Nuts, Loaves and Fishes

by **Tsaba** on June 12th, 2013, 7:56 am

12th Summer, 513AV

Tsaba wandered through the marketplace, one leather-gloved hand holding her hood up against the tugging breeze. She'd found it was best not to let people get a better view of her than absolutely necessary; despite Zeltiva's port being Sahova's main access to the mainland, so few people seemed to know what a Nuit was, and the general reaction to seeing her face seemed to be overwhelming concern for her health. She should get a scarf or something, although that would look even stranger than a hood in early Summer. Perhaps in Winter, things would be easier.

It didn't take her long to find what she wanted -- fish. A stall selling fish, some laid in salt, more laid out fresh. All dead, of course. She picked up a fresh one.

Tsaba needed to get comfortable with bodies. She was never going to be able to look at herself properly with Auristics until she could shake the 'dead is bad' thing that was ingrained into her as a child. And it made sense to start with a nice, safe, meant-to-be-dead thing, like food.

She pulled djed into her sight.

It wasn't hard to ignore her own aura and focus on the fish. It would have been difficult before she'd started practising looking at herself, because she'd always ignored nonliving auras, but now she had a reasonable idea of what to look for. Dead flesh, the remnants of systems of flow that no longer functioned, like a dry riverbed or water marks in stone. Spine. Meat. Skin. Yep, that... that sure was a fish. It was harder to see anything without the moving, flowing aura, but it was there. She shut off her Auristic sight and put it back down, as if reconsidering a purchase.

But a fish had all the systems she was used to. What about a challenge? What about something so far removed from life that those systems were no longer recognisable?

by **Tsaba** on June 12th, 2013, 1:32 pm

The next stall sold bread; common, nearly stale stuff. Tsaba once again pulled djed into her sight and inspected a loaf. There was no pattern, no system; far from guessing the course of the river from seeing a dry riverbed, it was like trying to guess the course of the river after the riverbed had been obliterated entirely by wind and rain. But the problem, of course, was that she was looking for the pattern, the evidence of a living system. And there was more to an object than that. She made herself focus on the object itself; the temperature, the little pockets of air...

With a sigh, she put the loaf down. It felt... unimportant, compared to the people passing by. She could look at any one of them and see a pattern, a flow... the bread barely had any flow at all. It was just there.

"Good deal on bread today, Missy. Sure you don't want one?"

"No thanks," Tsaba said with a smile, meeting the stallowner's eyes. She strode off before he had a chance to ask if she was ill.

by **Tsaba** on June 18th, 2013, 8:57 am

Tsaba ran her hand along a wooden crate full of apples. Wood... plants had flow, life; presumably they moved sap or water or whatever through themselves similarly to blood. But they were still very different to anything that Tsaba had been trained to look at. Perhaps they would be better for practise than corpses? She needed a... a stick, or a plant, or something. Perhaps she should keep plants? That seemed like a lot of work for an Auristics experiment. But fruit would rot and die so quickly...

Out of the corner of her eye, Tsaba spotted a stall selling nuts. Perfect. She bought a handful of smooth, bulky ones, and was tempted to test them then and there... but she really should pace herself.

Several bells later, Tsaba sat in her room, two hazelnuts sitting on her desk in front of her. She stuck one in her mouth, carefully crushed it with her remaining teeth, and then spat it out. She lit one of her six-chime candles and began to focus.

There was life, in the undamaged nut. The potential for flow, but... dormancy. The rivulets for... whatever moved in plants... were tiny, smaller than anything she was used to, and the system was alien. She tried to focus not on the almost nonexistent flow, but instead on the avenues for it; the thick shell was fibrous but barely penetrable, like a tightly woven reed basket; the waxy flesh within lay mostly solid with tiny lateral channels, the only real difference in texture being the two slightly pulpier crescents facing the centre. Tsaba shifted her focus to the pulverised nut, just as her candle went out.

She wanted to continue, but rules were rules. Reluctantly, she shut off her Auristic sight and pulled out a piece of parchment.

She had diagrams to make.

"bought"0.1lb hazelnuts = 5CM

by **Tsaba** on June 24th, 2013, 6:29 pm

Tsaba sketched what she saw to the best of her abilities, which were unfortunately underwhelming. But they were good enough, she thought, for her to understand in the future. And that was what mattered.

About a bell passed by the time she was satisfied with her sketch, and she refocused. She lit another tiny six-chime candle as her Auristic sight focused on the undamaged nut once more. It was easier to focus now that she knew what the aura would look like. That seemed to be an advantage of using Auristics on inanimate objects.

She turned her attention to the pulverised nut.

It meant nothing to her. No more than the loaf of bread. Ingrained habit tried to skip right over it, to ignore the aura as mere background; it was interference, just meaningless chaos that made up the background against which living auras were set. She forced herself to look at it, to pick out anything familiar from the whole nut. She could tell that it was room temperature. It was a pulpy, loose mass. But there was nothing about it that would differentiate it from, say, a small pile of sand.

Tsaba's candle went out, and she hissed in frustration. She knew that Aurists could tell sand from nuts, wood from stone. It was supposed to be a very, very basic distinction. So why was it so difficult for her? She pulled out a clean sheet of parchment. Not because she'd seen anything worth diagramming; what she needed to write was a letter.

by **Tsaba** on June 25th, 2013, 6:35 am

Tsaba dipped her quill in ink and put it to paper.

Craun,

Hope this finds you well. I have been experimenting further with Auristics and while the hyperspecialised skills you taught me may have served a healer well, they are somewhat of an impediment to a broader understanding of the skill. Will start Glyphing classes soon; hopefully, a proper grounding in such a discipline will help to compensate.

I strongly suspect that the methods used by the local humans may be more useful overall, largely due to their... what were your words?... 'Intolerable lack of focus'. I eagerly await the opportunity to be proven wrong. The world is a vast, complex place, and as futile as it may be to try to absorb all of it, it is simply foolish to pretend that nonety per cent of it does not exist. Do let me know if you have any advice to offer; I'm staying at the Zeltivan University. I hope your experiments go well, and please try not to kill anyone in my absence.

All my love,
Tsaba

by **Eldritch** on August 5th, 2013, 7:55 pm

Tsaba :

Notes :

If you have any comments/questions/concerns about your grade please PM me and we will work something out.

Keep on writing!

Completed Nuts, Loaves and Fishes