Remember that we'll stay in Japan one more day and personally I'd like to check out our money and buy a few more things in the shop tomorrow.Candesce said:
Xander [Quest], Thread Five: How to Bind Your Familiar
- Thread starter Judge Mental
- Start date
I was under the impression ki is not good at speeding perceptions? No harm trying anyway, I suppose - I'll put it in.Cytokinesis said:
As to 16 hours of recovery - from zero, that won't even get us near half, given the way mana regeneration works. Even if we're still around 20% after the matches, that cuts less than 20% of our recovery time to full.
We're going to want mana for a fair few things in Hawaii - in addition to that summoner we ticked off, there's both the familiar binding and our sacrifice to Din and anything that could go wrong from those. And I very much doubt that nothing else we might want to spend mana on will come up.
[x] Raise aura just enough to get the pressure off you and Cordy
-[x] Be prepared to raise further if there's any issues
-[x] Pay attention to your own Aura as you do so... maybe there's something the participants have been doing to compensate?
-[x] Once you're stable, check on your allies. Briar is tiny, and Cordy is eight.
[x] Ki and Divination - Start when the matches start
-[x] Boost reaction time with magic and ki
-[x] in fact, use all the magic to help you get as much as you possibly can out of this match
-[x] Don't forget to use ki sight rather than just ki sensing
-[x] Use the spell to block your ability to view souls.
-[x] Be prepared to raise further if there's any issues
-[x] Pay attention to your own Aura as you do so... maybe there's something the participants have been doing to compensate?
-[x] Once you're stable, check on your allies. Briar is tiny, and Cordy is eight.
[x] Ki and Divination - Start when the matches start
-[x] Boost reaction time with magic and ki
-[x] in fact, use all the magic to help you get as much as you possibly can out of this match
-[x] Don't forget to use ki sight rather than just ki sensing
-[x] Use the spell to block your ability to view souls.
Hm this is basically just an expanded version of my previous vote, so...why not?
Changing my vote
[x] Raise aura just enough to get the pressure off you and Cordy
-[x] Be prepared to raise further if there's any issues
-[x] Pay attention to your own Aura as you do so... maybe there's something the participants have been doing to compensate?
-[x] Once you're stable, check on your allies. Briar is tiny, and Cordy is eight.
[x] Ki and Divination - Start when the matches start
-[x] Boost reaction time with magic and ki
-[x] in fact, use all the magic to help you get as much as you possibly can out of this match
-[x] Don't forget to use ki sight rather than just ki sensing
-[x] Use the spell to block your ability to view souls.
Changing my vote
[x] Raise aura just enough to get the pressure off you and Cordy
-[x] Be prepared to raise further if there's any issues
-[x] Pay attention to your own Aura as you do so... maybe there's something the participants have been doing to compensate?
-[x] Once you're stable, check on your allies. Briar is tiny, and Cordy is eight.
[x] Ki and Divination - Start when the matches start
-[x] Boost reaction time with magic and ki
-[x] in fact, use all the magic to help you get as much as you possibly can out of this match
-[x] Don't forget to use ki sight rather than just ki sensing
-[x] Use the spell to block your ability to view souls.
16 hours from zero gives us 13 hours to 25%, and 3 hours more to 34%. That is if we start from zero, but we're probably not going to start from zero. Due to the way regeneration scales if we start at 25% we can actually go all the way up to 81% (9 hours to 52%, 6 hours to 76%, 1 hour to 81%)Candesce said:
We were at 24% after the session with the girls. We've spent ~4 hours not using magic. We don't recover for 1 of those hours due to how resting works, so that leaves 3 hours left. The first hour gives us ~2%, the next two both give us 3%. So that means we are at ~32% mana right now.
Let's assume all of this is going to be very expensive and we are spending 17% mana just with the haste spell and the divination (which I kind of doubt given how fast the master level fights are). If the fights end at 7:00, that means we don't start regenerating till 8:00. From there we can potentially have around 13 hours of rest (8:00 PM to 9:00 AM) which will bring us from 15% to 49%. We can still buy 1 or 2 mana potions if we make a deal on another summoning, bringing us back up to 62-82% for the next day.
Lu-Sensei is going to be with us to defend against the worst threats (and we can have Briar top him off to full), so we shouldn't be expending all our mana finding all the last reagents. If we go to sleep with 25% we're sure to have enough for Hawaii, and it is possible for us to go to sleep with more than that if we are careful.
Hmm. We're doing something different on mana regeneration math, and I'm not sure which of us is missing something.Cytokinesis said:
As far as I recall, it's 1% per hour +1% for every 25% we already have. If we have 25% when we sleep - and if we shield our dreams tonight, I think we'll probably have less - that's 13 hours till 51%, and 3 more puts us at 60%. If we don't do any more magic until then.
Where are you getting the extra 1% per hour?
It's 1% at 0% and 2% from 1 to 25%. Lemme see if I can't track it down.Candesce said:
Huh. I found the post in question - I think you might be right? Judge Mental's phrasing is a bit weird.Cytokinesis said:
It looks like my calculations are still wrong though. Those rates are only when sleeping. Given that a full day takes us from 15-33% it looks like the rate drops by a percent for waking hours or so, which means our mana would be somewhere in the middle.Candesce said:
Still, the divination spell on the preliminary round we watched took less than a percent of mana.
More than I'd thought, either way. And as this certainly is an important opportunity, I'll switch my vote.Cytokinesis said:
[x] Raise aura just enough to get the pressure off you and Cordy
-[x] Be prepared to raise further if there's any issues
-[x] Pay attention to your own Aura as you do so... maybe there's something the participants have been doing to compensate?
-[x] Once you're stable, check on your allies. Briar is tiny, and Cordy is eight.
[x] Ki and Divination - Start when the matches start
-[x] Boost reaction time with magic and ki
-[x] in fact, use all the magic to help you get as much as you possibly can out of this match
-[x] Don't forget to use ki sight rather than just ki sensing
-[x] Use the spell to block your ability to view souls.
[X] Raise your own aura just enough to ward off the pressure. This will interfere slightly with attempts to use sensory skills.
-> Pay attention to your own Aura as you do so... maybe there's something the participants have been doing to compensate?
-> Once you're stable, check on your allies. Briar is tiny, and Cordy is eight.
[X] Ki senses and divination.
-> Pay attention to your own Aura as you do so... maybe there's something the participants have been doing to compensate?
-> Once you're stable, check on your allies. Briar is tiny, and Cordy is eight.
[X] Ki senses and divination.
Vindictus
XENO
- Location
- Texas
Easy answer- meditate during the flight.Cytokinesis said:
Judge Mental
Stranger In a Strange Land
[x] Raise your own aura just enough to ward off the pressure. This will interfere slightly with attempts to use sensory skills.
[x] Use all the buffs.
You bring your aura up, hardening it to withstand the strong currents of eagerness and aggression flooding the gym. It immediately gets easier to breathe, as well as think, and the first thing you do is check on your companions. Lu-sensei is fine, of course, and Briar doesn't seem to be affected at all. Then again, fairies have never feared this kind of strength - they flee from the presence of evil, or when their safety is directly threatened by someone, but the presence of a creature that just happens to have a powerful life-force is more often a cause for dares and pranks than it is for fear among the little folk.
Cordelia isn't doing so well as your older companions, but she's at least got her own aura up - way up, as it happens. Evidently she doesn't want to take any chances about geting overwhelmed when the actual fighting starts. You don't blame her, but you're confident that your own, more potent ki is up to the task at its present level of intensity.
Right, then. It's the finals - as in, the last round of matches for the entire tournament. The masters have gathered, the A/V crews appear to have their somewhat slipshod set-up up and running, and the clock is counting down. Arguably the greatest fights of the whole competition are about to take place, and you're in a prime position to see them all. With that in mind, there seems very little reason not to go all-out with your magical detection methods. As far as your ki-based sensory enhancements go, there is your promise to Lu-sensei not to go spying on people's souls to keep in mind; fortunately, your magical talents provide you with a means of suppressing that particular ability.
Carefully evaluating the durations of the different spells you want to use, you come up with a combination that you think should let you get through the finals, provided that the matches don't take too much longer than the previous master-level bouts you've seen thus far. It's going to eat a big chunk of mana, easily a third of the 28% and change you currently have in your tank just to get everything up and running, and quite possibly as much as half, depending on how long the fights run. Still, you feel like the expense will be worth it, and proceed to work your magic.
Gained Enchantment F+++
As the first few spells take effect, the world around you seems to get clearer and brighter, little details that were invisible at a distance fading into view, while words that were previously just an unintelligible murmur start to make sense. With your faculties temporarily enhanced, you work out how to weave the next spell, which you hope will isolate your unintentional soul-visions without impairing your basic ki sight. Once that magic is in place, you carefully bring your aura sight up through various levels of intensity.
Gained Necromancy E+
Hmmm. That soul-sight restraining spell is not working as flawlessly as you could have hoped for. Oh, it's doing what you wanted, but there's definite interference bleeding through from the spiritual aspect of your aura and into the rest. It's hard to separate one of the essential components of your being from the others, and clearly, you need more practice at it - more, you are certain, than you could get in the time you have remaining, even if you were to burn all your remaining mana fiddling with re-casting the necromantic blinder. This will just have to do. That settled, you cast another necromantic spell in the hopes of getting some additional input about the spiritual forces at work in these fights, and then bring up the modified haste spell, and watch. The world. Slow. Down.
Gained Augmentation D+++
With most of the spells in place, you open up your mystical senses a bit more and try to determine if there's any magical practitioners here. After a few moments of accelerated time, you conclude that there is a decided lack of spellcasters - you seem to be the only one in the room, in fact. You suppose it's not terribly surprising; there weren't that many genuine magic-users in the tournament to start with, and in all the cases you've seen, there was at least one ki adept at the same level capable of matching or just plain out-fighting them. A bit of a shame, but if nothing else, it'll save you a little magic. That settled, you start re-channeling your ki to further augment your sensory abilities. Quite a lot of the energy winds up focused on your head, and when you look out at the world in this state, it's like gazing into a world made of pure light. Everyone in the room is glowing to one degree or another, and even the non-living objects are re-radiating the ambient ki given off by the gathered warriors. It's a sight to behold.
Gained Ki Enhancement E++
Unfortunately, there's a distinct drawback to all the power in the air, and that is that you're having a hell of a time sorting out which energy belongs to who, and what it's doing. Every person you look at has at least four auras passing over and around him, and even with all your enhancements up and running, you can't really sort one out from the other. You'll have to hope that once the contestants move onto the mats, the extra distance from the ki-heavy crowd will clear things up.
Slowly, the referee declares the opening of the final matches, and calls the first two masters up to fight. One is a grey-haired man of mixed Eastern and Western features, wearing a black gi with a picture of a white tiger on it; his opponent is a short, broad fellow who looks a bit like a diminutive Santa Claus, save that he's wearing a plain green robe rather than the traditional holiday red. As you'd hoped, the extra distance brings their auras into the clear, and as they bow, you ready yourself to observe every detail.
The ref's hand drops.
Before your multiply-enhanced eyes, auras ERUPT.
And a long instant later, your own aura buckles under the pressure.
You immediately try to reinforce it, but you're already juggling six separate applications of ki: one to boost the mundane workings of your eyes, so you can follow the masters' movements; another for your ki sight; three to different regions of the brain, to ramp up processing power, retention, and pattern recognition; and of course, the thread that was keeping the outer layers of your aura hardened against foreign energy. You could have done all of that at once without too much trouble, except that you're also trying to track the readings from a necromantic spell AND deal with an entire world that's been moving far, far slower than you're used to for entirely too long already. Then there's your ki sight; with that necromantic blinder on, your ability to filter out potentially-hazardous bits of information appears to have taken an unexpected hit.
All of it taken together is simply too much. Something has got to give, and unfortunately, it's your defensive application of your aura that's volunteered for the job. As the ki you'd invested into that effect slips from your control, stinging your skin like a full-body static shock, the rest of the effects you've got in place tremble, as if they're about to go too. You really don't want to know what happens when ki enhancements running inside your BRAIN collapse like that, and you quickly shut them down before you find out. With your ki locked down, the world slips back into the normal color scheme.
And then the full force of the gathered masters' auras hits you like a runaway freight train.
Your last memory of the Twenty-First World Martial Arts Tournament is the shared look of surprise on the faces of your martial arts instructor, your fellow student, and your fairy companion. Then you topple over backwards, bang your head on something, and black out.
The next thing you know, you're laying in an unfamiliar, somewhat comfortable bed, looking up at an unfamiliar ceiling. You have a low-level throbbing headache, and the back of your skull stings, but you don't seem to have any medical equipment attached to you, and you're still wearing your clothes. Wherever you are, it's fairly quiet.
What do you do?
[ ] Lie in wait. You're sure somebody will come along.
[ ] Call out. There must be somebody nearby to keep an eye on you.
[ ] Examine your condition in greater detail.
[ ] Examine the room in greater detail.
[ ] Screw waiting. Get out of the bed, slowly, and go looking for answers.
OOC: So, what happened?
When I wrote the previous update, I'd already decided that "grit your teeth" was an automatic fail once the masters started fighting, and that "low-strength aura" would only work if Alex didn't use his ki sight, which opened up a hole and weakened the defense to cause the knockout scenario. All the other stuff he had going on at the time didn't help in that respect (Alex has little to no prior experience with cognitive enhancers, and this wasn't the best time to experiment), although the necromantic lock-down of the soul visions DID prevent a potential traumatic memory - nothing eldritch, mind you, just the undiluted warrior spirit of a couple dozen world-class masters of the martial arts. In order to use ki sight and not black out, Alex needed to have his aura set to medium or high, and of those options, only medium would have gotten him any additional skill-ups. Even then, I hadn't planned on it being much; as these were to be the final matches, the masters were going to be moving FAST.
[x] Use all the buffs.
You bring your aura up, hardening it to withstand the strong currents of eagerness and aggression flooding the gym. It immediately gets easier to breathe, as well as think, and the first thing you do is check on your companions. Lu-sensei is fine, of course, and Briar doesn't seem to be affected at all. Then again, fairies have never feared this kind of strength - they flee from the presence of evil, or when their safety is directly threatened by someone, but the presence of a creature that just happens to have a powerful life-force is more often a cause for dares and pranks than it is for fear among the little folk.
Cordelia isn't doing so well as your older companions, but she's at least got her own aura up - way up, as it happens. Evidently she doesn't want to take any chances about geting overwhelmed when the actual fighting starts. You don't blame her, but you're confident that your own, more potent ki is up to the task at its present level of intensity.
Right, then. It's the finals - as in, the last round of matches for the entire tournament. The masters have gathered, the A/V crews appear to have their somewhat slipshod set-up up and running, and the clock is counting down. Arguably the greatest fights of the whole competition are about to take place, and you're in a prime position to see them all. With that in mind, there seems very little reason not to go all-out with your magical detection methods. As far as your ki-based sensory enhancements go, there is your promise to Lu-sensei not to go spying on people's souls to keep in mind; fortunately, your magical talents provide you with a means of suppressing that particular ability.
Carefully evaluating the durations of the different spells you want to use, you come up with a combination that you think should let you get through the finals, provided that the matches don't take too much longer than the previous master-level bouts you've seen thus far. It's going to eat a big chunk of mana, easily a third of the 28% and change you currently have in your tank just to get everything up and running, and quite possibly as much as half, depending on how long the fights run. Still, you feel like the expense will be worth it, and proceed to work your magic.
Gained Enchantment F+++
As the first few spells take effect, the world around you seems to get clearer and brighter, little details that were invisible at a distance fading into view, while words that were previously just an unintelligible murmur start to make sense. With your faculties temporarily enhanced, you work out how to weave the next spell, which you hope will isolate your unintentional soul-visions without impairing your basic ki sight. Once that magic is in place, you carefully bring your aura sight up through various levels of intensity.
Gained Necromancy E+
Hmmm. That soul-sight restraining spell is not working as flawlessly as you could have hoped for. Oh, it's doing what you wanted, but there's definite interference bleeding through from the spiritual aspect of your aura and into the rest. It's hard to separate one of the essential components of your being from the others, and clearly, you need more practice at it - more, you are certain, than you could get in the time you have remaining, even if you were to burn all your remaining mana fiddling with re-casting the necromantic blinder. This will just have to do. That settled, you cast another necromantic spell in the hopes of getting some additional input about the spiritual forces at work in these fights, and then bring up the modified haste spell, and watch. The world. Slow. Down.
Gained Augmentation D+++
With most of the spells in place, you open up your mystical senses a bit more and try to determine if there's any magical practitioners here. After a few moments of accelerated time, you conclude that there is a decided lack of spellcasters - you seem to be the only one in the room, in fact. You suppose it's not terribly surprising; there weren't that many genuine magic-users in the tournament to start with, and in all the cases you've seen, there was at least one ki adept at the same level capable of matching or just plain out-fighting them. A bit of a shame, but if nothing else, it'll save you a little magic. That settled, you start re-channeling your ki to further augment your sensory abilities. Quite a lot of the energy winds up focused on your head, and when you look out at the world in this state, it's like gazing into a world made of pure light. Everyone in the room is glowing to one degree or another, and even the non-living objects are re-radiating the ambient ki given off by the gathered warriors. It's a sight to behold.
Gained Ki Enhancement E++
Unfortunately, there's a distinct drawback to all the power in the air, and that is that you're having a hell of a time sorting out which energy belongs to who, and what it's doing. Every person you look at has at least four auras passing over and around him, and even with all your enhancements up and running, you can't really sort one out from the other. You'll have to hope that once the contestants move onto the mats, the extra distance from the ki-heavy crowd will clear things up.
Slowly, the referee declares the opening of the final matches, and calls the first two masters up to fight. One is a grey-haired man of mixed Eastern and Western features, wearing a black gi with a picture of a white tiger on it; his opponent is a short, broad fellow who looks a bit like a diminutive Santa Claus, save that he's wearing a plain green robe rather than the traditional holiday red. As you'd hoped, the extra distance brings their auras into the clear, and as they bow, you ready yourself to observe every detail.
The ref's hand drops.
Before your multiply-enhanced eyes, auras ERUPT.
And a long instant later, your own aura buckles under the pressure.
You immediately try to reinforce it, but you're already juggling six separate applications of ki: one to boost the mundane workings of your eyes, so you can follow the masters' movements; another for your ki sight; three to different regions of the brain, to ramp up processing power, retention, and pattern recognition; and of course, the thread that was keeping the outer layers of your aura hardened against foreign energy. You could have done all of that at once without too much trouble, except that you're also trying to track the readings from a necromantic spell AND deal with an entire world that's been moving far, far slower than you're used to for entirely too long already. Then there's your ki sight; with that necromantic blinder on, your ability to filter out potentially-hazardous bits of information appears to have taken an unexpected hit.
All of it taken together is simply too much. Something has got to give, and unfortunately, it's your defensive application of your aura that's volunteered for the job. As the ki you'd invested into that effect slips from your control, stinging your skin like a full-body static shock, the rest of the effects you've got in place tremble, as if they're about to go too. You really don't want to know what happens when ki enhancements running inside your BRAIN collapse like that, and you quickly shut them down before you find out. With your ki locked down, the world slips back into the normal color scheme.
And then the full force of the gathered masters' auras hits you like a runaway freight train.
Your last memory of the Twenty-First World Martial Arts Tournament is the shared look of surprise on the faces of your martial arts instructor, your fellow student, and your fairy companion. Then you topple over backwards, bang your head on something, and black out.
The next thing you know, you're laying in an unfamiliar, somewhat comfortable bed, looking up at an unfamiliar ceiling. You have a low-level throbbing headache, and the back of your skull stings, but you don't seem to have any medical equipment attached to you, and you're still wearing your clothes. Wherever you are, it's fairly quiet.
What do you do?
[ ] Lie in wait. You're sure somebody will come along.
[ ] Call out. There must be somebody nearby to keep an eye on you.
[ ] Examine your condition in greater detail.
[ ] Examine the room in greater detail.
[ ] Screw waiting. Get out of the bed, slowly, and go looking for answers.
OOC: So, what happened?
When I wrote the previous update, I'd already decided that "grit your teeth" was an automatic fail once the masters started fighting, and that "low-strength aura" would only work if Alex didn't use his ki sight, which opened up a hole and weakened the defense to cause the knockout scenario. All the other stuff he had going on at the time didn't help in that respect (Alex has little to no prior experience with cognitive enhancers, and this wasn't the best time to experiment), although the necromantic lock-down of the soul visions DID prevent a potential traumatic memory - nothing eldritch, mind you, just the undiluted warrior spirit of a couple dozen world-class masters of the martial arts. In order to use ki sight and not black out, Alex needed to have his aura set to medium or high, and of those options, only medium would have gotten him any additional skill-ups. Even then, I hadn't planned on it being much; as these were to be the final matches, the masters were going to be moving FAST.
So everyone what have we learned?
Quantumboost
Now with 50% more dots in Dimensional Science
- Location
- Ensemble Space
Don't watch matches way above your skill level and expect to get many skillups out of it?Nightblade said:
Or, at least, don't invest too much in it.
Apologies guys, at least partially my bad. I didn't anticipate overload quite like this - I was hoping we could cast a spell to do the filtering for us. Seems the failure was on what level of aura buffering we needed.
Still, we have made the first steps towards ki and magic based cognitive enhancement, and proved the concept of blocking ki sight's soul perception, so it's not a total loss.
[X] Examine your condition in greater detail.
[X] If you feel up to it, review what went wrong with your ki manipulation, and consider ways to avoid being overwhelmed in future. Would some pure spiritual power deployed in your defence been more effective, for example?
Better safe than sorry.
Still, we have made the first steps towards ki and magic based cognitive enhancement, and proved the concept of blocking ki sight's soul perception, so it's not a total loss.
Sometime you gamble and loose?Nightblade said:
[X] Examine your condition in greater detail.
[X] If you feel up to it, review what went wrong with your ki manipulation, and consider ways to avoid being overwhelmed in future. Would some pure spiritual power deployed in your defence been more effective, for example?
Better safe than sorry.
[X] Examine your condition in greater detail.
Well at least it won't happen next time right, we learn from our failiures. And apparntly we didn't lose out on a lot of +'s just a few. We Almost have C ranked Augmentation too!
We wanted the +'s and we got them. K.O +'s.
Well at least it won't happen next time right, we learn from our failiures. And apparntly we didn't lose out on a lot of +'s just a few. We Almost have C ranked Augmentation too!
Doing ALL OF THE BUFFS with a Low ranked skill aura in Master Fighting area where its like trying to look at lots of bright lights and then making us see the bright stuff better for all the +'s didn't work?Nightblade said:
We wanted the +'s and we got them. K.O +'s.
Ridiculously Average Guy
I'm you, but stronger
- Location
-
[X] Screw waiting. Get out of the bed, slowly, and go looking for answers.
because I'm an American, dammit!
because I'm an American, dammit!
