Day 4, turn 13. Wet.It seems to be drizzling right now, and everything is getting a little wet.
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: 8/10
Mana: 8/10
Inventory: Wearing plain white robes.
1 axe
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.
Noticed stable mana control, allowing initiation of spells in seconds instead of minutes.
Spell Concept: Destruction/Entropy/Separation - 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.
Spell Concept: Combine/Enthalpy - Can join gravel back into pebbles by focusing on the image of combining similar yet diffuse materials. Inefficient mental image.
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.
Return my axe to the tool-shed.
Hypothesis: Mana can affect mana. If ambient mana affects my mana strings, I should be able to form a mana sense.
Experiment: Try to form and hold two mana strings, one per hand. If I can't, then just make one. It's not the core of the experiment, but the differences from two different inputs should make it easier, like pinpointing a sound's source with both ears.
Meditate and try to sense changes in the strings to sense mana in the environment, or in my peers.
Practice Entropy magic on a large branch. Try to cut it into sections with clean cuts, as though I was cutting firewood from a log. Try a plane or crossed # shape in my mana string, to direct the effect to a cross-section.
Wherein I try to create a new way to sense mana, without ever having tried normally, and without knowing that I have two other states of mana that are probably more useful for a passive sense. This is a good idea, trust me.
The axe goes back in the shed.
Lose axe.5Forming two strings, one in each hand, goes quite well. After not long at all they've settled into position and are being sustained by your will, lying mostly motionless.
4Your attempt to look, to sense external mana, does yield results. Just not in the way you expected. The strings keep trembling, and as you narrow your focus on them in an attempt to discern the cause, you notice a second energy flowing through your body. It flows into your arms, up to the fingertips, and back out. As you expand your point of focus from your arms to your entire body, you come to the realization that this energy, though faintly visible to your sight as of yet, is flowing in massive loops throughout your entire body. Through your stomach, your lungs, your head, your fingers. All is connected. This second energy seems more real, less imaginary, and thus harder to sense. It gives off much more of a sense of presence and purpose than your core does.
While your personal mana doesn't seem to interact much with this other energy, it does nonetheless seem likely that this second energy introduces too much agitation to any mana inside your body for you to use it as an external dowsing odd. You retract the spools carefully, shaking chills out of your arms as you prepare for the next experiment.
5Same as when you tried to join two sticks together, the reverse seems to also not work. As you stubbornly focus your energies on splitting the branch, you accidentally stumble onto a new spell! Instead of rotting or breaking down the wood into crumbly component parts, you've learned how to apply crude force with mana! By focusing your mana into a blade shape and moving it towards the branch while focusing on the idea of pushing, moving, and splitting, (in all the forms that entails,) you manage to cut into the branch roughly a fingers width deep. As you push the blade in further it seems to lose cohesion and turn back into a diffuse mass of energy. Bad image, lack of practice, or some other problem?
Lose 1 hunger, 1 mana.Bah, I'll eat as much as I want.
Anyway.. it seems like I can move magic to the sparkles, but I need some way to tell the sparkles what to do with it. Mmm! Back to the beginning again.
What I really want is stuff like throwing fireballs by saying "Fireball" and waving my hands around. With the flow responding to what I do, even if entirely automatically, and the sparkles reacting to getting fed bits of the blob, even if they don't do anything.. there should be some way of translating things I do with my body into magic, I'm just missing a key element.
Maybe it's not possible? Maybe you can only think it into happening? Visualize stuff?
"..I should try to think it into working the way I want."
Hypothesis: I can think it into doing the stuff I want by visualizing it. Instead of casting a spell that does something, lets try to cast a spell that makes it work the way I want Or changes me so that I work the way I want to.
Try to reshape a big blob chunk into a caricature of myself. Sit down somewhere, and shape the blob into a little me, in the same position I am.
Try to visualize the various aspects of the body as well, and add them into the little blob. Body heat. The various magic aspects. Hair. Blood vessels. Nerves. Try to make it into a little simulacrum, as complete and accurate as I can.
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: Headache?
HP: 10/10
Hunger: 10/10
Mana: 10/10
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.
1Trying to mess with this much mana was, apparently, a horrendous idea. You lose control of most of the Blob while it's still inside your body, and even as it disperses it runs rampant, disrupting the flow through sheer mass, sending waves of shock running through your whole body. You topple to the ground, groaning in pain and taking shuddering gasps.
Eventually the numerous pain signals and other senses running rampant through your body settle enough for you to sit up and take a shaky drink of water. This
really sucks.
Lose 1 hunger, 5 mana.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: Sprained ankle
HP: 10/10
Hunger: 6/10
Mana: 10/10
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
-4x Bluegills (being dried)
-0x Cooked Bluegill Fillet
-3x Dried? Bluegill Fillet
Current Location: Genesis Field
Skills:
-Basic Fishing
-Basic Foraging
-Basic Construction
Spells and magical knowledge: None
Right, fuck exploring.
Let's have some fishy breakfast of dried bluegill, and go fishing. No strenuous activity, and as little weight on my foot as possible.
((Did you drop the sword and shield you had?))
Some bluegill gets eaten, and you feel a bit better.
Lose 3 bluegill fillet. Gain 4 hunger.3You manage to catch another 3 decently sized fish, and no fishing related incidents happen this time. You feel like you might be getting a better understanding of where the fish like to hide in this river, and such.
Gain 3 medium fish.Attempt to use magic now that I have? It
Gain permanent status: ___touched. Add ___ energy: ___/___ and ___ satisfaction: ___/___ to your character sheet.Late in the morning, you wake with a blinder of a headache and furiously thirsty. You find yourself once more in the bare empty chamber, the only sign that something happened being the leaf you're resting on. Even the runic circuit seems to be dormant and dark. Deep inside you, perhaps attached to or even suckling on your core, is a massive, writhing, pulsing sphere of angry red energy. Tendrils extend out from it to every part of your body, like a second set of blood vessels.
4With a shrug, you get to work testing out your new power. At first nothing happens, but once your step outside of the room at the end of the cave, you see that all is well. You can't help but let out a laugh of delight at how easy it is to use! With hardly any focus and no meditation at all, you seize control of the sword that was laying at your feet and telekinetically lift it to your hand. With a second gesture from your other hand, the raw stone of the cave wall quickly shapes itself into a chair, molded perfectly to your form and surprisingly comfortable.
Gain mysterious sword. Lose 2 hunger, 4 mana. Lose _ ___ energy.
((Shuffled the smoked meat that started in the shed to be on its own line for clarity))
The genesis field:
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
- 16 smoked meat that should probably be eaten soon
Alice’s tent
Meat smoking tent
- 11 meals worth of various deer bits, currently smoking in the hut. Done and smoked, as of turn 11.
Amon’s small pile of straight sticks and small logs of varying lengths, a basic wood and leaf bed.
Lots of grass
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
-Four fish drying overnight (hopefully?) above the campfire
Rope and wood swing, on the edge of the forest.
The Northwest forest:
A small cluster of pear trees (about half 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
Every 3 days is most certainly not happening, both to make room for college homework, housemates/social thing, and to allow time for player responses. Not that this takes long to write, maybe 45 minutes, but it is fairly low on the priority list. Apologies for the delay!
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Topic: Roll to learn magic (5/8) Day 5 (Read 17500 times)