glowfic | Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming

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Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming

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.

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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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Edited 2016-02-18 05:07 (UTC)

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.

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.

...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).

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.

...Transforming objects. That sounds fun. (Although she tells Emily about the metal option as soon as she gets them. It's not really a question which one Emily's going to pick when she's done enough blue magic.)

To start out with, how may she transform an object?

Edited 2016-02-18 06:01 (UTC)

She may alter the colours of things. Not very fast. And not the roses. The roses are not editable by this power.

This is not particularly surprising!

They can go on like this for a while. It's a good routine. Magic is fun. And, you know, gross and painful, but whatever.

Emily sticks with dance club even after she's better than anyone else there at any of the dances they know, what with their lack of cheaty magic. But she's not particularly subtle about how good at it she is--that would make the dancing itself much less fun. She acquires a handful of admirers.

Possibly the most likeable of these is Luc, whose mom is from Montreal and who plays up his consequent knowledge of French like a Hollywood Parisian, but always in a sufficiently self-parodying way as not to become insufferable.

And one meeting, he presents her with a blue-stemmed white rose.

"What," she says.

He gives a presumably gallic shrug. "My great aunt died, recently. This was hers. She always claimed it was possessed, and perhaps she was right, for for as long as my parents have been bundling me into the car and incarcerating me in her stuffy old house for family reunions it has sat on the hall end table, and never has it wilted! When it fell into my possession in the general scuffle of my less savory relatives for the crumbs of her estate, I knew such beauty and mystery could only belong in the possession of the veritable Muse of our fair halls," he declaims.

"It's...beautiful. I appreciate it more than you know," she murmurs, taking it with care not to cut herself on the white-tipped thorns and even more care not to accidentally prick him with them. That would be a disaster.

And once the meeting is over and everything's packed up and everyone's left there is a very urgent email to write.

Found a new rose!!!!!!!!!!!!! Guy from dance club gave it to me. Inheritance from a dead relative who thought it was possessed. Have not tested it yet. Will v. soon.

Whoa, nice! Pics?

Pics! Shortly thereafter: Hurts like freezing.

Coooooool.

And after a few minutes: Ha. Pun intended? Also, cute, I look a little less like palette-swap Poison Ivy and a little more like some kind of plant fairy now. ...I'm going to have to peel something out and/or put it back in if I want to get rid of this skirt, aren't I.

Yeah, if you don't have full outfit control yet then you can only mess with it while there's a new flower on its way in.

I can probably cover this with, like, normal skirts for a while, but this was not the most thoughtful life choice I have ever made.

She pokes at the new available magic.

Would she like to make things colder? This magic makes things colder.

Yes she would! How much colder how precisely can she cold things?

Well she can't cold things very fast yet, but she can refrigerate them pretty respectably if she puts the time in. With sufficient dedication, she can even freeze water. The effect is reasonably well targeted, but of course when she makes one thing cold it tends to make things next to it cold all by itself.

Edited 2016-02-18 18:14 (UTC)

Exactly how well can she target it? Can she freeze shapes?

If it is her life's ambition to freeze things in shapes then she can freeze things in (blobby, small, imprecise) shapes. And, like so many things in flower magic, she can improve this capacity with practice.

It's not her life's ambition, but along with trying to freeze things faster and in wider areas it's the obvious route for improvement.

Oh, hey, does the rate at which she can reduce something's temperature correlate meaningfully to its specific heat?

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pythbox - 2016-02-18 18:28 (UTC) - Expand

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