Well his refusal of magic is, by his own words, rooted in feelings that have nothing to do with Taylor's concerns or reasons for wanting him to have it. Unless Taylor does have the reasons Danny guesses at and the text is just failing to convey that - this is about Danny once again failing to understand her and not trying to change that.
"I'm not just one human being who knows about magic, dad, I'm the only one who knows."
"I don't have to be, do I?" I ask, stretching my arm out further for him to grasp it.
I needed him. I needed another person to confide in, to collaborate with. It was too much for one person. That's why I brought him here, why I made a spectacle out of what could have been a quiet discussion at home.
"Taylor, I love you, so very very much. This must be hurting you so much," he says, leaning back and looking me in the eye. I'm stunned, frozen, even.
"But I don't need magic to be your father, Taylor. I don't need magic for you to teach me the things you've learned. I don't need it for us to be a family," he says.
He continues, wiping tears from my eyes. "If you think I need it, then fine. I'll take your hand, I'll join you, but I won't do it like this. I won't do it because you think I'll leave you without it. Because I won't understand you without it."
He glances away. "I might not know how to summon fire, or teleport. Maybe I can't talk to demons or fly."
He turns to look back at me with steel in his eyes. "But I will always love you. I'll always be there to listen. To help you. I'll do my best to understand the things you understand, to help you understand the things that an old man like me has had the time to figure out."
"If you need me in your life... My soul's just fine for that already," he smiles down at me.
This seems pretty clear cut to me. Taylor feels isolated because she is the only one with magic and feels isolated in her own little world of secret knowledge.
Danny is like "I dont need parahuman powers to live in your wild, wonderful scary world"
It seems like his assessment and response are completely on point.
He dident even outright reject getting magic, he just rejects the idea that he can't be involved in Taylor's life/secret life because he dosent have it right now.
Noticed this thread recently, read through all of it, and then made a giant list or relatively easy types of mana to test before waiting for it to be updated to post said list.
I've sorted everything by ease of acquiring the material.
This list is everything that is part of our body, so we don't even have to go looking
Scar (given how useful skin mana is, trying closely related things seem prudent)
Calluses (same)
Follicle/nailbed
Tongue/tastebuds
Vocal cords
Fat
Adrenaline
Adrenal glands
Tooth/enamel (we already have bone mana, but teeth are built differently and serve a different purpose, so should check them)
Cartilage
Smooth and cardiac muscles (I'm assuming muscle mana is from skeletal muscle, but it might be all muscle)
Mucus/phlegm
Bile
Vitreous humor/pupil/cornea/sclera/optic nerve (given how useful eye mana is, trying out related mana types seems wise)
Spine/Spinal cord
Nerve tissue
Lymph nodes
Lymph
Lymph vessels
Arteries/veins/capillaries
Galbladder
Pancreas
Stomach acid
Stomach
Small intestine
Large intestine
Bladder
Lung
Heart
This list is stuff that would be difficult, if it weren't for the fact that we regularly visit hospitals and they'd probably let us poke equipment and patients. Not sure if we can get everything here. We probably could if we went to Medhall's labs, but that has it's own problems.
Only red blood cells
Blood plasma
white blood cells
Granulocites
Platelets
Cryoprecipitate
Sickle cell blood
Cancer(would this be generic 'cancer mana', a warped version of whatever the specific cancer was originally, or the same as mana from a noncancerous example?)
Scab/coagulated blood
Pus
Insulin
Dna
Petri dish and agar in multiple varieties(pure agar, blood agar, chocolate agar, nutrient agar, tryptic soy agar, saburaud agar, knop agar, YEPD agar, etc.)
Bacterial culture(see if different species do different things)
Nitrile rubber
Latex rubber
Testosterone supplements/steroids
Laughing gas
Anaesthetics
Painkillers
Antiseptics
Dry ice
Liquid nitrogen
Oxygen
Wart
This is stuff that is either within walking distance of our house/business, or would probably cost us less than a hundred dollars to order a small amount online.
Beak
Pigeon eye
Pigeon blood(bird red blood cells have nuclei, so the blood might be different)
Beta keratin from Pigeon feathers to see if if different from alpha keratin possessed by humans
Insect exoskeleton and wings
Leather
Transistor
Circuit board
Plastic
Pyrite
Electrum(also called green gold)
Other gold colors like white, blue, grey, black, purple,
Mirror(might be same as glass and silver/aluminum, might be different)
Prism
Plastic
Wet clay
Bronze
Brass
Fossil
Petrified wood
Steam
Nitrogen
Helium, Neon, xenon, and other noble gasses
Freon
Chocolate
Vanilla
Rubber
Vulcanized rubber
Bearing steel
Milk
Eggshell, egg white, and yolk
Cooked egg white and yolk
Scrambled egg
Hydrogen
Meteorite
Fulgurite
Amber
Opal
Impactite
Tektite
Trinitite
Obsidian
Quartz variants like citrine, amethyst, etc
Other beryl variants like aquamarine, Heliodor, etc
Magnets, including magnetized iron
Aluminum oxide and un-oxidized aluminum since aluminum exposed to air quickly creates a thin layer of oxide, so 'aluminum mana' might be one of the two, a combination, or it could be identical for oxidized and non-oxidized aluminum.
Clear corundum/white sapphire, due to both the elemental properties of sapphires and rubies as well as the fact that it's crystalline aluminum oxide
Molten metals (will probably need to make a better forge)
Lava(same)
Saltwater, both from the ocean and by mixing table salt and fresh water
Sea salt
Pink Himalayan salt
Ash
Soot
Smoke
Crystal flesh
Gunpowder
Saltpeter
Colored fire from burning certain substances
Sage (how have we not tested this yet? We're growing the stuff!)
Saffron (same)
Apple (see above)
Solid soap
Liquid soap
Gasoline
Motor Oil
Various cooking oils
Paint of various types and colors, wet and dry
This is stuff that's very difficult or expensive to acquire, which I've separated into 'difficult' and 'good luck'.
Difficult
Liquid oxygen
Alpha particles(helium-4 nuclei, so should be attunable)
Other Diamond colors( due to the artificial scarcity of diamonds, the cheapest way to do this would probably be to go to London's natural history museum and try and convince someone to let us poke at the Aurora Pyramid of Hope, a collection of 296 natural colored diamonds)
Good luck
Endbringer flesh
Nanothorn
Chernobylite
Moonrock/moondust
Vantablack
Bucky balls
These are the true attunements I was curious about, as well as some possible experiments with mana.
True attunements
Sage robes true attunement
Feather true attunement for Thoth
Fur/hair true attunement for if we ever awaken a mammal
Scale true attunement for lizards
Skin/Taylor Hebert true attunement for research points and because it's easy
Experiments
Crystal flesh, Eldritch assistance or thaum > eye >corona pollentia to allow Lisa to use her power at a distance
Try combining one part blood, one part phlegm, and two parts bile manas into a single mass and homogenizing them like we do to make golem cores from pigeon mana to see if anything weird happens based on the four humors
If we take mana from multiple different substances and then homogenize them in proportions identical to an alloy, will the resulting mana be identical to mana from that alloy or different? For instance, homogenizing 88% copper and 12% tin resulting in bronze mana.
If we steal value from a gemstone and transfer it into something else, does that object turn into the type of gem, or does it end up with gems set in it? If the first, would be an easy way to get gemstone set bonuses
Can value be stolen from or transferred into animals and plants?
Since mana comes from our soul, would unattuned mana actually be 'soul-attuned' mana, or would it be possible to attune it to the soul if the mana indeed lacks an attunement? Test this on some small short lived animal we give mana purely for this purpose. Like a mouse.
And finally, I noticed two errors when looking through the mana list to make sure none of this stuff was already known.
Thaum > Keratin > Graphite Lists insect wings as a source of Keratin, but insect wings are actually made of a mixture of chitin and proteins like their exoskeleton, not keratin
Under elemental types, for Arcane > Ruby, there is both Fire Elemental and Passion
And finally, I noticed two errors when looking through the mana list to make sure none of this stuff was already known.
Thaum > Keratin > Graphite Lists insect wings as a source of Keratin, but insect wings are actually made of a mixture of chitin and proteins like their exoskeleton, not keratin
Under elemental types, for Arcane > Ruby, there is both Fire Elemental and Passion
Just now woke up and noticed these! Corrected accordingly, and added two new mana types to justify Ruby's Doubling Up.
I actually planned on introducing Silicated Ruby much earlier, but it seems I didn't have much of a chance to really elaborate on "what happens when you infuse a ruby with magic."
Also, I belive the reason we have not tested most forms of plants (With the exception of true attunements) is because it was established early on that most plant mana is so similar across various plants that trying to distinguish them gives us a thinker headache.
Noticed this thread recently, read through all of it, and then made a giant list or relatively easy types of mana to test before waiting for it to be updated to post said list.
I've sorted everything by ease of acquiring the material.
This list is everything that is part of our body, so we don't even have to go looking
Iirc it's something like the first number is how well you do and the second is how useful it is to be able to do the thing. So a 2,1 is a success that doesn't get you much but a 20,19 would accomplish a lot. Makes some sense for a system as complicated as this.
Iirc it's something like the first number is how well you do and the second is how useful it is to be able to do the thing. So a 2,1 is a success that doesn't get you much but a 20,19 would accomplish a lot. Makes some sense for a system as complicated as this.
Doesn't make it any less needlessly complex compared to say... degree of success bases on difference between target dc and roll result.
Which would effectively give you the same thing without extra rolling.
(I am at this point debating for the sake of it and to kill time, feel free to ignore me and I shall return to my cave. Poke me and be prepared for more responses and questions. )
Doesn't make it any less needlessly complex compared to say... degree of success bases on difference between target dc and roll result.
Which would effectively give you the same thing without extra rolling.
(I am at this point debating for the sake of it and to kill time, feel free to ignore me and I shall return to my cave. Poke me and be prepared for more responses and questions. )
The system is the way it is for one really important reason, namely, it lets me be honest when I fudge rolls. Stats influence rolls but aren't applied to them, and all rolls are contested.
The user vs something else. Sometimes the something else is an enemy, sometimes it's luck, sometimes it's an ornery metal that doesn't want to be beaten into a sword and is fighting you on the matter.
If an apprentice pyromancer got a 2 on a roll to blow up a town with one giant fireball, that means he failed and probably hurt himself in the process.
If an archwizard got a 2 on a roll to blow up a town with a fireball, that means he failed and probably only blew up 95% of the town.
Thus, stats only influence how I interpret dice checks. It lets me look at a dice result and consider how to interpret it without being locked into a fail/success dynamic that makes less logical sense.
Latest test is a key example of that. Taylor barely failed to convince her dad, but I interpreted the results differently, as she had garnered a massive amount of trust from him already with in-game actions. Thus, I interpreted the failure differently than if she had been hiding things from him this whole time.
In summary, I use this system because it lets me fudge rolls out in the open. You guys know I didn't have a 20 turn Taylor into an instant demigod at whatever it was she was doing, and you know I didn't make a critfail of 1 have her slip and fall on a banana, snapping her neck instantly, since I only loosely interpreted the dice in the first place as a way to guide the general direction of action results.
Or, to look at it another way, it makes it easier for me to justify cheating when the dice and the story don't match, when instead of rolling under the hood, I apply stat bonuses under the hood and roll out in the open.
The system is the way it is for one really important reason, namely, it lets me be honest when I fudge rolls. Stats influence rolls but aren't applied to them, and all rolls are contested.
The user vs something else. Sometimes the something else is an enemy, sometimes it's luck, sometimes it's an ornery metal that doesn't want to be beaten into a sword and is fighting you on the matter.
If an apprentice pyromancer got a 2 on a roll to blow up a town with one giant fireball, that means he failed and probably hurt himself in the process.
If an archwizard got a 2 on a roll to blow up a town with a fireball, that means he failed and probably only blew up 95% of the town.
Thus, stats only influence how I interpret dice checks. It lets me look at a dice result and consider how to interpret it without being locked into a fail/success dynamic that makes less logical sense.
Latest test is a key example of that. Taylor barely failed to convince her dad, but I interpreted the results differently, as she had garnered a massive amount of trust from him already with in-game actions. Thus, I interpreted the failure differently than if she had been hiding things from him this whole time.
In summary, I use this system because it lets me fudge rolls out in the open. You guys know I didn't have a 20 turn Taylor into an instant demigod at whatever it was she was doing, and you know I didn't make a critfail of 1 have her slip and fall on a banana, snapping her neck instantly, since I only loosely interpreted the dice in the first place as a way to guide the general direction of action results.
Or, to look at it another way, it makes it easier for me to justify cheating when the dice and the story don't match, when instead of rolling under the hood, I apply stat bonuses under the hood and roll out in the open.
The system is the way it is for one really important reason, namely, it lets me be honest when I fudge rolls. Stats influence rolls but aren't applied to them, and all rolls are contested.
The user vs something else. Sometimes the something else is an enemy, sometimes it's luck, sometimes it's an ornery metal that doesn't want to be beaten into a sword and is fighting you on the matter.
If an apprentice pyromancer got a 2 on a roll to blow up a town with one giant fireball, that means he failed and probably hurt himself in the process.
If an archwizard got a 2 on a roll to blow up a town with a fireball, that means he failed and probably only blew up 95% of the town.
Thus, stats only influence how I interpret dice checks. It lets me look at a dice result and consider how to interpret it without being locked into a fail/success dynamic that makes less logical sense.
Latest test is a key example of that. Taylor barely failed to convince her dad, but I interpreted the results differently, as she had garnered a massive amount of trust from him already with in-game actions. Thus, I interpreted the failure differently than if she had been hiding things from him this whole time.
In summary, I use this system because it lets me fudge rolls out in the open. You guys know I didn't have a 20 turn Taylor into an instant demigod at whatever it was she was doing, and you know I didn't make a critfail of 1 have her slip and fall on a banana, snapping her neck instantly, since I only loosely interpreted the dice in the first place as a way to guide the general direction of action results.
Or, to look at it another way, it makes it easier for me to justify cheating when the dice and the story don't match, when instead of rolling under the hood, I apply stat bonuses under the hood and roll out in the open.
I feel like you should mention this in the story posts. I don't know about anyone else, but when you said 'stats effect rolls' at the start, and yet here we are and every dice is still a 1d2 roll to succeed/fail, I got really frustrated whenever Taylor failed a roll. It felt like despite all the progress 'in story' it was just fluff compared to the dice which always have a 50% chance to succeed. Maybe just don't include rolls in the actual story? Then I wouldn't be so frustrated by how it's all coin-flips, because it's not like it's badly written. Your writing is great! But KNOWING that every roll is a 1d2 is super disheartening when I read and Taylor fails a roll it feels like she should have just succeeded, in a way that it wouldn't be if all I had was the narration.
So that's my opinion, I understand you're using the dice to spice up your writing, I just don't want to see behined the curtain because it pisses me off
It also allows for ambiguous outcomes that aren't quite a success or failure, and at least in previous games shade has done some numerology stuff where the exact rolls matter for things other than the comparison.
Hmm, I think that that is somewhat interesting. It certainly makes more sense now that it has been explained (I'd been wondering just how it worked), but it is basically a way of having things be somewhat randomized while still being primarily narratively driven. I was going to be one of the ones complaining that it didn't look like our skills mattered, but knowing they are indeed being taken into account assuages things.
"Oh. Well, that's certainly convenient," dad said, closing the door casually as we both walked back into the house.
He took it surprisingly well, the knowledge that he apparently now has magic, and I didn't intentionally do anything to cause it. It certainly made me look like an idiot, considering I based my reasoning on how I knew so much about magic, and still had no clue how he was able to do that.
As he stows his keys and locks the door, I begin to explain things that he needed to know, things that my power helped me to avoid, mercury and gallium both being obvious candidates.
As I went down the list, however, dad looked a bit befuddled. "Taylor, so far, it sounds like most of the things you've listed are... Well, to be frank, they're not exactly the safest things on their own. Mercury? Arsenic? I'm not sure I would ever actually find calcium metal, unless you handed me a piece," he says, taking me out of my catastrophising.
He had a pretty good point.
"Not all of the dangerous mana types come from dangerous materials, though, dad. Bones and Gallium are pretty easy to come by, and those are both kind of dangerous too. Oh! Eggs can be a real problem too. I haven't messed with them too much, but I wouldn't infuse a raw egg with mana if I were you," I say.
He puts on a pot of coffee, and though I don't drink it often, I take a mug of it when he offers it.
He might not be as tense as I am about the situation, but I can tell that he's listening, by the way he seems to have his focus on me.
"Speaking of which, I haven't been sitting around while you've been working so hard. I know how you've had an eye out for stuff to help with your magic and your business. You might already have some of this stuff, I'm not sure what books you've been buying lately, but a second one never hurt anybody," he says, going to the closet and digging something out. A bunch of books, wrapped with paper.
"Happy birthday, kiddo," he says, handing em over.
'Oh. My birthday,' I realize, taking the package from him gingerly, unwrapping it to see what all is inside.
The one on top has my eyes widening. "Unobtanium, a Look At Our Needs". I've heard of this book, but I haven't actually read it before. It's a manifesto that was written by Hero, and later, other editions came out where other tinkers emerged and took their own crack at 'updating' the encyclopedia-like book.
An entire book detailing the things the world's greatest tinker thought about society, and the things parahumans could do for it.
I looked at the other books too, books on business, physics, mechanical engineering, botany, and, at the very bottom of it all, what looked like an absolutely dusty green tome, thick and covered with archaic bits and bobs. Illuminated text on the front simply read "MAGIC" and when I opened it up, I realized it was actually a three-ring-binder,
I looked at dad for an answer to the last odd gift, and he shrugged with a bit of embarrassment. "Noticed how messy your notes were. I know how you hate losing things."
Looking at the books themselves, I could tell they weren't the sort of thing you got cheaply. "Dad, these are all college-level textbooks, where did you even get all of these?" I asked.
He smiled, but it was a bit less wide than usual. "The community college. Annette still had some old things there from her teaching days, and they didn't mind," he explained.
Sure enough, these weren't the student-editions, but the teacher's ones, and there, in the cover of the book, mom's name was proudly written on them.
"It's perfect," I said quietly, still a bit too fragile for more enthusiastic responses.
Taking in the silence, dad decided to interrupt it before it turned awkward. "So, back to the magic lessons, Professor Hebert?" he asked, holding up a hand and making the center of his palm glow a flickering teal.
Blinking the wetness away, my eyebrows rose. "Fast learner."
"Alright, so, what you're doing right now is called Infusion. You're taking some of the mana you're putting out into the air and pulling it back into something physical. The mana you've got right now, I'm fairly certain, is some form of Thaum to Skin mana. Thaumic Mana is the name I've been using to refer to mana attuned in a medium of air, so you'll want to learn that terminology and a lot of other jargon, first off..."
It seems Lisa knew about my birthday as well, as when I went into work the next day, she had a tacky looking ribbon tied around an absolutely insane-looking sheaf of notes roughly stapled together.
"Happy birthday, boss, or should I say," Lisa begins, only to begin hissing and gurgling at me.
I feel the ambience shift, and despite Lisa lacking magic of her own, little balloons appear out of the humid air.
The balloons are covered with runes in a cheery, blown-up font.
"Not really surprising, but latex balloons are pretty easy to describe in water. The hard part is writing 'Happy Birthday Sage' on them," she says, smirking at my unspoken question.
The balloons pop shortly after that, spraying flecks of water everywhere, missing the sheaf of notes entirely.
"Anyway, I finished translating what you gave me. It isn't everything, but then, you didn't exactly have all creation handy when you were jotting things down," she says.
"Thank you. Anything in particular you noticed while working on it?" I ask.
She gives me a look. "You know what loanwords are?"
I do, and nod affirmatively. "Yeah."
She points at the notes. "That language is chock full of em, I'm almost certain. This language has a lot of overlap with other languages, considering it includes a lot of characters whose aesthetic doesn't match, but describe concepts that just barely fit in the idea of water."
"Such as?" I ask, looking to try and see what kind of aesthetic she was talking about.
"Jello Shots. Alcohol takes about a sentence to describe. Gelatin and the animal products it's derived from, several words. Jello Shots specifically, though, fall under some kind of narrow hodgepodge crossover between things that look, act, and smell like water. There are a few other things like that too that don't line up with reality quite right, and when it happens, there's different linguistic quirks in the writing and spoken form," she explains.
She starts raising fingers. "I'd take this with a grain of salt, but there's probably a language for meat and fruit and they're probably frighteningly similar, if not the same language," she explains, raising one after the other to count them off.
"There's also a language just for steam and ice, but they only share a few dozen words with water, and the words they share aren't what you might expect. Steam and Water only seem to share words like 'Flowing' and 'Falling', and when it becomes weather, the language gets muddy and incoherent, so there's probably a weather language too with a few words shared here and there," she continues.
"Other than that, glug glug blub blub," she jokes.
I nod. "Thanks a lot. You need any healing? I've got another job for you, and I'd like you fresh for it," I ask, pulling up a chair in case she does.
Lisa tosses her hair, sitting down. "Far be it from me to turn down a free checkup. Have at it, doc."
"Right," I say, putting my hands over her temples and pulsing low levels of weak magic. Nothing strong enough to heal wounds or trigger mutations, but enough to take the edge off, I knew from my own tests on the matter.
"So, if I had to guess, you want me on more power testing. That thing where you move energy between materials, right?" she asks.
I nod, knowing that Lisa probably sensed the gesture without me having to speak.
"Did you figure out that your mana has a last-in-first-out queue of effect priorities?" she opens with, sighing under my healing touch and leaning back.
"Explain?" I ask, having a few ideas of what she's talking about, but nothing concrete enough to speak on the subject.
"Yeah. Your mana works backwards. Latest material is used to perform the previous effect. If you do Fire then Ice, the mana tries to do fire, but it does it by using Ice," she explains plain as day.
"So if you had a mana that made swords, and put that in something that tried to do lightning," she opens with, pausing long enough for me to chew on the idea.
"It would try to make swords, using lightning?" I answer.
"Ding ding ding, we have a winner. You got a notebook or something? You're wanting me to do the hard work for you, right?" she asks, rolling her shoulders and standing up, fresh and ready to go.
"I was hoping you might have a few ideas, yes," I nod, reaching over to where I kept my tome.
"Any plans on letting me in on the company secret, or we just sticking with family and pets?" she asks, leaning up against a wall.
I froze for a moment, but the surprise passed quickly. "You work quick, Lisa. It's a good thing I hired you to work for me when I had the chance," I say in lieu of an answer.
"Here's some of my notes. A lot of it is kept in my eidedic memory, but I do write some things down when I feel the urge," I explain, handing it over and watching as she flips through it.
I only bothered to save the really important or useful mana types in actual writing, so as to not get bogged down with all the trivialities, and it seems that's paying dividends now, as she opens up the little notebook labeled "Useful Components".
"What are you after?" she says, looking through the runes and phonems and attunement chains with a keen eye.
"Something profitable?" I ask a bit nervously, hoping that my rigorous magical testing holds up to her need for information.
"Sorry, gotta point something out," she says, pointing at some of my repeated tests. One of the things that had been particularly annoying to figure out the mechanics behind.
"Notice how some of these are getting more boring instead of weirder and more meta?" she points at the plant repeated tests.
"Plant mana; helps plants. Plant to Plant mana, help plants by helping plants. Plant to Plant to Plant mana, help plants by helping plants by helping plants. Result gets more fucked up and abstract the more you force it."
She then points to silver.
"Copper, do time stuff. Copper to Copper, do time stuff. Copper to Copper to Copper, do time stuff. No change."
She then points to some of my healing tests.
"See how when you double up copper at the end of other stuff, it slowly starts changing? Graphite to Copper to Copper, rewind, but with a taste of healing. Salt to Copper to Copper, rewind, but with a taste of separation."
"I noticed that, but I wasn't sure why it was happening," I offer.
"Check out gold, same thing. No change when you double it up. Same thing happens to aluminum," she says, clearly thinking hard.
"It's almost like multiplication, in a weird way. Most materials make your magic grow more convoluted and complex, but a few of them, Copper, Gold, and Aluminum for one, make it slip back towards their original effect. I bet there's some sort of weird reason why, too, but it's not hitting me with such a small sample size," she says.
I remember my full list of learned magics, and offer up one that isn't in my notes. "Silver does it too. Attuning something to silver over and over just results in silver magic."
She blinks. "Oh, it's just precious metals. They draw your magic back to their original effect instead of compounding on it."
I jerk back with confusion. "Aluminum isn't a precious metal," I point out.
She gives me that knowing smirk. "It was. Napoleon was rumored to have cutlery made of the stuff, and it was rarer than gold until we figured out how to mass produce it. If your magic is just going off that 'collective human experience' thing, then any metal that's 'considered' precious by its own arbitrary definitions would count. Gold, Copper, Silver, Platinum, the works."
I give Lisa a grateful look. Her ability to just pluck answers out of the most incoherent data continues to surprise me. It could have taken me months, or maybe even years to make the kind of connections that she figured out in one quick session after glancing at my scribbled down notes.
"As for profit... You know there's a huge bounty on Grey Boy's bubbles, right?" she asks, pointing at my wide variety of time-related magics.
"Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. If it does, there's probably not an easier source of money this side of the law, cracking open the bounties on the fucked up shit that villains leave laying around," she says in a blase tone.
"Something that won't make me a target of those same villains?" I plead.
She thinks for a moment, putting a finger to her chin.
"Sell the PRT a better mousetrap. Here, hold on," she says, scribbling down something in the margins of my notebook.
"Might not work, but I'm not exactly a wizard, so cut me some slack," she says, revealing her grand creation.
If Lisa's logic on how attunement works is correct...
Use creation to make something to make thorns that utterly demolish what they come in contact with.
"Lisa, that's terrifying. Maybe don't design horrible weapons unless I give the sayso," I ask politely.
She gives me a sly grin, glancing at my notebook. "Sure, in return, please don't bring any zinc within a mile of me," she says, clearly having noticed the part in my notebook where I tested nearly six recursions of zinc's curse magic.
Ok, maybe I shouldn't be calling the kettle black when it comes to designing horrific things to do with magic.
12, 7
After talking shop with Lisa, and taking long enough for me to stop pondering what sort of horrific shenanigans she would get into given magic, (She was entirely too clever when it came to deadly things that could be done with it, I found), I decided to try moving some funds around in my business.
It turned out to be a pretty simple affair, I sent money from my business to the government, and a mysterious check came in the mail from an unnamed source who would not be named a few days later, the unnamed person, if they WERE to be named, of course, would have a name that rhymes with "Wage" and a job that rhymes with "Vogue".
I ended up getting more than enough money to afford this week's goodies, even more atomic samples for me to play around with, and play around I did, testing out all the new substances that I managed to order off the internet.
I found out that Helium was another Wave Mana, Divine in nature, (Did the gods speak in squeaky high pitched voices?)
I also found out that my power could be especially smug, informing me that Titanium Magic made something be the same size that it currently was. Something that would have been undetectable if not for a parahuman ability apparently picking up the slack of testing for something that had no meaningful effect on anything.
I found several more forms of magic by going down the list of atomic elements that seemed downright demonic. Rubidium seemed to make my eyes reflect hellfire whenever I was telling lies, and Bromine made the most awful scent, easily worse than anything I had ever smelled before.
It wasn't all bad though, I found out that I could animate candy using magic, and that Strontium Mana was especially well suited for it. The gummy bears wandering over my desk descended upon the gummi worms with fervor and ferocity that seemed out of place on the rainbow-colored sweets.
The further I went down the list, to heavier and heavier elements that were more and more obscure, the stranger their effects became.
Molybdenum, for instance, seemed to stump my power. All the mana did was try to connect two dimensions, neither of which were this one.
Polonium and Astatine seemed to create Lesser and Greater Chaos Magic, the sparkling rainbow lights not fooling me for one minute, as I could see minor distortions in time and space near a few of the motes, while several others seemed to spark and sputter dangerously.
Lanthanum and Cerium seemed to have more of the vaguely religious mana types associated with them, both having to do with farming and grain, and one of them even named "Ceres' Assistant". The magic was obviously a nod to the element's namesake, one of those fertility and agricultural deities.
The last one of any real note turned out to be another Alchemy Type, Rhenium. It was a bit horrific, considering that it's sole effect was that it could alchemically liquify whatever it was applied to.
I took my Partner's words to heart when it gave me the warning it gives for all alchemical magics, and decided not to use it until I was more prepared for the potential consequences.
At the same time, I looked over Lisa's notes, and they were thorough. I suspected, studying these runes and translations, I would be able to create runic scripts without nearly as much bumbling around, something I tended to require a lot of when developing new magic.
I also looked at the runes she claimed were "Loanwords" from the elemental languages of meat and fruit. With her notes, I was able to parse out what she meant. While the Elemental Language of Water involved a lot of wavy lines and ripples, the words for "Jello Shot" involved circles and curved lines connecting the circles.
Looking to the other runes I had learned, the one that seemed closest to that was the symbol for mercury, a circle with a halfcircle above it, and a cross below, helpfully named "Flesh Crossover" by my power.
I did find a few of the runes in Lisa's studies that matched up with the ones in my own notes as well, where she pointed out the Ice Runes, and how they involved "distorted" curves like ovals. Something that lined up with my studies of freezing ice in water. The runes I derived from studying ice freezing in water involved both ovals and rippling lines, the hallmarks of ice and water.
She did really good work, and with how thick her sheaf of notes was, I suspected she had put in countless hours trying to get everything ready for me.
Her question came back to me. Is magic just something for family and 'pets', or did I plan on giving it to others? To people I trusted?
I had to think about that, before it started appearing on its own.
Walking into the back of my lab, I unlatched a small box that contained a silicon replica of a letter, one that I made from memory as a copy of the one I had seen.
Picking up the letter gently, I turned it over, examining it again before putting it back in its place, and locking the box up once again, waiting for the day I would put it to use.
I didn't know why dad's soul had awakened on its own.
But there was someone who might.
First off, I would like to apologize, several mana types have changed, due to me only just now realizing my incompetence this chapter.
I had erroneously granted mana types to several precious metals that were impossible, and had to correct those once I realized what I did. Aluminum, Silver, Gold, Copper, and Platinum do not have recursive mana types, and the ones that I accidentally gave some to, I have since reverted. Keep this in mind, moving forward, as other "precious" metals will emerge over time, from a list I have prepared that contains the ones that are considered "precious" by magical standards.
We need to play with these thorns!
Could we make Paralysis Thorns? Sleeping Thorns? Memory-stealing thons? Kinetic Thorns? Etc.
Also crazy idea, what if we tried to burn an endbringer, IE Behemoth, via Hellfire/Hellforge, into super-valuble material?
We'd need to Void-Quarantine them first, but it could work!
Then we'd have some serious advantage to bartering with the person who tried to summon us.
I wonder just how creative Lisa got.
Are we talking Arcane > Fluorine > Oxygen > Oxygen > Fluorine > Alcohol > Paper (Scribe Elemental Language of Spontaneous Combustion)
Or something simple, yet horrifying like Arcane > Zinc > Zinc > Egg > Egg > Chromium > Chromium (Cleanse target of resistance to cancer)
What if we made a computer golem based on elemental language of lightning? 'Tis all just ones (zap) and zeros (zoops) anyhow. 😁
Edit: Maybe somebody has already had this idea though... I just enjoy funky magitek. 😅
Editedit: Actually tapping into the internet by recreating the same success as the Lisa-phone by stuff ing Relay Magic into a router maybe?
Right. Interesting.....
I wonder what WOULD happen if we were to try to mix say Water and Sound, would it try to describe things in terms of both water and sound? Whichever was the simplest descriptor? What happens if you add say Air (ie Thaum > Thaum > Paper) into that mix?
I wonder just how creative Lisa got.
Are we talking Arcane > Fluorine > Oxygen > Oxygen > Fluorine > Alcohol > Paper (Scribe Elemental Language of Spontaneous Combustion)
Or something simple, yet horrifying like Arcane > Zinc > Zinc > Egg > Egg > Chromium > Chromium (Cleanse target of resistance to cancer)
