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

[alicornucopia]

"Okay. It'll take a while." Kaylo leaves the practice room, sends the book back whence it came, and gets some more.

[aeskhyne]

The library creatures seem to be excited by books moving around; they follow them, making soft whiffling noises.

Teah keeps half an eye on Kaylo while he goes and answers more prayers.

[alicornucopia]

Kaylo works diligently, looking things up, making notes and doing scratchwork.

[aeskhyne]

It's mildly interesting to read 'over his shoulder', but it'd be a lot more interesting if Teah could spare the attention to look up what all the bits and pieces mean. He's busy, though. He is always, always busy.

[alicornucopia]

As news of his existence spreads, he gets busier. Several independent people are conducting deliberate experiments. Various people are opportunistically taking advantage to solicit long-held wants of miscellaneous kinds.

[aeskhyne]

He deals with the experiments much the same way he did at home - ignore a lot of people who are praying only to see if it works or find out what he can do, treat meaningful prayers that happen to be occurring in an experimental context just the way he would outside of one, and occasionally give out whimsical results or hurried, nondeliberately-cryptic verbal responses.

[alicornucopia]

Kaylo would probably be annoyed with him stymieing the experimenters if a) he knew about it b) he didn't have a direct line. But he is busily inventing.

[aeskhyne]

Hey, stymieing experimenters is informative in its own way. It informs them that he has better things to do, and an offbeat sense of humour. If he very seriously answered every single experimental prayer, that would just create an expectation that he answers experimental prayers seriously, which would ultimately turn out to be false. (He's been through this logic already back home; in fact he suspects he's been through it more times than he remembers.)

[alicornucopia]

Kaylo takes about two weeks, given that he's still attending classes and also now has parents to call on a daily basis, to complete a draft of the spell.

"Hey, Teah, I have something that should let me see your magic," he reports when he's done.

[aeskhyne]

They're a busy couple of weeks, as documented in Kaylo's list, which grows every time Teah manages to consider it relevant; after a couple of days it turns from an increasingly hefty scroll to a small book.

He eradicates every disease in the world that lights can't touch, and plenty that they can. He interferes extensively in Ryganaav as Kindness, mostly to save lives, in varyingly subtle ways. He's so charmed by the library creatures that he keeps including some whenever they are remotely justified, and soon many people have helpful little flocks of fluffy bird-feeted Snitchlings ranging in size from 'large pea' to 'small grape', with the ability to pick up and carry objects hundreds or thousands of times their own weight. It's tremendously cute. Speaking of tremendously cute, the world's first magical puppy kicks off a bit of a fad, and a couple of enterprising individuals ask him for an assortment of interesting dogs capable of growing up and making more dogs. He provides.

He checks in with old petitioners every so often, but happily, most of them don't seem to need him for anything.

When Kaylo gets his attention, he finishes a few prayers he had his eye on and then says, "Cool! How's it work? Want me to update the book to see if you can see it?"

[alicornucopia]

"I can actually see a little even when you just talk, but yes, please - and if you make me a sophisticated map that displays even extremely tiny to-scale replicas of what you're doing or have done, it should work on that too."

[aeskhyne]

"Huh."

The book updates. It looks like a wash of shimmering, sparkling multicoloured light racing over the pages where he records more things.

"I'll have to think about the other thing a little..." which involves going off and doing a tick's worth of other prayers, and coming back and updating the book again. And putting a library creature on top of it to see if Kaylo sees persistent Teah-magic (answer: yes, the library creature is extremely shiny and throws little rainbows as it dances around on top of the miracle index and flutters its little wings).

[alicornucopia]

"What are these things for?" wonders Kaylo, coaxing the library creature onto his finger.

[aeskhyne]

"They carry stuff! I mean, originally I just thought I might as well look for useful books and might as well mark the ones I found and they were the first thing I thought of to do that, but they're library creatures. You can ask them to fetch stuff or put it away. They could probably carry you if you asked, they're pretty strong. And they're little and fluffy and cute!"

Teah is so proud of his library creatures. And their littleness and fluffiness and cuteness.

[alicornucopia]

Kaylo shoos the library creature off his finger. "Okay. So I can see stuff you did that persists autonomously - I wonder if magic things like that in your world persisted after Korulen and whoever it was summoned you? - and I can see things you're actively doing and if I'm understanding the rest of this correctly I can see what you're paying attention to if I squint at least within this room, I need to revise that part if I do another draft..."

[aeskhyne]

"Magic things like that better have persisted after they summoned me, can you check or have somebody check? Still thinking about the map, it's coming, don't worry." He handles another couple ticks' worth of prayers, updating the book three times during this interval.

And then there is another wash of rainbow light, on the wall this time, starting slightly above Kaylo's eye level and proceeding down and to both sides in the next thing to no time at all. What's left when the initial burst fades is an exact scale model of the world, omitting people and small objects but including plants and buildings, even underwater - and all the water is represented by actual water, so the parts where the oceans go through are transparent, showing the wall behind them. The model is dotted with rainbow shimmers under Kaylo's analysis, and as Teah goes off prayer-granting again, a dozen more appear in rapid succession - although most of those fade again almost immediately, one-time effects instead of persistent magical constructs. His attention expands and contracts and transfers from place to place almost too fast to follow by eye, giving the impression that he is in at least ten places at once, but in fact he only ever does one thing at a time.

"It'll move around if you ask it to," he adds. "Figured it'd be handier that way."

[alicornucopia]

"I can summon a person from your original world, or scry on something, if you tell me who to grab or what to look at. There's fine. Damn, you're fast - this is all serial, though, isn't it? Are you literally pausing infinitesmally midsentence to go handle things on other continents and pick back up with me?"

[aeskhyne]

"Yeah! Well, not mid-my-sentences, most of the time. But between 'em, and while you're talking, and I guess sometimes when I pause between words. Hmmm..." He answers five more prayers while he's thinking. "You know what, check on the maze fountain in Toronto, it's big and obvious and if it's not magic anymore it'll be easy to tell."

[alicornucopia]

"All right." Kaylo sends a library creature to the library, since that is what it's for, to get him a book with transworld scries. He goes on supervising the play of magic across the map. "Are there any things you do in parallel?"

[aeskhyne]

"Not exactly. I can think about more than one thing at once, and I can look at more than one thing at once, but I prefer focusing on one thing at a time. So maybe if I'm doing a sweep to see how everybody I'm keeping an eye on is doing, I'll glance over a bunch of them at the same time, but if two of them look like they're in trouble or up to something interesting I'll check out one and then the other."

[alicornucopia]

"Could you talk to more than one person at once?"

[aeskhyne]

"By going back and forth, yeah. But not talking to both at the literal exact same time."

[alicornucopia]

"Could you manifest your voice as a harmonizing choir?"

[aeskhyne]

"What for?" he snorts. "Sure."

[alicornucopia]

"I don't particularly want you to do it, I'm just wondering where it falls apart - could half the choir be coming from that side of the room and half from that side of the room?"