand against our might, and if they fail then we have the leyline. But if they succeed, you'll be able to commune with God more fully than you have ever before. Everyone wins!


As he talks, he moves over to directly above where Pete is on the edge of the pit.
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XANTALOS, THE KARATEBOMINATION
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Harry Baldman

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Re: The Forgotten Art: Disgust and Confusion On The Wizardly Way
« Reply #3130 on: November 30, 2014, 12:42:22 pm »

Goodify? Is that a real word? Well, I guess if magic says it is...
Hm... no, I won't be taking any of those spells.
Although the goodify one sounds interesting. Wonder what would happen if I washed with goodified shampoo.
Still, I have an idea...


Get dressed. Then very slowly open the door and take a peek outside. If all is well, slowly and carefully make my way outside. If successful and nobody intercepts me, then make my way towards the nearest place that could give me access to a computer and the internet. It's time to do some magical research and perhaps post my findings.

I am assuming I do not have any internet capable devices like smartphones, right?


You do have a smartphone in your bag, to compensate for your old one that got disappeared forever. A smartphone plus a few other things that may or may not be a technological level ahead of smartphones and that look like they'd probably need surgical insertion into your brain or hand to work properly. What's more, this place has some pretty decent wi-fi coverage. The inside of your bag, peculiarly, seems to have even better wi-fi coverage.

Knowing all this, you suspect you could stay in this room completely unbothered by civilization for days if you felt like it, living off chewing gum and the internet like a proper modern lady.

Larry grunted.  "Oh.  Huh.  Can't you, like, trade with someone from another heaven?  There's salsa angels and cheese angels and smut angels, so why not eighteen wheeler angels or whatever?"

"I could, but then I'd need to find an angel first, and they avoid this place more than they do the moon, I hear, since at least on the moon you can laugh at all the inconstant people, while here everything's too dark and drab to bother seeing. And I don't think angels can be bothered with trade, by and large. They're not big on personal possessions in the first place."

Hmm. On one hand I really do want more power, I'm choosing that either way. On the other hand, Pete's been really helpful in getting here. Plus he's really good at killing people. Let me see if I can convince him one more time.


Hey Pete! What if we just let them try it out to redeem themselves? After all, you've proven they can't stand against our might, and if they fail then we have the leyline. But if they succeed, you'll be able to commune with God more fully than you have ever before. Everyone wins!


As he talks, he moves over to directly above where Pete is on the edge of the pit.

"I would indeed normally go with that suggestion," says Pete, getting pulled out of the pit, "but now they've gone and pissed me off with this whole attacking business. So off to hell they go if I have anything to say about it!"

"Fantastic choice, man," the woman sarcastically says, pointing her hand at Pete. A beam of dark green liquid shoots straight into Pete's shoulder, putting him off balance right at the edge of the pit. Pete falls backwards, barely holding on to the pit's edges with his hands and feet in a vaguely comical manner.

"Poets! Help!" he shouts as he tries to get his bearings, but another sandwich shooting from the only remaining sphere hits him straight in the belly, causing him to lose his grip on the side of the pit partly, leaving him hanging on with only one hand. How dramatic. One particularly dainty poet grabs the hand and starts to pull him up.
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Re: The Forgotten Art: Disgust and Confusion On The Wizardly Way
« Reply #3131 on: November 30, 2014, 12:54:39 pm »

"Huh.  Guess I could ask Cal, if he can be arsed to show up.  Was supposed to meet me here an hour ago.  HEY CAL WHERE ARE YOU?"  The last comment was directed at his marked hand.
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HMR stands for Hazardous Materials Requisition, not Horrible Massive Ruination, though I can understand how one could get confused.
God help us if we have to agree on pizza toppings at some point. There will be no survivors.

Xantalos

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Re: The Forgotten Art: Disgust and Confusion On The Wizardly Way
« Reply #3132 on: November 30, 2014, 12:57:16 pm »

The DUNKER sighs.

Dangit Pete, I really liked doing stuff with you.

Call over my massive amount of Pork Queens and tell them to push Pete and the poet guys down into the pit.
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XANTALOS, THE KARATEBOMINATION
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((The Xantalos Die: [1, 1, 1, 6, 6, 6]))

Pancaek

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Re: The Forgotten Art: Disgust and Confusion On The Wizardly Way
« Reply #3133 on: November 30, 2014, 04:20:46 pm »

"Neat. I do like the matchsticks, they're very original. So how does one go about choosing his or her particular way of giving magic to others? Do you just choose the object? And is the magazine Lee gave me really necessary, or can I acces the voice in the magazine some other way?" John asks Pilton, sounding excited
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Parisbre56

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Re: The Forgotten Art: Disgust and Confusion On The Wizardly Way
« Reply #3134 on: December 01, 2014, 11:26:56 pm »

Just out of curiosity, what's the name of the bag's WiFi AP?
Also, use the powers of the bag to insert my golden shoes in it, if possible.
Then use the bag's network to research the hotel and the people in it. Anything will do, from simple reviews to police reports.
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