2PM approached, and Isaiah hadn't yet left the couch. He wore yesterday's clothes, yesterday's makeup, yesterday's 5 o'clock shadow. He supposed he should at least get the shaving done. Makeup could stay or go as-is; without broaching health issues with sharing Sana's eyeliner, he found no way to touch up what still caked to his eyes from the night before. The lack of fresh clothes wasn't an easily remedied conundrum, either - not when everything he owned was currently ash or tatters.
After expending the energy he didn't have to shave, Isaiah left the apartment without issuing goodbyes. He embarked on the long bus ride to another friend's house, a friend who would surely support him without complaint during dire times like these, and he found himself more irritated with Mont Blonc than he felt when recuperating. No one allowed him to have his miseries these days - no one permitted him to experience the dire straits of life when they could share a thousand comforts. Hell, between guilt and nurturing dispositions, Isaiah thought he could spend the rest of his life as a bum without a single complication. When one source of comfort dried up, he would surely move onto the next. And once he exhausted the quiet tenacity of each of his friends, he could simply go to the Negaverse to get set up with a fresh life.
Ah, there it is again. Isaiah thought to himself while he deposited his two-and-a-half dollars in exact change. They sounded their tinny chimes in the machine before a rumbling whir bestowed upon him one all-day ticket. The ever-present question of to stay Order or to go Chaos. To stay or to go. To be or not to be.
That is the question.
The shopkeeper spent the forty minutes of bus time in idle introspection. Few bothered speaking to him; current bus culture commanded more to look to their phones than their surroundings. For a while he studied a caramel-skinned girl with the smallest braids he could imagine while she played a furious game with her rubiks cube. She timed it, too, by the way she kept tapping her laptop. But soon the bus reached his destination, and he left without ever knowing her name. He wondered, then, if corruption would be much the same as this - leaving without ever really knowing anybody.
Lorne's apartment was a short walk away, through an alleyway in which he could transform, and he neglected to go farther than the stone steps leading up to the door. Instead he seated himself on the first pair, laid his bone cane across his lap, and waited for Hvergelmir to pay him a visit. 2PM wasn't long from now.
Shazari
a start for you!
Posted: Fri Dec 18, 2015 7:14 am
It had gone fairly well, Laney thought. She and Jenna had gotten out of bed at 6 am: enough time to each take a speed shower and throw on their coziest sweatshirts and leggings, then make it out the door to the diner to treat themselves to a well-deserved brain breakfast before heading off to the testing center. The test had taken a good chunk of time. Laney and Jenna had spent a long while studying for it, though, so it seemed like it had gone well . . . and if it had, then that was a good thing. It opened up career options a tiny bit more for Laney, and a fair bit more for Jenna, as well.
Things were looking up. They'd celebrated completing the exam with a quick lunch at Taco Bell before parting ways. From there it had been a short walk (because who could afford a taxi?) to the address Scholomance had given her, powering up in a quiet alley along the way.
Her uniform didn't come with a wristwatch, so Hvergelmir wasn't entirely sure whether or not she'd arrived on time -- but it couldn't have been too far off. She smiled, spying the squire sitting on the front steps, dapper and funerary as ever in his slightly-left-of-center bone-decorated suit.
"Scholomance," she greeted cheerily. "So good to see you. How are you feeling?" Hvergelmir extended an open hand, in case he still needed help getting to his feet. A small plastic bag dangled from her other hand.
The wait was simultaneously not long and too long.
Anxiety, brimming as it was, often drove him to perceive every segment of every second, with every sound sandwiched into its folds each receiving strict analysis. Each footstep was questioned for who it belonged to and if they were a threat. Each horn that sounded was evaluated for traffic disturbance, shitty driving manners, or warnings to the surrounding populace that yet another creature brandished its talons against Destiny City. Each stirring uneasiness was scrutinized for outside factors, such as an approaching General's aura or the perception of a youma nearing the area. Sometimes he asked himself if one of the few Order signatures that passed by might've been another looking to attack him for uniform alone.
And during this time, anxiety steadily rose. He caught himself breathing shallowly, even holding his breath at times. His heart pounded to the point of palpitation. He knew how, ultimately, this would pan out, as he had experienced much of the same in years prior. I'm not a teenager anymore, he reminded himself carefully and I know exactly how to handle this.
Shirking his gloves, Scholomance pressed fingers to the diaphysis of his cane and slowly spread them outward, analyzing both the texture and the divots in the long bone. He analyzed the depth of every recess, questioned each pockmark felt in his fingers' travels, and felt around each bump or spur or protrusion that he happened upon. He found the fovea capitis, the greater and lesser trochanter, and other bone markings whose names he never learned. And long before he could reach the midpoint of the bone, he felt a welcoming softness that helped in shirking some of his high energy anxiety. Opening eyes, he looked up.
"Hvergelmir." He was (gratefully) practiced at maintaining calm register. "I haven't been feeling." He did, however, accept the hand to assist himself to standing. "I hope you've had a good test. It's unfortunate that we're essentially shitting on it by going to Scholomance." If it were a different day, he would've spared the time to visit with Hvergelmir on her accomplishments. He thought, at least, that it was both necessary and enriching to learn about the other knight for as much as she was willing to give. However, an already livewire level of trepidation demanded that he transport them now or shirk his nerve altogether.
He opted for the latter. "Hold your dress, for we might wind up in mud." He barely loosed a breath before they vanished altogether,
and found themselves enveloped in a dense fog. It was not of typical color, instead bearing an ambient burnt orange luminescence which the squire couldn't explain. It looked as though evening drew upon Scholomance, but he wasn't certain of the time. He could hardly see his own feet. "I... Have no idea where we are." Panic, again, welled in his throat.
Shazari
Posted: Wed Dec 23, 2015 7:19 am
'I haven't been feeling.'
These words rang in her head.
Laney didn't have many friends that were given to sarcasm or dry humor. Those defense mechanisms -- rattling off unnerving facts in the halfway guise of idle whimsy -- weren't the sorts of go-tos that Orah favored, or Jenna, or Colin, or Tara. In her everyday life, most of the people Laney was close to suffered, instead, from a tendency to hide their problems and their negative emotions.
In her powered life, though, Hvergelmir saw a bit more of this.
It was possible, for some people, that a comment like that really would be just a throwaway thing, something not entirely meant or felt. And it was true, too, that Hvergelmir barely knew Scholomance, other than a few brief meetings and a slightly lengthier written correspondence . . . Still. It was also true that he'd been considering putting himself directly in Labyrinthite's crosshairs just to satisfy some morbid curiosity. Hvergelmir felt justified in worrying, when he said things like this.
She didn't actually have time to hike up her dress, despite Scholomance's warning. In fact, she was in the middle of saying, "Oh, I don't mind --" when the squire transported them both to space -- to Saturn, she supposed with a small bit of awe for the idea.
There was fog everywhere.
Fog, thick and orange -- and if her companion had seemed off before, it was more obvious now.
Hvergelmir slid her fingers across the top of her signet ring, illuminating her dimly in the crisp glimmer of her aspected magic. It would do absolutely nothing for the fog situation, frankly -- adding light to fog tended to make things worse, at best -- but she hoped it might do something for Scholomance himself, who seemed more than a little unnerved. She brushed her knuckles soothing over the pale skin of Scholomance's cheek, just above his rictus mask.
"We'll go slowly," she suggested. "And we can always go back if it isn't working out, try again some other time. Remember, this is your Wonder -- you have the power to leave at any moment."
Hvergelmir did feel a certain sense of foreboding -- though whether that was the Wonder itself, or just a suggestion placed in her mind by earlier conversations with Scholomance, she couldn't say. It was better not to obsess over how dangerous Wonders could be, not right now. It was better not to think about Degrasse and Cove.
Hvergelmir traced her fingers repetitively through the hair above Scholomance's ear, sticking very close to him. "If your ancestor knows this place," she suggested, "maybe he can be persuaded to lead us safely." And if not -- or if Scholomance went into a real panic -- she wanted to make sure she was close enough to ensure that he didn't accidentally teleport back to Earth and leave her behind. That would be disastrous, to say the least.
You useless sniveling cocksock. Scholomance gritted his teeth. What now. Wander around until we smack buildings or drown? That's a terrible idea. Unless...
"Okay, Blaine is busy being useless. We're going to try something different, and it's kind of horrible, but it doesn't hurt other people. I'm going to cast on you, and it's going to completely screw up how Scholomance looks. It's like it tears up the ground into pieces and rearranges them, but it's slow enough that you can watch it happen. I want you to see if you can find the nearest building and watch where it falls. To give you an idea, I've found about six buildings here on a clear day, and the largest one is a tower. This should give us an idea of how to navigate through the fog. Hopefully." If not, it was time to play blind games with his cane.
Scholomance took a step back, gathered his concentration, and pressed his cane to the ground for the knell that parted out the wonder. The fog whorled outward into great rings that thinned and spanned around some of the larger chunks of the wonder. A great swath of land remained beneath their feet, allowing a twenty-foot radius for maneuvering. The remainder of the place unbound into ribbons of rock, brick, and stone that spiraled upward from the original buildings. The colors cooled to an ominous darkness and its pale glow. Directly before them, one structure raveled out from a handful of stories to a height that pushed through the sky.
Shazari
Squire - Parva Morta Duration: 30 second maximum magic pool Distance: Victims can be tagged up to 20 feet from Scholomance himself Number affected: Up to 3 'tagged' based on line of sight Extra: Magic 'tethers' at 20 feet from Scholomance barring sight interruption Description: Scholomance summons a death knell that will immediately affect 'tagged' characters (anyone focused on by Scholomance within line of sight). Any targeted character will have their corporeal form turned into a ghastly spirit-form, and will find that any attack or attempt made toward corporeal bodies will only pass through their form. In trade, corporeal characters will be unable to strike or harm those who are rendered as spirits. Spirits will see the world around them as an inverted, crumbling version of their current location. Corporeal characters will look to them as blots of energy rather than people. Spirits can still attack each other, and both corporeal and incorporeal characters can attack Scholomance, as he is the link between the illusory otherworld and the real world. Breaking his concentration will end the attack prematurely.
During channeling, Scholomance's magic actively damages him as tradeoff. Effects start at full body ache and exhaustion and can lead up to immediate collapse afterward, depending on circumstances. He is also completely immobile while casting and cannot attack any targets.
Posted: Wed Dec 23, 2015 1:33 pm
There was no response from Scholomance's ancestor, Blaine -- not an encouraging result, and not one that boded particularly well for the possibility of future successes in interacting with him. Perhaps he really didn't want to help Isaiah.
Maybe if we bargain with him, he'll be more forthcoming in exchange, she thought. Offer to release him from his vigil, like Babylon did for Menachem. There must be some way of doing that that's less dangerous than what Finn tried.
In the meantime, of course, they had to actually find the man. Or find anything -- which might turn out to be a struggle.
Scholomance, at least, calmed enough to come up with another solution. All wasn't completely lost.
Hvergelmir did not, at first, understand all that Scholomance was implying with his hasty description of his magic. She supposed that was his purpose -- to enact it before she could question the specifics -- but she caught on to the most important part, which was that it was going to be her job to find and identify the path to a building in the limited amount of time during which Scholomance could lift the fog, before the landscape twisted further.
That was fine. She had a well-trained visual memory. She could probably manage something like this competently.
Hvergelmir was not, however, prepared for the sudden thump of the plastic bag she was carrying: it slipped through her fingers and fell to the ground.
Not, of course, that she hadn't had a decent grip on the bag. No. It hadn't just slipped through her fingers -- it had, literally, slipped through her fingers. They'd lost some degree of tangibility.
This was a momentary distraction. However, fortunately, it could not entirely compete with the shifting landscape for her attention. She looked up and watched the world falling away, fog and all -- but not falling, precisely. Or, at least, not falling in the way that falling usually occured. Everything seemed to suddenly fall upward. It was like some Hollywood tractor beam had locked onto it all and was pulling it up into space, ripping the world apart as it did so.
Hvergelmir understood from Scholomance's brief explanation that it was temporary; but, she wondered, was it real? Was he actually tearing his Wonder apart? A question for later.
For now, she found the likeliest building -- terrifying in this horrific ruin, its dark form battering up at the sky in crumbled pieces, moving away out of sight. Luckily, it was directly ahead and not terribly far. Hvergelmir didn't think there were any major hazards set to block their way, if they moved in that direction. She pointed herself directly toward their goal, squaring her shoulders, then carefully stepped out of her shoes, leaving them to mark the direction for the moment.
"Okay," she said, her voice (or maybe the world) sounding weird and globby, like she was either speaking or hearing through water. She hoped Scholomance could still hear her. "I've got it."
He, too, would have kept an eye out for the rising buildings if his magic didn't demand a pound of flesh in exchange. Scholomance felt the energy drain from his body while he held the cast, and in its place came the pain of a further demand than what his body could supply. The calm quietude borne on Hvergelmir's touch left him then, perhaps lost in trade for the cast or simply lost to the ether when she no longer touched him, he didn't know. But the seconds passed and the world expanded, until it reached a point where the fragments of the world simply drifted in slow, whimsical circles.
At Hvergelmir's voice, Scholomance relinquished the cast as quickly as he could. Buildings reformed into their typical appearances, the ground realigned with itself, and the fog swooped in to obscure all sight of the reconstructing wonder. "I hate casting magic," he complained under his breath.
"Fun, isn't it?" An inexplicable anxiety rose to near the level it was when they first arrived. "It's mostly only useful in stopping people from beating each other to death. And, apparently, fog. I'm guessing what happens to the world is some kind of elaborate illusion, and the thing of interest is how it separates people." And objects, he thought, as he stooped to pick up Hvergelmir's bag for her. In handing it back, he hoped to take her arm, for Hvergelmir was warm and inviting and typically his hands were pretty cold. And, of course, he didn't mind the touch from earlier - he wouldn't mind more of that, either.
"Okay, lead the way." As they both already witnessed, not much remained on the island to obscure their paths. The few terrariums he spotted on his first visit created more of an outlying perimeter, and they must've landed beyond that. Only a sparse handful of trees remained and he imagined that they both would see those before hugging them with their faces.
"Blaine's usually inside. Almost always. Well... So far, always. He's kind of meek, and he's got that nasal whine to his voice that makes you think he got spoiled growing up, and his diction is a little stuffy too. You can't miss him." Especially considering he's the only other moving entity in Scholomance. This is pointless rambling.
Shazari
in case you wanted to get them through or to the doors of the building, they are stylized like St. Vitus Cathedral doors insofar as architectural arrangement is concerned, but they are missing the trumeau supporting the tympanum (which is a stained glass window with the Scholomance upward-looking eye and a bunch of wiggly bits that make it look fancy and complicated). The doors are composed of unknown black material. It appears petrified.
The doors can't be opened without a signet ring being pushed into a recessed area in the center of the door. When that happens, the glass 'veins' in the door will glow dark blue. The scholomance eye will appear to look down on them. In order to get clearance to enter, knight magic must be cast and then the doors will open.
Posted: Tue Dec 29, 2015 9:04 am
Hvergelmir couldn't disguise her relief when Scholomance broke off his cast magic and released its hold over them. There was everything unnerving about being in that state, dead-but-not-dead or whatever it actually was.
' . . . It's kind of horrible, but it doesn't hurt other people.'
'I hate casting magic.'
Hvergelmir studied Scholomance surreptitiously as he approached, watched him bend to pick up her bag for her while she stepped back into her carefully oriented shoes. "Does it hurt you?" she asked, tucking her arm around his in case Scholomance needed to give her some of his weight. He was still only recently back on his feet from his encounter with Labyrinthite, after all -- and coming here had been Hvergelmir's idea. She didn't like the notion of his suffering for it.
She started them forward across the fog-bleached landscape, moving through the milky orange air. Once more, they were walking blind, but this time with much better certainty that they weren't about to fall into a ravine or knock skulls with the skeleton of a dead dinosaur or anything like it. The building would be up ahead, and unless they decided to start sprinting, they'd soon come upon it without any accidents or collisions.
"Well," Hvergelmir said conversationally, "perhaps he'll like fresh company regardless. I have to admit, it really is eerie here -- a hard vigil to stand for a thousand years, I'd imagine. But then, my Wonder's designed to be welcoming -- I guess yours is meant to be forbidding, to keep people out. A feature, not a bug, maybe."
She was grateful for the other knight's presence at her side. Proximity may not have saved Cove, but Hvergelmir reminded herself that this was Scholomance's Wonder, not some third party's territory they were passing through. It was probably not designed to do him harm or bar him entry. They were probably both safe.
The fog ahead of them changed color, thinned: then, finally, a great wall appeared in front of them, broken by a pair of impressively elaborate doors with Gothic-looking architecture.
She raised an eyebrow at Scholomance. "Do we knock?"
"If I compare it to how I feel after casting my aspect - yes. It's like..." He paused to draw a breath. "Getting suffocated and compressed at the same time. If I wait long enough, my bones start to hurt like someone is trying to break them all for me. Whatever it is - whether some sort of elaborate hoax or a venture into the spirit realm or insert-theory-here - it's hard to do."Grateful for the arm, he used her support while he forced weary legs to function for his bidding. "No one else I've met seems to have such a problem with magic, though. I'm wondering if it's something I'm doing wrong?" Unless Blaine was privy to a better methodology for it, he wasn't certain if the excessive fatigue and pain stemmed from the magic naturally or if it was his poor form.
The trek, he estimated, was perhaps a couple dozen yards at best. Scholomance worried frequently about the distance they'd already walked and whether they somehow skirted the building in their walk. He wondered if they were both misled by the magic, or if one of them might have bumped Hvergelmir's shoes when she planted them in the direction of the next building. All the while, they passed through orange upon orange upon brilliant orange, with no signs of fading fog. Finally they parsed through enough of it to discover the first gates of the building, and Scholomance loosed an audible breath. He didn't know how long he held it before he noticed.
"Blaine is hard to read," he admitted while he looked to the large doors. "Sometimes he's forthcoming and conversational, sometimes he isn't. Mercurial isn't quite the right word. Anyway, it's worth a shot if we can find him."
Looking toward the dead, cracked ground, Scholomance pressed his cane to one of the deeper fractures and twisted it about. There it remained a little more stable, and the squire entrusted more of his weight to it. Afterward he glanced toward the eye of Scholomance that marked the crown of the building. "Sort of. It's less of a knock and more like... Swiping your security card, I guess. Or that's how I rationalize it. As a research institution, I imagine they wanted to tailor their lock systems so 'approved' individuals could come and go as they please.
"It's actually not that complicated of a locking mechanism, assuming this one still works." Carefully the squire worked the blue and gold ring off his finger, then pressed its bezel to the indentation. A mechanical slotting sound followed, and soon the piping along the door glowed a deep, royal blue. The eye crowning the double doors appeared to shift toward them, waiting.
"Oh. Right." Scholomance sighed. "Depending on the 'security clearance', some doors require you to cast magic on or near them. Would you mind? It'll let us know if you've - er, if your ancestor ever had any type of clearance here. Besides, my bones feel like they want to melt out through my eyes."
Shazari
Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2016 1:59 pm
Hvergelmir listened carefully to Scholomance's description of casting his magic. "It does sound unusual," she agreed. "So it could be there's something wrong -- either in the process, or maybe something's off with your talisman and it's not channeling as easily as it should. Or it could simply be that you're getting heavy feedback as an intended safeguard -- that the discomfort it causes you is meant to keep you from casting long enough for something catastrophic to occur. A hard limit to keep you from overusing your powers."
She lifted a shoulder in a delicate shrug, staring up at the doors. "A question for your ancestor, at any rate. I can't presume to know -- only to confirm that it's outside the ordinary."
The idea of casting magic to pass a security checkpoint was a rather interesting one. She'd seen something similar on Mimisbrunnr . . .
"When I was on Mercury some time ago, with a friend, she had a technological system at her Wonder that also needed a dash of magic to jump-start. More evidence that there could be some relationship between this Wonder and Mercury, maybe," she pondered aloud. "Something to mull over."
Her free hand drew her distaff out of the air, its antlered finials rising several feet overhead. She lifted the spindle off its hook, and slid her fingers down till it dangled loosely from her hand.
"Close your eyes, or cover them tight, if you don't mind -- this won't harm you, but it'll be very bight."
She afforded Scholomance time to do so, then turned her wrist so she could gently flick the spindle into a lazy spin. There was a low, thrumming sound, and a soft crackle: then the air around Hvergelmir -- or, more accurately, Hvergelmir herself -- lit up painfully bright.
She let it linger for several more long seconds before releasing the cast, letting the spindle wind to a stop. The air cleared.
"You can open them now," she confirmed. "Let's see if I'm welcome."
'the discomfort it causes you is meant to keep you from casting long enough for something catastrophic to occur'. Don't muscles have that same safeguard? We can't lift cars as civilians lest we want to break our bones in the process. It could be the same. Or it could be that I suck at casting it. Or the magic is rusty. Or any number of things. Practice is the greatest teacher right now.The rest of her speculation was accepted for review at a better time. Traversing Scholomance was an ill occasion for introspection.
Her second comment concerning Mercury (how well-traveled was she?) gave him an interesting comparison between the wonders, though he reserved comment for after the enactment of Hvergelmir's magic. As requested, Scholomance closed his eyes and found that the brilliant flash seared even his eyelids to a painfully bright orange. He found it much too akin to waking up on a particularly sunny morning with a terrible, blistering hangover. He imagined that he would've easily gone blind had she cast with his eyes open. Mentally he thanked her for giving proper forewarning about it.
The eye of Scholomance turned upward in quiet acceptance, and the barred path soon unlatched and swung open for the pair. Skylights built into the ceiling allowed light over the top of several prep tables, each with the desiccated remains of pots, mortars, pestles, and rudimentary flasks. Each desk sported complicated carvings, with only some overlap with the designs on previous desks - and some of these looked to be defaced by bored research assistants who took their work lightly. Around the circular room was a series of tall display shelves, each faced over with glass, and each set into stone recesses bearing arches over the topmost shelf. None had doors, yet the fingerprint smears on each pane suggested a patterned sigil to open the area. Behind them sat a profusion of different bowls, containers, and jars, though all stood empty.
A runner rug paralleled the outermost wall, while a set of additional display shelves separated the runner from the central area that housed the tables. These, too, sported a surfeit of containers, each as empty as the last.
Toward the back of the room, beyond the furthest table, was a break in the normal pattern of reagent storage. Instead, a large bookshelf spanned floor to ceiling with highly regulated dusty tomes loading the shelves. Before them stood Blaine, in highly similar garb to Scholomance, though he bore glowing sigils about his uniform with a distinct lack of bones. He looked back toward them, a single book in hand, and shock crossed his features immediately. While he recovered in an instant, he set the book to table and started toward the pair at a brisk pace before bowing low in front of the Cosmos knight.
"Ah! Lady Hvergelmir! I wasn't expecting you so soon! I see you've met my... Protegé..." Blaine donned the best polite smile given short notice, and combed stray blonde wefts from his face.
Scholomance himself said nothing; he only quirked a brow at his companion.
Shazari
please let me know if things need changing i am writing around a cat and it's distracting
