Turn 4: In which our attention returns to OckellWet, bedraggled and just the least bit traumatised, Class A returns to sunny Ockell by cart, Oak and Dalia leading the way. The students may have been lost, hunted or transformed into wood pigeons, but their experiences with magical beings have at least convinced them that they are capable of acts of magic. Such as turning back into a human after spending days trapped in the form of a wood pigeon.
Such is education.
TeachingMagic Action: Teach Class A Wild Magic
You apologise to Class A for their admittedly terrible experiences with Fey magic, and start to teach them the basics of wild magic - focusing on what you want to achieve, drawing on your reserves of occult power, and releasing conscious control to let the magic take its course.
[3]
Class A... doesn't trust you. They pay attention to the lessons, and from time to time work up the courage to cast small spells, but their understanding of wild magic is still mostly theoretical.
You suspect there is still some resentment over the Mosswoods trip.
Continue to teach life magic to the students of class B, focusing upon charms. Pay close attention to Rachel's progress, and give her additional instruction if she continues to show interest and talent.
You keep going with the life-based magics, teaching class B healing and fleshworking charms.
[1]
With Class B's usual relentless enthusiasm, they decide to supplement the curriculum with field work in Ockell. Field work requiring a level of expertise far beyond theirs.
Uninjured urchins, even the magical sort, are kicked out of the hospital on principle. So the students take their services directly to the townsfolk, offering to make amends for their earlier blunders involving wild magic. Using only a basic set of healing and fleshworking charms, they attempt to straighten crooked limbs, strengthen the flesh of the old and decrepit, and improve the looks of the worse-favoured young men and women of Ockell through radical cosmetic surgery.
There aren't any casualties. There are a lot of people going around with hideous, fleshy growths and deformities, cursing your young charges. Old men with uselessly huge biceps that their spindly legs can barely support, a crippled washerwoman who now has three legs and a lot of stockings to knit, a young Cyrano who now has two extremely small noses... the list goes on. This doesn't make class B very popular. Admittedly, a large part of the populace blames the idiots that let a student practice magic on them. Nonetheless, the mayor of Ockell himself does come and visit you, asking if you can make sure your charges keep their magic on the school premises.
Bring Class B out onto the school fields and teach them plant magic. Buy a bunch of random seeds so they can have a little practice (and fun) doing so.
You spend a few gold on seed for mixed grain, vegetables and flowers, nothing special, and start to work on the basics of plant magic with Class B, keeping the lessons practical and reasonably fun.
[6]
It goes... quite well, really. Perhaps instructing absolute beginners to start using plant magic to grow plants from seed wasn't the best plan, especially given Class B's penchant for wild magic and inexhaustible enthusiasm for any hands-on spellcasting. The school fields are now a whole lot greener, which is nice. There are grasses and small trees, dwarfed by the mighty living wood buildings you and Dalia grew, as well as vegetables and berry bushes scattered across what used to be unused dirt.
The new plants are nice and all, but a bit weird. It's hard to say much more than that without going into particular cases. They're odd shapes, or doing unusual things, or have a weird vibe to them. A sunflower plant seems to be trying to bear fruit, and some of the grass feel a bit watchful. Nothing too threatening, just a tad off. Hm.
Class A doesn't like the change much. They rarely frequent the school grounds now, staying in classrooms or the town most of the day. In fact, they seem to be sleeping in one of the lecture halls. Grown wood accomodation might not appeal to them so much after the Mosswoods experience.
Continue teaching the children of class A while agreeing with them that nature sucks unless you're racing through it.
Try to get them to create devices capable of stopping things. My aim is to get at least half of them to build Stop-Shields capable of stopping projectiles before they hit. I don't care if they're not as small as they can be, we can improve efficiency later.[/b] Hopefully, if they master static local kinetic nullification, then next month I can move to projection and get them to build Stop-Wands for capturing magical creatures and non-lethal defense.
The students are glad to be back in your classroom, and apply themselves with renewed vigour. Good kids, seem to be a lot more comfortable learning mechanics fifty feet in the air than sitting around in the woods. You start them on tinkering magic.
[5]
At long last, some of your students manage magic. Well, all of your students, actually. Surviving the Mosswoods seems to have given these youngsters a good dash of the old team spirit, and they go through the lessons with one another after class. They've also taken to eating and sleeping in a floating lecture room, so you make sure to put some important formulas and diagrams on the blackboards during the day. All in all, they're pretty comitted to tinkering and kinetics.
All of them manage to create their own Stop-Shields, small utilitarian devices powered by clockwork, capable of stopping physical projectiles up to a metre away from the wielder. Pretty good ones too - the students have built machines capable of stopping or deflecting not only thrown rocks and heavy falling objects, but also catching or slowing crossbow bolts before they hit them. The devices also work pretty well on objects as heavy as humans - the students have fun running at one another with their shields powered, only to be forced to a halt a few feet away from their friends.
Non-magic action: Teach Class A dream magic, and give them the general cautions for students of magic: Don't try to do more than you can handle, always have a plan for if your spell backfires somehow, use responsibly, etc.
Also, make a note of it if one of the students in Class A has a particular aptitude for dream magic.
Class A are willing to learn about dream magic, and carefully note down your warnings. So you start teaching them the fundamentals of dream magic.
[1]
It goes... very, very badly, for them. A lot of their dreams seem to be about the Mosswoods at the moment, and even small bits of dream magic bring back memories of terrifying experiences. It doesn't help that one's experiences in fairy woods tend to be dreamlike, events happening with twisted logic, atavistic fears rising again, and strange creatures that most see only in dreams and nightmares lurking in the shadows. So the students really don't feel comfortable practising dream magic, to the point where they gradually stop doing it.
Irene, a quietly confident girl from the mountains, doesn't seem too badly traumatised by the Mosswoods debacle, and is capable of performing the basic spells you demonstrate to the students. Hard to say whether she has any particular aptitude, really, as the rest of her peers refuse to perform dream magic after a week or so. They just grimly take notes and pretend that they're unable to perform any of the charms you show them.
Magim and Kansei go on an adventure Construct a device capable of locating a classroom and teleporting people to one of the classrooms and back by following its link to the Kinetic Negator, hopefully with Magim helping me with the parts of dreamwalking-teleportation I'm not that familiar with. Then activate the teleporter and go through. If it works then maybe it will lead to something useful for teaching or at least profitable.
Magic action: Help Dr. Ifto make his device, using my experience in dream magic to work on the teleportation part. Once it's complete, follow him.
Teleportation isn't at all easy, unless you're one of the specialists employed by the administration... strictly speaking, it isn't properly kinetics. An easier option is changing the background topology of the universe a little, and making a door that leads somewhere it shouldn't. This is something a bit of dream magic can help with, in fact. Kansei and Magim get to work.
[4],
[1]Magim spends several days scribbling equations involving vector spaces with arcane background fields and trying to remember how the Baire Category Theorem works when the distance between any two points is equal to the square of the smell of your grandmother's special apple crumble. Marrying dream magic with mechanical kinetics is never easy - the laws of physics don't dream, and don't have much patience with bubbles of low entropy asking them to. Luckily, before Magim can put any of his worryingly involved arcane mathematics into practice, Kansei has dug up an old manual which happened to have pretty much exactly the thing you need in it. The add-on for the Kinetic Negator takes almost an entire month to build, but once he's finished, there's a door inside the Negator that should lead straight to the classroom. In fact, it wouldn't be too hard to do this for all the classrooms... put in an extra door that leads straight to the Negator.
Dr Ifto bravely volunteers to walk through the door, as his colleague waits in the Negator's cramped interior. Half a second later, the wooden frame quivers and ripples, and he's flung straight back out, his flailing cane nearly catching Magim in the mouth.
Magim himself fares better. As soon as he steps through the portal, he realises that he's in the Dream, an unstable semi-place that supervenes on the real world, a dimension formed out of dream-stuff, the byproducts of unfinished dreams. Doors from the physical world into the dream tend not to work too well, as anyone awake is ejected from the Dream almost immediately, in Ifto's case at high speed. Magim however is a dream-mage, and can drop off at a moment's notice. By falling asleep at once, he manages to stay in the classroom.
The classroom itself is empty and normal, although the light is strange, omnipresent rather than coming from any particular source, and what shadows there are are all wrong. But leaning out the door, he looks out over an impossible landscape, the buildings of Ockell warped into bizarre configurations, some stretched vertically and looming over the school at crazy angles, some short and squat like autumn mushrooms, some multiplied endlessly by the countless aspects they present to the folk of Ockell, each one taken from their subjective experience and made almost-real by dreams. The sea, barely visible behind the towering houses, is storm-wracked and grey, a single wave the size of a mountain falling slowly over the harbour below it. Pretty normal for the Dream, really. Apart from the sea, West Isle folk don't seem to have any particularly visible major anxieties or fixations.
Luckily, the room is reasonably high up in the Dream, at the moment, rather than in the Nightmare, the realm of the heaviest and most disturbed dreams that sink to the lightless depths of the world. Nonetheless, the ground below is obscured by huge, dark trees, probably born from the unsettled dreams of the children that returned from the Mosswoods, certainly containing doors and boltholes to the hellish world below.
So that's where that was.
Diverse matters in OckellFor a magical action, regularly go out into the town and help with medical troubles once again. Try to find out about longstanding ailments that have been incurable prior, and fix them if they're not too troublesome or risky (no attempting to make zombie legs for an amputee, not just yet). While doing this, talk about the progress the students are making with healing magic, and broach the subject of bringing in livestock animals for them to practice the trade on, before attempting to heal humans. The primary goal here is to maintain Vids' positive reputation, while gauging whether the townspeople would be suspicious of the wizard school bringing in animals to experiment on--I'll actually obtain the animals later.
The good people of Ockell are absolutely fine with you or the students buying and using animals to practice any kind of magic. More than fine really, almost overyjoyed at the prospect. Very much in support of the idea.
You spend a week or so removing old war wounds, smoothing out club feet and resetting improperly healed bones. Then people with unexpected deformities start to trickle into the hospital - not the cancers or swellings that you'd normally see in a backwards planet like this, but issues that could only have been created with magic. The victims of your student's handiwork.
Undoing charms is never too difficult, but a few of the townsfolk have been subjected to fairly bizarre or complex fleshworking spells - Class B's reckless confidence with all branches of magic coming to the fore again. This stuff would be easy for a medical mage to deal with, but takes some serious concentration from a golemist.
[4]
Thankfully, you manage to fully undo your student's errors, and restore all the townsfolk to their old bodies by the end of the month. Admittedly, this could have been much worse, especially if the students were at a more advanced stage. Still, it's a pretty tough month.
NONMAGICAL ACTION: visit Okell and socialize. Hang out with eh commoners, performing necessary home and hearth rituals, and sharing meals. Take advantage of my popularity and build on it by being jovial and interested in their stories.
MAGICAL ACTION: Perform a series of divinations using entrails. Goal is to determine favorable and unfavorable situations for making contracts with the entities of the island. If I need to specify one entity to examine, let's go with the sea god.
[5]
You succeed in making yourself popular with the common folk of Ockell, eating in taverns, buying sweet rolls and coffee at stalls on the harbour, drinking in the alehouses. You spend a great deal of time simply wandering around the city, on the look out for anyone to talk to, and frequently get invited back to someone's home for a night of feasting, drinking and storytelling. Not only do people like you, but they're no longer afraid of you - folk that wouldn't have had the courage to talk to a wizard a few months ago invite you to dances and parties. You perform a few rituals, blessing hearths and choosing auspiscious names for boats, but nothing too dramatic, as you need to save some energy for the divinations. Buying several goats to cut open digs into your funds a little, but not too badly.
The divinations are novice work, really - sensing the attitudes of various occult entities isn't difficult, especially as you have a pretty good idea of how such creatures might behave.
The spirit of the Wyish sea, the only properly sailed expanse of open water on this planet, Fyn, should be easy enough to contract with at any time - humans are constantly interacting with their domain all year round, whether they're sailing, bathing or fishing. There might not be too much ready power here - a great deal of the little natural magic the people of this world can muster goes into making offerings and prayers to Fyn, and imploring their help, so a lot of the spirit's energy is probably tied up with them, and granting their sea-based wishes. Definitely wouldn't be a bad candidate for your students to contract with though - having some measure of control over the Wyvish sea could go a really long way on this world, so long as Kansei doesn't start selling flying machines.
The Mosswoods fairies would be willing to contract with wizards, but probably won't deal with children. They'd drive a hard bargain, as fay are wont to do, although it looks like Oak Greensleeves managed to get a pretty good deal by amusing the court with his Ent disguise. A sense of humour and an unlimited lifespan can make a being place a pretty high value on entertainment.
You manage to locate some particularly holy places on the Gef, the Usk and the Blacktorrent, perfect for communicating with the river spirits. The Bull and Geffid would be easier to contract with, according to the entrails, but the Tall Woman has the most untapped power and occult sophistication. The Blacktorrent is the oldest river on the island, and forces millions of gallons of snowmelt through narrow mountain gorges each spring. A wild and terrible river.
The mighty beings of the deep and open sea could also be contracted with, although this would be a dangerous undertaking. Such things often have few concepts other than "dark" and "light", "great" and "small", "hunter" and "prey". Nonetheless, the arrival of wizards has piqued their interest, and they are waiting or manifesting in some way near a cove on the west side of the island, like sharks on a starless night drawn to the glimmer of a fishing boat's lantern.
Whatever lurks in the mountains... you get the sense that it or they are pretty old, but younger than the deep beings, Fyn, and even the river spirits and the Mosswoods. Irritatingly, the intestines don't really give straight answers to the questions you pose them about these things, and there's a twist to the liver that you're really not getting. You're not ever sure that they could be contracted with at all.
Finally, towards the end of the month, you notice that Class A no longer sits in the grown oak dining room in the plant-based part of the school for the daily shared meal.
Research into a way of improving my own skill in plant magic--what is the norm, and is it possible on a reasonable timescale?
You could potentially learn a new Art, another way to practice plant magic, either by inventing it yourself (an undertaking more suitable for Archmages) or by studying under someone. While there's not much in the way of higher education on this planet, the Mosswood fairies had their own unique forms of magic, many of them based around plants. Perhaps you could become adept in such enchantments? It might take months, or even years if you're unlucky, but it could be done.
Improving your skill in transformation based plant magic would involve attaining the level of skill known as Mastery. This is not an easy thing to do, and takes people many years of study. Admittedly, you did spend many years studying the occult in the hopes of mastering plant magic, only for your examiners to fail you in one of your final examinations. Somewhere in the endless series of written exams, assignments, projects and sparring sessions, you slipped up and made a mistake they deemed critical. Whether the examination system is trustworthy or not, you have to admit that your magic does have a tendency to go wrong that your peers, and even lesser mages don't necessarily run into.
You spend a while mulling this over. Perhaps there's something holding you back, stopping you from actually attaining mastery over your particular discipline.
Why did you fail to get your Master's again?
Non Magic Action: Head to Ockell and assist with anything that needs assisting with
Nothing in particular need assisting with on the campus, but wandering around Ockell gives you a good idea of what the townsfolk would like help with. For one thing, they need a new feast hall, the current one being a bit too small to comfortably hold the whole town during festivals. For another, they'd like a way to indicate to ships where the harbour is at night - something visible from a long way off, but less hassle than a beacon or lighthouse. And a group of concerned parents wants a way to stop children that fall in the river Gef being swept out to sea, though you're not sure how often this actually happens.
So those are some things you could assist with, if you want to. None of your peers ask for help though, so you spend a fair bit of the month tending to the campus plants and doing whatever it is you enjoy doing in your spare time.
Teachers
All - A little gold of their own, the necessaries for praciticing their magical specialism to a reasonable degree, and a teacher's salary in monthly offworld gold payments.
Magim Somar'ahneiro - Dream-based water purifier, Dream grenades (6)
Oak Greensleeves - Two barrels of Fay wine (affords visions of the past)
Dr. Kansei Ifto - Nothing yet
Dalia Hemsworth - Nothing yet
Vids Iretineulqkin - Nothing yet
Hori Heera - Nothing yet
Students
Class A - Strong understanding of fundamentals of magical theory, especially wild magic. Rudimentary understanding of human body. Strong start in kinetic tinkering magic. Strong dislike of nature, dreams, transformation, and especially Fay.
Class B - Used to casting spells, strong understanding of basic magical theory. Worrying confidence with golem magic. Strong understanding of contractual magic, especially its dangers - capable of performing small rituals. Understanding of basics of life and plant magic and tinkering, can perform some healing charms.
School building and grounds
School grounds dominated by unusual magically created plant species.
Living wood and plant bedrooms and dormitories.
Floating teaching rooms and studies, held up by a Kinetic Negator made by Dr. Kansei Ifto.
Room of Dreams, accidentally created by Magim Somar'ahneiro.
Reputation
The wizards are well thought of in Ockell, thanks to the impressive construction methods used. Vids is particularly respected thanks to his work in the local hospital. Hori Heera is well liked among the commoners and working folk, for both his magical and social presence.
The students are disliked, due to a series of accidents involving wild magic and several botched fleshworkings.
Author
Topic: Re: Wizard School RTD: Turn 4 (Read 12639 times)