blood sweat tear

[imeanforever]

He's moving her to a different court to see if it'll improve her attitude. She's allowed to fly. It's been a long, long time since she was allowed to -

She is only allowed to fly to her destination, not anywhere else. She notices that she is not where she should be, that she cannot progress to where she was told to go, and she careens out of control when her wings won't flap anymore, and she crashes.

---

with Miles (kappa)

with Minus (kappa)

Comments

[imeanforever]

"How does that work?"

[eversomuchfun]

"I haven't heard a compelling explanation."

[imeanforever]

"Well, why do you live here?"

[eversomuchfun]

"I was curious about the Hellmouth."

[imeanforever]

"The explanation doesn't generalize?"

[eversomuchfun]

"Oh, some of the crowd is interested in the Hellmouth or drawn by the size of the existing crowd. But plenty of demons and vampires and assorted magic users have no idea the Hellmouth is even here, and yet they still show up, in numbers vastly disproportionate to the size of the town. I'm not enough of a magical theorist to know if the amount of miscellaneous magic that clusters here without the obvious intervention of any intelligent beings is adequately explained by the presence of a great big gate to hell, but there's a lot of that too."

[imeanforever]

"Yes, it's odd that my tear landed here too."

[eversomuchfun]

"Your tear is indeed an example of the kind of thing that shows up around the Hellmouth more often than can be reasonably explained."

[imeanforever]

"I'd like to figure that out eventually. But it's not urgent."

[eversomuchfun]

"I feel similarly."

[imeanforever]

"Any other mysteries that ought to go on the same list?"

[eversomuchfun]

"...I'm tempted to say 'why is magical theory such a fundamentally insane subject' but it's hard to explain what I mean when you have so little experience with local magic. You'll probably start to get the picture after you've been researching spells for a while."

[imeanforever]

"All right. It does seem less... neat... than sorcery already."

[eversomuchfun]

"This impression is only going to get stronger."

[imeanforever]

"I will anticipate it with trepidation."

[eversomuchfun]

Giggle.

[imeanforever]

Reading? Reading.

[eversomuchfun]

Reading!

Scrying techniques are many and varied and there is no clear reason why they should work the way the book claims they do.

"No good clues to the Gem's location in here," says Sherlock, closing the vampires book and wandering off presumably in search of another, better vampires book.

[imeanforever]

"How does anyone discover how to scry in a new way when it makes this little sense?"

[eversomuchfun]

"And you begin to understand what I mean about magical theory. The answer, as far as I can tell, is 'they guess wildly and are rewarded in no sensible pattern.'"

[imeanforever]

"How frustrating."

[eversomuchfun]

"Indeed."

[imeanforever]

"What happens when they guess wrong?"

[eversomuchfun]

"Failure. Of wildly varying kinds."

[imeanforever]

"Well, that sounds concerning. Do they get spells that do the wrong thing, or nothing, or just spontaneously die...?"