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]

Nifty

And then she puts her phone away and concentrates on her sister.

Heeeey I'm telepathic now! Possibly you are too, I don't know, Anna didn't say how much you had to use a rose to get it but you've had the blue on your wrist almost as long as I've been wearing the pink one around and anyway this is a thing!

[whatamithinking]

Holy crap this is awesome

[iamnotpolaris]

I know.

[whatamithinking]

...

...

Seems like I'm still limited to language, though.

[iamnotpolaris]

Enh, it's the roses, maybe if you work hard and believe in yourself you can send your innermost thoughts without lossy lingual compression.

[whatamithinking]

You realize I'm going to babble at you for hours now, right?

[iamnotpolaris]

Stop if I really need to concentrate on something.

[whatamithinking]

Of course.

[iamnotpolaris]

Nnnnot a problem, then.

[whatamithinking]

I love you so much.

[iamnotpolaris]

Love you too.

And then back to class, with her sister chattering in the back of her mind. Can she make a bookmark already tucked between the pages of a textbook? Can she make a small rubber ball in motion inside the desk? Can she pierce her ear with a small, spontaneous stud? (She shakes her hair over that ear first and sets it to last only seconds, trusting in her rose regeneration to close the hole. The point is not to acquire a second ear piercing, the point is to see if the thing can be done.)

[pythbox]

The bookmark is tricksome but possible; it takes an inordinate amount of effort to have the bookmark push the pages aside even by the tiny necessary amount, but it works.

She can make a small rubber ball and use telekinesis on it the moment it emerges; 'in motion' is not a setting the conjuration process seems to have.

Pushing a conjured item through the final barrier into reality when the destination point flat-out intersects with a solid object is really difficult, even more than just the bookmark trick, but she's strong enough to get the spontaneous ear piercing past the resistance.

[iamnotpolaris]

She'll do that, then. This is her magic, and it is not going to get away with not letting her do things.

Hmm. Can she make a small-enough-to-escape-notice but overinflated-enough-to-pop-immediately balloon...over there, and make it so it only lasts a couple of seconds? What does that do?

[pythbox]

It pops.

[iamnotpolaris]

The class is briefly startled but settles down quickly.

Is pushing stuff out of the way its own thing? Should she be working on that by itself?

[pythbox]

It seems to be to some extent its own thing that can be worked on, and also to some extent just way harder than most other things conjuration can do for some reason.

[iamnotpolaris]

Huh. Well, she can work on that too then. Random piercings in miscellaneous locations that are not currently visible but that she would not be mortified if they were.

[pythbox]

Random piercings continue to be difficult. The more of herself she has to displace, the more difficult they are. But it'll improve like any other conjuration subskill if she works at it.

[iamnotpolaris]

Good. One more little detail to add to the current routine.

(When she goes to bed that night she notices that she barely notices how much having the black and white roses active hurts any more.)

[pythbox]

And when she wakes up the next morning...

It's pretty clear about belonging to the black flower in particular. It doesn't feel quite like any of the other flower magic she has. It feels like a choice, between four differently-flavoured subspecialties. One feels like it has to do with imbuing magical properties into existing objects; one feels slippery and hard to define; one feels like it has to do with making it easier for her to learn new skills and improve old ones; and one feels like it has to do with manipulating darkness.

[iamnotpolaris]

Oooooh. Okay, she needs to think about this. Possibly email Anna and Cass. Yes, definitely do that. They might know more about the four things.

I woke up this morning with a new thing in my brain asking me to choose between four different things and it's definitely from the black rose and I was wondering what else you could tell me about that? I'd prefer to make a more rather than less informed choice.

[gaincontrol]

The shadows one is fun, we both have that. Cass has the skills one too and it's really useful. If you keep practicing with black-flower magic you'll get to pick up the rest eventually.

[iamnotpolaris]

She considers what she could do with the skills one combined with the grace from the pink flower, picks that one and starts looking up low-commitment high-output classes on things like dancing and martial arts. She ends up joining a dance club on campus, which eats a little bit into her "telekinetising things and blatant conjurations" time but is fun enough on its own merits to make up for that. And between the grace boost and the skills magic she gets absurdly good absurdly fast.

[whatamithinking]

...Edie hasn't been doing much less with blue-flower magic than Emily was with black-flower magic (and she added the red flower, a little while back, because she had gotten used to a single flower's worth of pain a little while ago and Emily wasn't using that one so one of them should explore its effects).

[pythbox]

The blue flower would like Edie to choose between magic for shielding things, magic for transforming objects, magic for repairing objects, and magic for manipulating metal.