[Bronze Woods] Sculpting with Res-Clay

by **Isolde Seibold** on March 17th, 2015, 7:35 pm

27th of Spring, 515 AV

Isolde had gotten the idea a little while back (had it been days ago, or more than that?; time was running together for her) to convert her usually gaseous res into a liquid. This had been in honor of her newly-discovered earth reimancy, in order to attain a more definite and controllable res-type. The experiment had worked out alright, maybe better than she'd originally hoped for, considering that it had been a new idea, something she hadn't tried before. But it had still been... difficult to control the res the way she wanted to. A good first attempt, really. But not the best she thought she could do.

Naturally, she had come to the conclusion that what she truly needed to mold the res to her specifications was to literally mold it-- to take the process one step further. First from a gas to a liquid. Then from a liquid to a solid.

So that was what she was here to do.

She had come back to the place she was starting to think of as her Hollow, a nice little meadow of tall grass amongst the trees of the Bronze Woods. It was a more open space but still secluded, with the thickets of trees on either side blocking most of the area from easy sight or access, the ground dipping down somewhat in the middle to form the shape of a flat basin... and altogether just large enough to have a nice amount of room to work. This Hollow wasn't the one that Kouri had used --whether or not the ghost girl still inhabited that place Isolde didn't know, and she didn't particularly want to find out. But it was nearby. Maybe a mile or so away. If she stood on her tiptoes and looked in a westerly direction, she thought she could just see the top of the branches of Kouri's tree.

She supposed that the other tree, the one that had smashed her old body into pieces
--courtesy of Kouri's maniacal rage-- was also around here somewhere, though she was not too eager to revisit that site, either. Better to leave those bits of past in the past, and focus on the present.

That mean getting to her reimancy.

Isolde sat cross-legged at one edge of the Hollow, her back resting against a large boulder for support, though she kept her spine straight, not allowing for poor posture. She held her arms out and up, hovering in the air slightly in front of her. A few seasons back and she would have used this time for meditation, for getting into the right state of mind-- something she had thought helped ensure that she practiced her magic safely. Now, she didn't. She could still feel the mind-fog sometimes, pulling at her as if wishing to enfold her back into its blank depths. Meditation brought it closer than anything else. So until she figured out a way to stop the fog from happening --though she didn't know if she would ever actually manage to do that-- she would just have to avoid the meditation and skip to the interesting (if dangerous) parts.

The Nuit took a deep breath, closing her eyes momentarily as if to center herself. When she opened them again she was as ready as she could be. So she began.

by **Isolde Seibold** on March 17th, 2015, 8:03 pm

The first thing she did, of course, was draw up her res. This, she found, came easier than it once had, though it still took concentration not to allow it to disperse harmlessly out of her reach, and even more concentration to produce the different forms. The res she called up now was that which seemed like a liquid. The first time she had thought to create this sort of res, she had conjured a gas, then compressed it, giving her the idea of how a liquid state would look and feel. This time she was able to bring out the liquid without the act of compression.

The idea now was to do exactly what she had done before, the same process, but to take it one step further: going from from a liquid to a solid.

The Nuit held out her hands on either side of the blob of liquid, arms wide apart and fingers spread, and then slowly squeezed her hands into twin fists. As she did, she envisioned the res getting littler, more compact. The blob of res echoed her prodding thoughts, constricting smaller and smaller, and then smaller and smaller still. Isolde kept going after that, bringing her fists closer together physically to urge on the transformation... and then it happened.

It was like watching water turn into slush, then snow, then ice. The color of her res in its natural state --a gas-- was a strange, translucent, nearly invisible bluish-white, almost reminiscent of the outline of a barely-manifested ghost. The color had thickened and brightened as a liquid, creating a pearly, opaque, bubble-like sheen. Now, approaching solidness, the blue tinge to the res seemed to bleach out to an undertone, like the shimmering colors of a butterfly's wings that only become readily perceptible when they catch the light; conversely the whiteness of it became more apparent, making the res look slick or wet somehow, almost exactly like the surface of ice. Isolde held her hands still for a moment longer, cementing the look of the material that floated before her into her memory, so that she might create it faster and easier next time. Then she reached out, and touched the res.

It... was solid. And it wasn't. She had never felt anything exactly like this before. Despite the color of it, it was not cold as she had imagined it might be, simply chill, as all her res was-- a product of coming from inside her, she thought, with no body heat to lend it. She could put her fingers lightly on it as if it had a surface... and yet if she pressed even a little harder, they sank into the mass, no longer meeting any overt resistance. It was almost like a dough, except that it was thicker than that, more moldable. Maybe more like clay, a material that a true sculptor would use, but yet... not quite that solid. Somewhere in between, then. The largest difference was that she could easily put her hand in the middle of the substance and pull it out again, and the res didn't stick to her or dirty her fingers. At once, it appeared to be corporeal and intangible. Odd. Very odd.

Another thing of note: compression from a gas to a liquid had seemed to reduce the quantity of res, from a good-sized cloud to a sphere the size of her fist. This next step took it even further down. She had started out with enough liquid res to nearly envelop her body. That had condensed down into a lump about the size of her head, maybe a little bigger. Considering this, she idly touched the solid res, and set it to spinning in front of her. It seemed it took less res to create a gas... but no, that wasn't right, was it? She didn't feel like she had worked any harder to make the liquid or the solid, besides the initial complication of figuring out how to make it in the first place. Then... perhaps the amount of res didn't change, but just got closer together. That would explain the shrinking that occurred. It was like how water grew larger when it froze in a jug, so you had to leave room at the top. Only this was the opposite: the res got smaller when it went from liquid to solid.

Interesting. She wondered if it was like this for everyone, or just for her. The Burned Man, her teacher, had made it seem like most processes of magic were highly tuned to the individual-- his res, for example, had usually taken the form of a sort of plasma, which he had said was neither liquid or gas but something else. It had looked, almost, like smooth-edged ghostly flames, and had seemed almost sentient in its movements. Isolde's res, on the other hand, had always been more passive, waiting for direction. It came down to personality and intentions, the Burned Man had told her. Res --and, as such, reimancy itself-- could be anything. The potential for limitations sat in its wielder. Using magic was an act of creation, equivalent to a sort of art; the style, then, was left to the whims and abilities of the artist.

by **Isolde Seibold** on March 17th, 2015, 8:14 pm

Now that she had the material she wanted, the next step was simple: using her hands as an extension of her will to shape it. She had no formal training in sculpting, which she thought might have helped with this, despite the nontraditional method of using res instead of clay or some other non-magical material. And with time she thought she would be able to sculpt it without physically touching the res at all, just by thinking at it and telling it to take a new shape. For now, however, she was using her hands. Shaping the liquid res before using only her mental processes had resulted in a lack of precision, probably having to do with the relative sharpness and accuracy of her mind in what it envisioned. She had been a largely tactile person for a long time. Using her hands now would help shape her ideas. Eventually she would graduate to more efficient means.

Isolde reached out, and touched the res-clay (well, she had to call it something). Only a light touch was necessary. Because she knew her hands to be merely a channel of her will, the barest touch caused a disproportionate response. She poked it here and there, just to test its reactions, and it twisted and jiggled and bent into any manner of shapes. She ran her fingers simultaneously down the sides, spreading her hands diagonally as she went, and the substance flattened out where she touched it, forming a sort of pyramid with an uneven bottom. She pinched the corners and drew them back up, and the res-clay shifted into a rough cube. She smoothed her palms against the edges and they rounded to suit her, and she kept rounding and smoothing until the res had flowed into a sphere, and then with a rolling motion of her hand the sphere had turned into a cylinder.

She did the pinching motion again, this time only at one side, and the cylinder changed to a cone, similar to the original pyramid but with a circle as a base. Isolde twirled a finger and the cone reversed its position in the air, flipping so that its base pointed down, the pointy part up. Then she marked her fingers on the sides and with each motion the res stretched, following her hands. When she was finished, it looked somewhat like a child's drawn version of a pine tree, conical and spiky on all sides... though of course it was not only a drawing chalked on the ground, and the shape was missing a stump at the bottom to represent the trunk. With a deft motion, Isolde added that, smiling. Then she squeezed both hands together in a cupping motion, and the res crumpled inwards, turning into a lump once more.

For a moment the Nuit sat where she was, letting her hands to fall to rest on her folded knees, and closed her eyes. She furrowed her brow as she felt within herself, cautiously checking for signs of overgiving, as the Burned Man had showed her. Her initiation to reimancy had been somewhat atypical, as her teacher had elected to cut not only her palms but also a thin slice across her stomach, just above the belly button, starting at her rib cage and extending down and to the side in a shallow half circle, like a frown from hip to hip. The thought had been that that area of flesh was highly sensitive, and could act as a warning trigger should she ever be close to overgiving. And it had worked for her before; last time she had used too much reimancy she had felt a burning in her diaphragm, which had turned into a symptom much like hiccups when she continued to cast, only much more painful and uncontrollable.

It was in this area of her body that she now felt, pressing a hand flat against her belly. Nothing yet. The amount of res she had generated thus far was not unusually large, and after that she hadn't done anything but the mental, playing around with what she had called forth. At this rate, she felt she could continue on for quite a while, if necessary. Isolde opened her eyes, and went back to work.

by **Isolde Seibold** on March 17th, 2015, 8:34 pm

For a long time she sat there, messing around with the res, shaping it, scrapping the shape, doing it again. She made a sort of star shape, and then like a diamond, a boot, an arrow. Eventually she molded the res-clay back into its original lump once more, thinking... and then she frowned. Hesitantly, she reached out.

The first touch contoured the edges, polishing out the bumps. The res looked again like a sphere, and she tweaked it gently, enticing it to shape longer, more like an ovoid or an egg, though not quite. She pulled at the bottom, and it extended downwards, into a column coming out of the ball, as if supporting it. Isolde ran her hands lightly over that, dragging the sides of it gently outwards, and the column thickened in increments, and shortened. She sat back, considering the new shape.

It looked like a sketch of a human head, complete with a neck at the bottom. Isolde put out her hand and touched the base of the neck, and called more res to her palms, thickened already to the consistency of clay. She pressed her hands to either side of the neck, adding the new res, and the edges blossomed out, forming rough shoulders. These the Nuit widened with deft movements, turning the form in midair to make certain the back was the right shape and not too skinny. She spun the thing to face her, staring at it. At him. At what she wished she could form to look like him.

It was only a vague shape, and now Isolde turned more to the details. She closed her eyes again. Picturing him. She was frightened that maybe she wouldn't be able to picture him clearly, but the images came quickly to mind. Most of them were moving, memories of him laughing or playing with Wynry, cooing to one of his birds or clucking at the chickens, playing cards with the other men at the Outpost, working in the field with his back stained with sweat, gathering her close to him in his arms. She drew the memory of his face into the fore of her mind, then opened her eyes and inspected the rough head and shoulders she'd created. Isolde picked her hands up once more, and laid them lightly on the unshapen face.

She widened the jaw, angling it, drew more res to her palms and added the indistinct shape of ears midway up the sides of the head. Smoothed her fingers over the front of the rounded face at an incline, adding the profile of cheekbones. Created yet more res, just a bit, and stuck it onto the front like a nose. She closed her eyes again, drawing up another picture of him; an easy one, this memory one of him sleeping, when she had looked over into his relaxed face. Isolde sculpted the sharpness of the nose with a series of quick, feather-light touches, then dragged her thumbs over and to the side at the top of the bridge, creating the rough outline of his brow. Lines were added to his forehead, calling into existence the creases there and those under and around his eyes. The eyes themselves were blank orbs, matching the top of the head and the bareness of the jawline; he didn't look quite right as it was, she had no prior skill at this, and she didn't know if she could do the intricacies of his eyes and his hair.

For a moment longer, Isolde stared into the incomplete face, hesitant to do anything that might accidentally ruin it. It didn't matter, somehow, that it would not be too difficult to draw this up again, exactly as it was. In fact, it would probably be easier to do again, with some practice, and it would look closer to how he actually had been, as she realized how to create more detail with increasing accuracy. And still. It was ridiculous, she knew. But she didn't want to hurt him. To change him.

Eventually, she forced up her hand and scratched her nails gently against the jawline, dragging out lines that would flesh into fine hair, thickening to a light beard, then, with some more hesitation, a bit of a thicker one. She darkened his eyebrows again, giving them more definition, and played with his ears until they were approximately the right shape, though they didn't sit exactly the same on his head. The actual hair was next, and she chose the mid-range look, swept over messily to the side, because he had grown his hair into many styles throughout the years. This had been one of her favorites. She had to add more res to the top to do the hair, curling her fingers to comb the globs of it into thin strands before laying them in place. It didn't look right, she couldn't capture the natural flair of it, the look of softness as it lay across one eye. The eyes...

The Nuit spent a long time trying to get them right, almost forgetting about the rest. She altered the shape over and over, added thin lashes then thickening them slightly, and again. The eyelids were difficult to sculpt without making them look bulbous or swollen. And then the irises... they were the most difficult of all. The most frustrating thing about the entire process was the fact that she couldn't get the res to change color, no matter how she willed it. She wanted the eyes to be Vantha, to flicker to life. She wanted the whole thing to come to life, as if recreating his image might bring him back to her in reality. But of course it didn't. Of course it didn't.

Eventually she was finished, that or she couldn't bear to go on. The imperfect face stared back at her and she thought about destroying it as she had the other shapes she had created before. But she couldn't stand to. Instead, Isolde lashed out a flicker of will, and transmuted the res. Immediately, the color of glazed ice turned to that of stone, much like the grayish rock that composed the walls of Syliras. She had her hands out beneath the small statue, and it fell from the air, smacking harshly against her palms. It was heavy, and Isolde strained to lower it gently to the ground, irrationally nervous that if she dropped it the bust might break.

Once it was safely on the grass, Isolde heaved the sculpted hunk of rock into an upright position so that it sat up on its own. She leaned back once more against the tree, panting slightly, and watched it, her arms folded over her chest as if she was cold. Sternly, she told herself that she would only stay for a few chimes, until she caught her breath and was ready to leave. In the meantime, she studied the product of her work with a discerning eye, staring unhappily into the malformed, oddly provocative, just-almost-familiar face.

It was bells later that she came to, realizing with a start that the light had shifted, and that Syna was already starting her slow descent down. The Nuit scrambled to her feet, turned on her heel, and left the Hollow without looking back. She thought if she did she might not be able to tear her eyes away again. She walked quickly, almost in a trot despite her protesting bones, so that she might get to the city before nightfall.

by **Orin Fenix** on April 5th, 2015, 10:34 am

Grades are Served

Isolde Seibold

Skill	XP
Planning	1
Intelligence	2
Observation	3
Reimancy	3
Sculpting	1

Lores

Location: The Hollow in the Bronze Woods
Reimancy: Emitting Djed as a Liquid
Reimancy: Emitting Djed as a Solid
Reimancy: Checking for Overgiving

Shield Points

1

Training

Extras :

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Solo [Bronze Woods] Sculpting with Res-Clay