[x] Check out the guy in the corner.
-[x] Be careful - the only people in this room should be the ones with cancer, so the mages are Up To Something and this might be a trap.
-[X] Purge anything harming him with Red once you've learned what you wanted. Magnostadt's mages clearly aren't going to do more than merely keep him alive.
[x] While you do that, start relaying some of the more important and less embarrassing things to your friends. You can go into more detail later.
-[x] Explain that that was apparently the version of you that has full access to precog. Remember to say hi to Mom for her.
You casually walk toward the partitioned corner of the room. Stories have taught you that so long as you look like you're supposed to be somewhere, few people will challenge you on it. Your own experiences have appended '
but only if they're already busy or simply lazy.' While you
could try to take a roundabout route toward it or something similar, someone might just challenge you if they think it'd be more important than healing the severe internal burns Neph left in her wake.
Strangely enough, you can
feel your own emotions returning as the seconds tick by. They felt muted and distant in the moments following Neph's abrupt departure. You're glad they returned to normal so quickly.
"Guys? I'm back."
You blink several times and review your own memory of what you just said. You
somehow attached satisfaction to your message and you're not even sure
how. The memory doesn't feature anything you can identify.
"Testing?" you try. This time, the message doesn't have any accompanying baggage.
"...Oooookay, that was weird. Um, anyway, everything went perfectly fine, but it might take me a bit to get through everything. To start off, 'Neph' is apparently the part of my soul that has precog running at all times — she called it 'full access' but followed it by saying her control is imperfect and that she's experienced a year more than me by now, so I'm not sure what to think of that. Mom, she wanted me to say 'hi.'"
You switch to only messaging Mom.
"Also that Indira is a crappy mom fond of gilded cages while you're a way better mother than you give yourself credit for."
You change back to the channel with Nanoha, Sidhe, and Mitra.
"Problem is, I think that amounts to having her always dream and then remember precog-events as indistinguishable from other memories. She seemed to have trouble knowing if this was the present, the future, or even what ultimately happened with, um, some unpleasant stuff. The term 'lucid' was thrown around a lot and she mentioned we'd have mixed results with spells affecting dreamers. If I try to summon her before she's running around and active, which seems to be linked to urgent problems I care about, it'll go from nine Red motes to ten to eleven and so on. It'll go back down over time or maybe soon after I get new landbonds, she wasn't sure which. She thinks she's closer to an overlay than an actual personality, complete with using the same 'soul bits' for thinking — I noticed being completely focused on her words until after she stopped speaking and I think the same held true on her end. Maybe it's like a program? It can only run Neph or Jade, but not both?"
You reach the Black/Green generator and let part of your mind catalogue the underlying structures. You don't try to make sense of what you're looking at, not yet; you'd like to be able to devote your full attention toward magical analysis.
"Anyway, she basically tried to relay as much useful info as she could in the time we had available, I think. Olivie has a weaker White Champion enchantment and actually prefers we use her name without titles once she's sure it isn't meant to be a deliberate snub. She's probably a White mage, too. Jail is a S+ ranked mage, is teamed with a SS-ranked one who's good at wide-area bombardment, and has a bunch of combat cyborgs who are supposedly good people with bad upbringings. There's also a mostly-vanilla lightning mage speedster thrown into the mix — a desperate need for hugs was mentioned. We shouldn't use lethal measures on anyone lest they escalate to lethal themselves, which means no missiles against anything except drones or droids or whatever. Jail stole an Agni battlecruiser of some kind and tweaked its logic so that it thinks mentioning being an Agni is a disqualification for actually being an Agni, so that sounds like it'll be somewhat annoying to deal with.
"There's, um, also the part where Hayate Yagami is kiiiiiinda linked to the 'planet-killing Book of Darkness.' Neph mentioned she was one of the people linked to it, which I think means there are others? Not sure how that's supposed to work. Anyway, we're supposed to keep her safe and relaxed if we don't want another faction of mages 'fighting literally everyone and winning.'"
"That should be considered our new highest priority," Mom interjects.
"The Book of Darkness and its Guardians are reportedly capable of stealing Linker Cores from mages and absorbing powerful Lost Logia. I do not wish to see what would happen should they awaken and effectively combine infamously unstable artifacts with one of the single most dangerous Lost Logia currently known to humanity, to say nothing of the pain caused by them stealing our Linker Cores. The long-term effects would also be quite unfortunate; I do not believe they would have had an opportunity to steal Linker Cores that had previously been used for Agni spells."
"Seriously, bugger all that for a lark."
"...Wait, why are the spells important?" Nanoha asks.
"I thought Linker Core coloration was the only important bit."
"Unfortunately not. Linker Cores will slowly optimize themselves with extensive use, becoming more suitable for a given style of magic or even specific spells. This is one of the reasons why it is more common for mages to adapt a given spell or effect to their own system of magic than it is for them to simply cast the original. Even scholars interested in comparing and contrasting the underlying mechanisms of magic styles will seldom use more than one."
"One of the reasons the Midchildan style of magic is so darn popular is simple momentum. It's pretty good for all sorts of magic, so even mages who specialize in narrow fields will use it simply because others have already adapted a ton of spells for it. Agni magic tends to be better for brute force — sturdy Binds, strong shields, devastating beams, etcetera, but our versions of stuff like Wide Area Scanners are simply inferior to those used by several other styles. Even Tarnkappe, which is arguably one of the best stealth spells out there, has you basically forcing power into reality until it refuses to acknowledge your existence."
"To conclude the original point, the Book of Darkness is allegedly capable of perfectly casting any spell previously used by a Linker Core it has absorbed. Fortunately, its four Guardians do not share this ability; they can only utilize a single Linker Core and its spells at any given time. Their Linker Core selection appears to be locked upon initial summoning and cannot be changed until the Book of Darkness is fully charged, whereupon it will dismiss them until its next initial activation. Unfortunately, the Guardians appear to be capable of learning and using new spells while using a given Linker Core, something they have reportedly exploited to great effect in more recent appearances. Curiously, the Guardians appear to be sapient and attempt to leave their victims alive, behavior that becomes even more pointless after the Book of Darkness activates and kills everyone. One of the leading theories among scholars is that they are bound by ill-thought restrictions from the Book of Darkness and simply have no choice. Another popular theory is that the past users of Linker Cores influence the Guardian programs and that they simply imitate sapience, including the concept of mercy."
"Either way, not really a group we want to fight, y'know? Nobody is quite sure what rank they should be classified as, but they definitely have the Linker Cores to let them get to SSS eventually and they have a ton of combat practice against a variety of magic styles. Death is just an inconvenience to them and all attempts at diplomacy have been outright ignored. Still, I'm a little surprised they'd reportedly win against Olivie; are you sure Seer-you was including her instead of just peeps on the ground? One, she's SSS-class, which isn't a classification people just toss around for funsies. Two, I'd expect them to fight us, any of Olivie's retainers on the ground, and the combat cyborgs, not the people up in a big-arse battleship. At least, not unless the Guardians saved the best for last and crap, they'd be weaker by then. Never mind, objection withdrawn."
You mentally ratchet up your threat assessment of Nanoha's home plane just a bit higher. It's one thing to know devastating artifacts were left around the plane like they were dandelions. It's completely different to have one that's
apparently the closest thing to unstoppable
on your doorstep. Still, you think you were supposed to be briefing them on Neph's stuff, not discussing all the ways the Jewel Seed Incident thingie could go horribly,
horribly wrong.
"So, um, back on topic? I think I covered — wait, Mom, you'll also need the materials for healing Familiars for the start and end of JS. Thedas is in a bit of an ongoing war against abominations, but they have medieval population levels and are going to win anyway, so Neph recommended not freezing it since it'll make uplift easier. A safe uplift would apparently be a real concern despite their low tech level — the Titan blood can reportedly let them 'casually cut through Seekers,' which is a disturbingly specific example. Two downsides of doing that is how we couldn't respond to prayers to their Maker — who is asleep or neglectful or nonexistent, I dunno — and get worship as his agents without starting up a local Agni church branch. Oh, um, that was one thing. The second downside is that it'd make the Fade more dangerous, which is the spirit-world thingie with all the neat artifacts.
"The world with the giant turtles would apparently be boring for us these days, or at least stable enough it doesn't really need or want any sort of intervention. My homeworld should be left unfrozen as well since they seem to have things under control, but Neph wanted me to head over and teach some of the new Red mages over there how to cleanse. Velgarth's Plane of Fire is reportedly kinda dull. We shouldn't procrastinate on unfreezing Nanoha's plane, the Jewel Seeds reportedly start to get stronger if we leave it for more than about another month.
"In stuff that'll be relevant before then, we should either locate a group called the 'Yambala Gladiators' with a teensie bit of help from Magnostadt or travel, um, 'two hours north-northwest to a swamp dungeon.' That second one is supposedly faster, but riskier since the djinn there seems overly fond of hidden tests and betrayals upon failure of them. I doubt we'd get much mileage out of stealing her powers, either. Also, um, Mom? We could just do Unison whenever, but it'd apparently hurt me. If that happens anyway, I'd be OK with it.
"Nanoha, there was a thingie about getting you a colorblind mage-gift from Velgarth and then, um, basically setting it on fire, but it'd probably be a good idea to do some research to make sure that's actually safe. She seemed sure it was, but I'm still worried. So maybe call up Neph again or overchannel Red to get more details, I dunno. That second one seems cheaper. Also, worship doesn't work across planes; we can turn me into a full-fledged god on one and I'll still be just a godling on another. It works across dimensions, though. Anyway, could you guys, like, go on hold for a minute or something? I need to study this horrifyingly disease-ridden guy for a bit."
You take the ensuing silence as agreement and turn your full attention to the target. Assembling the pieces of the puzzle is the work of mere moments now that you have a full mental map of the effect. Strictly speaking, what you're looking at isn't a real Enchantment or spell so much as the
product of a spell or enchantment. You think there might be at least six major strains of disease fighting for superiority, devastating Redhead's body in the process. If his own immune system wasn't overcharged by what you think might be a
natural Red/
Green effect, he would've died several times over. Even the unnatural order imposed by extensive
White healing wouldn't have been adequate to keep him alive this long, something you suspect Magnostadt's mages are well aware of.
(Ability Discovered: Shadowblood Ecosystem [Rank 0])
Honestly, you think whoever was studying him was just a
bit of a shortsighted idiot. Or maybe idiot
s, plural. The resistance to each disease is just making them increasingly deadly and harder to kill as time goes on,
including developing a resistance to
White healing. You're not even comfortable trying to take a sample for future examination. Sure, it's successfully generating a respectable amount of Green and Black, but you'd prefer not to play around with biohazards.
Unfortunately for the various diseases,
fire is an equal-opportunity killer. Flooding the victim's body with Red and siccing it on the diseases takes care of everything save for his skull. That, you need to heal manually, both to prevent damage to his brain and to heal his rotting bones. Either way, you learn quite a bit from undoing the horrific damage left by the diseases and your own subsequent purge.
(Ability Improved: Red Cleansing [Rank 25 -> 26])
(Ability Improved: Aura Healing [Rank 7 -> 9])
Nobody challenges you when you exit his little corner of the room. You do notice Nanoha hurrying toward you, though. She appears surprisingly happy considering the room you're in.
A few of Neph's comments rise to the forefront of your mind and make it difficult for you to maintain a small,
perfectly unembarrassed smile.
Don't go on a date with Nanoha yet, it ends in stress and awkwardness.
If you ignite Nanoha's mage-gift, you'd literally be giving her a piece of yourself. Provided, even soulfire grows back, but isn't that just so romantic?
Nanoha slows to a stop and frowns.
"...Are you feeling alright? You're still immune to the heat from... all of
this, right?"
"Fine!" you squeak. "I'm fine. Everything is
perfectly okay. I'm immune. Yes."
[X][X][X][X][X] OH LOOK A DISTRACTION
[] Ask Nanoha out on a date, scheduled for a year or so from now.
[] Propose meeting up with Sidhe and going out shopping. Since this is the one plane that actually accepts the weird gold, you'll have enough of it to purchase whatever you want.
-[] Focus on Red enchantments and effects.
-[] Do a cursory scan of everything you can find, but don't get too bogged down looking at any one thing.
[] Tell Nanoha that your rejection might've been just a teensie bit premature. No, it really wasn't, this is fleeting while you're sure that would've ended badly. Neph even said so.
[] Ask Nanoha what she wants to do next, then roll with it if you can.
[] Go find Mom and participate in politics.
[] Aimlessly explore the academy. You're supposed to find someone fun to debate with, right?
[] So what did Nanoha think of Neph?
-[] Incidentally, does Nanoha want to become a demigod?
[] Write-in
GM's Note: Yes, the previous actions taken with regards to Nanoha's crush were, in fact, a good idea. (AKA "Gently let her down for now, but maybe much later, when you can actually handle a relationship.")
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