chalk

[alicornucopia]

In Paraasilan, Esmaar, a pair of roommates are about to break a rule that, compared to the one about running in the corridors or even the one about unlicensed teleportation, is there for a good reason.

In unison, they complete their shared spell.

~~~

with Adarin (Aestrix)

with Ekador (kappa)

with Brilliance (kappa)

with the admin (kappa)

with Teah (kappa)

with Katran (lambda)

with Hall (kappa)

with Joy (kappa)

with Kalinda (Christy Hotwater)

Comments

[aeskhyne]

He discovers that Draconic is flowering with new vocabulary for things he's always needed to express as metaphors even to himself.

"I 'hear' the prayer, I 'grab onto' it, I 'look' to see what the deal is. 'Hearing' means I get the thoughts behind it, not just the words, even if they're saying it out loud too. But that's the only kind of thought I can read. If it's something simple like a headache, I go in and fix it, and then I 'let go'. I can only do things while I'm 'holding onto' a prayer, and only things that are relevant to it, for my definition of relevant, and I can only 'grab onto' it while the person's still praying. Which is why I don't talk to people a lot and get kind of terse and cryptic sometimes when I do, because time spent talking is time spent not doing anything else while prayers keep slipping away. Speaking of which, there's a bunch more little things to go on your list if you want 'em."

[alicornucopia]

"Yeah, just update it whenever it's convenient. Why are you rendering it as 'prayers'? What does a person have to be doing to get your attention?"

[aeskhyne]

The list grows.

"Has to be a wish or a prayer that's - directed outward, not just somebody sitting and thinking about wanting something, and it has to be directed either at me or at something vague enough that I could count as it. Like the mage in Ryganaav who wanted her gods 'or someone kinder', or the Aleists who keep asking 'watchful spirits' for things, or the girl in Erubia who wanted help from 'the saviors'." (He quotes all those phrases in the relevant languages.) "At home people mostly know how to get my attention if they want it, but sometimes they try praying to miscellaneous gods just to see what works, and it seems like as long as the god they're asking for doesn't have a definition in their mind that excludes me, it works. And wishing on things like stars and birthday candles works too, if they're not thinking of the star or the candle as a specific person inhabiting that specific thing, if it's more like a convenient stand-in for Magic Or Whatever or a superstition they're not really thinking about that closely."

[alicornucopia]

"Okay. There have to be millions of people doing things that fit that definition at any given time; what elevated these ones to consideration? Or am I wrong and Elcenians don't do this that often for whatever reason - in which case how do you sift through them at home where it's common knowledge?"

[aeskhyne]

"It's kind of noisy. I can filter them a little - like when I got here, that first item covers like a dozen different prayers for candy, I was looking for easy familiar stuff. When I got the wolfrider and the shren I was looking for high emotional weight. When I'm not filtering I just pick at random-ish, whatever catches my interest in the moment - I tend to try to jump around geographically instead of staying clustered in one place, and when things come up that have really high emotional weight or involve somebody I've helped before, they catch my eye a little easier. That's part of what I mean when I talk about keeping an eye on somebody - that I'll recognize their prayers."

[alicornucopia]

"Are there other things you could filter for if you wanted?"

[aeskhyne]

"Yeah. It's kind of like... I can get a sense of what a prayer is going to be like at a 'glance', without going into details, and it's like somebody spilled a bunch of marbles on the floor and I can look for red ones or yellow ones or green ones or spotted ones or stripey ones or purple ones with white swirls. Most of the kinds of common elements a prayer can have, like kind and strength of feeling or like asking for particular types of thing - people stuff, luck stuff, concrete stuff, health stuff, abilities they don't have or don't have enough of - I can recognize as categories and filter for if I want. But sometimes I just grab a red marble and look at it without checking from a distance what kind of spots it has. That's how some things end up getting listed as skipped - I looked and found out it was something I couldn't do."

[alicornucopia]

"But it does have to be something about the prayer itself, there's no - if a hundred people came to me and told me what they were going to pray for and I sorted them into two lists at random could you aim for the one list or the other?"

[aeskhyne]

"Yeah, no, not a chance. But if you sorted them by something and told me what it was, and it was a meaning thing and not 'took more or less than 40 letters to write down in Leraal', I could probably aim for them pretty well. Better if it was something I was familiar with. Maybe not to the point of getting the one whole list before the other whole list, but categories are just squishy like that sometimes."

[alicornucopia]

"What if I was sorting by whether I personally approved of it or something, what would that count as?"

[aeskhyne]

A tick goes by with no answer, except for the list updating twice.

Then: "I'd have to know you better, I think. Figure out what kinds of things you approved of. And I can't even tell ahead what I'm going to approve of every single time, so I wouldn't be perfect at it. I could still make good guesses, though."

[alicornucopia]

"So you would be making an independent evaluation of what I'd be likely to approve of, not referring to my actual approval from my head or my list or whatever. How many prayers can you hold onto at once?"

[aeskhyne]

"One at a time."

[alicornucopia]

"Okay. Define 'relevant'?"

[aeskhyne]

"I'm not sure there's a definition that isn't circular. Relevant is relevant if I feel like it's relevant at the time. I'm not a hundred percent consistent about it, so the results aren't a hundred percent consistent either. But, say, I don't have to be granting a prayer as long as I'm responding to it - the apple tree of no was still a response, and I can get way bigger than the original scope as long as I'm still basically on topic - like I did with shrens and hearers and dementia."

[alicornucopia]

"Why an apple tree?"

[aeskhyne]

"Her favourite food is applesauce and she's Aleist. When I do a nice no I do a nice no. They're more widely understood back home, weight of history and all, but I figure people here will catch on eventually too."

[alicornucopia]

"But would it have been irrelevant to send, say, the entire city of Peiza a rainstorm with thunder that happened to say 'no' in the pattern of the booms in pulsecode?"

[aeskhyne]

"Nah. I could've if I'd felt like being that flashy and obscure."

[alicornucopia]

"And you had access to memories which could theoretically have included incidental information about Peiza needing rain?"

[aeskhyne]

"Yeah. And I can read the history of the world if I want, find out things like that - and here's what I mean about inconsistent relevance: Peiza did need rain, I just looked it up, and then I gave it some, because it was funny that it did with you saying that and I was still holding onto the prayer for our conversation. That's the kind of weird edge case I couldn't plan for or do on purpose if I tried. You were just making it up, right, you didn't actually know one way or the other?"

[alicornucopia]

"I had no idea," confirms Kaylo, reading the updates to the list.

[aeskhyne]

"Learning anything interesting?"

[alicornucopia]

"Maybe. How long can you hold onto a prayer? What if someone literally prayed for you to be able to do whatever you want?"

[aeskhyne]

"As long as I want, I guess, I haven't tried - and I have to know what I'm doing to grant a prayer. If I had any bright ideas, that would let me try 'em out, but I don't."