Solo Bucket of Magic

[Elsa Marin]

Winter 19th 513AV

Sahova. A tangled mess of intersecting corridors and halls where a single wrong turn could send a person down, always down, into its bowels. At least, that was the theory. Elsa would have to figure out how to get past the invisible walls before she could do any proper bowel-exploring. She'd bumped into a few of them here and there, and figured these were the 'wards' Anna had told her about. Interesting stuff, she reflected, rapping her knuckles against thin air. It wasn't solid, really. Soft, but unyielding. She'd run into it face-first and only come away with bruises as she was flung back to the floor.

The uninitiated might have said something like "Ye gods! Foiled by nothingness! Avast!"

Of course, Elsa was not one of the uninitiated.

With a small smile, Elsa marked a point on the barrier with her fingers. She had gathered a sizable library of analogies and metaphors to describe to herself what she was doing with her Djed when she formed the seed portal. Poking a hole in cloth, chipping stone, pushing, pulling, calling. After a week of Voiding simply to avoid the stench of Sahova, Elsa was beginning to see to the heart of it. Voiding was the act of creating nothing. To make an unmaking. The paradox of it scratched at her head and scraped against the inside of her skull. She tried to shape her Djed to match, but couldn't even get the first few skeins in place. The effort left her keeled over against the barrier, clutching her head until the scratching stopped.

That was the problem, probably. She still thought of magic as a weaving of sorts. The making and changing of things. In an absolute sense, to define the Void was to reject the Void. To define the Void as something that rejected definition was to reject the Void. To define the Void as something that rejected being defined as something that rejected definition was to reject the Void please make the scratching stop

[Elsa Marin]

Elsa channeled her Djed until her head pounded, pouring it all into the smallest point she could focus on. Nothing was happening. She had packed enough Djed to keep a portal open until the next bell into a point the size of a grain of sand, all of it focused to form the seed of nothingness that was the heart of her craft, and it wasn't working. Admitting defeat, Elsa let her hands drop, resting her head against the barrier. It was more comfortable than the walls around her, at least.

Whatever this barrier was, it would not yield to her Djed. It was hard to believe, but there was a magic that would resist even the Void. But it's not the Void, is it? Elsa thought it over in her mind. It did not resist being Voided. The portal never formed at all. It prevented the formation of the seed portal somehow. There were other ways to Void things.

One step back, a turn to the left, and Elsa was looking down the corridor. Her Djed became hooks, ripping into the fabric of the world until it split open. She picked at the edges, emptying the world point by point, letting the Void pour into the world until she had an Elsa-sized hole into nothing. Then she moved it, shifting the portal edge-on into the barrier like a blade.

The piece of the portal intersecting the barrier vanished. Elsa's will was rebuffed, and reality reasserted itself, filling in the portal. Shocked, Elsa's control slipped, and the portal unwound itself completely. Mizahar could be bent, but it snapped back into place the moment one's concentration slipped even a fraction. Elsa could not hold back the weight of a world trying to right itself through sheer willpower. Not yet, at least.

Reeling, Elsa staggered to the side until she hit the wall, clinging to it. The headache was back, and it wouldn't go away. Her eyes felt like bags of sand. Her fingers were cramping. She was overgiving, and she knew it. From the corner of her eyes, he could see the edge of the world, with nothing beyond. Mizahar was a poor facade painted on canvas stretched over the gaping maw of the Void. She could see the threads and the grain of the paint clear as day, this close to the void. Whenever Elsa was tired, or stressed, or wading the shallows of overgiving, she felt like if she turned around quick enough she would finally be able to tear her eyes away from the facade and see-

She whirled. There was nothing behind her but stone. Too slow, Elsa, far too slow. She reached out and pressed against the wall, half expecting it to flex under her touch like the barrier. It didn't. The skin of the world was cold and hard and absolutely unyielding.

After catching her breath, Elsa managed to stagger to something resembling standing straight. She had brought her power to bear against the ward, and been denied. Elsa Marin had been beaten by thin air. Anna wouldn't have been defeated like this. Anna would have done something clever and obscure with glyphs and the air would have opened to her like a flower. Anna would have filled the entire corridor with fire and simply blasted her way through. "'s not fair," she muttered. Long-restrained fury sparked in her heart, like ashes kindled to blazing. "I can't even open a door."

"'Odd, your sister was reading nader-fucking-canoch five minutes after she enrolled'," Elsa told the air in a stuffy, sing-song voice. "'How strange, Anna was reciting the major exports of Taloba backwards and forwards just last week. In verse. Are you feeling alright?'" Down that corridor was something she wasn't meant to see. Anna wouldn't let something like this stop her. Anna would rise to the challenge. Anna wouldn't even see it as a challenge. Elsa hammered at the barrier with her fists, growling and screaming. "ANNA!" Elsa's face was hot with tears and blood as her Djed was whipped into motion by the same mindless fury that saw nothing but her sister's condescending face beneath her fists. "ANNA ANNA ANNA ANNA!"

[Elsa Marin]

Several thing happened at once.

First, the barrier became visible. For half a second, Elsa could see the force of her blows rippling outwards from her fists, absorbed by a curtain of color that hung in the air. For one instant, all of Elsa's senses were tuned to spectrum she had never imagined. She could see the Djed raging through her arms. She could taste the walls behind her. At some point in her tantrum, Elsa's eyes had started bleeding. So that's why I'm seeing red. The thought was oddly detached.

Surprised, Elsa stumbled backwards. Unfortunately the wall chose that exact moment to not be there for her, but the floor rose to the occasion, breaking her fall with her head. Pain exploded behind Elsa's eyes, and her clarity vanished, replaced by white streaks of lightning blurring her vision whenever she blinked.

"Ow." The sound seemed to pulse in her head, and the act of simply groaning breathlessly in pain only made it worse. "Ow ow ow aaaaaa." Clutching at her head, Elsa managed to stagger to her feet before falling to her knees and vomiting on the floor. Groaning, she managed to get back to her feet and stagger away, one arm supporting herself on the wall, one arm clutching her throbbing head.

Now, if she could just avoid passing out in Experiment-on-me-town Sahovaland, she needed to figure out just what had happened. That had been magic. Real, actual magic, like Voiding, but nothing Elsa had even imagined herself capable of. Internal manipulation of Djed. She'd never thought of that. Ha! Ten days out of Zeltiva and she was already learning more about magic in a day than she'd learned over her entire stay at the College. Now she just had to wait until the world stopped spinning. And get the blood out of her eyes. And nose. It was dripping into her mouth, staining her teeth and making the world taste like metal.

"This better not have driven me mad," Elsa reflected out loud. "That would just be the worst." She tried a chuckle, but all she got was pain.

[Strange]

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This is a Moderator Intervention

While reading over your thread I have noticed some inconsistencies between what has occured here and the Lore. In order for this thread to be graded it must cohere with the fictional world of Mizahar. I have outlined below what needs to be fixed.

1. How you have approached the Flux here doesn't match up much with the Lore. You see it is impossible to learn the Flux by 'coincidence' or 'accident'. The Flux can only be learned by intense meditation and physical discipline. The Initiate has to meditate deeply about his own body until he knows every inch of it with perfect clarity. It is impossible to inherently know or activate or come across the Flux on your own without knowing anything about it. I would suggest you edit this part out of the thread and seek a Flux PC or NPC out in a new thread.
2. Your Voiding here was better than last time but you have sort of stretched your limits as to what you can do with it here. When you tried to open one on the barrier this is in fact impossible. If you imagine opening a portal like putting a needle through a bit of cloth this is more like trying to put a needle through solid titanium. You wouldn't have been able to pack "enough Djed to keep a portal open until the next bell into a point the size of a grain of sand" because the Djed would just not get through. It just wouldn't have happened. No djed depletion just no Void.
3. The way you moved your Portal with the hooking analogy and such is not entirely what happens when you push a portal around. You have a tear in reality and you move the whole thing like a big sheet of metal rather than creating more portal at one side and collaping a bit at the other side. You cannot collapse bits of the sides of portals. You can only collapse an entire portal or scale the portal up or down.

Once you've fixed these points, PM me and I will remove this Intervention.
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