Flashback The Batty Dead

[Vosk]

The Survival Facility, 12th of Spring, 41 AV

Slowly as the years wafted by like the scented candles from a time before her own, the confines of this dark underground area had gotten to her. Insatiable boredom coupled with the malaise of maintaining her body methodically each and every period of time - maddeningly nobody reported on the whereabouts of the sun each day - had driven Vosk into a fit of finding something to do. She sat upon a stool that creaked at every small movement with the age it possessed. Laid out before her were the remains of a small bat. Living creatures were rare to come by, and the sway she had over the rations allowed her to bargain with the humans above in the more oxygenated rooms in exchange for small and simple life that would usually be consumed when captured.

Gazing upon the furry little once-flying rodent, she thought now would be a great time to learn more about the inner workings of such a creature so that she might better use it with her magic. Insects and rodents. Cave moss and fungus. These were the only things readily available unless she were to open a gate to another world. The prospect was tempting for at least one of the worlds, but an outpost in another land would lead to circumstances that rendered the wizards obsolete and therefore the end of their existence. To her left a small set of tools for cutting, extracting, and pinning were splayed out over a piece of vellum as well as a vial of ink made from somebody's blood and a brush made from hairs. Nothing was wasted in the facility. Retrieving two metallic pins, Vosk pulled apart the wings and stretched them apart, driving a pin through them unceremoniously to get a better look at the creature. Her hands hastily retrieved a magnifying lens and set about examining the fur for consistency.

[Vosk]

It was very fine, close together and soft by appearance alone. Risking further rot, Vosk ran her finger from the other hand along the soft belly fur in curiosity to glean more information. She pinched the mane between her fingers, the softness delighting her morbid curiosity slightly before she huffed and set down the magnifying lens. She realized she had forgotten something. It seemed worthwhile to draw a focus at this point in time, to help stabilize the djed she was about to channel. Vosk picked up the vial of blood ink and unscrewed the cap. The vial had a flat bottom, so she wasn't worried about spillage. Carefully, she picked up the paint brush and dabbed it into the vial, getting the hairs on the end of the brush drenched in the fluid. She laid her right arm flat on the table, forearm facing the ceiling. Vosk set the brush to her skin, recalling the focus that had become her style over the years she had spent as a wizard.

The focus was a basic sigil. It had a lot of intricacies in terms of fancifulness but it was fairly easy to draw. Her own sigil matched the movements of a curling wrist nicely, a series of crescent shapes converging into a cage of four half-moons. The center of the glyph became even more simplified, two straight intersecting lines flowing to the center and symbolizing the capture of djed. Vosk bent her wrist and slashed the paint over her skin, a ticklish feeling but not altogether unpleasant. The temperature was room temperature, the same as her flesh.

[Vosk]

With further slow and deliberate strokes of paint, the sigil began to come into focus. It wasn't perfect, but the arms of the crescents misaligning didn't seem to hinder the glyph much in practice. Still, a sloppy glyph is often a dangerous glyph when handling serious magic. The magic Vosk handled was mere dabbling, so she surmised this would be just fine. Setting the brush to her skin again, she carefully traced the vertical and horizontal lines through the glyph and complete it, dabbing the center with her brush and setting it aside.

Closing her eyes and crossing her fingers for good measure, the Nuit began to imagine the bat fur she had inspected earlier. The silky smooth texture, the short forest of hairs. Fine detail was difficult, but it was more of a trial and error process. The human who taught her warned that not even an expert in the field could replicate a form perfectly on their first go at a mere glance. Still, Vosk had all the time in the world considering her indefinite lifetime. There was enough time in this world to take it easy, to study, to learn, to diversify and improve. Morphing had gifts she was willing to work for, but there would be a toll to pay in time.

Receding into the back of her mind, she concentrated on building up the hairs individually within the confined space of the focus, keeping those concepts in mind. It was a slow process, the strange sensations of stretching flesh and shifting mass tickling her due to their small size brushing over the nerves of the body her mind inhabited. All the while she worked by senses aside from sight, trying to feel her way through the magic and keep her concentration absolute. The focus proved to be effective in wrangling the unfamiliar djed. Eventually the time came where she had to open her eyes and admire her handiwork, only feeding the transformation enough djed to stay active.

[Vosk]

When her eyes met her creation, it was a mild disappointment. The hairs were huge, black, gangly and crooked in some places. In other places, they were short and stubby or jutting off at odd angles. It was truly a horrible transformation, but then again this was her first attempt at trying hair, let alone bat hair. She resolved that she would fix this in time with repeated transformations to slowly build her outline into a full painting. This time she decided she would accompany the transformation visually, aiding it with her gaze.

When her eyes met her creation, it was a mild disappointment. The hairs were huge, black, gangly and crooked in some places. In other places, they were short and stubby or jutting off at odd angles. It was truly a horrible transformation, but then again this was her first attempt at trying hair, let alone bat hair. She resolved that she would fix this in time with repeated transformations to slowly build her outline into a full painting. This time she decided she would accompany the transformation visually, aiding it with her gaze. Vosk formed a theory in that moment that visual concentration would help improve with finer detail, while absolute mental concentration was better for shifting lots of mass around.

[Vosk]

As her concentration renewed force, she imagined what the hairs were missing in comparison to the bat hair. Shorter, thinner hairs that were silky smooth instead of the pubic hair-like protrusions that she had conjured out of faulty performance. Holding these refined images in her mind, she paid close attention to the finer details as she tapped into the magic once again. Over the next several chimes, she stretched new hairs and even gave them small roots rather than affix them to the skin like the buildings of a micro city. Of the existing hairs and the new hairs, she shrunk them down to uniform length, and reduced their thickness while smoothing out their texture.

The sheer concentration was difficult for the Nuit, but the actual djed drain from this was small. She suspected that she could do something of the sort three times over before needing to recuperate her djed reserves. Vosk continued to refine and perfect her transformation, trying to reach the perfect consistency and softness. Then, she focused on the color. The soft dirty brown was much unlike the black hair of her current body, she went over each hair individually, one by one as she adjusted the coloration.

[Vosk]

Of course, everything she did would always have the hue of decay. She knew wounds were difficult to Morph, and she theorized rotting flesh to be the same way. As time passed, the hair would begin to grey unsustained by the products of life. Her transformation was no different, and there was already a grey tinge to it. As her body reached greater stages of decay, so would her transformations. Still, an artist could cover the blemishes on her canvas.

The final result was a small patch of grey-tinged brown fur, almost blending together into a form of discoloration on the arm due to how small the hairs were. It was a lot of work, but with an unfamiliar discipline anything she did would be a challenge in itself. With this particular transformation, her experience with it had become more resolute. She felt more comfortable morphing hair in general, comfortable enough to remove the guide of her focus. Still maintaining her transformation, Vosk retrieved a rag from the tray nearby and began to roughly wipe away the glyph made of blood carefully, watching it in case the glyph breaking would create some sort of reaction. Vosk knew that the things she didn’t know would come to manifest as mistakes, and caution was her truest virtue. Still, a little fun every once in awhile seemed to help her mental state given these long years underground.

[Vosk]

With the focus gone, her djed was less confined and more ‘free’ when she tried to direct it. Gazing upon her skin and thinking back to the concepts and alterations she had made, the model of bat fur was beginning to become something she could experiment with. It was a partial model that would take more perfection to be sure. As she concentrated and watched the hairs sprout with that shoddy structure of djed as a basis, it became more and more easier. She focused on covering her entire forearm with the hairs, getting used to the more rampant and uncontrolled circumstances without the aid of her glyph. Slowly, over the next thirty chimes or so she replicated the silky short hairs all over the top of her forearm. Exhaustion from concentration was beginning to set in, and a tingling sensation was beginning to form underneath the transformation from the djed drain. Vosk knew it was time to stop, but she hesitated for a moment. Snapping out of it, she wrenched her mind from that place and weaned the transformation of djed.

Vosk had noticed that as she came closer and closer to overgiving, her mind would begin to betray her. It was for this reason that she perhaps made little progress, never willing to go far enough with the risk of actually going too far hanging over her head. It seemed that even minute details could have greater djed drain when made macro versus simple details made macro, perhaps as a side effect of keeping her djed active, or maybe djed wasn’t something with a ‘size’ to it but rather something more vague that made her pay for complexity? In either case, she would be more careful in the future.

[Vosk]

Letting the transformation subside, Vosk cut off the djed flow and let the transformation shift back to the natural state of skin. She watched as the hairs receded into her flesh. Her morphing experiment? It was a resounding success. She had successfully morphed hair, and she knew she was on her way to greater things with the discipline. There was so much arcane value in even the simplest creatures, even a dead bat. Inspiration, ingenious creativity. These two things would be useful in the coming years of her study, and she knew she had access to them.

Her fatigue had reached her, and her mind was too rattled for anything else. Vosk decided that she would leave to eavesdrop on her friend Kalere. But first, she had to clean up. The Nuit removed the pins from the bat wings and set them aside. With the rag she had used to wipe the blood, she picked up the bat and went over to the far side of the wall where there was a sealed alcove hollowed out from the stone, covered by a circular stone tile. There was a nob on the tile, which she pulled away to expose the contents of the container. Salt for preservation. Vosk knew she still had to remove the internal organs and fill the creature with ash to truly preserve it, but for the next day a tomb without moisture was the perfect place for it.

Pushing aside the salts, she buried the bat and covered it up to preserve it and then she sealed up the salty prison. Another day of productive unlife.

[Kaleidoscope]

 

Vosk

Skills

• Observation: +4
• Medicine: +1
• Painting: +2
• Glyphing: +2
• Morphing: +5
• Embalming: +1

Lores

• Waste not want not
• Medicine: Dissecting a bat
• Anatomy: Properties of bat fur
• Morphing: Using glyphs to focus
• Morphing: Different ways of concentrating for different levels of detail
• Morphing: Creating hair
• Recognising overgiving in self

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CHARACTER 2

Skills

• Example 1
• Example 2
• Example 3
• Example 4

Lores

• Example 1
• Example 2
• Example 3
• Example 4

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CHARACTER 3

Skills

• Example 1
• Example 2
• Example 3
• Example 4

Lores

• Example 1
• Example 2
• Example 3
• Example 4

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Comments: Hi there! I very much enjoyed reading this thread! I hope you're happy with the grades, and I'll be happy to look over it again if you'd like something else.

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