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]

"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."

[imeanforever]

"This concerns me. Is it a particularly hard problem to treat? I feel like I might notice from the first spell I cast if it were going to be an issue for me at all but if it is I'd like some sensible way to address it."

[kingsidecastle]

"The only effective treatment I've heard about is to never use magic again," she says. "Which I guess wouldn't be so bad starting from a position of never having used the relevant kind of magic before, but you might be in especially big trouble if your own magic turned out to retroactively become a problem, and I have no idea how likely that is..."

[imeanforever]

"I... had not considered the possibility that it might affect my equanimity with regard to sorcery."

[kingsidecastle]

"And now that I've thought of it I have no idea how to tell whether it's possible and how likely it is if so. Well, I suppose getting hundreds of sorcerers to try magic until some of them get addicted would give us an idea."

[imeanforever]

"I don't have any sorcerers handy besides myself. Mortals can learn it, but we have no addicts on hand to see if it satisfies the cravings. Do we?"

[kingsidecastle]

"I could try to come up with one," says Castle. "There are some people I could ask."

[imeanforever]

"And I think it would at least be challenging to come up with other sorcery to do based on learning how to make a fairylight, and those are quite harmless."

[kingsidecastle]

"So we'll see. But it might be prudent if you didn't try to do any local magic until we know what resources we have for predicting how magic addiction interacts with sorcery."

[imeanforever]

Nod.

[kingsidecastle]

Shrug. "Anything else I should test while we're here? Particular effects that it would be useful to know if local magic can achieve?"

[imeanforever]

"I wonder if you could let me sense harmonics directly. If it were a persistent effect it would be almost better than letting me flatten them out."

[kingsidecastle]

"I've been thinking about that," she says. "You might want to nominate someone else to test it for you, because it can be hard to reverse a well-cast chess magic spell, and it has occurred to me that a spell to see harmonics might not be able to function while leaving them unchanged, and you might not want to go around constantly scrambling harmonics in your vicinity even if it let you see them."

[imeanforever]

"Good points all. I wonder if Tea wants to see harmonics."

[kingsidecastle]

"Let's find out."

She steps out of the workroom and leans out over the top of the stairs and says, "Tea, would you like to see harmonics?"

[eversomuchfun]

"Sure, why not," he says, appearing at the bottom of the stairs and looking up at Castle.

[imeanforever]

"The idea being that you may go around indefinitely drunkening or otherwise affecting them and this would be a good thing to know before casting it on someone who uses sorcery," explains Promise.

[eversomuchfun]

"Yeah, I heard," he says. "I have no objections to being your test case."

He ascends the stairs.

[imeanforever]

Promise supervises.

[kingsidecastle]

"Promise, would you like to participate? A second person sitting for rook will help to balance and strengthen the spell, and as far as I know the danger of magic addiction is only in the actual casting."

[imeanforever]

"Sure. What do I do?"

[kingsidecastle]

"You'll just have to sit in a specific place in the spell layout not doing much, like Royal did when I cast all those spells at the school."

She begins to construct a spell layout with eight points. Four wooden rooks and four metal rooks in an inner ring, each with its corresponding bishop holding a spot in the outer ring. A lot of those clear glass pebbles. Four glass bishops and four glass knights, on points between the inner and outer rings; numerous glass pebbles covering other places in the diagram. Promise is directed to sit in a particular spot between the inner and outer rings; Castle sits in the corresponding spot on the opposite side; Tea gets the center spot.

Castle begins describing a spell-narrative.

Here is a far-seeing traveller, knowledgeable and wise, with sharp senses and a keen mind. Here is an invisible landscape, its existence known to few, its features understood by fewer. But that can change. He can learn a new kind of sight.

Visions take shape around them, showing the harmonics of the room as they currently stand...

...and then flaring and warping into a spiky crystalline structure. Castle keeps talking, but frowns slightly. The structure shifts faster and faster as she speaks, blurring and warping in places. She offers a diplomatic suggestion that seeing and changing should not be the same, but the spell is having none of it; after a few more sentences she thanks the glass pieces for their help and ends the spell. The sharp-planed tangle of visible harmonics fades from the air.

"Well?"

[eversomuchfun]

"I'm definitely seeing something," he says. "If what we saw at the start of the spell was drunk harmonics, I think these harmonics have taken regrettable doses of hallucinogens."

[imeanforever]

Promise starts curiously surrounding Tea with fairylights.