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

[kingsidecastle]

"Yes, the floor patterns are my guidelines for marking out spell layouts, so I don't have to get out the masking tape every time," she says. "That's interesting."

[imeanforever]

"Harmonics are normally somewhat affected by things around them. Sorcery, living things, landscape. But not so dramatically."

[kingsidecastle]

"Hmm. Well, let me know when you've got a solid enough idea of the space that I can start trying things and seeing how it changes."

[imeanforever]

Promise nods. She makes a few more grids, then starts making lines only a few lights across along features that seem likely to exist to confirm that they're there, and finally she says, "I think I have a manageable working knowledge."

[kingsidecastle]

"All right. Let's see..."

She goes to the boxes and picks up a double handful of small rounded stones in a lovely mix of blue, green, and purple. These she arranges in a wide circle on the floor, dragging the chairs out of the way so that they face each other across the circle, one by the window and the other by the door. In the very center of all this, she places a glossy black rook with a minimalist design. Then she sits in one of the chairs and gestures Promise into the other.

"I'm going to see if I can make the patterns even more orderly and geometric than they already are," she explains. "I'm hoping for the space inside that circle to achieve perfect twenty-four-point radial symmetry; I'm not sure what the space outside the circle will do, but I guess we'll find out."

[imeanforever]

Nod, nod. Promise finds a spot outside the circle to perch.

[kingsidecastle]

Castle talks to the rook, encouraging it to pursue its dreams of extreme stability and regularity. An image of a beautiful crystalline tower with perfect twenty-four-point radial symmetry builds itself facet by facet in the air, starting from the ring of stones and proceeding inward and upward. When it's well past the ceiling, she thanks the rook and the vision fades.

[imeanforever]

And Promise starts mapping again.

She's not taking notes, so she just lights up the entire floor-level layer.

[kingsidecastle]

Inside the circle, the harmonics have been marshaled into such an exact copy of the crystalline tower that even Castle can clearly see it reflected in the reactions of the fairylights. Outside the circle, the pattern fragments into imperfect echoes that fade as they approach the walls of the room.

"Did that work as well as it looks like it did?"

[imeanforever]

"It did!"

[kingsidecastle]

"Well, that's promising. Now I want to see if I can make it completely uniform in there," she says, getting up to collect the rocks. Then she puts them away, replaces them with twice as many clear glass pebbles, and sits back down in her chair outside the circle.

Rook! Don't you just dream of perfect calm and quiet? Yes you do. Well, Castle is here to help. Be serene. Be sturdy. Be clear.

There isn't even an image this time, just a sense of stillness in the air. Castle thanks the rook.

The harmonics outside the circle are mostly unaffected - the patterns have smoothed out a tiny bit, maybe - but the harmonics inside the circle are now perfectly flat.

[imeanforever]

"Oooooh."

[kingsidecastle]

"Useful?"

[imeanforever]

"Extremely!"

[kingsidecastle]

"Good to know," she says.

[imeanforever]

"But if I have to put a rook down on a geometric surface and talk to it for a while beforehand it will not be useful in an emergency, is the trouble, since it's so local."

[kingsidecastle]

"The circle is important too. And the rook might not work so well for you, although you do have a pretty strong rook association so it's not completely hopeless. Still, being able to get usefully uniform harmonics in two minutes with a bag of glass pebbles and a rook is better than not being able to get them at all, isn't it? The geometric surface wouldn't be strictly necessary for this one as long as you had the pebbles laid out in a reasonably uniform circle with the rook in the center."

[imeanforever]

"It's definitely good and I would definitely like to learn how. But I don't think it's directly applicable to my main project on deck, which will involve assailing a well-defended palace under circumstances such that if I don't win immediately I probably lose."

[kingsidecastle]

"Well. That does sound like a situation where you want something less ritualized and more immediate," Castle agrees.

[imeanforever]

"Yep."

[kingsidecastle]

"Still, we've proved that my magic can affect your harmonics in a useful purposeful way, which is pretty good for a day's work. Do you want to try the harmonics-affecting spells yourself?"

[imeanforever]

"One thing that I have been led to worry about is the risk of addiction. Is that a serious danger?"

[kingsidecastle]

"...It may be," she says. "I've never felt the temptation myself, but I've heard of cases. It can get pretty bad, and I don't have a good way to judge your particular risk. The sort of thing where either you'll be completely fine and never have to worry about it, or you'll be in big trouble, and there's no good way to know ahead of time which option you'll get. I wasn't thinking about it, but only because it's never been a problem in my tradition, and that's not all there is to it."

[imeanforever]

"Can you go into more detail on 'big trouble'?"

[kingsidecastle]

"People who get addicted to magic sometimes make very bad decisions about what magic they should be doing, and bad decisions and powerful magic aren't an auspicious combination."