Time for our first official turn.
At the ivy gates to the academy campus...The Academy of Inberlin was built fairly recently. It is the only city to rival the old cities of the orient in size and in grandeur, despite the late foundation. It was first built
after the Architect Wars, when the rulers of
Fragment fought to establish the permanence of their ideals, winning as their prize the ultimate victory in some cases--the immortality of their children--and eventually in almost all cases, final defeat. As the children of the architects migrated to new and fallow lands to spring up their own cities and establish refuge, only Inberlin grew exponentially out of the new cities, and so it is apparent that this academy was not built solely for the purpose of teaching students of war, but to provide a community and a place for growth.
It resembles a green tower, ensconced by a pallid slab of magical stone, a dark blue in color. The outer wall of the tower is a transparent, elastic substance that bubbles and sways in the turbulence of high-altitude winds, while protecting the inner structure of terraces and platforms resembling a fungal colony.
At the base of such a structure, the artificers find themselves looking up at the sparkling pinpoints of light that are students levitating their way between platforms. Rows of entrances mark the side walls of every terrace, buildings carved ether into the rocky structure itself, or out of it. Flat surfaces are divided into stone parquet tiles, while curves and irregular shapes are built up from single pieces of glistening stone embedded with thousands of shining pinpricks of light.
The whole structure is settled in what seems like a gentle sloping crater, and more houses are constructed on the inner slopes of that crater. Starting at the ivy gates where you stand, and proceeding a ring around the whole base of the structure, are gardens and hedgerows decorated with flowers in all stages of bloom, lit from above by the glow of the green material surrounding the campus. It seems like it is always daytime here, though the city of Inberlin itself stands outside in the darkness.
On the bottom rung, there is a string of entrances to the well-frequented shops and places. Prime real-estate, it seems, for there are people everywhere dashing into and out of doors. The campus looks rather like a circus from a distance, what with so many students walking and skipping and floating around. Some have wings, some have metal limbs, yet most sport a humanoid appearance, as if parents bestow upon their children an appearance similar to their own.
...it's hard to pinpoint where to start. But if you had to guess where to find a workshop, it would be just up ahead, next to a clockwork statue of a man strangling a wyvern. There are wavegears on wooden racks outside the door of every store, people leaving theirs there before shopping. But there are shops with wavegears on the walls and logo, and there are shops with gears, antennas, circuitry, and all sorts of tools.
Spirits abound in the air. There is a Lv.3 spirit whose purpose is to watch over and report disasters to whom it may concern. There is a Lv.5 hiding in the trees, who warns you that he owns a section of the western gardens, and whomever harms the trees will get seriously hurt. A Lv.6 hovers from person to person, saying nothing but seeking something in particular.
If I can determine the center of mass and I know the density of marble and the crystal I can locate the crystal and chisel and cut away the rest. Obtuse crystal dimensions might pose a problem. "There are no Impurities or irregularities in this marble correct? Also what are the approximate dimensions of the crystal?" She asks a proctor.
I'll use basic components to make a small servant and use wire to supply mana power and control the servant from the starting location. He shouldn't need a spirit if I control him directly.
She starts looking a look up table of densities (with marble and the crystal), a lab with the balancing equipment for center of mass calculation and a workshop to build a small (she might scale it up depending on her success with the block) humanoid servant and enough mana conducting wire to guide the servant the whole way through. Also if she bumps into some nice professors she might want to talk to them.
You notice a group of students wearing splattered aprons and having flowers growing on their arms and heads in various stages of bloom. They lead you (willingly or unwittingly) to a chemistry lab located in the western gardens. It's a quaint, three-story rectangular building with arched windows and a wide porch that spans the whole front of the building. Green lanterns light the entirety of the porch as well as the path through the garden. Behind it is a
large tree almost as wide as the building itself, with flowers of different colors on each of its crowns.
The students pass through the door but a Lv. 3 spirit guards the door. Its body is like that of a nutcracker, and it holds a wavegear in its hands that looks like a percussion-cap musket, albeit with a helical gold-colored spiral running down the length of the barrel.
Hmm, Ideas...
Excuse me, does anyone have a ocular device or low quality engram they would be willing to part with?
Leaving for the labs
She attempts to load the spell telekinesis into the crystal, if she hasn't taken it out of the block yet yet, she cuts it out of the block. If it doesn't work, she makes it into an engram crystal.
A middle-aged student walking past you overheard you asking for oculars.
"Everyone's running out of oculars. Someone planted a tree in the garden over in that direction," he says pointing to the gardens on the west. "You might be able to pick a few."
Approaching the professor's offices...The professors' building is connected to the main campus by a tunnel wide enough for a mammoth, leading through the gardens in the main campus. The offices themselves resemble a half-dome made of clear glass, filled with many smaller domes of black glass. Presumably these are the offices themselves. One would guess that there are at least a hundred offices inside.
An orchard surrounds the glass dome, itself planted with glass trees which shed their branches onto the paths of multicolored cobble. Lv.1 spirits sweep up the glass and push it out to the sides, where metal birds nest in the piles of broken glass and form flower-like cribs for their young, which they build out of scrap picked up from across the city.
Octavia mutters something to the extent of "Well I wouldn't be able to definitively say that but..."
Though the spirit was probably already gone. The professors surely wouldn't have any difficulty with an angry level 2 spirit... But perhaps it would be wise for her to follow up on this just in case. She did have a couple of questions to ask anyway.
In front of the glass dome you notice a mob of the glass sweeper spirits confronting a professor wearing a wide purple dress. They form a waist-height circle around her, chirping some unintelligible noise at her while she converses in clear language.
"I will contact the exterminator when he returns from his trip... well if the monster shows up again within an hour, I suppose we could call the army... it's really probably much less serious than that..."
Meanwhile, inside the Flowering Hall...Let's try carving out a small section of the repulsors, near the start, and see if they're point-to-point or direction-based.
(Answered your question in the OOC thread)
Attempting simple magic to displace the tiles, you find that the force keeping the red line contiguous and unbroken is too much for a simple spell... you estimate the minimum noise level at around 5 due to the operation of the repulsion field.
You hear the loud crack of a slingshot, and something flies above your head, gouging out a large crackling section of the force field in the process and landing in the seam between two lanes, caught inside a trough between the lanes.
The wall complicates things. Maybe it's elasticity could be useful? Or it could have a limit to how high it goes up. I could check just by throwing something at it, but what?
He looked down at the rope in his hands, and an idea sprung into his mind.
Artifice the rope into a sling, then artifice another length of vine into a ball. Then head back to the barrier and throw that ball as high as I can into the barrier, backing away from the barrier as I watch it fly.
[d12: 8] You shape the cords into a string and flatten one end into a rigid platform. [d8: 6] The ball itself is a solid wood icosahedron, with sharp edges to dispel the force field. It punches right through... and then settles over one of the glowing red lines. It's as if each force field is a tunnel and the ball has landed between them after punching through.
She stares at it a bit.
I'll need to take care of this..
.. What was the Spell.. Ah. "forma subcinctus".
As she holds her staff out and down at the block, a small section breaks off, and forms gentle chains. Part of it flattens, and she insets the Jewel into it, before hanging it about her own neck, beneath her tunic.
Shift Form, a simple spell on such a charged block.
Well, might as well see to the path. Ready, my dear spirits?
She takes flight and heads down her section of the track to the finish. Memorizing the path she takes so to better program the gear later on.
Make sure to check closely as well spirits. We have a goal, and I won't, we won't, fail it.
[d12: 5] You zoom across the track, noting the repulsive force which Elena and Vallernius discovered prior, and follow the track swiftly for the first 300 meters of winding track. [d6: 1] You come to a stop at the beginning of the 100m final stretch, noting that your flight spells have gotten noticeably weaker toward the end. Coincidence?
Finally, in the spiritual realm..."Probably best to start with the most complex part..."
Set out to recruit a choir of level 1 spirits. Four or eight would probably give the best ratio of harmony boost to difficulty organizing. Sixteen if it seems viable.
Get an accordion from the academy's music room (assuming it has one). Consider an ignition to amplify its sound.
Train the spirits in a simple "pull construct forward" composition, noting how quick they are to learn.
[d10: 7] You issue forth a signal to all the spirits and let them hear. They seem to be quire receptive to your message of joy!
The proctor is quick to point out that there is a storage room for musical instruments in the back of the Flowering Hall; this area is used for ceremonies after all. You find trumpets, trombones, horns, and stringed instruments, but no accordion. You then hear the distinct sound of one coming from the gardens outside.
An elderly man, clad in regal garments, plays somber tones on a bench, a song of mourning, of a thousand-year life coming to a dreadful end. Two young children have sat down to listen on the bench opposite.
Resonance (Lasts a number of uses equal to the degrees of success): Boosts vibrations to increase volume and richness of tone (reroll your harmony die). It may break the instrument if you get carried away (roll max value on either roll), but the resulting opus will be well worth the damages!
Your entourage of 8 spirits gathers around the man, one of them asking what you are going to do to him.
Author
Topic: Antinomy of the Five Spectra (IC) -- The Academy Exam (Read 17701 times)