- Location
- Malaysia
The only Alien God "cultists" I know of is the divine cyborg blacksmith and Ra-Ra-Rasputin./jk
[Worm x Fate] Journeywoman & Apprentice
- Thread starter fallacies
- Start date
- Crossover
Iiiiit's ... complicated.
In the first place, the Whateleys were canonically sufficient threats to the Human Order that their timeline got culled, I believe? But well, the Entities have kind of made that a wash one way or another -- either the Entities are just supporting these timelines as a Lostbelt-esque thing on their own dime, or the Entities have already won lol. So we're kind of in Lostbelt/Singularity territory just by the name of the game.
Lovecraftian entities are technically "Outer Gods", as opposed to "Alien Gods"; "gods of the exterior/outer space", rather than "gods of a foreign star". (A lot of the translators conflate the two when translating, so it's kind of confusing, but in the Japanese the distinction is clear.) Lovecraft is associated with the foreign (thus Foreigners), being beyond the Human Domain, and works of fiction; the Alien God is allegedly "from beyond Gaia entirely", an actual literal alien (though after Lostbelt V, who knows...)
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Ylamona
Konlulu~
Eh, for all we know, Outer Gods are literally being that dwell between the void of stars or their avatars or something even weirder. Functionally, they are still the same scary thing here anyway.
My point is, I doubt Lovecraft exist, at least as far as we know it if the Whatchamacallit exist as an actual separate being. That's like Nursery Rhyme still exist as she is known when there is actual world shaping Alice next to her. A fine line between a writer and the written you can say.
Not really. There's a very big difference between a god that's fundamentally a subsystem of Gaia, and therefore native even if their domain is "fiction" or "the void between the stars" or "Gaia's perception of outer space", and a true alien. It's sort of like the difference between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and an actual foreign nation; one of these things is much more likely to be truly hostile to you than the other.
I'm not even sure what you're saying here, but it's not actually clear that any of the "fictional" heroes actually didn't-exist; a bunch of them hail from culled timelines, but in some metatemporal sense, they still 'existed', they had a legend and whatnot. Certainly, we've had direct interactions with Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu, and Randolph Carter, who is Totally Not HP Lovecraft, has shown up on screen a couple times...
MaskedCritic
Verified Obsessed with Yuri
- Location
- Fluttershy's Secret Dungeon Shrine to Metal
A few thoughts:
Taylor as a magus? Absolutely terrifying. Her methodical nature combined with the "fuck impossibility, I'ma do it anyway" attitude...
If her Element is Water, what's her Origin? How does Water mesh conceptually with Taylor's favorite thing, Escalation?
Taylor actually comes across as more of a girl here than in canon. Kudos!
On the other hand, Taylor is showing far less interest in the appearance of other women than she did in canon. She's actually coming across as mostly straight! ...it's weird.
Taylor as a magus? Absolutely terrifying. Her methodical nature combined with the "fuck impossibility, I'ma do it anyway" attitude...
If her Element is Water, what's her Origin? How does Water mesh conceptually with Taylor's favorite thing, Escalation?
Taylor actually comes across as more of a girl here than in canon. Kudos!
On the other hand, Taylor is showing far less interest in the appearance of other women than she did in canon. She's actually coming across as mostly straight! ...it's weird.
Ylamona
Konlulu~
Except Whatchamallit actually exist here and Lovecraft as we know it exists here, anyone with a brain will be able to put two and two together and make them no longer exist. So even if Lovecraft exist here, he probably didn't write about this particular family.
Just because they are native now, doesn't mean they are not also from the outside, aka true Alien. Remember the Olympians? Remember the Mayans? Those came from the outside and yet have no problem exist here. Just because there is a version of Yog-Sototh exist in Gaya, doesn't there's no actual one outside of her either.
Considering how...observant Taylor was with grandma, and to a lesser degree Rin. I dread how much she can be interested in women in Canon then.
Er... how would they make them no longer exist, given that the last time the Association tried (and Enforcers are really no joke), they got curbstomped?
That is also not how that works. "Naturalized aliens" are still fundamentally subsystems of Gaia now, whatever they were in the past; and they didn't exactly show up all guns blazing, either. On top of which, outside the context of Gaia, 'gods' map to entities that one way or other legitimately have the powers they're supposed to have -- for example, the Olympians are all machines that have 'functionalities' that map to their usual domains/portfolios. When they lost their alithea, their true forms, and were reduced to Divine Spirits and the like, then they became "things that have powers because Gaia says they have powers", but at least until then they were perfectly capable of performing their own phenomenon interference.
That being the case, consider what "legitimately having power over the void between the stars" would look like.
*cough* Kaos *cough*
Yeah. An entity that is both "something from beyond the stars", and furthermore "actually had astronomical phenomena as their domain", and yet was also eventually naturalized as a subsystem of Gaia -- something like that would have to answer far too many questions about why the hell they even exist, and it's just not necessary. The text implies they're just normal gods, relatively speaking; just, gods of things beyond the Human Domain, and as such not particularly pleased with humanity.
(Also, while having a god exist both inside and outside Gaia as separate existences is ... questionable even in general, in the specific case of Yog-Sothoth, whose entire powerset and domain is transcending spacetime, fiction, and parallel worlds, it's definitely not applicable. There's absolutely no way in hell that such an entity wouldn't be able to contact its 'iterations' in other Worlds, and an entity that could span Worlds would almost certainly be easily capable of overwriting any single iteration. If 'Yog-Sothoth' is a full subsystem of Gaia, and not just an 'ambassador' or something, it's safe to assume that if there's any external entity with a similar divine portfolio, it's got to be a fundamentally distinct entity.)
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Ylamona
Konlulu~
Because an eccentric hermit is a totally different kind of beast compared to literally a supposedly fictional character with disturbing implication come alive? Sure, power is a great deterrence but fools are of abundance and I doubt there's a shortage of people want to "meet" one of character from a famous writer come alive. After all, of whatchamallit is alive, what else?
*raised eyebrow* Yes and? Who's to say that you can't exist as both things? One as the gods that supposedly fiction and the being outside it. After all, Alien being operate on their own Alien Rule. Whether it was turning the world itself into an eldritch crystal wasteland or manifest in the world using a facade created by an American writer. Just because there's myth about it, doesn't mean the real thing doesn't exist and can't visit the earth just because. Kaos exist in the myth of mankind and yet he also exist as his own totally not a giant mothership self after all.
And besides, whenever I said about Nasu's Yog-Sothoth?
You... seem to be missing the point. The Enforcers are absurd near-Servant tier combat-focused magi with esoterica and bullshit tricks of their own. They are usually sent in coordinated, trained teams that regularly do things like "fight DAAs." They're basically the magical SWAT team of the Moonlit World.
Lavinia doesn't seem to be particularly threatened by them, and the Association has given up sending people to fight her.
Exactly how would anyone else make them cease to exist?
Also, at this point, you are arguing that Lovecraft, for example, somehow came to know about legitimately totally alien entities, which he wrote down in detail; which happens to correspond to "foreign gods" that already existed within Gaia, as entities that long predate the life of HP Lovecraft, never mind the fame of his works; and which completely independently also matches true alien gods that exist outside of Gaia. And that this is essentially a coincidence, and the alien god has essentially no relation with the outer god.
Putting aside whether this is at all plausible, it essentially has nothing to do with the Nasuverse at this point. The Outer Gods that have been shown to exist -- the ones whose interference creates and powers Foreigners, and whose plots were involved in Salem and in the Imaginary Scramble event -- are stated to be, and observably operate under restrictions matching, 'normal' subsystems of Gaia. The advent of a truly Alien God doesn't look like "lol one random magus family is having fish children"; it looks like the Tabula Rasa, or the war against Sefar.
Ylamona
Konlulu~
And whoever ever said about only magus association? Worse monsters exist in Nasu alone, let alone this Gaia Bet world. Beside, my main point is that Lavinia would be much more impactful due to her fame than just treated as a hermit second owner.
First, I never argue that Alien God ever related to Outer God. Second, Identities are quirky thing as Kojiro proves. You don't need to be actually someone to be actually someone. Use the story as your face, create a Bunrei to fill that hole. There are a lot of things that can be done for that and it's not even impossible for mortal living in the world.
Yeah but I never said anything about Nasu's outer god in my original post am I? Or else I would use Sut-Typhon and not Yog-Sototh. For all we know, this Lavinia is actually connected to an Entitiy instead and the Outer God is here just the Entitiy or whatever. We don't know and I doubt we will ever know in story anytime soon.
No, they... really don't. There are very few things scarier than the Mage's Association in either world. Unless a major DAA, Literally Chaldea, or a True Magician takes an interest in you -- or, on the other side, Literally an Endbringer or Cauldron -- you're not going to run into going to run into anyone more scary than a team of Enforcers. Lavinia is in the category of people like Touko, or the Shikis, or Zouken -- major players on the global scale that generally get left alone because they're fucking terrifying; and their peers have usually have better things to do than risk their lives against each other. Probably the only people on that list who actually do anything are Barthomeloi, Satsujinki, and Chaldea. And Gransurg Blackmore if it's in Crimson Moon's benefit. That's about it.
Also, that's not what you said the first few times, but whatever. Again, not so much. In the first place, I'd be shocked if anyone outside the Moonlit World even knew she existed, because easy wide-scale mental interference exists. And within the Moonlit World, yes, she's kind of famous, but she's famous for being a Lovecraft character. Exactly who do you think is going to go anywhere near that tier of threat of their own accord, especially if she has a reputation for eating Enforcers?
No, this is ... just how hermits work in the Nasuverse. That's how the second category of Sealing Designates operate. They're fucking terrifying eccentrics that can resist any reasonable amount of force, so people just stay clear of them and leave them alone even in the Moonlit World unless some rare guy with ethics like Satsujinki decide to do something about them.
^
... again, that would be a tremendous deviation from canon, using a canon character with a canon powersource and a canon background, who is clearly being invoked in their canon capacity as a major player in the US East Coast, for.... essentially no reason whatsoever.
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Stop: Just... No.
Ellf
Apprentice Wizard
- Location
- Virginia
just... no.
@The Dude, the posts I quoted are problematic. They violate Rule 2 in the way that you're pretty much shitting on modern feminism, and in fact, that's what you admit to doing. I will be issuing you a 25 point infraction and a three day threadban under this.
The only reason it was not a Rule 4 violation as well was because you did stop yourself from becoming too disruptive.
@The Dude, the posts I quoted are problematic. They violate Rule 2 in the way that you're pretty much shitting on modern feminism, and in fact, that's what you admit to doing. I will be issuing you a 25 point infraction and a three day threadban under this.
The only reason it was not a Rule 4 violation as well was because you did stop yourself from becoming too disruptive.
TheOmnimercurial
Dragon Bard
- Location
- UK
I aint saying a thing..... ^_^
- Location
- Malaysia
Giving my two cents on Nasu Outer Gods, didn't it get explained in the Imaginary Sea Event that the Outer Gods can't directly interfere with Nasu Earth without compatible vessels like Foreigner Servants outside of giving visions to people, that Lovecraft didn't actually know that what he was writing down was real( or close enough)(Salem already confirmed this part before so its rather old), and that Outer Gods claimed to have helped Gaia make Humanity and that all of them want to Halp Humanity for a variety of reasons that likely aren't benign.
007 : A Taste For Slaughter
fallacies
Puyo Mage
Benedict's was an 'authentic' 24-hour diner — whatever it was that 'authentic' was supposed to mean in the restaurant industry.
That wasn't a slight against the place on my part, as the food was consistently delicious. It's just that — for all that it rocked the art deco look of a vintage 50's diner, and legitimately serviced a long-distance trucking route — it had actually been built in the mid-to-late 90's, shortly after I was born. Not to mention, it was part of a restaurant chain that was wholly owned by the McDonell's Corporation.
I couldn't remember when it was that I'd last visited, but in happier times, me, Mom, and Dad would occasionally drop by on the way home from a weekend trip to Gran's place down in Martin's Beach.
For me, personally, the defining feature of diner fare was the availability of breakfast at any hour of the day; and so, quite naturally, I ended up ordering scrambled eggs and pancakes with a side of sausage, coated all over with a generous helping of maple syrup. It wasn't the healthiest of meals, I knew, but for whatever reason, I was inordinately hungry today.
Probably, then, it was a little hypocritical of me to get on Zenjou's case for choosing what she did — but, following a bowl of New England clam chowder, her main dish for the evening was the one item on the menu that I absolutely couldn't stomach.
The Maxi Burger Classic was a one-pound double bacon cheeseburger deluxe served with fries and onion rings — a staple at any restaurant associated with the McDonell's brand, franchised or otherwise. Fugly Bob's up by Market, for example, famously offered the Challenger — a nearly-identical burger, but topped with chili instead of lettuce and tomatoes.
The nutritional information on the menu here at Benedict's helpfully supplied that the burger alone was worth about 1,775 calories, give or take — a little over the lower limit of the recommended daily caloric intake for an adult woman.
"You had more than half a carton of egg fried rice for lunch," I said, staring at Zenjou's plate. "You're going to get fat."
Having cut the burger with a steak knife, Zenjou lifted the half of the sandwich closer to her and took a bite — taking the time to slowly chew before washing it down with a sip of coke.
"Weight management isn't solely about controlling intake," she said, setting down her glass. "Maintaining a regular caloric expenditure is critical. Thankfully — alike to constantly running a fever — the escalated metabolism come of a constant use of Reinforcement burns up a significant amount of energy." She popped a smaller onion ring into her mouth and chewed. "I'd actually recommend that you aim to consume 3,500 calories a day at a minimum. Put a little meat on those bones of yours."
What are you? The witch from Hansel and Gretel?
This was exactly the sort of opinion I'd expect from a conventionally-attractive girl genetically predisposed to slimness. Benefits of Reinforcement aside, her baseline metabolism was probably fast enough that irrelevant of whatever she ate, she'd never have to contend with obesity.
On the upside, a metabolism like hers practically guaranteed that she'd never naturally develop the kind of curves that Mrs. Whateley sported.
If I weren't basically in the same boat, maybe I might've taken a petty pleasure in that.
"It's really alright to just casually talk about magecraft like this?" I asked. "I know you said that the Bounded Field you set up takes care of that, but —"
"Aside from the two of us and the waitress assigned to this aisle," said Zenjou, lifting another onion ring from her plate, "every human within a range of ten meters is imposed with a mild mental interference that substitutes an apprehension of our conversation with generic dialogue supplied by their own minds." She bit into the ring and chewed. "But, that's only to preempt the perception that our table is unnaturally absent of noise. In fact, as a countermeasure to electronic recording, no sound that we make passes significantly beyond the boundaries of our booth; and at distance, the movements of our lips would look to be entirely randomized."
In other words, the Master-Stranger effect implemented was mostly fool-proof against potential eavesdroppers, barring the slim possibility that somebody had physically bugged the booth. I supposed it was proof enough of the Bounded Field's efficacy that nobody within earshot responded at all to Zenjou's candid admission to Mastering them.
Accepting her explanation at face value, though, it sounded as if the complexity and the sustained nature of effect rather exceeded the scope of what she'd earlier described as a 'single-action spell protocol.' Was she tapping into a nearby leyline for mana?
Honestly, I couldn't tell. All that I knew for certain was, she hadn't bothered to divert away the looks she received from the male patrons within view of our table — faintly smiling as she basked in the attention.
I did my best to ignore that.
"So," I said. "Seeing as I can't follow a regulation that I don't understand, what's this 'mystery' thing that Mrs. Whateley mentioned?"
Swallowing a bite of her burger, Zenjou wiped her lips with her napkin.
"One of the things I didn't intend to touch upon quite yet," she replied. "The short of it is that the revelation of the existence of magecraft would produce an outcome that the Association cannot tolerate. Thus, the consequences they visit upon those who breach the rule of secrecy are deadly serious. I imagine that if a particular magus were to present their use of magecraft as a parahuman power, the Association would default to looking the other way; but public disclosure of the underlying mechanics is absolutely forbidden."
She sipped her coke.
"Before you ask," she continued, "it isn't some Harry Potter thing, where the terrible outcome that must be avoided is just a matter of persecution. There's a more technical explanation for the underlying justification, but at this juncture, you're likely to dismiss it as hogwash if I were to go into detail."
Once again, Zenjou had drawn a distinction between 'magecraft' and 'parahuman powers' — as if they weren't both a load of bullshit not yet accounted for by modern science.
Personally, I didn't see a need to distinguish; but as it was apparently a matter of critical importance to the secret fraternity of Myrddin wannabes, I supposed that there wasn't any harm in playing ball. Follow the rules, and they wouldn't bother me. Simple enough.
Assuming, of course, that Zenjou hadn't just hired a pair of actors to help maintain her ruse.
— not that I had the leeway to seriously entertain a take like that. Yes, it was definitely prudent to approach things with a healthy dose of skepticism; but if regarding something as a falsehood was certain to provoke serious repercussions, at some point, you'd have to take the equivalent of Pascal's wager.
Being as power dynamics ensured that Dad and I were effectively at Zenjou's mercy, I honestly couldn't think of a pragmatic reason for her to invest significant time and resources to the sole purpose of misrepresenting the nature of 'magecraft.'
For the sake of argument, it could be that she legitimately got off on 'persuading' a 15-year-old to buy into a worldview from out of a young adult fantasy novel; but —
Really, for all that she tolerated my verbal sniping and general lack of respect — if she told me to jump, circumstances were such that my only choice was to ask 'how high?' To my mind, at least, that significantly diminished the likelihood she was lying.
"Explain it so I understand, then," I said. "I'm not that close-minded."
She hmm'd in contemplation — chewing through a bite of her burger before speaking.
"Let's start with some basic concepts," she said. "Yesterday morning, I mentioned the matter of 'salience' — that when working with water, Reinforcement more easily applies to surface tension than hydrogen bonding, as the former is a feature more commonly apprehended. Taking that into consideration, what precisely did you Reinforce when repairing my cup this afternoon?"
"Its ability to flow?"
"Correct. And why is that 'salient,' if per the strictures of physics, normal glass isn't capable of flowing at room temperature?"
'Salience' was in Zenjou's usage something that emerged in the consciousness of the population at large. If it could be said that the capacity of glass to flow at room temperature was in fact 'salient,' it would have to be in the context of —
"It's those anecdotes about church windows thickening at the bottom, no?" I asked. "They even turn up in textbooks on occasion."
The one from my freshman chemistry class, for example — because, apparently, Winslow couldn't even be trusted not to have misinformation in the textbooks they ordered.
"Correct again," Zenjou replied, nodding in approval. "And Mystery is in general the term for items of salience descriptive of phenomena that don't fall strictly within the dictates of the established laws of physics — the engravement of which within the Collective Unconscious of Man is referred to as a Thaumaturgical Foundation. To vastly oversimplify, magecraft accesses Foundations as to make use of Mysteries in the rendition of possible outcomes."
If I wasn't misremembering Mom's explanation from when I was in middle school, 'the collective unconscious' was a term from Jungian psychology — a pattern of unconsciousness that manifested in common across the human species, emerging from the standard response that our brains had evolved to handle with the acquisition of common elements in culture.
I had a distinct feeling this wasn't the definition that Zenjou was using — but I could grasp the gist: If an irrational belief about the way things worked persisted within the public mind, magecraft had a use for it.
"Why the emphasis on 'possible,' though?" I asked. "If something violates the laws of physics, isn't it just outright impossible? Like, I shouldn't have been able to reshape glass at room temperature, period."
"It isn't 'impossibility' in the legitimate sense," said Zenjou, "and it persists only so long as mana is available. Removed of such, the 'possibility' that remains as an outcome is nothing that can't be achieved within the boundaries of science and technology — attained at a resource expenditure of approximately equivalent value to a parallel use of technology. Ergo, magecraft is in summary more or less a circumvention of the due process demanded by the laws of physics."
I bit off the end of a piece of sausage, looking down to my plate as I chewed. So far, I could roughly follow Zenjou's logic — but some of the things she'd mentioned didn't quite add up.
"But, taking that glass thing as an example of a Mystery," I said, "what would 'disclosure' entail, exactly? Two billion people watching a YouTube tutorial on how to Reinforce a cup to liquefaction?"
Midway through a bite into her burger, Zenjou paused — making a weird expression before following through and swallowing.
"That isn't what 'disclosure' would typically entail, no," she said, sipping her coke. "Setting aside the consequences that would snowball from the revelation of mana, science would in such an event quickly bring the demonstrated phenomenon to quantification — assimilating it to the corpus of human comprehension, or otherwise amending the corpus as to accommodate." She paused. "And should that come to pass — is there a need to yet hold faith in the neighborhood milkman?"
I blinked at her non sequitur.
"What does that have to do with anything?" I asked.
"Not read up on your Pratchett, are you?" said Zenjou. "With particular exceptions irrelevant to the present discussion, Mystery encompasses for our purposes here those items taken in faith — the things that people suspect to be true; that they hold to fall within the realm of possibility. Rhetorically, if it comes to pass that a given Mystery is wholly quantified to scientific comprehension, is it still a Mystery?"
The milkman existed. There wasn't a need to suspect his existence; to hold it in faith. His being was objectively confirmable.
Magecraft, in other words, required whatever it justified itself upon to exist in the capacity of a Mystery — held in faith to the level of carrying 'salience.' Conversely, if by the advance of science, something no longer qualified as a Mystery —
Like I'd surmised on Sunday afternoon, what Zenjou practiced was akin to stage magic — impressive-looking, but only on account that the know-how to perform it was scarce.
It was a power held in scarcity; because — like in that animated cape flick from Earth Aleph — if everyone's super, no-one is.
"But what's the point, then?" I asked. "If magecraft only produces outcomes achievable via tech, why bother with it at all? I mean, you said that the resource expenditure is about the same either way, right?"
Somehow, in the time that we'd been speaking, Zenjou had finished the first half of her burger. Wiping her lips again, she casually pointed to the street-facing window of the diner.
"See that car across the street?" she asked. "The red one."
I glanced in the direction she was pointing, but in the dim light of the dusk, it took a moment to find what she was talking about. Across the diner's parking lot; across the 4-lane street beyond, there was a red automobile parked in front of a building — just outside the range of my swarm.
"What about it?" I asked.
"Activate your Circuits," she said. "Abiding by instinct, fill your eyes with mana. Don't force it."
Closing my eyes, I inhaled and did as asked. A warmth entered into my eye sockets.
"Now," said Zenjou, "remove your eyeglasses, and look again beneath the car."
Taking my glasses off, I blinked open my eyes —
"Huh."
A little jarringly, the environment around me had entered into sharp focus. This extended beyond the windows of the diner to the landscape without — revealing the details the dusk had concealed, even as the contrast and brightness were entirely unchanged.
In the shadow of the car across the street, there was a small black cat.
"To glimpse that kitten at a comparable clarity via technological means," said Zenjou, "you'd have to acquire a fairly costly pair of night-vision binoculars. Yet, merely by an expenditure of mana in equivalent value, you've just now circumvented the need for such a thing." She lifted the second half of her burger. "This is really only possible for magecraft at a personal scale, however."
— because, beyond the scale of personal magecraft, the kind of resources required escalated to real estate, of all things.
Still, I supposed that answered part of my question — even if in all seriousness, I couldn't buy the claim that a couple of seconds of Circuit activation was of the same monetary worth as a pair of night-vision binoculars. Those things were an upwards of two hundred bucks at the least.
"Alright," I said, cancelling my Reinforcement and putting my glasses back on. "So there's a practical convenience in the substitution of costs. Outside of tapping into a leyline indefinitely, though, you're eventually gonna end up with an outcome that could've been achieved without the use of magecraft. What's the point of magecraft, then — cost substitution aside?"
Swallowing a bite, Zenjou exhaled.
"The majority of magi aren't so focused on utility in a practical context," she said, sounding a little exasperated. "Also, higher-order magecraft does frequently make use of a leyline as to indefinitely render that a Fantasy supersedes the strictures of physics."
Picking up a French fry, she dipped it into the condiment cup at the edge of her plate.
"I don't know that it'll satisfy you as an answer," she continued, biting off the ketchup-covered end of the fry and chewing. "But — setting aside the matter of cost substitution as you've asked — what do you figure it means when I say that 'the due process of physics' is circumvented?"
The due process of physics, outside of cost substitution?
"As in like, the laws of physics require things to happen a certain way, but magecraft overrules it?" I asked.
Zenjou nodded.
"If I were to heat a piece of glass in excess of 550° C," she said, "physics would have it undergo the process of glass transition. However, if I were to simultaneously Reinforce it in its capacity as a rigid solid —"
Glass transition could be denied.
It wouldn't persist if mana provision were discontinued — but in a very literal sense, on a temporary basis, magecraft permitted that 'Fantasy' could supersede reality.
I felt like a bit of an idiot for not having comprehended right off the bat. The concept itself was blatantly obvious; practically staring me in the face the entire time — but for whatever reason, my mind had glossed right past it until Zenjou had pointed it out.
Now, my imagination was aflame.
"Say," I said. "How can I tell if something's salient enough to qualify as a Mystery?"
Wednesday morning was the first that I attempted to jog with full-body Reinforcement. As the temperature was about the same as the day prior, I'd gone out in a hoodie, t-shirt, and pair of sweatpants — not having yet saved up the money for actual jogging gear.
The hoodie turned out to be a mistake.
Not even five minutes in, I was sweating like crazy, and I had to take the thing off. Tying the sleeves around my waist, I resumed my jog — sort of going on autopilot as I mulled over the topics that Zenjou had covered at dinner.
The original intent had just been to go a little further than I had the past two days; to feel out the limits of my body during the active use of magecraft. Unfortunately, I'd let my mind wander a little too far; and by the time I realized it, I was straight across the Docks and well past the limits of the Trainyard.
Aside from the tracks and facilities still in active use, much of the area appeared to be completely derelict. I'd have thought that the druggies or the homeless would make use of the abandoned boxcars to stay out of the cold; but in the zone that I was in, at least, there wasn't a single human within range of my swarm.
It was only seven, and I wasn't yet tired at all. Not in a particular rush, I decided to take it easy for a bit — slowing down to a walk as I navigated the skeletal remains of an abandoned freight station.
Along one of the walls at the edge of the complex, there was a broken-down automobile, heavily rusted and missing its wheels. On a moment's whim, I approached the wreck — removing my glove and touching the door.
Instilling my mana within, I directed the individual motes of energy to form into a vertical line upon the surface — raising the saturation to the limit.
There was a crackling noise, and I quickly pulled my hand away — stepping back as the exterior chassis of the door shattered along the line that I'd made.
Zenjou had broken her glass cup with nothing more than a single tap of her finger. Comparatively, I'd taken far too long.
"I can work with this, though," I said aloud.
That wasn't a slight against the place on my part, as the food was consistently delicious. It's just that — for all that it rocked the art deco look of a vintage 50's diner, and legitimately serviced a long-distance trucking route — it had actually been built in the mid-to-late 90's, shortly after I was born. Not to mention, it was part of a restaurant chain that was wholly owned by the McDonell's Corporation.
I couldn't remember when it was that I'd last visited, but in happier times, me, Mom, and Dad would occasionally drop by on the way home from a weekend trip to Gran's place down in Martin's Beach.
For me, personally, the defining feature of diner fare was the availability of breakfast at any hour of the day; and so, quite naturally, I ended up ordering scrambled eggs and pancakes with a side of sausage, coated all over with a generous helping of maple syrup. It wasn't the healthiest of meals, I knew, but for whatever reason, I was inordinately hungry today.
Probably, then, it was a little hypocritical of me to get on Zenjou's case for choosing what she did — but, following a bowl of New England clam chowder, her main dish for the evening was the one item on the menu that I absolutely couldn't stomach.
The Maxi Burger Classic was a one-pound double bacon cheeseburger deluxe served with fries and onion rings — a staple at any restaurant associated with the McDonell's brand, franchised or otherwise. Fugly Bob's up by Market, for example, famously offered the Challenger — a nearly-identical burger, but topped with chili instead of lettuce and tomatoes.
The nutritional information on the menu here at Benedict's helpfully supplied that the burger alone was worth about 1,775 calories, give or take — a little over the lower limit of the recommended daily caloric intake for an adult woman.
"You had more than half a carton of egg fried rice for lunch," I said, staring at Zenjou's plate. "You're going to get fat."
Having cut the burger with a steak knife, Zenjou lifted the half of the sandwich closer to her and took a bite — taking the time to slowly chew before washing it down with a sip of coke.
"Weight management isn't solely about controlling intake," she said, setting down her glass. "Maintaining a regular caloric expenditure is critical. Thankfully — alike to constantly running a fever — the escalated metabolism come of a constant use of Reinforcement burns up a significant amount of energy." She popped a smaller onion ring into her mouth and chewed. "I'd actually recommend that you aim to consume 3,500 calories a day at a minimum. Put a little meat on those bones of yours."
What are you? The witch from Hansel and Gretel?
This was exactly the sort of opinion I'd expect from a conventionally-attractive girl genetically predisposed to slimness. Benefits of Reinforcement aside, her baseline metabolism was probably fast enough that irrelevant of whatever she ate, she'd never have to contend with obesity.
On the upside, a metabolism like hers practically guaranteed that she'd never naturally develop the kind of curves that Mrs. Whateley sported.
If I weren't basically in the same boat, maybe I might've taken a petty pleasure in that.
"It's really alright to just casually talk about magecraft like this?" I asked. "I know you said that the Bounded Field you set up takes care of that, but —"
"Aside from the two of us and the waitress assigned to this aisle," said Zenjou, lifting another onion ring from her plate, "every human within a range of ten meters is imposed with a mild mental interference that substitutes an apprehension of our conversation with generic dialogue supplied by their own minds." She bit into the ring and chewed. "But, that's only to preempt the perception that our table is unnaturally absent of noise. In fact, as a countermeasure to electronic recording, no sound that we make passes significantly beyond the boundaries of our booth; and at distance, the movements of our lips would look to be entirely randomized."
In other words, the Master-Stranger effect implemented was mostly fool-proof against potential eavesdroppers, barring the slim possibility that somebody had physically bugged the booth. I supposed it was proof enough of the Bounded Field's efficacy that nobody within earshot responded at all to Zenjou's candid admission to Mastering them.
Accepting her explanation at face value, though, it sounded as if the complexity and the sustained nature of effect rather exceeded the scope of what she'd earlier described as a 'single-action spell protocol.' Was she tapping into a nearby leyline for mana?
Honestly, I couldn't tell. All that I knew for certain was, she hadn't bothered to divert away the looks she received from the male patrons within view of our table — faintly smiling as she basked in the attention.
I did my best to ignore that.
"So," I said. "Seeing as I can't follow a regulation that I don't understand, what's this 'mystery' thing that Mrs. Whateley mentioned?"
Swallowing a bite of her burger, Zenjou wiped her lips with her napkin.
"One of the things I didn't intend to touch upon quite yet," she replied. "The short of it is that the revelation of the existence of magecraft would produce an outcome that the Association cannot tolerate. Thus, the consequences they visit upon those who breach the rule of secrecy are deadly serious. I imagine that if a particular magus were to present their use of magecraft as a parahuman power, the Association would default to looking the other way; but public disclosure of the underlying mechanics is absolutely forbidden."
She sipped her coke.
"Before you ask," she continued, "it isn't some Harry Potter thing, where the terrible outcome that must be avoided is just a matter of persecution. There's a more technical explanation for the underlying justification, but at this juncture, you're likely to dismiss it as hogwash if I were to go into detail."
Once again, Zenjou had drawn a distinction between 'magecraft' and 'parahuman powers' — as if they weren't both a load of bullshit not yet accounted for by modern science.
Personally, I didn't see a need to distinguish; but as it was apparently a matter of critical importance to the secret fraternity of Myrddin wannabes, I supposed that there wasn't any harm in playing ball. Follow the rules, and they wouldn't bother me. Simple enough.
Assuming, of course, that Zenjou hadn't just hired a pair of actors to help maintain her ruse.
— not that I had the leeway to seriously entertain a take like that. Yes, it was definitely prudent to approach things with a healthy dose of skepticism; but if regarding something as a falsehood was certain to provoke serious repercussions, at some point, you'd have to take the equivalent of Pascal's wager.
Being as power dynamics ensured that Dad and I were effectively at Zenjou's mercy, I honestly couldn't think of a pragmatic reason for her to invest significant time and resources to the sole purpose of misrepresenting the nature of 'magecraft.'
For the sake of argument, it could be that she legitimately got off on 'persuading' a 15-year-old to buy into a worldview from out of a young adult fantasy novel; but —
Really, for all that she tolerated my verbal sniping and general lack of respect — if she told me to jump, circumstances were such that my only choice was to ask 'how high?' To my mind, at least, that significantly diminished the likelihood she was lying.
"Explain it so I understand, then," I said. "I'm not that close-minded."
She hmm'd in contemplation — chewing through a bite of her burger before speaking.
"Let's start with some basic concepts," she said. "Yesterday morning, I mentioned the matter of 'salience' — that when working with water, Reinforcement more easily applies to surface tension than hydrogen bonding, as the former is a feature more commonly apprehended. Taking that into consideration, what precisely did you Reinforce when repairing my cup this afternoon?"
"Its ability to flow?"
"Correct. And why is that 'salient,' if per the strictures of physics, normal glass isn't capable of flowing at room temperature?"
'Salience' was in Zenjou's usage something that emerged in the consciousness of the population at large. If it could be said that the capacity of glass to flow at room temperature was in fact 'salient,' it would have to be in the context of —
"It's those anecdotes about church windows thickening at the bottom, no?" I asked. "They even turn up in textbooks on occasion."
The one from my freshman chemistry class, for example — because, apparently, Winslow couldn't even be trusted not to have misinformation in the textbooks they ordered.
"Correct again," Zenjou replied, nodding in approval. "And Mystery is in general the term for items of salience descriptive of phenomena that don't fall strictly within the dictates of the established laws of physics — the engravement of which within the Collective Unconscious of Man is referred to as a Thaumaturgical Foundation. To vastly oversimplify, magecraft accesses Foundations as to make use of Mysteries in the rendition of possible outcomes."
If I wasn't misremembering Mom's explanation from when I was in middle school, 'the collective unconscious' was a term from Jungian psychology — a pattern of unconsciousness that manifested in common across the human species, emerging from the standard response that our brains had evolved to handle with the acquisition of common elements in culture.
I had a distinct feeling this wasn't the definition that Zenjou was using — but I could grasp the gist: If an irrational belief about the way things worked persisted within the public mind, magecraft had a use for it.
"Why the emphasis on 'possible,' though?" I asked. "If something violates the laws of physics, isn't it just outright impossible? Like, I shouldn't have been able to reshape glass at room temperature, period."
"It isn't 'impossibility' in the legitimate sense," said Zenjou, "and it persists only so long as mana is available. Removed of such, the 'possibility' that remains as an outcome is nothing that can't be achieved within the boundaries of science and technology — attained at a resource expenditure of approximately equivalent value to a parallel use of technology. Ergo, magecraft is in summary more or less a circumvention of the due process demanded by the laws of physics."
I bit off the end of a piece of sausage, looking down to my plate as I chewed. So far, I could roughly follow Zenjou's logic — but some of the things she'd mentioned didn't quite add up.
"But, taking that glass thing as an example of a Mystery," I said, "what would 'disclosure' entail, exactly? Two billion people watching a YouTube tutorial on how to Reinforce a cup to liquefaction?"
Midway through a bite into her burger, Zenjou paused — making a weird expression before following through and swallowing.
"That isn't what 'disclosure' would typically entail, no," she said, sipping her coke. "Setting aside the consequences that would snowball from the revelation of mana, science would in such an event quickly bring the demonstrated phenomenon to quantification — assimilating it to the corpus of human comprehension, or otherwise amending the corpus as to accommodate." She paused. "And should that come to pass — is there a need to yet hold faith in the neighborhood milkman?"
I blinked at her non sequitur.
"What does that have to do with anything?" I asked.
"Not read up on your Pratchett, are you?" said Zenjou. "With particular exceptions irrelevant to the present discussion, Mystery encompasses for our purposes here those items taken in faith — the things that people suspect to be true; that they hold to fall within the realm of possibility. Rhetorically, if it comes to pass that a given Mystery is wholly quantified to scientific comprehension, is it still a Mystery?"
The milkman existed. There wasn't a need to suspect his existence; to hold it in faith. His being was objectively confirmable.
Magecraft, in other words, required whatever it justified itself upon to exist in the capacity of a Mystery — held in faith to the level of carrying 'salience.' Conversely, if by the advance of science, something no longer qualified as a Mystery —
Like I'd surmised on Sunday afternoon, what Zenjou practiced was akin to stage magic — impressive-looking, but only on account that the know-how to perform it was scarce.
It was a power held in scarcity; because — like in that animated cape flick from Earth Aleph — if everyone's super, no-one is.
"But what's the point, then?" I asked. "If magecraft only produces outcomes achievable via tech, why bother with it at all? I mean, you said that the resource expenditure is about the same either way, right?"
Somehow, in the time that we'd been speaking, Zenjou had finished the first half of her burger. Wiping her lips again, she casually pointed to the street-facing window of the diner.
"See that car across the street?" she asked. "The red one."
I glanced in the direction she was pointing, but in the dim light of the dusk, it took a moment to find what she was talking about. Across the diner's parking lot; across the 4-lane street beyond, there was a red automobile parked in front of a building — just outside the range of my swarm.
"What about it?" I asked.
"Activate your Circuits," she said. "Abiding by instinct, fill your eyes with mana. Don't force it."
Closing my eyes, I inhaled and did as asked. A warmth entered into my eye sockets.
"Now," said Zenjou, "remove your eyeglasses, and look again beneath the car."
Taking my glasses off, I blinked open my eyes —
"Huh."
A little jarringly, the environment around me had entered into sharp focus. This extended beyond the windows of the diner to the landscape without — revealing the details the dusk had concealed, even as the contrast and brightness were entirely unchanged.
In the shadow of the car across the street, there was a small black cat.
"To glimpse that kitten at a comparable clarity via technological means," said Zenjou, "you'd have to acquire a fairly costly pair of night-vision binoculars. Yet, merely by an expenditure of mana in equivalent value, you've just now circumvented the need for such a thing." She lifted the second half of her burger. "This is really only possible for magecraft at a personal scale, however."
— because, beyond the scale of personal magecraft, the kind of resources required escalated to real estate, of all things.
Still, I supposed that answered part of my question — even if in all seriousness, I couldn't buy the claim that a couple of seconds of Circuit activation was of the same monetary worth as a pair of night-vision binoculars. Those things were an upwards of two hundred bucks at the least.
"Alright," I said, cancelling my Reinforcement and putting my glasses back on. "So there's a practical convenience in the substitution of costs. Outside of tapping into a leyline indefinitely, though, you're eventually gonna end up with an outcome that could've been achieved without the use of magecraft. What's the point of magecraft, then — cost substitution aside?"
Swallowing a bite, Zenjou exhaled.
"The majority of magi aren't so focused on utility in a practical context," she said, sounding a little exasperated. "Also, higher-order magecraft does frequently make use of a leyline as to indefinitely render that a Fantasy supersedes the strictures of physics."
Picking up a French fry, she dipped it into the condiment cup at the edge of her plate.
"I don't know that it'll satisfy you as an answer," she continued, biting off the ketchup-covered end of the fry and chewing. "But — setting aside the matter of cost substitution as you've asked — what do you figure it means when I say that 'the due process of physics' is circumvented?"
The due process of physics, outside of cost substitution?
"As in like, the laws of physics require things to happen a certain way, but magecraft overrules it?" I asked.
Zenjou nodded.
"If I were to heat a piece of glass in excess of 550° C," she said, "physics would have it undergo the process of glass transition. However, if I were to simultaneously Reinforce it in its capacity as a rigid solid —"
Glass transition could be denied.
It wouldn't persist if mana provision were discontinued — but in a very literal sense, on a temporary basis, magecraft permitted that 'Fantasy' could supersede reality.
I felt like a bit of an idiot for not having comprehended right off the bat. The concept itself was blatantly obvious; practically staring me in the face the entire time — but for whatever reason, my mind had glossed right past it until Zenjou had pointed it out.
Now, my imagination was aflame.
"Say," I said. "How can I tell if something's salient enough to qualify as a Mystery?"
Wednesday morning was the first that I attempted to jog with full-body Reinforcement. As the temperature was about the same as the day prior, I'd gone out in a hoodie, t-shirt, and pair of sweatpants — not having yet saved up the money for actual jogging gear.
The hoodie turned out to be a mistake.
Not even five minutes in, I was sweating like crazy, and I had to take the thing off. Tying the sleeves around my waist, I resumed my jog — sort of going on autopilot as I mulled over the topics that Zenjou had covered at dinner.
The original intent had just been to go a little further than I had the past two days; to feel out the limits of my body during the active use of magecraft. Unfortunately, I'd let my mind wander a little too far; and by the time I realized it, I was straight across the Docks and well past the limits of the Trainyard.
Aside from the tracks and facilities still in active use, much of the area appeared to be completely derelict. I'd have thought that the druggies or the homeless would make use of the abandoned boxcars to stay out of the cold; but in the zone that I was in, at least, there wasn't a single human within range of my swarm.
It was only seven, and I wasn't yet tired at all. Not in a particular rush, I decided to take it easy for a bit — slowing down to a walk as I navigated the skeletal remains of an abandoned freight station.
Along one of the walls at the edge of the complex, there was a broken-down automobile, heavily rusted and missing its wheels. On a moment's whim, I approached the wreck — removing my glove and touching the door.
Instilling my mana within, I directed the individual motes of energy to form into a vertical line upon the surface — raising the saturation to the limit.
There was a crackling noise, and I quickly pulled my hand away — stepping back as the exterior chassis of the door shattered along the line that I'd made.
Zenjou had broken her glass cup with nothing more than a single tap of her finger. Comparatively, I'd taken far too long.
"I can work with this, though," I said aloud.
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- Location
- Space
That's a fairly convincing Faultline impression you've got there Taylor. Gg.
- Location
- Probably at sea
... stuff like this, and the conversation taking up most of this page, is why I'm often frustrated with Nasuverse-style metaphysics. I'm about 70% certain Nasu himself hasn't thought about this nearly as hard as people on this page have, and would break every one of these rules in the service of doing something cool.
Still, it's very good to see Taylor's mind working in the twisty, exploitative ways that were some of my favourite things about canon. She seems like, similarly to Waver, she'll go very, very far given a grounding in even just the basics of magecraft.
Still, it's very good to see Taylor's mind working in the twisty, exploitative ways that were some of my favourite things about canon. She seems like, similarly to Waver, she'll go very, very far given a grounding in even just the basics of magecraft.
- Location
- Void
And the surreal part is that we have yet to dig into how Magecraft can make use of Symbolism, be that Alchemical or otherwise.
Beyond that, I can only imagine how Dead Apostles are acting in this World of Parahumans, and if this would technically be on a Fate or Tsuki timeline. As I could easily see Nero Chaos being an S-Class among the likes of the Slaughterhouse.
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Ylamona
Konlulu~
For some reason due to stuff, I thought you meant Nrvsngr guy and imagine that beefy man wearing a too small milkman outfit staring down menacingly a child while holding a tray of delivery milk. Would be funny to see similar characters trying to "blend in" like that and meeting Taylor thoughThe irony is, the neighborhood milkman is Kaos
"No Taylor, that Pizza Delivery girl is absolutely not someone you should piss Off"
"Taylor, don't pet the Black Shuck familiar"
"Yes Taylor, that forest in the public park is a vampire thirst for blood"
nasuverse metaphysics is just around agnostic logic with a of tinkerbell logic.
the technobabble is pretty much just fallacies' signature writing.
Use of Reinforcement in FSN
fallacies
Puyo Mage
Use of Reinforcement in FSN:
This is a non-exhaustive but mostly comprehensive survey of the descriptions of Reinforcement in FSN. Items excluded primarily fall in the category one-line mentions that don't really go into detail, or repeats of the same information.
Moving on, from Nasu's official tweets during the launch of UBW (2014):
The glossary entry on Reinforcement from Side Material:
On an unrelated note, the glossary entry on Thaumaturgical Foundations in Case File Material:
This is a non-exhaustive but mostly comprehensive survey of the descriptions of Reinforcement in FSN. Items excluded primarily fall in the category one-line mentions that don't really go into detail, or repeats of the same information.
FATE - Day 01 - 15 said:
MirrorMoon said:
- Reinforcement is rendered by way of permeating (通す, tohsu) a target with mana.
- As of FATE - Day 01, Shirou believes that rendering mana permeation without proper structural grasp would only hasten the target's annihilation. Ergo, he seeks only to permeate "the unoccupied interstices" (空いている透き間, suiteiru sukima) of the object.
FATE - Day 01 - 15 said:
MirrorMoon said:
- Objects originally borne of Form (カタチ, katachi) are difficult to Reinforce.
- Relatedly, Shirou compares Reinforcement to the act of adding brushstrokes to a completed artwork, giving that doing so runs the risk of reducing the completeness of the object being processed. He gives that this is the reason that Reinforcement is difficult despite being straightforward — maybe linking it to its lack of popularity amongst magi.
FATE - Day 07 - 01 said:
MirrorMoon said:
- According to Rin, capacity to stockpile mana in objects aside from one's own body is uncommon.
- Objects permeated with mana undergo some manner of change — rendering the consumption of the mana used. This is part of the reason thaumaturgical phenomena are short-lived, and don't persist in perpetuity.
FATE - Day 07 - 27 said:
On FATE - Day 07, Rin approaches the task of training Shirou in Reinforcement with a presumption that he should be able to master it by the end of the day.MirrorMoon said:
FATE - Day 07 - 27 said:
Shirou ends up breaking all 30 of the lamps that Rin prepared. At this, Rin gives that her presumption was overly naive.MirrorMoon said:
FATE - Day 07 - 27 said:
MirrorMoon said:
- Reinforcement applies to an object's effects / capabilities.
- Alteration entails affixing capabilities without an object's native features.
FATE - Day 07 - 27 said:
Shirou refers to Reinforcement as "the easiest of all" magecraft.MirrorMoon said:
FATE - Day 07 - 27 said:
MirrorMoon said:
- In Shirou's opinion, his incapacity to perform Reinforcement comes of an inability to properly control his mana.
- This came as a response to an assessment by Rin that he was being overly forceful; that he was using too much mana; that he wasn't strictly acting to Reinforce the target's weaknesses.
- Shirou takes Rin's critique to imply that he should be cutting corners.
FATE (Realta Nua) - Day 11 - 18 said:
In the loredump that replaces the FATE - Day 11 sex scene in Realta Nua, it's revealed that in Shirou's opinion, his use of Reinforcement comes with Circuit activation to the level of "one through four." The phrasing makes it sound like he's numbered his commonly-used Circuits in his head or something ...
FATE - Day 15 - 09 said:
As of FATE - Day 15, Shirou is actually still incapable of determining whether or not he's successfully Reinforced an object after doing so.MirrorMoon said:
Moving on, from Nasu's official tweets during the launch of UBW (2014):
Official FSN Anime Twitter said:
Official FSN Anime Twitter said:
Beasts' Lair said:
- Ergo, per WoG, Reinforcement of the body and the 5 senses is "a fundamental amongst fundamentals."
- Temporary Reinforcement of the flesh is rendered by permeating one's own body with mana; by infusing one's own blood with mana. Nasu gives that this is a simple feat.
- On account that it's difficult to permeate non-self objects / implements with mana, the Reinforcement of such is typically rendered by way of encompassing the exterior with "a single layer of armor." Nasu gives that this is cheap, quick, and strong.
The glossary entry on Reinforcement from Side Material:
Side Material said:
And from CM3:TMDict said:
Complete Material III said:
Unfortunately, the Theory of Magic Google Doc doesn't allow me to copypaste.
On an unrelated note, the glossary entry on Thaumaturgical Foundations in Case File Material:
Lord El-Melloi II Case Files Material said:
TMDict said:
- Faith and the unconscious of the people reinforces the strength of a Mystery.
- However, propagation (広まる, hiromaru) weakens the strength of a Mystery.
- Thaumaturgical Foundations are Thaumaturgical Principles / Theories (魔術理論, majutsu riron) engraved upon the World, and render the paradoxical effect of stabilizing Mysteries to the extent of their prevalence / popularity (知名度, chimeido, lit. "degree of being well-known"). Note that Case Files Material also states that the qualification of the Cause Rank is "the establishment and stabilization of a Foundation."
- The TMDict translation doesn't really properly render the bit about "families." The nuance is actually that (all?) magecraft (strictly?) passed down as of a single family would be unreliant upon Foundations, and are instead established upon personal / personalized spell protocols / formulas. That is, this may be a common occurrence without the purview of the Association.
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008 : Chrysalis
fallacies
Puyo Mage
The stretch of Canal Street in the vicinity of the City Subway station was one of those shopping areas that despite seeing a lot of pedestrian traffic in the daytime probably wasn't actually lucrative. Dating from when Brockton Bay was still 'the Star of New Hampshire,' the 4-to-5 story brownstone buildings housed a number of dingy, shoddily-maintained outlets whose wares catered in general to the needs of urban poor — unalike to the upscale, tourist-oriented places along the Boardwalk.
Maybe two or three minutes from the station, Zenjou pulled her Volkswagen into a vacant space in front of a boarded-up building — encompassed in the telltale heat of a Bounded Field.
"You're really just gonna park on the street?" I asked, exiting the car.
"What's wrong with that?" she asked.
A well-maintained 1953 Volkswagen Beetle was more than a little eye-catching in the commercial part the Docks South. Given, it was around eleven in the morning, and car-jackers probably wouldn't be so bold as to make an attempt on it in broad daylight. Still —
"Crime rate's pretty high in this area," I said aloud. "Somebody thinks there's something valuable, and they'll break your windows."
"Hm. I see," she said — tilting forward the back of the driver's seat, unloading a pair of carry-on suitcases from the rear. "Good thing the Bounded Field deals with that, then. Here, take this."
She offered me the handle to one of the suitcases, and I took ahold — a little surprised at how heavy the thing was.
"What do you mean 'deals with that?'" I asked, following after her she pulled her own suitcase toward the front entrance of the building.
She pulled out a key and fiddled a bit with the padlock — unlocking it before she answered:
"Look around. Is there any other vacant parking nearby?"
There wasn't, in fact — not for two full city blocks. It was only to be expected, given the time of the day, and the fact that we were on Canal Street.
"You're saying you set up the Bounded Field to reserve a spot for you?" I asked.
"Not so. It's the Whateleys' doing," she said, pulling open the plywood panel, and switching to another key for the sturdier door within.
With a click, the lock opened, and we headed inside — closing and latching the plywood panel behind us. Inside the building, I was confronted with a stale, musty odor, and an unlit service corridor that terminated at a stairwell opposite the street-facing facade.
"But yes," said Zenjou, rolling her luggage toward the stairs. "Unto those incapable of actively circulating mana, the deterrence here asserted extends well into the street. I presume the old woman dislikes having to seek out parking every time she drops by ahead of a prospective tenant."
So, thaumaturgical Master effects could to some extent be repelled via the mana circulation of a trained magus. Good to know — though, if Zenjou were willing to so casually disclose the information, I doubted it was of any use against her.
"You're renting the place, then?" I asked.
"I'm not paying a penny," Zenjou replied, smirking — visibly pleased with herself. "In exchange for assistance on a certain project, I've been let to 'squat,' rent-free. Plausible deniability, you know? I intend to use this as a forward operating site in case I ever have to act as a cape — but, there isn't a paper trail that connects the Whateleys back to me, if anyone cares to investigate the ownership of the property."
At the base of the stairs, she stowed the telescopic handle — switching over to hold the carry-on by the clutch on the side. Effortlessly ascending the first flight of stairs, she paused before the grate-covered window to glance back at me — looking to her in incredulity from the ground floor.
"What's the hold-up?" she asked. "The luggage isn't going to carry itself."
"We're taking the stairs? Really?"
"Yes, really — as there clearly isn't an elevator. A bit of manual labor never hurt anyone."
Reluctantly, I followed suit. The way up was four stories and eight flights of stairs, and the luggage had to be sixty pounds at minimum. Using Reinforcement, it was doable — mostly; but I imagined that if I hadn't already spent myself earlier in the morning, it might've been moreso.
Down a stretch of corridor on the top floor, we entered into a dance studio with mirrored walls and an elevated glass ceiling, set at a slight incline. The interior looked a little less age-worn than the rest of the building.
"Just set the case down wherever, and take a rest," said Zenjou, placing her own carry-on against a wall — not even breathing hard. Giving me a once-over from head to toe, she continued, "Aside from increasing your caloric intake, I think we'll definitely have to work on your basic fitness. A climb like that shouldn't have even required Reinforcement."
Big words for a girl who'd pretty much admitted to running Reinforcement at all times. Unless she was a hundred fifty pounds of solid muscle under those tight-fitting clothes, I very much doubted that without the use of magecraft, she'd be looking so incredibly fresh.
Exhaling, I set my carry-on on the floor, seating myself on a chair nearby.
"What's in there, anyways?" I asked. "Rocks?"
"Good guess," Zenjou replied, unzipping the luggage I'd been carrying and laying it open on the hardwood floor. "Not entirely off the mark."
The suitcase was fitted with an insert of grey foam, cut with apertures in array to accommodate a large selection of items — jewels, for the most part. I wasn't familiar with the pricing of gemstones, but altogether, it must've been worth a fortune.
"You robbed a jewelry store or something?" I asked.
Zenjou chuckled.
"I assure you, everything here was legally acquired," she said. "But, for our purposes here today, this is the only item you should concern yourself with."
From a corner of the suitcase, she withdrew a large empty jar, setting it upon the open-front school-desk beside me. I wondered for a moment if she intended to have me repeat the glass-mending exercise; but touching her fingers to the lid, she spoke the word 'reload,' and the jar lit up like the flash on a camera — prompting me to shield my eyes with an arm.
I felt it before I saw it: An unfamiliar arthropod that abruptly manifested within — legless and ugly, with clearly defined mandibles and a fin-like dorsal crest along its chitinous segments; terminating in a spiny tail that split into two like the caudal fin of a fish.
Even if I didn't actively assert control, my power provided a read on the instincts of any insect I connected to. For all that this one appeared to lack eyes, it was immediately able to discern the presence of warm bodies in its vicinity; regarding Zenjou and I with a sort of hungry —
"Apologies for the flash," said Zenjou. "Bit of an inefficiency that I haven't yet worked out. To summarize, then, the lid on the jar is keyed to respond to a brief channeling of mana alongside the utterance of the word 'reload' — at which point, the contents will be replaced with your next guinea pig."
Teleportation? She had a jar capable of teleporting its contents?
"What's the thing inside?" I asked.
"A particularly loathsome parasite colloquially referred to as a blood worm, or a vampire worm," said Zenjou. "Though taxonomically, it's an arthropod and not really any kind of annelid, so as the name implies, it's evolved to feed upon the blood of warm-bodied mammals — burrowing deep within the flesh. As to how precisely it enters the body — let's just say that it isn't entirely on accident that its shape is phallic."
Subsequent my becoming a parahuman, I'd mostly ceased to regard arthropods with disgust; but looking at this thing, I couldn't help but imagine it chewing through me — lodging itself between my organs. Where the hell did Zenjou even find it?
"... and I guess I'll be attempting to Reinforce it?"
"It'll be a two-fold exercise," Zenjou replied. "You'll be Reinforcing the blood worm, yes — but only by way of using the glass as a conduit. If the thing dies in the process, reload and try again."
"Couldn't I have done this with something that — I dunno — isn't instinctively geared to violate my body on the off chance that I let it loose?" I asked. "Like a household cockroach?"
Zenjou regarded me with a smug, sadistic smile.
"Consider it incentive not to break the jar," she said.
Keeping the jar intact was extremely easy.
The blood worm, on the other hand —
I went with the 'motes of mana' technique right off the bat — effortlessly bypassing the glass. With half of the objective completed in under a minute, I proceeded to introduce my mana to the blood worm.
This was where I started running into trouble.
Earlier, when Zenjou mentioned off-hand that the circulation of mana could overcome thaumaturgical Master effects, I hadn't fully appreciated the implications. More accurately, my understanding of the underlying phenomenon had been overly narrow.
Mana was fundamentally vital energy, and vital energy circulated the bodies of living organisms. Naturally, the energy I put through the carapace of the blood worm was engulfed in the flow of its vitality — quickly eroding from my grasp.
It wasn't 'thaumaturgical Master effects' that a circulation of mana could overcome, and it wasn't strictly that trained magi alone were borne of such a capability. Magecraft itself was obstructed; and while it was obvious that having a bit of training better equipped a person to negate the effects of a spell, at the very small scale that I was working at, the not-particularly-high-volume circulation of a blood worm's vital energy was sufficient to ward it from my Reinforcement.
This was, I realized, the thaumaturgical equivalent of a Manton limit.
Unlike an actual Manton limit, though, it didn't seem entirely non-negotiable. If a flowing stream could easily dilute a drop of food coloring to invisibility, it stood to reason that the solution was just to add more.
So thinking, I clasped the side of the jar and allowed my mana to flow, again directing it to congregate at the points at which the belly of the blood worm rested against the glass — gradually raising the count of the motes as to permeate the flow of vitality without inducing an oversaturation —
There was a wet splatter from within the jar. Along the length of the blood worm, its organs had burst, and its gooey innards had ruptured from the breaches in its exoskeleton — painting the sides of the container in slime. If not for the glass in the way, I might've been drenched in God knows what.
Crap.
Blowing air from my lips, I pressed a pair of fingers to the lid of the jar — remembering to close my eyes before releasing my mana into the metal.
"Reload," I said.
I saw a flash through my eyelids; and the next I opened them, there wasn't any trace of the mess I'd made. Instead, a fresh worm had taken the place of the oozing carcass.
It was the second of several dozens in the initial hour of the exercise.
At maybe a quarter to one, Zenjou wrapped up the first stage of whatever she was doing with the mirrors in the room, and called a break. We locked up downstairs and took our lunch at a pizzeria about a block up the street. Probably owing to the morning's exertions, I was completely famished, and ended up eating a couple more slices than I usually did — well against my better judgment.
"It's completely impossible," I said, wiping my hands after a sixth slice. "Either my mana's blocked, or the thing just ends up dying. There isn't any in-between, regardless of how little mana I use."
Zenjou had the gall to look amused.
"Reinforce a creature you haven't suborned as familiar, and you'll be squaring off against its odic circulation," she replied. "Even that you attempt to brute-force the process, the Thaumaturgical Resistance so bestowed ensures that for animals larger than a common housecat, you're unlikely even to reach the point of rupturing organs. Consequently, the Reinforcement of another human is considered to be of the utmost difficulty, irrelevant of whether your subject is a magus."
A familiar? Like a witch's familiar?
No — that wasn't important at the moment.
"Is there a way for me to go about this without 'brute-forcing,' then?" I asked.
Sipping her orange Fanta through a straw, Zenjou softly set the bottle down beside her deep-dish pizza.
"I don't anticipate that you'll complete the exercise anytime this week," she said. "For my purposes, it would be convenient, yes; but do take your time if necessary. That said, there's a hard way to do it, and then there's cheating. If you manage to pull it off in short order, I would expect that you're either a prodigy beyond compare; unusually suited to the Thaumaturgical Attribute of Reinforcement — or, you've found your way to the latter solution."
Should've expected that she'd take it as a yes-no question, rather than a request for a pointer.
"Would it be bad for me to cheat, then?" I asked.
Zenjou laughed.
"Use of Mystery is fundamentally a borrowing of power beyond the ken of man," she replied. "It's all cheating, all the way down." She slightly inclined her head. "If indeed you go the path I imagine, though, it's merely a matter that you'll quickly arrive at the desired outcome without a comprehension of how you got there. Not optimal, but certainly nothing that would lower my opinion of you."
Because, obviously, her opinion of me was already as low as it could get. Still, this time around, her answer was informative enough. Whatever it was that 'cheating' entailed, it was 'a borrowing of power' — the use of a crutch that circumvented the need to comprehend the detailed mechanics of Reinforcement.
"A little earlier, you mentioned familiars," I said, fishing for more hints. "Something about them not possessing Thaumaturgical Resistance? What's up with that?"
"No," said Zenjou. "It's not that they don't have Thaumaturgical Resistance. Typically, an animal taken as a familiar is by various means made to act as a remote terminal to its master — an extension to the magus' body and soul. It doesn't assert a Resistance against its master for the same reason you aren't impeded in the Reinforcement of your own flesh. However, its Resistance would be in full effect against a third party."
Or to rephrase, animals naturally possessed firewalls against the action of magecraft, but those turned into familiars were made to open a dedicated port to their master.
That gave me a couple of ideas.
Putting them into action wasn't easy, though.
I wouldn't admit it aloud, but a part of me was glad that Zenjou had provided a seemingly endless supply of blood worms to experiment with — rather than something I'd feel guilt over killing, like lab rats. I lost count of the number of worms I'd gone through after maybe the hundredth or so, and it wasn't until nightfall that I made substantial progress.
As expected, the problem was that the task hadn't been properly explained to me.
Up to this point, I'd learned of three distinct variants of Reinforcement:
First, by instilling a phenomenon with mana at moderate concentrations, I could to some extent manipulate it; force it to more potently express particular features related to my affinity for 'water.' This was a bottom-up process heavily reliant upon a comprehension of whatever I was working with.
Second — unreliant upon my 'water' affinity — by way of oversaturating an object or a part of an object, I could forcibly break it down. This was also technically a bottom-up process, but nothing that required significant mental input.
Third — also unreliant on my 'water' affinity — by way of actively circulating mana within my own body, I could improve the performance of my physiology in various ways. This was a top-down process that ran on instinct, and didn't require much in the way of specific knowledge on how things worked.
I'd approached the exercise under the impression that it would mostly involve an application of Reinforcement in the first variety; but really, going at it bottom-up would've required a far better grasp of cellular biology than I possessed. Versus a mostly undifferentiated piece of glass, there were far too many ways a living organism could cease to function as a coherent system. I was definitely capable of the micromanagement required, but even with the sense I possessed for the blood worm's anatomy, the guesswork and the trial and error necessary to get things right would've consumed a prohibitive amount of time and resources.
Per Zenjou's overly cryptic hinting, this was probably 'the hard way' to go about things.
How would I 'cheat,' then?
Ideally, the objective would be for the worm to be Reinforced in the manner I Reinforced myself. Trouble was, strictly in thaumaturgical terms, it wasn't my 'familiar'; wasn't an extension of my body, my power notwithstanding. It was an organism entirely distinct from me, and I didn't have access to a port in its firewall.
I could, however, control it. I could direct it according to my will — in accordance to its instincts as an organism. That being the case, all that remained was a question of execution.
Until today's exercise had drawn my attention to it, I honestly hadn't noticed, but my power did in fact provide a sense of the odic circulation in the insects connected to me — lurking in the backdrop of my field of perception like a phantom limb I'd never known.
That phantom limb could be made to move.
Perhaps because they were as large as rats, the odic pathways in a blood worm were rather more robust than those in a common house fly. However, attempting to bring them to full activation in the capacity of Thaumaturgical Circuits resulted in scores of deaths from misfire.
I didn't get a sense that non-lethal 'Circuit' activation was vastly out of reach, but — a little impatient to get the job done and over with — I shifted my focus.
If the goal were simply a Reinforcement of physiology, there actually wasn't a need to kick the odic pathways all the way up to fight-or-flight levels of activity. Availability of mana to the flesh was the sole necessity. Ergo, if a blood worm could acquire and circulate mana at sufficient volume, it could Reinforce itself — 'Circuit' activation or not.
The trick, then, was for me to encompass the worm; to hold it in a mist of mana — directing it to draw upon the energy to boost its odic flow.
The immediate feedback to my power was —
"Oh, God."
— a noticeable boost in the fidelity at which I could interpret the senses of the worm.
Too much information, frankly — and not in the sense that the volume was beyond my processing. Suppressing the urge to utterly eviscerate the evil thing in the bottle, I consciously restricted my access to the sensory feed from its nervous system.
"I'm finished," I announced, triumphant. "I'm done with this."
Kneeling beside the circular design she'd etched upon the floor, Zenjou looked up — visibly surprised.
"Already?" she asked, standing upright. "It hasn't even been a day."
I didn't know if she could tell what I was doing just by looking, but I held the bottle up as she approached — to show her that I'd won; that she'd underestimated me.
"Keep the Reinforcement going," she said, "but set the bottle on the desk."
A little confused, I did as asked. Stopping a meter away from the desk, Zenjou lifted her left hand — raising her middle and index fingers to form a finger gun.
It was a weirdly juvenile gesture, and I thought for a moment to verbally mock her; but before I could find the words, a sphere of black the size of a marble manifested before the tips of her fingers — emanating with the heat of mana.
Making a noise as it displaced the air, the blackness shot forth — phasing through the surface of the glass, and harmlessly dissipating against the blood worm's carapace.
"Hm," said Zenjou, lowering her arm. "Pretty good. Though at some point, you'll want to be able to do this without the support of your power."
When she wasn't being insufferably smug, I could almost mistake her for a decent person. Though —
"What the heck was that just now?" I asked.
"What, this?" she asked — regarding me as she once more raised her left hand, pointing a finger gun to the ceiling.
Several centimeters above the tips of her fingers, a sphere of black yet again manifested.
"It's widely considered a breach of etiquette to point your finger at people," Zenjou explained. "In certain parts of Finland, for example, the gesture was traditionally held as a manner of malediction — casting your ills upon another, with the intention that their health might come to suffer."
She opened her hand, and the sphere dissipated.
"Enacted via modern magecraft," she continued, "it's rather generically termed as Gandr — an Old Norse word that connotes an existence of monstrous or mystical potency, such as a wand or stave; a charm or hex; a terrible beast; or so forth. If conventionally cast, it's sufficient to incapacitate a victim with flu-like symptoms for a day or two."
The equivalent of a non-lethal Blaster power, in other words — perfectly well-suited to fighting crime.
Just how big was Zenjou's repertoire, precisely? She hadn't been particularly shy to show off her magecraft in front of me, scarcity of Mystery or not — but after half a week, it felt like I'd barely caught sight of the tip of the iceberg.
More to the point, I didn't get why she would talk about 'acting as a cape' as if it were some kind of unfortunate last resort. Even if I hadn't yet seen enough to confidently place her in the weight-class of an A-lister, her power-nullification alone was sufficient to put her on the map. Unlike a random fifteen-year-old with a bug-control power, she could make a real difference if she wanted.
Didn't great power come with great responsibility? Or did she think that it was none of her business that Brockton Bay was rotting from the inside out?
"Anyhow," said Zenjou, pacing over to the open luggage, "this right about catches you up to the requirements of the test I intend to run. For the time being, I haven't any more exercises for you to work on. Therefore —"
Once again disregarding that her skirt was barely long enough to cover anything, she bent over the suitcase — retrieving from the foam insert a red gemstone a little larger than the average strawberry.
"Here," she said, handing it to me. "Pour your mana into this."
"Try to Reinforce it, you mean?" I asked — a little relieved that she hadn't asked me to put it into my mouth.
"No," she replied. "This isn't another challenge, or anything of the sort. Just something of a demonstration — to give you an idea as to why it is that I work with gemstones. Attempt to oversaturate the stone with mana, as you did when failing to Reinforce."
Well, if she wanted a broken gem, who was I to argue? Her money, her loss.
I exhaled, directing my mana through my fingertips; through the surface of the stone. Within, the energy accumulated, quickly filling up —
"Huh?"
Except, it didn't. Unalike to the glass that I'd shattered, there wasn't a sense that I was approaching a limit. If anything, it felt like I was trying to fill a swimming pool with a garden hose.
"For thaumaturgical purposes," said Zenjou, "the properties of a particular material are an expression of their placement as of the Shared Unconscious of Man. The Mysteries inherent to gemstones; the Fantasy so associated — these have since the dawn of civilization come to entrenchment in every corner of the World."
"... there's no end to its storage capacity?"
Leaning against the side of the desk, Zenjou crossed her legs.
"Try looking through a face of the jewel," she said.
I brought the stone closer to my glasses, tilting it so that I peer through a single facet. Within, there were a confusing array of repeating geometric shapes, tinted and distorted by the optics of the stone.
"What do you see?" asked Zenjou.
"It's like a kaleidoscope?" I ventured.
Zenjou nodded.
"And kaleidoscopes are a subject of Fantasy," she said. "Our minds are predisposed to apprehend their interiors as spaces of endless expanse, separate from the one we inhabit — tiny Worlds unto themselves."
Mana permitted that fantasies could iterate into reality. Thus, like the 'technicality' that glass could flow, the fantasy that a jewel could encompass an entire world could be brought into practical effect by an expenditure of mana — somehow, as a method to store more mana.
Magecraft was bullshit in general, but this felt like it not-so-subtly violated the laws of thermodynamics or something.
"Now," Zenjou continued, "seek out the center of the stone with your mana."
Looking to the jewel, I forced a tendril of motes into its depths — deeper than I'd previously extended myself.
For maybe half a minute; maybe a minute, nothing of note occurred. Unclear as to what exactly Zenjou expected me to find, I considered calling it quits; but right as I was about to speak up, something moved against my mana.
Whatever it was, it was clearly alive — as much so as the blood worms I'd been Reinforcing.
"You felt that, did you?" asked Zenjou, noting my expression of surprise with a smirk.
"What is it?"
"Within those gems that long slumber in the earth, faeries and elementals occasionally take residence. This would be an example of a fire elemental." Zenjou smiled — for once without her ever-present smugness. "If you like, you can bestow it with a visible form. Merely push it to an ideation in immediate reach."
Compared to the blood worms, the 'faerie' — whatever it was — was oddly receptive to me. Though my mana was obstructed at the boundary of its odic circulation, it allowed me to 'knead' it; to guide it toward a salient state.
Before my eyes, a tiny girl with gossamer wings etched into being within the stone — cutely tilting her head as she looked to me with curiosity.
"And this," said Zenjou, "would be your formal introduction to the world of the supernatural."
Maybe two or three minutes from the station, Zenjou pulled her Volkswagen into a vacant space in front of a boarded-up building — encompassed in the telltale heat of a Bounded Field.
"You're really just gonna park on the street?" I asked, exiting the car.
"What's wrong with that?" she asked.
A well-maintained 1953 Volkswagen Beetle was more than a little eye-catching in the commercial part the Docks South. Given, it was around eleven in the morning, and car-jackers probably wouldn't be so bold as to make an attempt on it in broad daylight. Still —
"Crime rate's pretty high in this area," I said aloud. "Somebody thinks there's something valuable, and they'll break your windows."
"Hm. I see," she said — tilting forward the back of the driver's seat, unloading a pair of carry-on suitcases from the rear. "Good thing the Bounded Field deals with that, then. Here, take this."
She offered me the handle to one of the suitcases, and I took ahold — a little surprised at how heavy the thing was.
"What do you mean 'deals with that?'" I asked, following after her she pulled her own suitcase toward the front entrance of the building.
She pulled out a key and fiddled a bit with the padlock — unlocking it before she answered:
"Look around. Is there any other vacant parking nearby?"
There wasn't, in fact — not for two full city blocks. It was only to be expected, given the time of the day, and the fact that we were on Canal Street.
"You're saying you set up the Bounded Field to reserve a spot for you?" I asked.
"Not so. It's the Whateleys' doing," she said, pulling open the plywood panel, and switching to another key for the sturdier door within.
With a click, the lock opened, and we headed inside — closing and latching the plywood panel behind us. Inside the building, I was confronted with a stale, musty odor, and an unlit service corridor that terminated at a stairwell opposite the street-facing facade.
"But yes," said Zenjou, rolling her luggage toward the stairs. "Unto those incapable of actively circulating mana, the deterrence here asserted extends well into the street. I presume the old woman dislikes having to seek out parking every time she drops by ahead of a prospective tenant."
So, thaumaturgical Master effects could to some extent be repelled via the mana circulation of a trained magus. Good to know — though, if Zenjou were willing to so casually disclose the information, I doubted it was of any use against her.
"You're renting the place, then?" I asked.
"I'm not paying a penny," Zenjou replied, smirking — visibly pleased with herself. "In exchange for assistance on a certain project, I've been let to 'squat,' rent-free. Plausible deniability, you know? I intend to use this as a forward operating site in case I ever have to act as a cape — but, there isn't a paper trail that connects the Whateleys back to me, if anyone cares to investigate the ownership of the property."
At the base of the stairs, she stowed the telescopic handle — switching over to hold the carry-on by the clutch on the side. Effortlessly ascending the first flight of stairs, she paused before the grate-covered window to glance back at me — looking to her in incredulity from the ground floor.
"What's the hold-up?" she asked. "The luggage isn't going to carry itself."
"We're taking the stairs? Really?"
"Yes, really — as there clearly isn't an elevator. A bit of manual labor never hurt anyone."
Reluctantly, I followed suit. The way up was four stories and eight flights of stairs, and the luggage had to be sixty pounds at minimum. Using Reinforcement, it was doable — mostly; but I imagined that if I hadn't already spent myself earlier in the morning, it might've been moreso.
Down a stretch of corridor on the top floor, we entered into a dance studio with mirrored walls and an elevated glass ceiling, set at a slight incline. The interior looked a little less age-worn than the rest of the building.
"Just set the case down wherever, and take a rest," said Zenjou, placing her own carry-on against a wall — not even breathing hard. Giving me a once-over from head to toe, she continued, "Aside from increasing your caloric intake, I think we'll definitely have to work on your basic fitness. A climb like that shouldn't have even required Reinforcement."
Big words for a girl who'd pretty much admitted to running Reinforcement at all times. Unless she was a hundred fifty pounds of solid muscle under those tight-fitting clothes, I very much doubted that without the use of magecraft, she'd be looking so incredibly fresh.
Exhaling, I set my carry-on on the floor, seating myself on a chair nearby.
"What's in there, anyways?" I asked. "Rocks?"
"Good guess," Zenjou replied, unzipping the luggage I'd been carrying and laying it open on the hardwood floor. "Not entirely off the mark."
The suitcase was fitted with an insert of grey foam, cut with apertures in array to accommodate a large selection of items — jewels, for the most part. I wasn't familiar with the pricing of gemstones, but altogether, it must've been worth a fortune.
"You robbed a jewelry store or something?" I asked.
Zenjou chuckled.
"I assure you, everything here was legally acquired," she said. "But, for our purposes here today, this is the only item you should concern yourself with."
From a corner of the suitcase, she withdrew a large empty jar, setting it upon the open-front school-desk beside me. I wondered for a moment if she intended to have me repeat the glass-mending exercise; but touching her fingers to the lid, she spoke the word 'reload,' and the jar lit up like the flash on a camera — prompting me to shield my eyes with an arm.
I felt it before I saw it: An unfamiliar arthropod that abruptly manifested within — legless and ugly, with clearly defined mandibles and a fin-like dorsal crest along its chitinous segments; terminating in a spiny tail that split into two like the caudal fin of a fish.
Even if I didn't actively assert control, my power provided a read on the instincts of any insect I connected to. For all that this one appeared to lack eyes, it was immediately able to discern the presence of warm bodies in its vicinity; regarding Zenjou and I with a sort of hungry —
"Apologies for the flash," said Zenjou. "Bit of an inefficiency that I haven't yet worked out. To summarize, then, the lid on the jar is keyed to respond to a brief channeling of mana alongside the utterance of the word 'reload' — at which point, the contents will be replaced with your next guinea pig."
Teleportation? She had a jar capable of teleporting its contents?
"What's the thing inside?" I asked.
"A particularly loathsome parasite colloquially referred to as a blood worm, or a vampire worm," said Zenjou. "Though taxonomically, it's an arthropod and not really any kind of annelid, so as the name implies, it's evolved to feed upon the blood of warm-bodied mammals — burrowing deep within the flesh. As to how precisely it enters the body — let's just say that it isn't entirely on accident that its shape is phallic."
Subsequent my becoming a parahuman, I'd mostly ceased to regard arthropods with disgust; but looking at this thing, I couldn't help but imagine it chewing through me — lodging itself between my organs. Where the hell did Zenjou even find it?
"... and I guess I'll be attempting to Reinforce it?"
"It'll be a two-fold exercise," Zenjou replied. "You'll be Reinforcing the blood worm, yes — but only by way of using the glass as a conduit. If the thing dies in the process, reload and try again."
"Couldn't I have done this with something that — I dunno — isn't instinctively geared to violate my body on the off chance that I let it loose?" I asked. "Like a household cockroach?"
Zenjou regarded me with a smug, sadistic smile.
"Consider it incentive not to break the jar," she said.
Keeping the jar intact was extremely easy.
The blood worm, on the other hand —
I went with the 'motes of mana' technique right off the bat — effortlessly bypassing the glass. With half of the objective completed in under a minute, I proceeded to introduce my mana to the blood worm.
This was where I started running into trouble.
Earlier, when Zenjou mentioned off-hand that the circulation of mana could overcome thaumaturgical Master effects, I hadn't fully appreciated the implications. More accurately, my understanding of the underlying phenomenon had been overly narrow.
Mana was fundamentally vital energy, and vital energy circulated the bodies of living organisms. Naturally, the energy I put through the carapace of the blood worm was engulfed in the flow of its vitality — quickly eroding from my grasp.
It wasn't 'thaumaturgical Master effects' that a circulation of mana could overcome, and it wasn't strictly that trained magi alone were borne of such a capability. Magecraft itself was obstructed; and while it was obvious that having a bit of training better equipped a person to negate the effects of a spell, at the very small scale that I was working at, the not-particularly-high-volume circulation of a blood worm's vital energy was sufficient to ward it from my Reinforcement.
This was, I realized, the thaumaturgical equivalent of a Manton limit.
Unlike an actual Manton limit, though, it didn't seem entirely non-negotiable. If a flowing stream could easily dilute a drop of food coloring to invisibility, it stood to reason that the solution was just to add more.
So thinking, I clasped the side of the jar and allowed my mana to flow, again directing it to congregate at the points at which the belly of the blood worm rested against the glass — gradually raising the count of the motes as to permeate the flow of vitality without inducing an oversaturation —
There was a wet splatter from within the jar. Along the length of the blood worm, its organs had burst, and its gooey innards had ruptured from the breaches in its exoskeleton — painting the sides of the container in slime. If not for the glass in the way, I might've been drenched in God knows what.
Crap.
Blowing air from my lips, I pressed a pair of fingers to the lid of the jar — remembering to close my eyes before releasing my mana into the metal.
"Reload," I said.
I saw a flash through my eyelids; and the next I opened them, there wasn't any trace of the mess I'd made. Instead, a fresh worm had taken the place of the oozing carcass.
It was the second of several dozens in the initial hour of the exercise.
At maybe a quarter to one, Zenjou wrapped up the first stage of whatever she was doing with the mirrors in the room, and called a break. We locked up downstairs and took our lunch at a pizzeria about a block up the street. Probably owing to the morning's exertions, I was completely famished, and ended up eating a couple more slices than I usually did — well against my better judgment.
"It's completely impossible," I said, wiping my hands after a sixth slice. "Either my mana's blocked, or the thing just ends up dying. There isn't any in-between, regardless of how little mana I use."
Zenjou had the gall to look amused.
"Reinforce a creature you haven't suborned as familiar, and you'll be squaring off against its odic circulation," she replied. "Even that you attempt to brute-force the process, the Thaumaturgical Resistance so bestowed ensures that for animals larger than a common housecat, you're unlikely even to reach the point of rupturing organs. Consequently, the Reinforcement of another human is considered to be of the utmost difficulty, irrelevant of whether your subject is a magus."
A familiar? Like a witch's familiar?
No — that wasn't important at the moment.
"Is there a way for me to go about this without 'brute-forcing,' then?" I asked.
Sipping her orange Fanta through a straw, Zenjou softly set the bottle down beside her deep-dish pizza.
"I don't anticipate that you'll complete the exercise anytime this week," she said. "For my purposes, it would be convenient, yes; but do take your time if necessary. That said, there's a hard way to do it, and then there's cheating. If you manage to pull it off in short order, I would expect that you're either a prodigy beyond compare; unusually suited to the Thaumaturgical Attribute of Reinforcement — or, you've found your way to the latter solution."
Should've expected that she'd take it as a yes-no question, rather than a request for a pointer.
"Would it be bad for me to cheat, then?" I asked.
Zenjou laughed.
"Use of Mystery is fundamentally a borrowing of power beyond the ken of man," she replied. "It's all cheating, all the way down." She slightly inclined her head. "If indeed you go the path I imagine, though, it's merely a matter that you'll quickly arrive at the desired outcome without a comprehension of how you got there. Not optimal, but certainly nothing that would lower my opinion of you."
Because, obviously, her opinion of me was already as low as it could get. Still, this time around, her answer was informative enough. Whatever it was that 'cheating' entailed, it was 'a borrowing of power' — the use of a crutch that circumvented the need to comprehend the detailed mechanics of Reinforcement.
"A little earlier, you mentioned familiars," I said, fishing for more hints. "Something about them not possessing Thaumaturgical Resistance? What's up with that?"
"No," said Zenjou. "It's not that they don't have Thaumaturgical Resistance. Typically, an animal taken as a familiar is by various means made to act as a remote terminal to its master — an extension to the magus' body and soul. It doesn't assert a Resistance against its master for the same reason you aren't impeded in the Reinforcement of your own flesh. However, its Resistance would be in full effect against a third party."
Or to rephrase, animals naturally possessed firewalls against the action of magecraft, but those turned into familiars were made to open a dedicated port to their master.
That gave me a couple of ideas.
Putting them into action wasn't easy, though.
I wouldn't admit it aloud, but a part of me was glad that Zenjou had provided a seemingly endless supply of blood worms to experiment with — rather than something I'd feel guilt over killing, like lab rats. I lost count of the number of worms I'd gone through after maybe the hundredth or so, and it wasn't until nightfall that I made substantial progress.
As expected, the problem was that the task hadn't been properly explained to me.
Up to this point, I'd learned of three distinct variants of Reinforcement:
First, by instilling a phenomenon with mana at moderate concentrations, I could to some extent manipulate it; force it to more potently express particular features related to my affinity for 'water.' This was a bottom-up process heavily reliant upon a comprehension of whatever I was working with.
Second — unreliant upon my 'water' affinity — by way of oversaturating an object or a part of an object, I could forcibly break it down. This was also technically a bottom-up process, but nothing that required significant mental input.
Third — also unreliant on my 'water' affinity — by way of actively circulating mana within my own body, I could improve the performance of my physiology in various ways. This was a top-down process that ran on instinct, and didn't require much in the way of specific knowledge on how things worked.
I'd approached the exercise under the impression that it would mostly involve an application of Reinforcement in the first variety; but really, going at it bottom-up would've required a far better grasp of cellular biology than I possessed. Versus a mostly undifferentiated piece of glass, there were far too many ways a living organism could cease to function as a coherent system. I was definitely capable of the micromanagement required, but even with the sense I possessed for the blood worm's anatomy, the guesswork and the trial and error necessary to get things right would've consumed a prohibitive amount of time and resources.
Per Zenjou's overly cryptic hinting, this was probably 'the hard way' to go about things.
How would I 'cheat,' then?
Ideally, the objective would be for the worm to be Reinforced in the manner I Reinforced myself. Trouble was, strictly in thaumaturgical terms, it wasn't my 'familiar'; wasn't an extension of my body, my power notwithstanding. It was an organism entirely distinct from me, and I didn't have access to a port in its firewall.
I could, however, control it. I could direct it according to my will — in accordance to its instincts as an organism. That being the case, all that remained was a question of execution.
Until today's exercise had drawn my attention to it, I honestly hadn't noticed, but my power did in fact provide a sense of the odic circulation in the insects connected to me — lurking in the backdrop of my field of perception like a phantom limb I'd never known.
That phantom limb could be made to move.
Perhaps because they were as large as rats, the odic pathways in a blood worm were rather more robust than those in a common house fly. However, attempting to bring them to full activation in the capacity of Thaumaturgical Circuits resulted in scores of deaths from misfire.
I didn't get a sense that non-lethal 'Circuit' activation was vastly out of reach, but — a little impatient to get the job done and over with — I shifted my focus.
If the goal were simply a Reinforcement of physiology, there actually wasn't a need to kick the odic pathways all the way up to fight-or-flight levels of activity. Availability of mana to the flesh was the sole necessity. Ergo, if a blood worm could acquire and circulate mana at sufficient volume, it could Reinforce itself — 'Circuit' activation or not.
The trick, then, was for me to encompass the worm; to hold it in a mist of mana — directing it to draw upon the energy to boost its odic flow.
The immediate feedback to my power was —
"Oh, God."
— a noticeable boost in the fidelity at which I could interpret the senses of the worm.
Too much information, frankly — and not in the sense that the volume was beyond my processing. Suppressing the urge to utterly eviscerate the evil thing in the bottle, I consciously restricted my access to the sensory feed from its nervous system.
"I'm finished," I announced, triumphant. "I'm done with this."
Kneeling beside the circular design she'd etched upon the floor, Zenjou looked up — visibly surprised.
"Already?" she asked, standing upright. "It hasn't even been a day."
I didn't know if she could tell what I was doing just by looking, but I held the bottle up as she approached — to show her that I'd won; that she'd underestimated me.
"Keep the Reinforcement going," she said, "but set the bottle on the desk."
A little confused, I did as asked. Stopping a meter away from the desk, Zenjou lifted her left hand — raising her middle and index fingers to form a finger gun.
It was a weirdly juvenile gesture, and I thought for a moment to verbally mock her; but before I could find the words, a sphere of black the size of a marble manifested before the tips of her fingers — emanating with the heat of mana.
Making a noise as it displaced the air, the blackness shot forth — phasing through the surface of the glass, and harmlessly dissipating against the blood worm's carapace.
"Hm," said Zenjou, lowering her arm. "Pretty good. Though at some point, you'll want to be able to do this without the support of your power."
When she wasn't being insufferably smug, I could almost mistake her for a decent person. Though —
"What the heck was that just now?" I asked.
"What, this?" she asked — regarding me as she once more raised her left hand, pointing a finger gun to the ceiling.
Several centimeters above the tips of her fingers, a sphere of black yet again manifested.
"It's widely considered a breach of etiquette to point your finger at people," Zenjou explained. "In certain parts of Finland, for example, the gesture was traditionally held as a manner of malediction — casting your ills upon another, with the intention that their health might come to suffer."
She opened her hand, and the sphere dissipated.
"Enacted via modern magecraft," she continued, "it's rather generically termed as Gandr — an Old Norse word that connotes an existence of monstrous or mystical potency, such as a wand or stave; a charm or hex; a terrible beast; or so forth. If conventionally cast, it's sufficient to incapacitate a victim with flu-like symptoms for a day or two."
The equivalent of a non-lethal Blaster power, in other words — perfectly well-suited to fighting crime.
Just how big was Zenjou's repertoire, precisely? She hadn't been particularly shy to show off her magecraft in front of me, scarcity of Mystery or not — but after half a week, it felt like I'd barely caught sight of the tip of the iceberg.
More to the point, I didn't get why she would talk about 'acting as a cape' as if it were some kind of unfortunate last resort. Even if I hadn't yet seen enough to confidently place her in the weight-class of an A-lister, her power-nullification alone was sufficient to put her on the map. Unlike a random fifteen-year-old with a bug-control power, she could make a real difference if she wanted.
Didn't great power come with great responsibility? Or did she think that it was none of her business that Brockton Bay was rotting from the inside out?
"Anyhow," said Zenjou, pacing over to the open luggage, "this right about catches you up to the requirements of the test I intend to run. For the time being, I haven't any more exercises for you to work on. Therefore —"
Once again disregarding that her skirt was barely long enough to cover anything, she bent over the suitcase — retrieving from the foam insert a red gemstone a little larger than the average strawberry.
"Here," she said, handing it to me. "Pour your mana into this."
"Try to Reinforce it, you mean?" I asked — a little relieved that she hadn't asked me to put it into my mouth.
"No," she replied. "This isn't another challenge, or anything of the sort. Just something of a demonstration — to give you an idea as to why it is that I work with gemstones. Attempt to oversaturate the stone with mana, as you did when failing to Reinforce."
Well, if she wanted a broken gem, who was I to argue? Her money, her loss.
I exhaled, directing my mana through my fingertips; through the surface of the stone. Within, the energy accumulated, quickly filling up —
"Huh?"
Except, it didn't. Unalike to the glass that I'd shattered, there wasn't a sense that I was approaching a limit. If anything, it felt like I was trying to fill a swimming pool with a garden hose.
"For thaumaturgical purposes," said Zenjou, "the properties of a particular material are an expression of their placement as of the Shared Unconscious of Man. The Mysteries inherent to gemstones; the Fantasy so associated — these have since the dawn of civilization come to entrenchment in every corner of the World."
"... there's no end to its storage capacity?"
Leaning against the side of the desk, Zenjou crossed her legs.
"Try looking through a face of the jewel," she said.
I brought the stone closer to my glasses, tilting it so that I peer through a single facet. Within, there were a confusing array of repeating geometric shapes, tinted and distorted by the optics of the stone.
"What do you see?" asked Zenjou.
"It's like a kaleidoscope?" I ventured.
Zenjou nodded.
"And kaleidoscopes are a subject of Fantasy," she said. "Our minds are predisposed to apprehend their interiors as spaces of endless expanse, separate from the one we inhabit — tiny Worlds unto themselves."
Mana permitted that fantasies could iterate into reality. Thus, like the 'technicality' that glass could flow, the fantasy that a jewel could encompass an entire world could be brought into practical effect by an expenditure of mana — somehow, as a method to store more mana.
Magecraft was bullshit in general, but this felt like it not-so-subtly violated the laws of thermodynamics or something.
"Now," Zenjou continued, "seek out the center of the stone with your mana."
Looking to the jewel, I forced a tendril of motes into its depths — deeper than I'd previously extended myself.
For maybe half a minute; maybe a minute, nothing of note occurred. Unclear as to what exactly Zenjou expected me to find, I considered calling it quits; but right as I was about to speak up, something moved against my mana.
Whatever it was, it was clearly alive — as much so as the blood worms I'd been Reinforcing.
"You felt that, did you?" asked Zenjou, noting my expression of surprise with a smirk.
"What is it?"
"Within those gems that long slumber in the earth, faeries and elementals occasionally take residence. This would be an example of a fire elemental." Zenjou smiled — for once without her ever-present smugness. "If you like, you can bestow it with a visible form. Merely push it to an ideation in immediate reach."
Compared to the blood worms, the 'faerie' — whatever it was — was oddly receptive to me. Though my mana was obstructed at the boundary of its odic circulation, it allowed me to 'knead' it; to guide it toward a salient state.
Before my eyes, a tiny girl with gossamer wings etched into being within the stone — cutely tilting her head as she looked to me with curiosity.
"And this," said Zenjou, "would be your formal introduction to the world of the supernatural."
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Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
I'm really enjoying the way you've captured Taylor's personality, here. She's pessimistic, cynical, judgmental, and often short-sighted, but she's also driven and intelligent, with a core of moral determination.
And, of course, she keeps checking out pretty girls while chanting "no homo" under her breath. Damn you, Rin's skirt.
If I were to offer a piece of criticism, it would be aimed at your choice of vocabulary. Your prose, in both narration and dialogue, tends toward the academic and formal, even to the point of sounding stilted at times. This is fine for a character like Rin, who aside from being ESL is in fact an academic, but it sounds much less natural on Taylor. The problem is exaggerated in a story like this, which features long stretches of two characters doing little but talk to each other, with first-person narration provided by one of them (worse, by the one whose voice doesn't suit your style). You've clearly made efforts to differentiate their voices ("what the heck" or "magecraft is bullshit" being phrases that would likely never pass Rin's lips), and their motives and attitudes are clearly set apart, but each time Taylor says "unalike to" rather than "unlike", or "without" rather than "outside", it shakes me out of the story.
And, of course, she keeps checking out pretty girls while chanting "no homo" under her breath. Damn you, Rin's skirt.
If I were to offer a piece of criticism, it would be aimed at your choice of vocabulary. Your prose, in both narration and dialogue, tends toward the academic and formal, even to the point of sounding stilted at times. This is fine for a character like Rin, who aside from being ESL is in fact an academic, but it sounds much less natural on Taylor. The problem is exaggerated in a story like this, which features long stretches of two characters doing little but talk to each other, with first-person narration provided by one of them (worse, by the one whose voice doesn't suit your style). You've clearly made efforts to differentiate their voices ("what the heck" or "magecraft is bullshit" being phrases that would likely never pass Rin's lips), and their motives and attitudes are clearly set apart, but each time Taylor says "unalike to" rather than "unlike", or "without" rather than "outside", it shakes me out of the story.