exploratory kidnapping

[alicornucopia]

In this room are two women, one gray and sixty years old, one just thirty and red-haired, both wearing elaborate outfits. The younger casts a spell.

In this room is now also a third person. (On whom the elder woman promptly also casts a spell, which she had at the ready.)

Comments

[missnicegirl]

"Are you the sort of theoretician who publishes results, and if so, could you let people know about this one in between figuring out ialdae?"

[alicornucopia]

"Aaah - look, are you really as young as you look?"

[missnicegirl]

"I'm seven years old."

[alicornucopia]

"Okay. I'm about a hundred sixty, which for dragons is not yet adult, and you are a seven-year-old miracle worker so I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you have noticed that adults are often terrible about paying attention to non-adults. Yes?"

[missnicegirl]

"Yes," she agrees. "One of the vampires I met today thought I was making believe when I offered to make him immortal. I think his husband might be more sensible, though."

[alicornucopia]

"Sure, they're not all terrible, but some of them are terrible. So I publish, but I do it anonymously. If I publish stuff you tell me, you can't tell anybody you've been talking to me, you need to pretend you've been chatting with a hermit Saraanlan elf named Kalobes Ansal."

[missnicegirl]

"That makes sense. Okay," she agrees.

[alicornucopia]

"Great. Okay. So. Vampiric inanimate audition: real thing, who'd'a thunk, I will whip up a cure in my spare time probably shouldn't be too hard now I know what the problem is and be hailed the world over as a boon to the vampire mental health community. Next: ialdae."

[missnicegirl]

"Next, ialdae! Oh, but anyone who can see ialdae will know you have it after you catch it. So I guess I've been talking to you and Aar Ansal, separately."

[alicornucopia]

"You can have been talking to me because I'm a dragon," says Kaylo, waving a hand.

[missnicegirl]

"That's a reasonable reason for me to talk to somebody, I guess... oh, there, you caught ialdae," she says, lowering him back to the floor. "Ordinary levels of it for a dragon, it seems like. I'm not completely sure how to teach you how to see it without an analysis - hmm, but if you cast any magic-seeing analysis on yourself and then took it off, it might generalize. So if you have one for witchcraft or wizardry or anything then you can try that."

[alicornucopia]

"I've got loads," says Kaylo, and he looks one up and casts it. "Just take it right off again?"

[missnicegirl]

"Wait a tick first if you want, but I haven't seen any indication that it takes ialdae a long time to learn an analysis, especially now that it's been taught so many of them."

[alicornucopia]

Kaylo waits a tick. Then he reverses the spell.

[missnicegirl]

The visualization of the analysis doesn't go away.

And after another tick, he starts to see more things. Matilda, for example. Matilda is extremely visible. She has ialdae like the sun has heat and light.

"Ooh," she says. "My ialdae learned your wizardry analysis. Neat! So that's how your ceiling lights work!"

[alicornucopia]

"It's a nice analysis, isn't it? This is gorgeous. I like it. I like it very much," says Kaylo, peering around.

[missnicegirl]

"It's very tidy! And isn't ialdae great? I don't have any dragons to transplant magic to or vampires to make immortal, but I can show you how ialdae's version of lightcraft works," she sends a little sparkly ball of pale blue light flitting in a circle around the room, "and sorcery," she levitates herself a few inches and bounces in the air and settles down again, "and colour-change magic," her bright blue hair ribbon becomes bright red.

Ialdic magic-seeing knows how all of these things work, and is very helpful about sharing this information with Kaylo; it is not purely a visual phenomenon. The ialdic light-ball has all the functionality of light-balls with no restriction about who it may be used on; the ialdic levitation is a pure application of ialdae to cause a thing to move, and similarly with the colour change. Just standing around not doing anything, Matilda is constantly generating a vast quantity of undirected ialdae which collects around her, giving her that sun-like appearance.

[alicornucopia]

"Oh, this is just cheating, I'm going to get my entire list pared down to a weekend hobby and have to take up sailing," says Kaylo, laughing delightedly.

[missnicegirl]

Matilda giggles.

"Ialdae is very handy! Do you want to help me figure out how to make everyone immortal after you're done figuring out all the magic things you want to know? What is your list?"

[alicornucopia]

"List is, here, you can look at it -" He rummages in his desk and turns up a clipped-together stack of papers in many colors of ink with questions, some crossed out, most annotated with marginalia.

[missnicegirl]

"Thanks!" She peruses the list.

[alicornucopia]

It includes things like channeling capacity: what the fuck and nail down where conjured matter &c comes from once and for ALL and firebirds: why and evolutionary history of wolfrider mindlinks, compare/contrast w/ unique green and likely disparate power requirements for different dragon types; explain.

[missnicegirl]

"What about channeling capacity? And what are firebirds and wolfriders?"

[alicornucopia]

"Channeling capacity is pretty well understood practically speaking. Wizards know how to use it, how to tell how much of it someone has, we even have a half an idea of why some people have more of it than others, we can increase our supply by getting familiars - and nobody knows what it is. Firebirds are a... bird. That does fire. They live near the sun. Wolfriders are two parallel species, wolves and riders, who have natural mindlinks with their opposite numbers starting when they're a couple days old."

[missnicegirl]

"Well, let's figure all these things out," Matilda says brightly. "What sorts of wizard spells could you cast to teach ialdae how to look at channeling capacity or find out where conjured matter comes from? Do you think it might be from the same place dragons and vampires keep the forms they're not using? I think those are the same place; I wasn't paying specific attention to it at the time but I've seen dragons and vampires and their shapeshifting magic seemed kind of similar in a lot of ways."