Lexica
Persevere
- Pronouns
- She/Her
She could only try to prevent you from completing the spell.
The College of Jewels (Magical Academy Quest)
- Thread starter Lexica
- Start date
- Original
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
Got it.
[X] Plan Ninjas can't catch you...
[X] You won't use your family's power. You promised yourself that, and if you can't keep a promise made to yourself, what promises can you keep?
-[X] You know that she possesses countermagic which, in the long range, will allow her to negate any advantages your elemental control affords you while retaining her own. You know that in the medium range the result will be much the same. Therefore, the short range must be your battleground.
--[X] Now that your range has been selected, observe the situation. You know that she has a specialty in countermagic, therefore, assuming realistic standards, she will probably not be your equal in elemental magic. You know, by the way that she disabled the boy instructed to stab her, that she is proficient at mundane methods of fighting, where you are not. You must defeat her at the game she has chosen.
---[X] She has skill in close quarters, and you do not. You must rectify this. The skills you can use to gain an advantage will be negated if she is given warning of them, so you can't use anything too large. So you've got to create a mundane advantage through ethereal means. Countermagic can't dispel reality.
----[X] You have your battleground. You have your method of attack. You have your advantage. With all this, the remaining steps are simplicity itself: Overwhelm her attempts to deny you your advantage, then press it mercilessly.
-----[X] Sprint towards her as quickly as you can while chaining fire spells in your clothing to set yourself alight, retaining one spell "slot" for attempting gusts of wind to add to your mobility. Once you've achieved ignition, progress entirely to mobility enhancement and distractions to her concentration, through other gusts of wind and flame, with an emphasis on closing the final distance. Your only attack shall be to bring as much of your surface area into contact with hers as possible: a hug would be ideal for this. Any sort of grappling will favor you heavily, and once her clothes ignite it will only get more effective.
-[X] Any attempts by her to use elemental magic at any stage should be swiftly punished with reciprocation, although by no means should your casting remain idle in the meantime.
Yes, this is really my plan.
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- Location
- Rochester, NY
Why set ourselves on fire right off the bat though? Could we not move that to once we're up in her face? It would have a greater surprise factor that way too, where as if we do it before sprinting for her she has time to regain her composure.
PhDEevee
Mathematician and Questgiver
- Location
- Sydney
Where are you getting this from? Even if your opponent's on fire, a trained combatant can reverse a grapple. Assuming you can even get a grip in the first place. Setting yourself on fire while running towards someone telegraphs the attack pretty hard, and is easy to avoid.
...Though I cannot deny your plan has a certain appeal.
Edit: Changed my mind partially. If Henry can actually get a solid hug, it might work pretty well. If.
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chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
Except we're not? It says right there to start sprinting before we start casting.
@Wander, how far away from her are we?
*Aliens Guy Gif.* Wind spells. They'll even billow the flames towards her.
Also, she's a young girl. Unless she's running pain suppressing spells, being burned is going to freaking hurt.
That being said, I put my plan into lots of little pieces to chain the logic together and make it easy to edit. Please feel free to make it better.
Lexica
Persevere
- Pronouns
- She/Her
25ish meters.
Ice is more complicated than just water so it would be more easily effected by disruption, but is doable. Summoning rocks of that size would be very easy.
- Location
- Rochester, NY
Would we be able to create mist? Or perhaps jury rig a cloud of steam using a fire and water spell? How much control would we have over them?
Lexica
Persevere
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Creating mist/steam would be pretty easy. Fine control of it would be almost impossible, but you could move the bulk of it around if you wanted to.
PhDEevee
Mathematician and Questgiver
- Location
- Sydney
Okay then.
[X] Plan Entrapment
[X] You won't use your family's power. You promised yourself that, and if you can't keep a promise made to yourself, what promises can you keep?
-[X] Ruby is a superior close range combatant, and will likely counter or dodge any spells you send at her from a more distant range. Your only real choice is to trick her, to make her think she's won - and turn the tables on her.
[X] As rapidly as you can - summon bits of rock, and bits of ice. Of the size you can throw with one hand, and which will hurt.
-[X] Keep moving, and keep your distance from Ruby while tossing rocks and ice at her. Litter the ground with rocks.
-[X] Summon them around the place so you can pick up rocks while on the move.
-[X] Toss in the occasional fireball or use a wind spell to accelerate a rock occasionally to put some pressure on her.
[X] When you begin to tire; or most of the ground is uneven because of ice and rocks; or Ruby has nearly pinned you down...
-[X] Prepare a fire spell - you're going to hold this while retreating.
-[X] Melt some of the ice to make the rock slippery. Try to position yourself in an area with lots of rocks.
-[X] When Ruby gets in close, try to loosen her footing by moving the rocks under her feet.
-[X] When she attacks you, grab her and set her on fire. Keep ahold of her unless she yields.
[X] Plan Entrapment
[X] You won't use your family's power. You promised yourself that, and if you can't keep a promise made to yourself, what promises can you keep?
-[X] Ruby is a superior close range combatant, and will likely counter or dodge any spells you send at her from a more distant range. Your only real choice is to trick her, to make her think she's won - and turn the tables on her.
[X] As rapidly as you can - summon bits of rock, and bits of ice. Of the size you can throw with one hand, and which will hurt.
-[X] Keep moving, and keep your distance from Ruby while tossing rocks and ice at her. Litter the ground with rocks.
-[X] Summon them around the place so you can pick up rocks while on the move.
-[X] Toss in the occasional fireball or use a wind spell to accelerate a rock occasionally to put some pressure on her.
[X] When you begin to tire; or most of the ground is uneven because of ice and rocks; or Ruby has nearly pinned you down...
-[X] Prepare a fire spell - you're going to hold this while retreating.
-[X] Melt some of the ice to make the rock slippery. Try to position yourself in an area with lots of rocks.
-[X] When Ruby gets in close, try to loosen her footing by moving the rocks under her feet.
-[X] When she attacks you, grab her and set her on fire. Keep ahold of her unless she yields.
- Location
- Rochester, NY
I rather like this. Do you think that adding in creating a cloud of mist or steam would be helpful, since it would obscure the ground and make it easier for her to lose her footing? Then again, it could be a double edged sword since it would obscure our vision as well.
PhDEevee
Mathematician and Questgiver
- Location
- Sydney
I did consider it when you mentioned it. I decided against it, because I felt that would favour Ruby - Henry would need a clear line of sight to toss stuff at her, and to maintain distance. It's very easy to walk into your opponent when you can't see. It also wouldn't surprise me if Ruby was able to sniff out the where magic was being cast in the fog.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
A couple of problems with this.
We're not a professional baseball player, so she can just gust the rocks away pretty easily unless we go magic vs magic, which we lose in the long run because of antimagic.
And this implies that she will close the distance when she has the upper hand, rather than just dinking us with rocks that we can't stop. She doesn't want to get close to us, we want to get close to her.
PhDEevee
Mathematician and Questgiver
- Location
- Sydney
We've seen nothing to indicate that Ruby has any interest in using Elemental magic. It wouldn't surprise me if she could, but she's pretty heavily into the countermagic stuff. And even if she did, it'd be hard for her to keep up with that rate of rock tossing with wind magic - and if she's doing that, she's not dispelling things, which gives the option of more attacks. You don't have to be a pro baseball player to seriously hurt someone by throwing a rock at them.
It's not about Ruby closing the distance when she has the upper hand, it's about making the battlefield as favourable as possible when it does happen. We don't know if Ruby has ranged spells. We do know she's extremely good at melee, and she knows we know this, so engaging immediately is extremely suspicious and not likely to work. If we make her think it's her idea, it's more likely to trick her.
- Location
- Rochester, NY
[X] SystemicHatter
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
Except she can just dodge, even more than my plan lets her, and both of us can cast while moving, so that's wrong. We don't have magic superiority here. It doesn't matter if she's pretty bad at elemental magic, she's going to use her magic to make us worse than her.
We don't know that she will close the distance. Your plan has two major failure points: It requires Ruby to not be able to counter us literally just throwing rocks at her, and to want to put herself in the one range where we can reliably hit her.
Relying on the incompetence of the enemy rather than working based off of conservative estimates of Henry's strength is a terrible idea.
PhDEevee
Mathematician and Questgiver
- Location
- Sydney
That's one failure point, basically - Ruby having strong ranged abilities, and choosing not to engage directly. Her being able to dodge or counter stuff thrown at her was something I took into account - hence altering the environment, and preparing a surprise at close range.
You are choosing to engage Ruby directly in an area in which we know she is competent. She isn't going to be fazed by fire - might I remind you she is the servant of a dragon? She's also had someone charge at her in an attack recently. Who's assuming incompetence?
If Ruby has ranged skill sufficient to outfight Henry while countering his spells, he's screwed anyway. If you assume that winning is possible, you have to assume that you have some strength or your opponent has some weakness in a particular area that you can exploit.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
Your alterations are literally just covering the ground in rocks. And then you melt a little bit of water and hope that the sand will turn into mud. How does this stop her from stepping to the side?
Being fazed by fire is inherently different from being burned by fire. Pilots fly airplanes. That's a thing. They're not scared of flying. But they die just as easily as the next person when they fall off of a building.
And the difference between the two situations is so large as to be a fallacy. One was a shaky, shivering boy with a knife, no magic, and no experience. The other is a confident young man who's on fire and completely ignoring that he's on fire.
We're on fire. That's the point. You can't martial arts burning people, because then you're on fire.
Uh, I hate this argument! "If this misrepresentation of your argument is correct then we lose anyway, so choose my option which is literally throwing rocks at her and hoping that maybe we can trip her with stationary pebbles!"
Any spell which takes too long she can negate, so we need to rely on long spells as little as possible. Long Range means long spells, so it's a bad place to be, because she'll hit us a lot more than we'll hit her. Short range forces her to react very quickly and if she fails her quick time event then she gets lit on real fire. There's an obviously superior range here. It's not the one where we try to fight spells with rock throwing!
She does have a weakness! It's called "Not being fireproof", because Elemental magic isn't the thing she's been focusing on! My entire plan is based around exploiting this!
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How is he going to set himself on fire in the first place without her counterspelling it?
PhDEevee
Mathematician and Questgiver
- Location
- Sydney
It was about covering as much area as possible to make footing treacherous, and choosing to engage her on the spots we've covered. Also, it's really not hard for someone to trip on small things, especially if they're paying attention to something else.
I was more pointing out that you were arguing earlier that you wanted to surprise her with wind and fire. Sure, she'll be burned by it - if you can hit her. If that first attack fails, Ruby waits until Henry is out of clothes and hair to burn... and then boom, Dissipation Field.
You can in fact martial arts people who are on fire. Sure, you don't want to grapple them, but if you kick them in the face, you can get away with scorch marks. And the reason why I'm making the comparison is that even a scared person with a dagger can be threatening to a lot of people. Particularly if the Archmage himself has just ordered your murder. Ruby just coolly kicked it out of his hands.
I don't see why rushing her wouldn't just get Henry kicked in the face.
Who's misrepresenting whose argument? You are attributing a number of abilities to Ruby that we have no evidence that she has, and using that as a basis for charging in and engaging her immediately engaging her in the something we know she's good at. Ruby is supposed to be Viola's successor. Viola specialises in countermagic, melee and enchanted equipment. Ruby might have ranged abilities that she can use while denying magic to her opponent, but that's not consistent with what we've seen so far.
See previous point about the kid with the knife. A 25 metre run? She's not going to fail that quick time event.
Also: long spells are harder for her to negate, because they have a higher rank. Her ability to disrupt spells increases the unpredictability of the spell, which means you can't overly rely on any one spell. She can disrupt everything, which is annoying, but rock spamming is harder for to deal with, due to a low reliance on any one spell, and no real need to aim.
If you're saying that taking ages allows her to put up Dissipation Field faster, that's going to happen anyway when the fight progresses to a certain stage.
I do not disagree with this. I just think your plan is terrible for actually succeeding in lighting her on fire.
Actually, this is probably the easiest part. Disruption only affects precise aim and predictability, and Dismissal is slower.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
Who says its a chant, or that she'd know what she was looking at?
Lexica
Persevere
- Pronouns
- She/Her
There are flashy versions of the Blackreach summoning rituals that Henry could use as an intimidation tactic, whether or not Ruby would recognize them... Without specifics of what she does or does not know, I will say that the Blackreach family is very infamous and that Ruby has spent enough time in Diadem high society places that she'll have almost certainly met people from the Blackreach family, even if 'met' amounts to 'she was there when Diana spoke to them.' But then, she also didn't recognize Henry, so she doesn't necessarily know he's from the Blackreach family, and she may not have seen any of their rituals before.
Regardless, Henry would not be 100% happy about doing that kind of thing because it still replies on the Blackreach reputation. He wouldn't consider it breaking the promise he made to himself even if it would bug him however.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
I'm beginning to feel like he's almost got more character than our character does.
Also, just kind of a random question, but does anybody know why there's a happy thanksgiving banner showing up? It's confusing me.