Winning votes:
[] Argen wants to hunt an Iron-level sacred beast that has been seen in the high forests. He's recruited you and Naia.
[] Naia wants to dedicate some time to comparing your technique and hers, on the idea that Ruler principles will help hers work better.
[] Just because you'll fight later is no reason not to make a new friend. Get to know Olerac, in a genuine overture of friendship.
[] Time to put Etaja through his paces. You use him to try to search for secret treasure, and end up finding something odd.
"So you follow the madra pathways out this way, right?" Naia dips a finger in her paint collection and follows it down your arm, tracing it out.
You nod. "Yeah! I have to keep it going, though--Ruler techniques stop if you don't keep adding madra to it."
Naia frowns. "How do you stop adding more from interfering with the madra cycling around your wrist?"
"What? I don't cycle madra around my wrist." Both of you stare at each other for a moment.
It had been a pretty straightforward idea: you and Naia have techniques that are not utterly dissimilar. You're both Copper. Talking to each other about how it works might help you both. The finger paint had been one of Naia's birthday presents. You've been using them to show how madra flows, which means that finger paint goes all up and down both of your arms at this point. Of course it does. The sacred arts aren't a purely mental discipline. They evoke power by
moving your madra. Body and spirit are both honed to evoke the power of the universe.
There's been one weird little piece of all this. You're wearing Etaja's bracelet while you talk. The more he learns of the sacred arts, the more he'll be able to help you. You were curious how it would work when your friend started putting fingerpaint along your forearm, and the answer is: it just works. She avoids the bracelet, so it's clear of any paint, but she doesn't seem to be aware that she is. She'll do things like taking her finger off your forearm, move to the other side of the bracelet, and continue her line... without seeming to be aware that she had done so. It's kind of eerie.
Now Naia runs a hand down her long, straight hair as she thinks this over. Half the Fisher family crops their hair short, and the other half keeps it long. "So you keep your technique going even when the pattern is outside your body?"
"Yeah!" You frown. "I mean, it doesn't make sense not to. It's a Ruler technique. Of course the technique has me controlling my madra even when it's outside of my body."
Your friend nods, thoughtfully. "I'm going to need to think about this." She takes a couple steps away, then sits cross-legged, taking a cycling position as she thinks about what she learned. You have something to think about, too. She's learned something about Ruler techniques, but in just asking you about her questions, she's taught you something about Striker techniques, too.
In fact, you still quite literally have a guide painted on your arms that tells you a lot about how to perform a basic Striker move. You take a cycling position yourself, and for a little while, you and Naia cycle together quietly. It's not that hard to find places to cycle together for the two of you--trees and water are often found close together. Once Naia starts incorporating more sword aura into her cycling, it will be less convenient for you, but more convenient for her and Argen to do some cycling together.
You push that thought out of your mind and focus on your madra, working out how to use it for a different
kind of technique. You aren't going to master anything today--in fact, if anything you should still be working on the Enforcer technique that makes your dad so scary and which you aren't yet mastering. But that sounds like something for another day! For right now, you want to experiment a bit and see how Striker moves work.
After a little while, Naia stands up. You break out of your own cycling trance and open your eyes to see what she's figured out. She holds up one hand, palm out, and points it at a nearby rock. After a moment, a ball of water appears in her palm, conjured from thin air with her sacred arts. Most of it shoots out, impacting the rock with a splash. The remaining water boils up and expands again, and she shoots a second one, only a second or so after the first one.
"Too weak," she murmurs. "And it took too much madra."
"How weak?" You ask.
"That was... maybe a bit over half normal strength?" She frowns. "I'm going to have to work on it."
She's just modified her own technique to be able to rapid-fire blasts of water, something she couldn't do before, and it's only going to get more refined from there. Apparently pushing some of it outside her own body, so she didn't get in her own way, was all that was needed to make it get a breakthrough.
Of course, if she's going to show off, you need to show off, too. Now you have to cobble together your own Striker move. Wordlessly, you ask for Etaja's help, and feel his equally wordless guidance as he helps you figure out the cycling pattern you would need to do. You stand up, point your palm at a tree, and trigger the attack.
There's a flash of green.
The tree is unmoved.
You frown at it, but you hear Etaja cackling in your mind. {Kid, you just shot that tree with a very brief beam of grow-better. It's not going to do much right now except maybe help people wake up in the morning. It's something like... what's that thing you all drink? Coffee. You made a beam that's like taking a very small shot of coffee.}
<I'll improve it,> you send back. <Life madra isn't just for growing.>
{True,} Etaja allows, {but
your madra is specialized for tending to orchards.}
You don't have a comeback for that.
Naia watched your move, but she considered it just as quietly and with as much stillness as you had on the outside. In the end, neither of you comment on it. "Keras," she says, instead. "Can we go over the cycling pattern you use again?"
You nod. Now that she's felt it practically, she wants to review things and see what else she can learn. Makes sense!
One afternoon, as you and your dad are finishing dinner, before Mom wakes up for her breakfast, there's a knock on the door. Your father gets up and reaches the door in only a couple of strides, but everywhere inside is only a couple of strides away at his size.
At the door is Kyeol. The grayish man is leaning on his stick. "Ah, wonderful, Forrester Brayan. I'll get to the point. I want to purchase at least two of your orus fruits, the ones that have reached the natural treasure mark."
"Why?"
Kyeol laughs, which still sounds a lot like he's dying of coughing. "Is it really that strange that I would look to purchase food? We all need to eat, do we not?" He grins without showing any teeth. "But, of course, I was looking to purchase these because I believe I can refine something worthwhile out of them. My new apprentice has reached Copper." He gestures to his side, and for the first time you realize Olerac is there, too. "I wish to provide him with a useful elixir to help his future growth, as well."
"And why," your dad says in a quiet rumble that still feels like it shakes the whole house, "would I want for you to do that?"
"Am I really so threatening?" Kyeol is still standing outside your door through this whole exchange, not seeming annoyed at not getting invited in. "I wish to live here in peace, just as much as anyone else in these lands. And whatever disagreements we may or may not have, I believe that being open is better for us as neighbors. Would you prefer that I disguise my request and ask a third party to purchase such things for me? No, better to ask directly. Besides, if the recipe works as intended, I see no reason I would not be willing to sell or trade some quantity of it back to you."
And, thus, to you. As your parents had worried about, Kyeol has some ability as a refiner, which means that he could, perhaps, push Olerac to a point where he could threaten you and your friends in a fight. And yet... the same external means he'd use to improve Olerac, he'd also be willing to let you use?
You're sure that there's some reason for that, but you have no idea what it would be.
"All right," Dad agrees, finally. "Why don't you come in and we can discuss it?" He doesn't look happy, but he's not angry or anything. "We'll see what arrangements we can make."
Kyeol doesn't gloat, doesn't sneer, doesn't do anything to indicate that he may have scored a point. He just nods, in a normal sort of way, wipes his sandals clean on the mat, sets his staff to rest in a corner, and takes his shoes off as he comes in, like a normal person.
Dinner is basically over (you were done a little while ago, but Dad eats a lot more, so it takes him longer) and it's not yet so dark you can't go out to play, so you abandon the adults to do boring adult things and go over to Olerac. He followed Kyeol in and is currently trying to disappear into the wall, afraid to get noticed. "Hi, Olerac!" You say it with a smile and a wave. "Wanna play with me while they do that?"
He takes a few seconds to respond to that. You almost think he didn't hear you until he responds and you realize it was actually just taking him time to think about it. "I'm not sure if I'm supposed to."
"Oh," you say, then ask the obvious question: "So what are you supposed to do here, then?"
"I don't know?" His hesitation is clear.
"Then maybe you're supposed to play while the adults talk," you suggest with genius-level insight. He hesitates, so you push a little further. "Besides, that sort of training helps settle the spirit after you advance, like I hear you did with Copper! Congratulations on that! Also, tag, you're it."
You tap him lightly on the shoulder and run out the door. A moment later, he's chasing after you.
Olerac has definitely made the most of his advancement to Copper. He's quicker on his feet than you are, now, but while he can catch you on a sprint, you still have the stamina to overtake him once he flags a bit. The tag session thus works pretty well. Eventually, he's too tired to keep going. You still could, but that's fine. You let him flop down on the ground and crouch next to him, grinning. "It's nice to have someone new my age," you explain. "It's mostly just been me and Naia and Argen, at least until you came."
He nods, staring into the middle distance, as if he's considering something. "Mom always said we couldn't really trust people we don't know, and we didn't know hardly anyone, so we mostly stayed to ourselves. She said that was fine. But I was kind of lonely."
It's not a unique story. The Hinterlands are full of hermits, recluses, and all sorts of other exciting terms for people who like to live by themselves that Thantiriiz has taught you. "Well, you're here now," you say. "Unless you and your mom are going to go back to living somewhere?"
He shakes his head. "I don't think she wants to. I don't think we could? She's Jade, so we were strong enough to handle most things until that cliff bear. But while she's got a replacement leg now, she's not all the way better. And we can't handle any other Gold threat. We know that now. Also, she's been talking a lot about Kyeol and your brother now."
You accept that. "Well, then you live here now! And even if we're going to have a match again, no reason we can't be friends here. You should come to school! Our teacher is a dragon." Olerac looks at you with concern. "No, it's fine! He's..." you hesitate. 'Nice' definitely isn't right, nor is anything like 'not scary'. "He's good at it!" You are proud of that answer. "He came all the way from dragon lands. He's going to show us the basics of script writing in the next year, he said." You know what a script is in theory: you write a very precise sort of instruction onto something, then run madra through it, and it does a thing.
You don't really know enough to say much else.
"Anyway! Come if you can."
Olerac continues staring into the middle distance. "I... think I want to," he says. "Kyeol is training me, but it's not something that takes all day. I would like to..." he hesitates. "make friends?" He says it quietly, like he's not sure you aren't about to laugh at him or disappear in a puff of smoke for saying that.
You don't do either one. "Sure! Just because we have to fight in a while doesn't mean we can't be friends. I fight with Naia and Argen all the time, and they fight with each other, too. What sort of training are you doing?"
He shakes his head, there. "I'm not allowed to say. Kyeol says that I need to keep focused, and not do anything before I'm ready or I will..." Again, he hesitates. "I'm not sure? It sounds like it would hurt me."
You shrug. "We spar and wrestle without techniques sometimes, too." Especially right now, when everyone has very different technique advancement. "Surely that's fine, right?"
"I guess?" Olerac has a bit of a stunned expression, like this whole conversation has gotten away from him.
1.5 years before your duel against Kyeol's champion
7.5 years before the Dreadgod's arrival
It turns out to take a little time for Olerac to really show up to school very often. As days pass, he's sometimes there, and it feels like he might get to do it more regularly in the future. But, he's still sort of getting to be part of your group. Argen and Naia are so far very neutral on that.
More importantly, one day when Olerac
isn't there, Argen shows up with a grin and a story--his mom has found something that the three of you would be good to handle.
There's a sacred beast that's been bothering the mine workers. It's not clear what sort of creature it was before--it could have been a squirrel or a mole or something. However, it's kind of mixed up now. It keeps trying to steal shiny things from the mine workers, to run off with them. It's too mean-tempered to try to tame, too stupid to even be a normal animal, too annoying to ignore, and too slippery for it to have been caught yet.
However, the Jades who have had to chase it down to get back helmets or picks or even wheels think it's probably only low-Iron in its madra density. Sacred beasts don't advance quite the same way as humans do: they sort of grow slowly and smoothly, without the jumps of power that humans see at Copper or Iron. What that means, on a practical level, is that it's a nuisance... that should be entirely feasible for three Coppers to handle. Absolute worst case scenario, you all will run away and someone else will be called in to handle it.
None of you have any particular desire to
lose, though. After school, Argen takes the leather ball of the end off his halfsilver sword. The blade has been extended as he grew accustomed to it: these days, the cutting edge goes almost halfway down the blade. Naia goes home, trying to get her parents to let her have a real spear--probably not one with barbs or metal, but at least something with a proper tip. This is, after all, a hunt.
You don't have any weapons to get, of course. Your friends instead send you home to get something to attract the sacred beast. You double-check your pocket seeds as you do so, but seeds are seeds. They aren't hard to carry around, so you just always carry them around. You still need something to get the slippery little creature to show itself for.
Bosc isn't home when you go home, so with the deep brilliancy of every idea of someone your age, you go and get her little hand mirror. That should be shiny in the early afternoon! And as long as nothing happens to it and it doesn't get dirty and you can bring it back before she gets back, it's totally undetectable that you did anything with it!
After a moment of hesitation, you take it, anyway.
The hunt itself is kind of boring. You aren't about to let anyone else get the mirror, since both Argen and Naia could break it. So you sit on one of the slag piles that the miners have already worked through and left behind, every so often grabbing the mirror and reflecting sunlight all over, then setting it next to you and pretending that you aren't watching it out of the corner of your eye. Argen and Naia just sit in a hollow nearby, not easily seen but not really well-hidden. None of you know a really great way to hide.
It takes an hour or so, but eventually the hunt bears fruit. As you go to set the mirror down once, you see a weird little grasping thing try to snatch at it, and pull it back. Even as you do, you shout in warning to your friends and twist to see it.
The creature is small, maybe a bit over a foot in length. It has fur and a general quadruped's build, but its head looks like no particular creature, and it hisses at you through oversized sharp teeth.
The grasping thing turns out to be one of its two tails, both of which are arced back over its body like you hear scorpions do, but instead of a poison thing, it's just like weird fingers. As it realizes it's been caught, it charges at you, trying to nip at your limbs, but you half-run, half-fall down the scree and avoid it. It chases you, not hesitating until Naia and Argen are there. Even then, the hesitation is only a moment before it throws itself forward again.
As you'd planned, Argen steps forward. "Sword's Spine!" He's proud enough of having learned one of the two Enforcer techniques his mom's path is built around. A silver glow springs to life around his sword, this one not at all hampered by the halfsilver that makes it up. He tries to stab it, but it jumps around, and he misses until it latches onto his leg. With a yelp, he kicks, and it goes flying into the air.
Naia steps forward even as it's flying. She calls water, and a ball of it shoots out. She was trying to hit it before it landed, but she misses. Her second shot, however, hits it straight on. It staggers for a moment as the force of the Striker technique rattles it.
Then, Argen is there, and this time he manages to tag one of its tails. It hisses again, and runs around a bit of rocky debris. For half a second, you think it's running for cover, but its meanness apparently eclipses its sense. It appears on top of the debris, and hurls itself bodily at Naia. Her block misses, and it lands on her face. It's thankfully not that dangerous a monster, or that could have been really bad. Even so, it still leaves a couple small bloody scratches on her cheeks before she throws it off. You try to step on it as it lands on the ground, but it grabs a protrusion with its uninjured tail and pulls itself out of the way.
It's still spitting and hissing as it clambers back to its feet, just as aggressive now as the miners had said before. It throws itself at you again, and this time you do manage to catch it, kicking it away. Even as it bounces off and comes after you again, Argen is there. This time, he doesn't try to stab it. He and Naia have both discovered how hard that is to do, at least against an angry and agile small target. Instead, he hacks at it.
One direct hit is all it takes. That disrupts its madra. Before it can pull its madra cycling patterns back together, your two friends are there. They stab it to death.
Then, all three of you take a moment to pause, catch your breath, and take stock. "I got it!" Argen is all smiles, even as he lets his Enforcer technique drop and sits down heavily. He prods the body with his sword. "No binding I can find," he adds. "Not surprising. That's only supposed to be in Gold and above. But, still, sacred beast meat. That's good for some advancement. And we got it ourselves! All by ourselves!"
He grins. You, on the other hand, check the mirror. It's a little dusty, but you can
probably clean it off and get away with the whole escapade.
"Can you heal us, Keras?" That's Naia, who still looks a little grave. You nod, and summon up your Ruler technique.
Inside, though, you're not feeling as good as Argen is.
You're too slow, too fragile, too weak. You didn't really
do anything in that fight, and you don't know that you could have. You're not armed, you can't use your Enforcer technique yet. You can heal, but so could a good night's rest, and you're not all
that much quicker. Either of your friends can take you down without too much difficulty, and… you don't know that that's going to change. You really can't wait for Iron.
{Kid, you're still trying to do this while being a farmer, basically.} Etaja didn't speak up during the fight, just like he said he wouldn't.
<My
dad can. I have to be able to, too.>
{Your dad is a lot better than you are. Get enough power, and you can do the same.}
<How do I get more power? Enough more power for that, I mean.> This is a conversation you've had with Etaja before, but that's the first time you've asked that so blatantly.
{Have you tried being better than everyone else in the world at everything?}
You bite back the urge to cry until you're able to put the words together without doing so. <That's not helpful!>
{It always worked for me.} You feel a mental shrug, before Etaja continues in a slightly kinder tone. {You're already a few percent ahead of where you should be, since I've helped you smooth out your normal cycling for advancement pattern. That sounds small, but we should be able to compound it. Don't get depressed.}
<I'm not depressed!> There's a momentary spike of anger alongside the thought. You send a silent apology a moment later. <...But I don't want to wait. We're going to do something more.>
{Really? Well, I am at your service. What do you have in mind?}
<Tomorrow. We'll do it tomorrow.>
Once your friends are back to full health, you'll take your prize back and get some dinner.
You may be slow, weak, and frail compared to your friends, but practice, effort, cycling, and some sacred beast meat are at least… helping. What is it helping the most?
[] Strength
E to D-. You are only about as strong as any reasonably fit person of your age and height, though sometimes you pull off an interesting surge.
[] Speed
E to D-. You are not particularly quick of foot, but you are good at getting your arms where they need to be.
[] Toughness
E to D-. You're at least pretty good at shrugging off bruises and falls.
Sorry for the delay. I have been sidetracked by work and other ideas, but I'm still very anxious to continue this quest. And, yes, we're still going through some of the results of the last vote.
