So, due to the immense and intense triumph of the fabled Project Tongs, I present its spiritual successors:
1) Project not-Water
Project Tongs seems dead in the water because the imperial articles of magic forbid the intentional creation of Dhar and would brand Mathilde as heretic and traitor if she even tried.
However, we've noticed that the Waystones always drain Winds in pairs at the very least. Thus, we theorize the existence of stable multi-Wind patterns that we will call . . . not-Elements.
Rather than attempting manipulation which we know would result in Dhar, we will attempt to create these intermediate structures and if some Dhar coincidentally sneaks in, well, who could have possibly guessed?
For Hysh And Ulgu, which we have seen manifested as ice and fog respectively, we will call their stable combination . . . not-Water.
While we could technically simply observe the natural turbulence of a boundary between two closely positioned objects made of Hysh and Ulgu conductive materials, that is something that, realistically, only boring boringmancers would do.
Therefore, we look for inspiration among the brilliant work of uncle Nagash. Now, I know what you're thinking, is this a long-winded and thinly-veiled necromancy joke? You'll be very surprised to hear that the answer is no!
Among the lessons of uncle Fred's diary, we have seen a way to weave the most erratic Wind into stable patterns. However, as we have already explained to Egrimm in a similar circumstance, if uncle Nagash wanted to mouth off to his homies for some sweet autodidact rep, he coulda had his minecraft crew take it easy with the fukken pyramids. Some obscure sources even claim that he was taught by shipwrecked Dark Elves who presumably did not start from zero either.
We therefore further theorize that his method of weaving Dhar into a stable construct originally comes from simplifying a High Magic method to weave all eight regular Winds together. As such, Mathilde would attempt to extrapolate how to weave this pattern with alternating Winds, hoping that this would keep them locked together.
Obviously, Mathilde cannot wield Hysh herself and attempting to raw dog it with a mate would probably see them both corrupted, so we will attempt a work-around. Rather than weaving it from magic itself, we will replicate the pattern physically with strands of Ulgu and Hysh conductive materials. We will then drip some AV onto it, which will hopefully filter out all the not-Fire, not-Earth and not-Wind, leaving us free to observe the trapped not-Water before it dissipates.
2) Project Elementally, Dear Watson
Mathilde once commented that natural water is a medium for Hysh and Ulgu and Ghyran. However, only the Jade College has spells that interact with natural water. Mathilde would observe how these spells interact with the other Winds naturally present in regular water and, given her experience with manipulating magical fog and even incorporating tidal principles into it, attempt to recreate these spells with Ulgu, then possibly derive further conclusions from comparing them with the original. If water itself proves too challenging, she could start from manipulating mundane fog or transitions between different states of matter and see how far she goes from there.
3) Project Ulgu-tunneling
Mathilde saw an Eshin sorcerer crush ambient Winds into Dhar using Ulgu. Maybe the problem was that we chose the wrong direction to start. Rather than manupilating one Wind using Ulgu, we should have tried to manipulate all the Winds.
The obvious question, my friends, is how to do that.
Here's where we get really clever. As anyone hanging around gyrocopters for any decent amount of time with long hair can attest, there are replicable patterns to the movement of mundane wind. We will attempt to find out whether these patterns might apply to magical Winds as well.
Mathilde will call on her experience with static Ulgu constructs and Ulgu tools to manifest a tunnel of Ulgu with a propeller inside and then go BRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. If eigth of these are linked in succession, we could facilitate a flow similar to OUCH, hey stop that, yes, yes, I'll see myself out, stop throwing things . . .
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