((Results pages will list the results of actions in this order. Research, Social, and Work. From most dice used to least. As new action categories open up, this order will change))
It's a surreal moment when you find yourself sitting down to write out a thorough academic report on an eyewitness account of magic of all things. Or, well, as thorough a report as you can make given the single source of dubious quality you find yourself working from. While there are a dozen different wild theories you could crack off with, you restrict yourself to the salient details.
- There was, at one point of human history, a religious organization that through some unknown means had attained the ability to conjure fire that came into conflict with the Catholic church through the investigations of the Spanish Inquisition. Whether the religious organization or those who fought them within the church have survived to the modern day is as of yet unknown, whether the early christian faith or other religious organizations had contact with this Organization, henceforth refered to as the Fire Cult, is unknown. Given historical references to pyromancy in many ancient religions, it is possible this knowledge was once widespread but is no longer in common practice.
- Given reports from the eyewitness account and subsequent experimentation, it is fully possible for a human to produce and manipulate fire in ways contrary to modern physical laws. How these methods work, where the energy comes from, and the method by which it was originally learned is unknown.
- It is theoretically possible for a human to manipulate their physical form through the utilization of the same method that allows them to conjure fire. Reports of humans withstanding bullets and bending steel with their bare hands might be representations of the least forms of these techniques as the eyewitness presumed the individuals in question to be early apprentices within the Fire cult. Therefore, assuming this hypothesis is correct, the bound demons referred to by the eyewitness could simply be Humans who had shaped their forms in ways a superstitious mind would view as demonic.
You purse your lips as your pen rests on the last point you have listed on the page of the notebook you started keeping. Looking down at your crippled legs, you can physically feel the cold metal of the plates keeping your ruined femurs and tibias together. Standing out in sharp relief to the pleasant warmth of the rest of your body.
Perhaps it's foolish, but you desperately hope the last part is true.
(Your incredibly limited knowledge has been organized, new options unlocked.)
The process of trying to recreate the original event is taxing to say the least. Days pass you by as you try to recreate the symbol. Your wastepaper basket filling up with sheets of printer paper marked with flawed symbols and your fingers rapidly filling up with bandages as you keep stabbing yourself with a pin to bleed onto the ultimately faulty symbol.
You were honestly close to giving up for this week when your most recent product blackened slightly and the Ember within you stirred. Not growing like it had in the first place. But stirring ever so slightly.
Taking this minute success with the grasp of a drowning man upon the hand of a rescuer, you return to your work. Taking the shape that'd worked slightly and fiddling with it. Shifting the thickness of the lines and the degree of the angles until finally. You found a shape that worked perfectly. With a final prick you'd long grown desensitized to, the drop of blood falls slowly through the air and splatters against the paper, igniting the cheap sheet of printer paper and stoking the Ember that smoldered within your soul. Compared to the ancient parchement that'd stoked the Ember nearly to the point of immolation, this only caused it to grow slightly. From perhaps the size of a chicken egg to the size of two chicken eggs sitting nestled together.
After furiously circling a copy of the successful symbol several times on a fresh book of graph paper you'd purchased after filling a previous copy with duds. You spent the rest of the day trying to fiddle with Embers within you. Thinking really hard at the Embers mostly. It was... challenging to say the least. But eventually with enough focus you managed to slowly shift one of the Embers around slightly. Slowly but surely bringing it from its spot in your center to the edge of the skin of your stomach. Working off of a hunch, you placed your hand in an open cup beneath the warm mote of energy lingering just below your skin and
pushed. With an imagined "pop" a small ball of fire emerged and rested in the palm of your hand.
You'll happily admit to staring for a very long time at the merrily crackling ball of fire hovering impossibly above the skin of your palm.
It was Beautiful in ways you couldn't possibly describe. It was only when a distant part of yourself noticed that the room around you was pitch black that you came back to reality. The moment your focus slipped, a strange zorping sensation occured and the fireball winked out of existence. As if it had never been.
Shaking the pins and needles out of your sleeping limbs and massaging the crick in your neck. You start bumping around to find a light switch as you considered what just happened.
(Method of Generating new Embers discovered, new options unlocked, new action category unlocked)
Work was, perhaps mercifully, completely mundane. No issues, no unpleasant customers. Just pure, unfettered normalcy. You had no idea how much you had needed that.
(No change to financial situation, no monetary problems developed)
((Next turn options will drop tonight, now pardon me while I go eat something))
