Legacy Tester (Panna Cotta)

[Hadrian]

Hadrian lost track of time. He worked, he slept, he worked some more. At some point, he thought there was food and drink, but whenever he was in pursuit of some intellectual prize, he spent less time thinking about the needs of his body. Hunger pangs and dizziness were not distracting him, so he must have been fed. He gave up on the fish idea for a while once he got to the parts of Tieh's research dealing with the Konti anatomy. He devoured her notes, of course, curious as to how much of it was factual and how much fanciful. He picked it up again, though, when considering the structure of gills with regard to filtering out other pollutants, such as the noxious fumes that apparently haunted the lower reaches of the Citadel. Again he drew pictures, sketches of piscine breathing apparatuses drawn from memory or borrowed from Tieh's own pictures of the Konti gills. He borrowed some of her glyphs and inserted some of his own in the developing schematic. After all, if he was expected to make this innovation, he would have to use dumb animals. Only a maledictor of Tieh's abilities could work from sentient beings. When his schematics were all but complete, he looked up and found a fish staring back at him, dull-eyed and incurious behind the glass of the fishbowl. "Tools," he muttered, and went about collecting what he needed. When it was time, he looked at the fish and rolled up his sleeve. "Sorry," he said. "Nothing personal." Then he stuck his hand in until he caught it, held it down on an operating tray, and cut open its head, locating its bony opercula. These he washed and set out to dry. The remains of the fish were left with a note for whomever was looking after him. It read: Dinner? Once the bony processes were dried, he began to inscribe each with the circles he had devised. The four fused bones each received a circle, the opercle, preopercle, interopercle, and subopercle. He was glad he paid attention to natural history as a boy. The circles were built around glyphs, because he understood glyphs better than he did malediction at this point: breathe, filter, clean, air. It was slow, exact, and tedious work, for even though the fish was large, the bony processes were delicate and he was no master etcher. When he was finished, he was about ready to pass out from exhaustion, but he was running on hysterical energy and wanted a preliminary test before testing them down below. "Preserver," he said, his voice rough from disuse and weariness. It might have been a bedroom voice, but he was oblivious. "Code specimens as O-1 and O-2." He pulled open the cage and set each within reach. "The ultimate goal is a fetish to allow the bearer to breathe toxic fumes and filter out usable air. Secondary goals, as always, are other effects." Only items that did nothing were truly failures, after all. Now he wished he had a legacy tester of his own. All the same, he climbed into the cage and shut it, and when the Preserver began to make its curious noises, Hadrian blinked. Revelation. "Oh gods," he whispered, not even paying attention to the operculum in his hand.

[Panna Cotta]

It was assumed that the golem could not only comprehend but also understand the command wizards give it. Hadrian was trying to be both a legate and a legacy tester, and for that he was such a fool. As a given example, why would an ordinary fish allow one to breathe clean air? The revelation dawned upon him just about the same time that the Preserver sent out its toxic fumes. He thought, ordinary fishes that find themselves in toxic water would probably die. In his mind, an idea fluttered: fishes that get washed ashore die. You can't really expect a fish out of the water to be able to breathe. A question replaced the thought, do fishes have the ability to filter gas? A brighter idea surfaced the same time his eyes rolled up and his body convulsed on the floor: he should have just stuck to trying to breathe underwater.

But it was too late.

Too late even for Tieh to save him from being poisoned. Because there were no healers in Sahova, Hadrian nearly died. It was, perhaps, a stroke of luck that the Preserver did not use more than one kind of toxic gas. The quantity Hadrian inhaled was enough to down a big whale, and that was saying a lot already. Maybe his Maledicted item worked, after all. But mostly Hadrian had the notion that it didn't.

It was really simple, the fish he used for his project was an ordinary fish that possessed no valuable property to be turned into a Maledicted item. It was, most likely, supposed to be nothing but his dinner. But the human will never really know what went wrong, never really understand what happened. He woke up aboard a ship with a bad case of stomach ache. If he checked his belongings, he would find that he was well compensated for his short apprenticeship.

But, if he failed and it was safe to assume that he did, why did Tieh keep him alive? The answer was, no, she didn't save his ass. When Tieh found him once again splayed unconscious and dying on the floor, she was prepared to let him die. Hadrian was already about to be sent to the Rubellum Chamber, where he would be placed into a coffin and preserved to become a Nuit wizard's replacement body. However, perhaps to compensate for all his Sahovan misfortunes, he was mistakenly placed into a cart that contained crates for export. The only mystery was that he was shipped out of Sahova together with all of his belongings - stuff which he should have left at Tieh's laboratory. Perhaps, at the very last moment, Tieh intervened?

This story was related to him by the Captain of the Ship he was on. The man said his travel back to Sunberth was for gratis, Hadrian was dying anyway. The news might came as a shock, but as they sailed the quiet summer sea, Hadrian felt like he was puking his bowels out of his body. All the sailors thought it was just a bad case of seasickness, and they had a good laugh whenever he would writhe in agony.

[Panna Cotta]

HADRIAN AELIUS Observation 3 Auristics 2 Research 4 Meditation 2 Painting 2 Malediction 4 Drawing 2 Glyphing 2 Lore of Sahovan golems Lore of Master Tieh Lore of being a wizard's apprentice Lore of being a Legate Lore of drinking water created by Reimancy Lore of fish anatomy Lore of using auristics on maledicted items Lore of maledicted glassbeak talon Lore of maledicted Konti body parts Lore of maledicted fish bones Lore of being poisoned with Wobblebus Lore of behaving like a Glassbeak Lore of boldness Lore of being overworked Lore of being infested with mageworm Others: 90 gm Maledicted fishbones that can temporarily negate effects of L1 poison (ingested poison only) F'nessi Nextbell brushes - allows divination of injuries that one might experience within the next bell : Date night with Tieh should Hadrian return to Sahova Notes: Sorry for the confusion and all that. Storyteller thread updated. Don't go selling those brushes, okay? Come back soon!