Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)

23st of January 2007 A.D.

You are not sure what you had expected to find in Karl's apartment, maybe the stereotype of a guy living alone for the first time on his life, clothes festooned upon every surface and something growing on the leftover takeout box. Instead the apartment is clean and remarkably ordered, particularly for someone who owns three dogs, good boys as they may be, though when you lay eyes on the scavenged laboratory equipment things start to make sense. If he was running a magical distillery out of here he'd have to keep from contaminating the work surfaces.

The flame kindles to life, clean alcohol burn, the glass of the beaker begins to heat and his movements grow almost ritualistic: full measure, half measure, sixth measure. Wait there's a name for that named for a dead German guy, Swiss, a demonic voice hisses in your mind in a tone most fitting for the imparting of mathematical wisdom. Euler's Number. Of course unlike the endless spiral of Euler's mathematical construct Karl does have to stop eventually, he runs out of stuff, out of time, in a sense out of energy so that is what the potion does, permit the finite to be infinite. Or at least that is what you are given to understand it does. As closely as you watch for it, as much insight as you've dredged for it, you cannot see a single telltale ripple or unnatural agitation.

Then a thought. "Drink it."

"I'm not hurt," he protests and part of you wants to jokingly reply 'not yet', but you do not know him well enough. It is a relief to be able to speak with minor practitioners without the shadow of your power ever before you, no different to his eyes than Lydia playing with the trio of dogs or Olivia looking though the unevenly spaced bookcase crammed in a corner, but that is not an invitation to scare him more.

"Technically everyone is hurt all the time, little micro-tears in muscle are how it builds up..."

"Hard to observe," he shakes his head, then without another word runs the knife he had been using to cut ginger along his left palm until the blood wells up. "Bottom's up."

The wounds pulls together like a video on fast forward... including a short lived scar.

Lost 1 Essence -> Now at 9/15 (Occult Excellency)
Lost 1 Willpower -> Now at 7/9 (ATB)

Alchemy is the study of ideal transformations, while an alchemical potion may certainly fail to heal something that is beyond the work of its brewer at no point would be produce a scar, unless for some reason it had been the intent of the brewer to do so, certainly not a scar that vanishes in a matter of seconds.

"It is not alchemy at all!" you exclaim. You pause thinking of how to phrase this... and give up with a warning. "This is going to sound incredibly corny."

"Hit me," Karl insists.

"The magic was inside you all along."

Olivia bursts into surprised laughter as Lydia looks on in equally startled bewilderment.

"Your gift is healing, or more specifically your gift is life-shaping, which is very rare for the record, many full wizards struggle with it. The thing is it's manifesting though tools and intermediaries, probably because healing by the laying on of hands like would feel impossible to you so it is."

"What? Magic works like Dumbo's Magic Feather?" he asks, looking more alarmed than a cartoon elephant merits.

"Kind of yeah..."

"Fuck! That means Manifesting works doesn't it? Like that movie that came out last year, the Secret? Mom will never let up about it if she finds out. If..."

As he is considering the virtues of secrecy against filial duty Olivia is the one to set him at ease. "For most people Manifesting is a thing the way a personal gravitational is a thing, technically there but practically insignificant. You need to shape that potential into power." On the last word you feel the cold/burning essence of Sanctuary kindle into brief life and she is across the room in a fraction of a second, still clear to your enhanced sight, but to Karl she must have been a blur.

Olivia loses 1 Demon Chi -> Now at 2/3

"Got it you're the Flash," Karl gulps.

"The Red Ranger," you correct, recalling a random bit of Power Rangers trivia to an eyeroll from the girl in question. "Anyway as I was saying because your magic spun outwards, though such a complicated medium you are able to heal more readily in other regards. I think that if you did do it as an act of will you would only be able to do it to yourself. This way you heal and enhance the dogs and... I think the reason it works on other people sometimes, unreliably is because you internalized the fact that man is an animal."

Which is a very wierd thing to have internalized on one's own. "Karl, the first time you healed someone else, gave them a potion, how well did it work?"

"There was this guy at Hollis hall, he had been burned, pretty bad..." the words are flat, drawn out of his as it with a barbed hook. "Like someone had hit him with a hot iron, I had to do something, so I gave him some and he got better., breathed easier laid down."

"Someone?"

"This is... you're going to think I'm crazy." He sounds very sure of himself.

Instead of answering with words you motion at Lydia, silently communing with dogs on the couch. We're going to think you're crazy.

"I went to get help and I found a bunch of people downstairs but when I tried to find the room with the burned student again, it was gone, the room, the patient, everything. They called it a bad joke."

"That sounds like you slipped into the spirit world," Lydia offers. "You were given a test, you passed it, by the very edge of what your magic would allow and then you were allowed to leave. The Well if a proving ground, that is why they choose an university to anchor it, not just any university one of the best in the world. It is an unfinished proving ground."

Lydia lost 1 Essence -> Now at 6/7

"Did you see anyone else in there? Beside the burned man I mean" you ask after a moment.

"I didn't even know I was anywhere different!" Karl protests

Still if Lydia's right, everyone else on your list must have passed some kind of test and been granted power in some way commensurate to their abilities.

What do you do next?

[] Keep going down the list, maybe you'll find someone else like Karl in need of direction, maybe you'll find something worse

[] Now that you know it's some kind of test and that it works on mortal magicians, why not see what a wizard of your acquaintance
-[] Carlos Ramirez
-[] Harry Dresden

[] Write in

OOC: For obvious reasons neither Morgan, the Merlin nor Wu Min are likely to be up for 'want a dubiously sourced power-up?'.