Local lore is surprisingly accurate

[what_greater_weapon]

Noelle finds that having a village is quite a pain. So she doesn't have one. Instead she travels. This isn't as easy as the sentence makes it sound. She has several sets of clothes that fit her just badly enough to make her look androgynous instead of feminine, while still being practical and not in her way. It's perhaps not what her fashion choices would be if choosing for aesthetics, but her fashion choices are not based around aesthetics. Instead it's to keep the idiots that think a lone reasonably pretty young woman is a tempting and vulnerable target to a minimum.

Not that it's a foolproof strategy. People are stupid, and she's apparently rather pretty. Not that anyone should try anything; while she might be tempting, she is not vulnerable. She has a sword at her hip that she knows how to use beyond 'pointy end goes in the person,' a small crossbow that looks deceptively useless when it is anything but, and a few knives that benefit from baggy clothes and the ability to hide knives therein. Anyone that thinks she is a tempting and vulnerable target and that they should act accordingly will be corrected. Possibly with the knives, if they especially deserve it.

She's actually in the middle of that right now. Well, sort of. She is working on being in the middle of that right now. In order to get there she has to find the guy. He had some wandering hands that went to unsanctioned locations, and after she broke his finger he, well, ran. Normally she might let him go, call it even, but she realized the next morning that he fit the description of a bandit with a sizable bounty on him. And he did have a mysteriously large purse for a man with that little class. It fits. And he's an asshole, so she can go retrieve him, dump him at the feet of the local lawmen that are looking for him, collect the lovely bounty, and be on her way.

One problem: the asshole ran into a thing the locals call the Witchwood. She realizes rather too late that it is appropriately named. The trees must be moving, or moving her, because she passed by that creek with the rocks in that particular formation and the slightly broken tree two hours ago, and she was following the sun. This should not happen.

Well. She has travelling rations with her, and she can find water reliably well (especially if the creek keeps showing up) but if she's trapped in here forever there's not much she can do about it. If it takes longer than a week she might set the forest on fire, but she's not that desperate. She'll let the magic woods lead her around if they want to, she guesses. Not that she has a choice.

She scrapes marks in trees with her least favorite knife, because it's not like she has anything better to do, and she wants to know how many times trees will repeat themselves. Scrape scrape. Wander wander.

Comments

[pythbox]

There is no more contact from the cursed person that night, and no notes with her breakfast the next morning.

[what_greater_weapon]

She is also fine with this. She skips physical exertions today, and goes straight to language. Read read read read she is running out of easy books she'll move on to trying to figure out magic soon read read.

At lunch time, she considers, and writes a note.

'Let me know if you would like me to stay away from certain parts of the castle so you can have space. I've just been going where I feel like, but it doesn't matter a ton to me. I don't mind moving bedrooms, if you want the wing I'm in.'

[pythbox]

There is no immediate response.

And then, around midafternoon, a tray-creature arrives with a note:

MORE
CASTLE

A few seconds later, there is a very quiet rumbling/grinding noise that comes up through the floor and in through the walls as though the castle has decided to scratch an itch.

[what_greater_weapon]

That is really cool and she wants to explore the shit out of the castle. But he needs his space. So. No exploring the shit out of the castle. Even if it has really cool - whatever that is. She's not sure.

'That is really really cool,' she writes, because she doesn't know what else to write. 'And I'll refrain from exploring everything to give you space.'

[pythbox]

Fairly quickly:

NO

MINE
HIDDEN

[what_greater_weapon]

'I mean, yes, but now that I know there are hidden places in the castle, I am terribly curious and want to know about all of them yesterday. I meant more in the sense that I will not try to find them.'

[pythbox]

No response.

[what_greater_weapon]

That's fine.

Read! Read read read read read augh her voice is starting to get scratchy.

[pythbox]

A tray-creature brings her a fresh pot of tea.

[what_greater_weapon]

Awww. Best tray-creature.

"Thank you," she says to it, patting it gently. She sips tea and considers the books.

She thinks she might need to come at this with a new angle. At least while her throat is protesting about reading this much aloud.

Noelle starts looking for the major concepts in the books - the things the highly technical stuff just assumes the reader knows, the things mentioned constantly. She recalls the mindscape thing, that is clearly something that is important, is there anything like it?

[pythbox]

There are multiple such things!

Besides the place-or-something called the Dream-world, there is the process called channeling (part of spellcasting; dangerous), the four varieties of spell power... Those are particularly difficult because the terminology is so inconsistent. In Callian and Albish they are Heart and Will and Earth and Sky, but in other languages they are sometimes called by unrelated terms, and it's not always clear which corresponds to which, and sometimes specific books use sometimes-clear sometimes-opaque symbols or shorthand.

[what_greater_weapon]

Of course they do. Why is she not surprised.

Okay. Is there a sort of pattern to the types of spell power that she can discern? Or, for that matter, more clarification on the Dream-word?

[pythbox]

Heart and Earth power seem to be somewhat interchangeable, and the same with Will and Sky; spells that are described as being able to use one half of a pair can often use the other as well, and they tend to be mentioned pairwise in theoretical texts.

The one book whose four symbols are an X, a circle, a triangle, and a rather creepy-looking stylized eye seems to pair them up X-triangle and circle-eye, but that doesn't do much to indicate which symbol corresponds to which term in the broader context, and there is no helpful legend.

In this other book which doesn't have a legend either, the little sun symbol is likely to be Sky, so the downward-pointing arrow it frequently appears with is likely to be Will, so by process of elimination the short wavy horizontal line and the horizontal lozenge are probably Earth and Heart. Which one is which isn't clear.

This book in one of the less straightforward languages calls the four power-types by terms which, if her inferences are right, literally translate to North, South, East, and West. The pairings seem to be East-South and West-North. Other books in the same language use the same system, and sometimes talk about the symmetry of the 'compass of power'. A paragraph referring to East power coming from above, West from below, and North and South from within might indicate that they correspond respectively to Sky, Earth, and (given the pairings) Heart and Will.

There is actually an entire book called The Realm of the Mind, but the language is another of the ones she's had more trouble with, and this book is among the least decipherable examples of it. Poor handwriting and obscure vocabulary are not an enlightening combination. If she struggles through it anyway, she'll find that it starts out as a collection of descriptions of specific Mind-realms the author has seen or heard of, interspersed with abstract speculation about what it means for a person's Mind-realm to look like a starry sky or a cozy cottage or a tranquil pond or an intricate puzzle-box.

[what_greater_weapon]

This is all really fascinating, and she writes notes on these things so she doesn't have to go diving back to various hard-to-read books to recall what seem to be the basics. Her notes include everything she's learned about it, and also the various notations she finds each variety of spell power in.

She does sit down and decipher The Realm of the Mind, because while it's a pain, she gets the feeling that the mind-thing is important.

Does it at all mention anything about how to get to the aforementioned realm of the mind?

[pythbox]

It does not talk about how to get to the realm of the mind.

The later parts of the book, though, are case studies of damage to the Mind-realm. Some of the people are described as having concrete problems - head injuries, illnesses of varying mysteriousness - but by far the majority of the damaged Mind-realms in question are noted as 'unwilling channel' and an estimate of how much spellpower they were made to carry.

Amid more speculation on the different manifestations of damage in similarly manifested Mind-realms, like why this lake boiled dry while that one froze solid, the author notes that it's hard to study unwilling channels because so few of them survive their use for long. Eight cases in a row came from a single enchanter who happened to fatally lose control of a spell while the author was nearby; the author, while not inclined to personally burn out anyone's mind in pursuit of knowledge, was not above collecting that enchanter's entire stable of unwilling channels and studying them all.

[what_greater_weapon]

... Well, this is valuable information to know, if not quite what she was after. Unwilling channels have terrible things happen to them. If/when she becomes an enchanter, she will not use unwilling channels.

Also, losing control of spells: can kill her. She will not do that.

Ughhhhh how does she get into this mind realm thing, do any books here mention it? She wants to know what hers looks like now.