Luca DR
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10 – Plasticity training (1/2)
🕑 Added 2023-05-11 12:05:51 +0000 UTCThe tiny second hand of Albert’s metal watch, a metal circle with barely lines in place of the usual numbers to tell the time, inched closer and closer to twelve. The other hand was striking eleven. It was a morning without classes, but the relief that should have come with the knowledge that Albert was free to play with magic all morning didn’t come. It was the 20th of September, Saturday, the day of the club. There were ways to postpone the fatidic moment, namely one: the gem.
Yet he also wished to preserve today’s Hazegem activation, in case he needed to rewind time at the club later. Having never been to a club before, he anticipated many things that could go wrong there. Irrationally so, but being aware of one’s own rationality or lack thereof is not the cure for wrong logical thinking. Sometimes it is a way to relish in it instead, making the problem worse.
He did try to resist the urge to activate it. In fact, it was going quite well. He spent the whole morning experimenting with magic, and for instance he figured out that he could dismiss a fireball without throwing it, letting the mana go to waste in exchange for not blowing up his room. This led to him developing a way to gauge how much mana his mana pool had when he was full. Measured in FU, or Fireball Units where one FU was the same as casting a standard level one fireball, his total mana pool amounted to 15FU, with a recovery rate of around 20 per hour.
After he was done calculating his mana, another thought occurred to him. He thought about what happened with the Hazegem the other night, about how the gem sucked all the mana that it could from him and suddenly his mind was inflamed by the fact that he couldn’t accept defeat at the hands of a stupid purple gem. He was going to try again, this time only giving the gem the mana that he said the gem could take and not a drop more. All the while he was going to stare at a clock to figure out if there was a law the gem followed when it rewound time.
There was one, it turned out. 3 Fireball Units per hour of rewind and rewinding less than the full 5 hours meant less recharge time for the gem. Albert had fallen asleep the other night and found the gem usable when he woke up, which meant that it had a maximum of 7 hours 48 minutes of rechange time for a 5 hour rewind. He only needed to wait a bit and take note of how much time it took to recharge after the 1-hour rewind and he could begin to have an idea of the formula that surely was behind its functioning.
There was an assumption being made here, and he knew it. The assumption was that magic still respected math in the same way that physical phenomena did. Which wasn’t all that obvious, especially if one postulated the possible presence of intelligence or, god forbid, sentience behind the nature of mana. The scary prospect was that this theory wasn’t as far-fetched as it could have been not two days ago. Albert still remembered well the sensation that came with using the [Appraisal], and the missing memory of everything else related to its activation. Using it again in skill form didn’t produce anything of note, sadly, relegating the whole event as a one-time-only thing that did nothing but muddy the waters.
It turned out that the gem took exactly two hours to become once again usable after rewinding one hour of real-world time, which meant that he could effectively double the amount of hours that there were in a day. (Let’s say it’s 10 sharp. He rewinds it back to 9. He then waits until it’s 11 so that he can rewind back again, this time to 10. In total, by the time it’s 11 again, he will have lived 4 hours instead of 2).
With nothing else to do, Albert waited for a refill of his mana, rewound time back to 7AM and waited. To be honest, he could use some more sleep, since he was feeling a bit tired. He also wanted to do the daily challenge from the system but he didn’t want to go in without mana, with only hope that the system realized his lack of magic and refilled his mana pool for him. By his calculations, a 45-minute nap was all he needed to refill his magic.
[Transporting to Daily challenge – Day 04: Plasticity training]
The first thing that came to mind when Albert looked at the room was one of those ancient Mayan temples from Tomb Raider. There was the façade of granite, framing a grand entrance to the torch-lit ruins, overgrown with vegetation. There was the huge cave containing it all with barely a few beams of light coming from the cracks in the ceiling. There was the huge statue right above the steps leading to the entrance. There was the rushing river below.
The sight was majestic and beautiful. There was a great bronze door at the top of the huge staircase, shut close. On its surface was a mural of sorts, with scenes of battle and feats of war depicted on it in relief patterns and frescos, colors washed away by time and metals greening with oxidation. On the double doors were holes and circles, that upon prodding and poking proved to be moving parts that could be rotated, until they aligned with each other in particular ways. One of these patterns, most probably, was the correct combination to get the great door to finally open.
Now, this was a challenge called plasticity training. In his mind, this meant that Albert had to take his whole arsenal of magic and use it in novel ways, thinking outside the box to figure out what to do. The first thing to do was always going to be the same however: using [Appraisal].
[Great mausoleum of Toim’Ras.]
Aiming the spell at the door, rather than at the whole structure in the cave, yielded another result altogether.
[Bronze gates of Raa’s. Said to have never been opened in a thousand centuries, these gates bar the entry to the mausoleum where Toim’Ras rests.]
Now this was progress. There was more information, useless lore that didn’t mean much but that revealed a pattern: Albert could choose arbitrarily smaller objects to Appraise, and the skill followed his intent.
Which meant that the next experiment was going to be trying to appraise the circles and shapes on the doors themselves.
[A puzzle that needs to be solved to gain entry to the mausoleum of Toim’Ras.]
Okay. This is something but it’s not enough. What about the single symbols?
[Owl.]
[Cat.]
[Number 7.]
Still not the answer to the riddle. But, and this was a huge step forward, the skill was able to translate the symbol into its actual meaning in English! Which meant that it could be used to translate and gain information about things even if they were simple ideograms written in an alien tongue. Great progress.
