[X] Meditate on your past life.
-[X] Your abilities, your soul, your mind and memories of this life. And magic of the mind. Just as magic comes from stories. Sometimes the untold stories in the mind can effect magic. The subconscious desires. The dreams. The stories you want to make real. Even if you don't realize it.
[X] Look through old objects of yours. Find your flute. The one your mother taught you to use before she died and you took up her flute. Remember all the music you shared together. Clean it, wash it in pure water, polish it in your blood, purify it with your breath. Surround it with symbols of music written in iron fillings that have been purified with fire in the shape of 3 triangles. Call out to the corner stones of the stories of life. The things that make a story worthwhile. The tears of happiness, the blood of resolution and the breath of music. All things you have shared with the flute in all the time you have played it while your mother was alive. Do all of this and make your flute, a memento of happier times, a key to future happy stories.
Once again, you watch as your father drives off to work. After dinner yesterday, you spent the evening in your room planning a ritual to create your first implement. You are unsure how effective it will be, but even a failure will help you understand your gift more.
Before you get started, you sit down and meditate again. You focus on your soul, and the magic of the mind. Hopefully whatever memory you unlock will help you understand the power of stories...
You barely hold back your tears as you pull what was once your father towards what remains of your home. You wish you could use your wand to levitate him there, but that would sully the intent. You never understood this when you were younger, but blood magic is like a forest fire—the more you feed it, the hungrier it becomes. And hunger is what you need right now.
This time, the sob does escape your lips, but you trudge on. You hope your mother made it safely away, but if you want to survive, you need to focus on killing the bastard who caused the entire village to kill themselves.
Betrayal. The name of the insane Living Spirit. Most Living Spirits kept to themselves, but Betrayal had lost itself in its name. No army could stand against it, as they would turn upon each other. No wielder of magic could face it, as the very story she used to fight it would be turned against her. Anyone who saw Betrayal would be killed, in case the tale of betrayal had infected them. Betrayal was once human, but now was merely a conduit for betrayal.
When Betrayal wandered into your village, minor feuds turned into death matches, wives stabbed husbands in the back, dogs turned on their masters, and every action was an act of betrayal. Your father and you had gone out to try and save anyone you could, but like any attempt to go against Betrayal, your own actions had betrayed you. Oh, you and your father had artifacts that prevented unnatural changes from being enacted on your mind, but those artifacts had merely been the first to forsake you—your necklace of profound silence had been torn from your neck by an enraged neighbor right in front of Betrayal, and only your father giving you his necklace had prevented you from attempting to kill him then and there.
He'd told you to run, and run you did. An hour later, you'd returned to find corpses, your father's artifacts laying broken around him, and your father himself—
"I'm gonna kill you, Tali," he, no, it rasps. You stare ahead, eyes dry. While this may have once been your father, it now betrayed everything that it had once stood for, though through no choice of its own. You and he had both agreed before going to fight Betrayal that if the other was infected, they would kill them. You will kill your father, but not until you make his death worth something.
No, you are going to get your revenge or die trying. You smile a grim smile. Truthfully, your solution to the problem of any story used against Betrayal ending in betrayal was simple. All you needed to do was enact a ritual that, even when it eventually betrays you, would still achieve your goals.
Simply said, but very, very dangerous in practice. For you are going to do the one thing your father told you to never attempt. As you enter the clearing where your house once stood, only ruins and still-smoldering ashes remain. It is the perfect backdrop to perform a ritual that will affect your very soul.
You jerk up, panting heavily. It takes you several minutes to catch your breath, but the nausea you feel in your stomach lingers on. You sprawl out on the floor and stare at the ceiling.
Betrayal. It seemed eerily similar to the Simurgh, but where the Simurgh can only affect people, Betrayal could make anything betray its purpose. A hearth fire would burn down your house, leaving you in the cold. A shield would weigh down your arm, leaving you open to attack. Solid rock would crumble beneath your feet.
It was such a terrible fate, that you were planning to kill your father for having succumbed to it. You can't help but think that in the brief moment you were unprotected from the aura of betrayal, you were partially infected yourself. Not only were you going to kill your father, but from what you could tell, you were going to kill him in a life-powered ritual that would do the one thing he told you never to do.
You make a note to explore your soul, to see if you can figure out what you did to yourself. That is a task for another time, though. Now, you just want to take your mind off of the terrible memories, and make yourself an implement.
Rather than a blank crafter's tool that can produce an item for every need, or a powerful device made to enforce your will on the world, you have chosen your flute. An instrument of art with a deeply personal connection to yourself.
You can't quite forget the memory, not yet, but you force yourself up off the floor to gather everything you need for your ritual. You find the task of preparing calming, and your stomach stops its twisting and turning.
First, you must set the stage. Taking all the remaining iron filings you have, you heat them up in your kettle barbecue, wash them with pure water, and breathe over them in a bastardized elemental ritual. You let a single drop of blood fall over the filings, hopefully binding all four elements into one reagent.
You spread the filings out over your dining room floor, and start to corral them into shapes. You form three triangles, reminiscent of your first successful creation of an enchanted item. At each outer corner, you place a musical symbol: a treble clef for guidance and order, a segno for a new start, and a natural accidental to represent returning to a natural state.
Your runic symbolism all set up, you pull out your flute. You haven't touched it since your mother died except for last night, when you pulled it out of your closet. It's a relatively cheap student flute, made of something called nickel-silver. From a purely material sense, there is nothing unique about it.
With this ritual, you will give it meaning far beyond any it might have had before. After you place the flute in the middle of the symbols, you close your eyes to steel your nerve, then nod and say, "Alright."
You stand in front of the natural sign, and speak.
"I was an innocent child. Through music and my mother, I was joyful. Though I have lost both, I call back through my memories to grant power to this flute."
You pour your remaining pure water over the flute. The flute sparkles, cleaner than you've ever seen it. Moving clockwise, you go to stand at the sign of the segno.
"I am a captive of suffering. Through trials and persecution, I am reborn. In my new beginning, I offer forth my strengths to grant power to this flute."
Pulling out the kitchen knife with which you are forming a love-hate relationship, you cut yourself on your palm, and rub your blood along the length of the flute. Your stomach is again nauseous, this time from the pain coming from your hand, but you soldier on. You move to the last corner, the treble clef.
"I will be a source of inspiration. Through music and magic, I will live. In my dreams of the future, I wish for my hopes to grant power to this flute."
You step into the triangle and pick up your flute. Ice-cold from the pure water, you taste the iron of your blood as you place it at your lips. When you planned the ritual last night, you had thought to play something simple like Bach's Lullaby, since it had been a long time since you had last practiced. Instead, something else comes out.
You would have jumped in surprise at the unfamiliar tune, but you quickly found that your body wasn't under your control. The music and magic flowing through you quickly put to rest any fright, and you soon found yourself enjoying a song that seemed, somehow, to be uniquely you.
Almost too quickly, the song comes to an end. Before you have a chance to wonder if the ritual worked or not, you stumble as a torrent of power flows from you into the flute. You fall to your knees, light-headed, and absently notice that the iron filings and the puddle of water have disappeared. Your main focus, though, is on the flute in your hand.
Despite having been in your hand for the last several minutes, the flute is still comfortably cool. The only visual sign of your ritual is that the once silvery metal now has a faint red tinge. The main difference is in how it feels. Unlike the sweatshirt you enchanted, you don't feel a resonance between it and you. Instead, it feels like a part of you. You have no doubt that you could point straight at the flute, no matter how great a distance it might be from you.
You smile. Strangely enough, you don't feel proud of your accomplishment. Instead, you feel content. You relish in the feeling for a little while, but eventually you get up and start straightening out the house for when your dad returns home. Today, you went through a whole gamut of emotions, so you think you'll go to bed soon after you eat dinner.
Tomorrow, there is much you can do, but little time to do it in. You pull out a notebook and start planning out your day. You think you can fit two different activities into your day...
Choose Two:
[] Meditate on your past life.
-[] Write in on a specific topic you wish to focus on.
[] Explore your abilities.
-[] Write in what you wish to attempt.
[] Go shopping (or pillaging) for reagents.
-[] Write in what and where.
[] Do something else.
-[]Write in.
(QMN: Remember that all you have at this point is what you can find around a normal house. We've used up all our iron filings, so we don't even have that. We also don't really know much IC about parahumans or symbolism. If you want to learn more about either topic, we'll need to make a stop at the local library. So far we've just been meditating recluses, but that will change eventually.
A question: do people want me to do an in depth analysis of our implement? Pro's would be y'all would get a better idea of what I'm thinking when I create an implement. Con's would be taking some of the mystery away and possible spoilers for future story points. I'm fine with either decision, so I'll see what people say.)
