Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming

[whatamithinking]

Edie has mixed feelings about the roses.

On the one hand, magic exists.

On the other hand, ow.

On the first hand, perfect healing.

On the second hand, ow.

On the first hand, flight.

On the second hand, holy fucking ow that one's definitely the worst, yep, ow ow ow.

Comments

[iamnotpolaris]

"You know you didn't really need to try that one, right, I don't even like that one."

[whatamithinking]

"If you think I'm letting a little pain stop me," Edie says, rolling her eyes.

[iamnotpolaris]

"Not really, but I'm not sure why you want to. I'm the one who's interested in getting really good at making little tchotchkes."

[whatamithinking]

"It could be important one day, and I don't want to be caught off-guard. Besides, flying."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Flying's pretty great." The black and white rose is only too much when it's going on and coming off, and that doesn't take that long (and she doesn't have to do anything to make it keep happening once it's going, or she might not be able to, but whatever).

[whatamithinking]

So she's supposed to be able to conjure stuff like this, right? (Ow ow ow.) So...does she just concentrate...like this? (She envisions a glass marble, focusing on the image in her mind and poking at what feels like the magic in her head.)

[pythbox]

There is a twist in the feeling of magic, as though the image is being pulled through it into reality.

Now she has a glass marble.

Holding it, she can detect a faint sense that it is her creation, and another, fainter sense that it is temporary, likely to vanish soon on the scale of minutes.

[whatamithinking]

Oh, that is so cool. Can she do something more complicated? A chess knight?

[pythbox]

The chess knight is harder to pull through the magic; it 'gets stuck'. Not immovably stuck, though; more like it's caught on something. Perhaps it could be wiggled free.

[whatamithinking]

Yes, that seems like a good thing to try.

[pythbox]

If she spends a few minutes trying different mental wiggles, she will be rewarded with a chess knight shortly after her glass sphere vanishes.

[whatamithinking]

If she tries the chess knight again, will it be easier?

[pythbox]

Whether it's because she has practice wiggling, or because she's learned how to wiggle a chess knight in particular, or because her baseline conjuration capacity has improved: yes.

[whatamithinking]

Can she conjure things in specific places? She tries the marble again, focusing on her desk halfway across the room.

[pythbox]

It feels like it has a longer distance to travel, but the marble is too round to get caught on anything along the way, so if she's patient enough to drag it all the way there: marble.

[whatamithinking]

Oh, good. Can she conjure objects inside things? She focuses on the interior of her pillow and focuses on the marble again.

[pythbox]

That feels like she meets resistance when the marble finally reaches the exit point of the magic. Incredibly strong resistance. Maybe not utterly impassable, but beyond her current strength.

[whatamithinking]

Doesn't keep her from trying, but eventually she has to give up even with her stubbornness.

She practices with more complex objects until she can't focus well around the pain any more and then she pulls the flower out and screams into her pillow and then she lies there crying for a little while, because ow.

[iamnotpolaris]

Emily's concerned, but Edie...probably...won't do anything she'll regret in the long term, and unless it gets worse than this she probably won't be able to dissuade her.

Practicing healing isn't easy, since neither of them are inclined to self-injury in ways not involving flowers, but she can brush a hand over her sister's forehead if it looks like she'll be crying long enough for a dehydration headache.

And she puts on her own black flower (ow, but she can handle it better) and practices her own conjurations. She started sooner, focuses better around pain, and is more invested in the results--she can already do things significantly more complicated than a chess knight. She conjures a piece of sapphire in the shape of a rose, and concentrates on making it last.

[pythbox]

The lifespan of the object is set when it emerges from the magic, and it's not immediately clear how to change that lifespan.

However, she might eventually notice that there's a moment just before the object leaves the magic and enters reality where its eventual lifespan is perceptible. And if she holds it there and fiddles with it, she can make it last longer (or shorter) once it's out. The rotation that lengthens the span makes the object more 'slippery', harder to hold onto and maneuver, and also puts it under increasing tension: if she loses her grip it'll unwind rapidly back down to a short-lifespan state. If she's particularly unlucky or managed to wind it particularly far, it might even spin all the way down to a lifespan of zero and disappear before she can grab it again.

[iamnotpolaris]

Tricky. But she has time to practice, and frankly, this is easier than learning to draw. If she varies the characteristics of the object, will that affect how difficult it is to hold onto?

[pythbox]

Yes. The metaphor breaks down a little here: the simpler an object, the less likely it is to 'catch' on the magic (or 'squeeze' with volume or 'drag' with mass or material complexity), the easier it is to hold onto when she's applying the final twist.

If she works at it, she can get a simple object to last for a whole hour, maybe even two. The secret of permanency is not yet obvious.

[iamnotpolaris]

Well, of course not. Cass and Anna have had the flowers for how long and Anna can't do it? It's not going to be that easy. That's fine. She's an artist. She knows that beautiful things take time.

Once she gets it up to an hour she works on getting progressively more complex objects to last that long.

[pythbox]

It's tricky, and it stays tricky, but the 'strength' and 'dexterity' of her mental grip are improving, and the 'size' of the aperture in the magic might be growing a bit too.

[iamnotpolaris]

Excellent.

And by this point it is time to get to bed. She evaluates her current pain level, determines that she can probably get to sleep like this, and doesn't bother taking out either of the flowers she's wearing for the night. In the morning she dresses in clothes calculated to hide the flowers, takes shameless advantage of the grace bonus her pink rose gives her in her art class, socializes with her sister and various acquaintances--

and shuts herself in their room again for more practice. This is the most interesting thing to happen to her for ages.

She doesn't really want to peel the black rose out of her system yet, and really, it's the one that seems to get the most good out of active practice. Twist twist twist how much more duration can she squeeze out of a glass marble before she goes back to scaling to greater complexity.