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Oct. 7th, 2020 11:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
The Bar has not relented in her attempts to get Harrow to eat something with slightly more calories than air. After many false starts, she seems to have struck gold with potatoes, a vegetable Harrow has never had before.
Mashed was a success; soup went well, too. But chips--ahhh, chips. Hot, salty, taste like almost nothing at all. Harrow may never eat anything else again. After several false starts in the dipping sauce area she has made peace with a light sprinkling of vinegar. The only problem is they make her gloves and her papers greasy.
Therefore, find Harrowhark Nonagesimus at a table with her journal and a skeletal hand, drawing spirals and... God help us... eating chips with a fork. It could be worse. The hand could be feeding them to her.
Mashed was a success; soup went well, too. But chips--ahhh, chips. Hot, salty, taste like almost nothing at all. Harrow may never eat anything else again. After several false starts in the dipping sauce area she has made peace with a light sprinkling of vinegar. The only problem is they make her gloves and her papers greasy.
Therefore, find Harrowhark Nonagesimus at a table with her journal and a skeletal hand, drawing spirals and... God help us... eating chips with a fork. It could be worse. The hand could be feeding them to her.
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Date: 2020-10-10 04:30 pm (UTC)The characters flicker... brighten... flare too bright, and the smell of charring bone rises again from the construct. But Harrow has been practicing the regenerating bone theorem to the point of delirium, and the characteristic silvery sheen begins to spread.
At the same time she ratchets back her thanergy control until the glow dims. She can feel the unfamiliar magic trying to tap into her motor cortex, and now it is her turn to relax slowly and surrender to something that feels downright off.
For a moment the arm wobbles, caught between her puppeteering and the reflection magic, but when she stills the control theorem it moves as easily as her own arm.
"The hard part is resisting the urge to control it," she says. "Letting it simply mirror. Perhaps if--" She focuses on her own arm as an assemblage of bone, and focuses her control there instead, puppeting herself as she has done in moments of great strain. "Aha!"
Her hand, and the skeletal one, clench in triumph.
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Date: 2020-10-10 05:04 pm (UTC)A thousand new avenues open up in his mind, theorizing how to pass control of a talisman from one cultivator to another, the possibilities such a mechanism could open -- it would probably not work as neatly as with Harrow, considering she can control the bones without a talisman, but still. Still. Oh, he will have to test this with Lan Zhan when he returns.
(When. One way or another, he will find Lan Zhan.)
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Date: 2020-10-10 07:17 pm (UTC)"God of the Nine Houses; a hybrid of three magics! We are the greatest necromancers of our generation, Wei Wuxian!"
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Date: 2020-10-11 01:24 am (UTC)He's laughing, elated. "Yes! If I had a drink, I would toast to us," he says. "Look at the marvel we've accomplished! And I should not have to modify the talisman too much before you place it on your own arm -- oh! The portal work! Will you still need that?"
Wei Wuxian grabs the other two talismans he'd laid aside earlier.
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Date: 2020-10-11 01:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-11 01:37 am (UTC)He pushes them across the table so she can get a better look. They are far more complex than the paper doll -- and now skeletal arm -- talisman, with multiple columns of characters and sigils woven in between.
"It is not as straightforward, but to break it down to its most simple, this -- " indicating the first column of the first talisman -- "sends out a call to this." Pointing to the last column of the second talisman. "And all of this in between works to draw them toward each other as a compass points north, regardless of distance or what features may lie in between. It is meant more for quick travel, so the portal it creates cannot stay open for long. But it might serve as a basis for calling to the arm from Canaan House?"
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Date: 2020-10-11 08:52 pm (UTC)"The element it seems would be most problematic is that you must find the other symbol not just in space but in time."
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Date: 2020-10-11 09:04 pm (UTC)He blows a loose lock of hair out of his face.
"I will think on it. I'm certain it can be done."
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Date: 2020-10-11 09:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-12 12:12 am (UTC)He's still looking down at the teleportation talismans, idly tapping the pen against the rightmost one.
"Moiraine's cultivation?"
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Date: 2020-10-12 12:14 am (UTC)"A hybrid approach may prove fruitful."
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Date: 2020-10-12 12:16 am (UTC)"I would ask that you not share any of my necromancy with her," he says, quietly. "I am glad you have learned much from her. But I still do not trust her not to harm me."
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Date: 2020-10-12 12:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-12 02:47 am (UTC)"Thank you," he says, not much louder than before. "I greatly appreciate it, Harrow."
He wants to ask: has she harmed you again? He swallows it back. Harrow has made it plain that Moiraine's aid is worth the risk, and that the bond the two women share is not one easily severed.
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Date: 2020-10-12 02:59 am (UTC)Even if she doesn't understand why. She doesn't understand how Moiraine could see a taint on him that is not on Harrow, both a more powerful necromancer and an objectively worse person (in her opinion). She doesn't understand why Wei Wuxian hasn't been able to make peace with someone who she is certain means him no harm. But she doesn't have to understand.
"I suppose you have much practice at being caught between in such a way," she says, thinking of Lan Wangji and his duty to Gusu Lan and his loyalty to his beloved Wei Ying.
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Date: 2020-10-12 11:45 pm (UTC)"You could say that, yes. But I know that I cannot be responsible for anyone's path but my own, and I must let others walk theirs as I ask them to let me walk mine."
Which is not easy, of course. Sometimes it is nearly impossible. But when has Wei Wuxian ever been afraid of the impossible?
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Date: 2020-10-13 12:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-13 12:54 am (UTC)This could be a way, he thinks. He will not share anything with Moiraine for his own safety; if, at the same time, he studies her cultivation, enough to counter anything she may attempt on him?
It is not trust. Quite the opposite. But at least he would not feel so hunted whenever he spots her blue robes across the room.
"I would be grateful," he says. "Can you think of anything that may work for me, knowing what you know of my own cultivation?"
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Date: 2020-10-13 01:17 am (UTC)"It is a very different magic from either of ours; almost as different as yours from mine. Yours seem to take the form of making statements to reality as to what you wish to do, with the necessary precision and information. I have a single tool--thanergetic conversion--and must wield it like a scalpel using precise knowledge of the physical sciences. Moiraine Sedai's magic differentiates into elemental energies that she must assemble in complex weaves, but their action seems almost more metaphorical, than anything practical."
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Date: 2020-10-13 01:30 am (UTC)"She mentioned a 'True Source' to me," he says as he tries to cast his mind back to their first conversation, before Moiraine revealed her true colors. "It sounded broadly similar to how I work with resentful energy -- taking energy from outside the self rather than generating it from within."
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Date: 2020-10-13 01:36 am (UTC)"But Moiraine Sedai simply opens a channel to a vast source of energy. She does not... scrounge, as you or I may be forced to. It is waiting for her, like Lan Wangji's qi, but external."
"I made contact with it once, when we were doing a shared working, and I collapsed on the spot."
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Date: 2020-10-13 01:50 am (UTC)"I see," he says. "And -- you mentioned elements. I assume she is able to divide the energy somehow, once she has retrieved it?"
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Date: 2020-10-13 01:58 am (UTC)"I find that deeply interesting, because thanergy has, as it were, only one form. It kills and decays, as it did your paper man. Yet with her assistance I have been able to explore, perhaps, different ways of thanergy."
"She calls her power also the Light of Creation, and although she has been uneasy about necromancy before, I believe we have come to understand one another; that life and death are both facets of Creation itself, and that all things must move from one state to another in their time."
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Date: 2020-10-13 01:20 pm (UTC)(Not nearly enough to get Wei Wuxian to trust her, though.)
He adds another note to the paper. "So her source is more a bundle of silk, with different cloths as different elements," he muses aloud. "I suppose that fits with her calling it weaving. So you have been able to -- not channel it, but differentiate your thanergy the same way? How?"
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Date: 2020-10-13 01:32 pm (UTC)(Nothing she has said so far goes beyond what Moiraine Sedai shared freely in their first conversations. That necromancy can kill thalergenic magic as it killed the paper doll--that is something else.)
"I will tell you that, if you can tell me how that, or any of your other notes, will help you improve your own practice. If your reason for asking is to prevail in a conflict I deeply wish to see avoided altogether, I will not help you, Wei Wuxian."
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