Completed From Nut to Nuit

[Tsaba]

15th Summer, 513 Tsaba sat at her desk, staring at two nuts. Hazelnuts, according to a brief library search. Not that that was important. The nut to the right was a round, smooth, undamaged little nodule. The one on the left was a pile of nut chips and powder. Her previous look at them hadn't been as useful as she'd hoped, but this time, she was ready. She was armed. She had A Reference For Common Nuts and Legumes lying open on her lap to the page on hazelnuts. There was a little diagram of a cross-section of a hazelnut. Tsaba wondered briefly what kind of person carefully sliced nuts into sections to diagram their contents. But it wasn't really any stranger than what she was doing, she supposed. She remembered the different sections from her previous Auristic foray -- the fibrous outer layer, the waxy meat, the pulpy little half-moon slivers that, according to the book, had something to do with hazelnut reproduction. After studying the diagram for several seconds, she lit one of her little six-chime candles, and focused on the whole nut. "Dalat djas-pond," she muttered under her breath, as if giving herself an order. "Radjudt Irst." Having examined this particular nut before, it was easy to make sense of the aura. Especially with a diagram telling her what to look for. Room temperature, three different layers of material. Alive but dormant. The auras barely moved, largely free of the flowing waves of colour that accompanied the aura of a living person in her eyes, but lack of motion did not mean lack of information; the colours, while mostly still, gave away texture and temperature in their pattern and hue. She knew what colour a room temperature body was. She knew what texture the pulpy flesh of a liver gave an aura. It was all the same. It just lacked a heartbeat. Tsaba shut off her Auristic sight, surprised to find that for the first time since she'd started timing herself, she hadn't exceeded her self-imposed six-chime time limit. The candle extinguished itself just as she noticed that, and she sat back, pushing her palms against her eyes more out of habit than to actually deal with pain. The familiar post-Auristics fatigue washed over her. It would disappear soon enough. Still, best not to push it, and give herself time to recover before using any more magic. Tsaba slipped a scrap of parchment into her book as a bookmark, turned to the first page, and started reading about nuts. If she needed to rest, she might as well learn something while she did so.

[Tsaba]

Tsaba made herself wait until a whole bell had passed before trying Auristics again. She took a few minutes to refresh her memory of the hazelnut diagram before lighting another six-chime candle. Then, chanting under her breath, she focused on the pulverised hazelnut. The fragments of structure left in the nut chips was a chaotic mess. It was impossible to make head nor tail of it, to recognise it as a whole, but damaged, nut. So she stopped trying. It is what it is, not what it was, she told herself. The nut was gone; what she had before her was a crushed mass. And within it were fragments of slightly differently textured material, all stirred up together. She'd been taught to look for the patterns of motion that suggested stable signs of life, and to ignore everything else; erratic pulses were a problem, but no pulse was meaningless. But she couldn't think like that any more. The fragments of nut were as real as a whole nut; the whole nut was as real as a human. She focused on the temperature, the texture, the size of the different pieces within the little pile. Next to her, a flame died, and Tsaba reluctantly pulled her attention back to her more material senses.

[Tsaba]

The fatigue rolled over Tsaba once more. She sat perfectly still for a few chimes, making sure that she wouldn't fall over before getting to her feet. She was still moving too quickly, delving too deeply. Magic-related mental damage was one of the few things that could permanently hurt her, and she couldn't seem to resist toying with it. But she did have other chores. She passed the time with her body maintenance routine. She undressed and carefully ran her fingertips over every bit of flesh that she could reach; up arms, over shoulders, down her torso and legs. The tightly-sewn wound in the center of her abdomen stretching from just under her sternum down to her pelvis was awarded special attention as she checked for any sign of moisture or torn stitches. It was her deepest wound, the cut that had been made to remove her body's organs before she'd ever inhabited it, and while that gave it the advantage of being both professionally sewn and properly dried out before her own soul had started messing with the body, it was still her most vulnerable cut. She also checked the other stitched wounds on her body, most of them minor cuts but for her sewn-on right pinky finger. It still didn't move and she couldn't feel anything through it, which wasn't surprising. Tsaba dusted her entire body with preservative salts before dressing again. It was a habit she'd picked up in the moist coastal air of Zeltiva, an attempt to keep her flesh as dry as possible. She hadn't been around long enough to know how well it worked yet. Immediate chores taken care of, Tsaba turned her eye back to Auristics.

[Tsaba]

Tsaba rolled a hazelnut contemplatively in her left palm. It was a nut. Just a nut. And her hand was just a hand. She could do this. She lit a six-chime candle, put her right hand palm-down on the desk, and focused. A corpse. She was looking at a corpse. A dead hand with the veneer of life overlaid, a soft peach glow that permeated the flesh but didn't pulse, didn't flow. It was, as usual, stronger around the sites where she drew the runes for the transfer ritual. And the room-temperature, unmoving flesh was wrong. No. Not wrong. Just different. She clenched and relaxed her hand. With the exception of the paralysed little finger which was no more than dead flesh, the glow shifted through her hand with the movement. It settled once she stopped. But the flesh itself didn't respond; it was like a puppet. Think of it like a hazelnut. Layers of textured flesh. That's what she needed to look for. It didn't matter that the sum of those layers was a corpse. Hard nodules in the center, separated by a thin layer of flexible but worn tissue. Fibrous yet spongy strands lay over them in neat, defined rows, permeated by tiny tubes. The layer of malleable fat was so fine as to almost be nonexistent; a natural consequence of the Nuit condition. And over it all, the fine, dry, papery protective layer. In mortals it would regenerate, but in Tsaba it wore over time and threatened to split at certain junctures. Just meat. Just layers of tissue. Nothing creepy about it. If she kept telling herself that, then just maybe, she could make herself believe it.

[Tsaba]

When her six-chime candle extinguished itself, Tsaba was tempted to ignore it. But a rule was a rule. She'd kept herself alive through sheer willpower; what chance did mere curiosity and the joy of expanding one's senses have at defeating her? It must have some, or she wouldn't have been using Auristics so much within a single day. Tsaba didn't get up right away. Instead, she turned back to A Reference for Common Nuts and Legumes. It would probably do her good to focus on something mundane for a bit. Something with nothing to do with magic, or the dead flesh of her own body. Although she was interested in seeing the effect of wounds on her 'dead' flesh. Would they show up as a mere interruption in the pattern, like the crushed nut before her? Would they show up as an angry threat to stability, like a cut on a living person? She really should have investigated that. Nuts. Read about nuts. Magic could wait. The two practice nuts were still on the desk before her. She put them away in a drawer, out of sight, then turned back to her book. She couldn't move too fast. Bad things happened to people who pushed themselves with magic. She was a scribe; a student of the quill and letter. Not some crazy mage. She was in control. No matter how many tantalising questions Auristics left her with.

[Eldritch]

Tsaba :

Skills
Auristics +3
Observation +3
Embalming +2

Lores
-Studying the components of a hazelnut
-More comfortable with auristics
-Caring for your body

Notes :

Nice thread as always Tsaba, I'm curious to see where your research takes this.

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

Keep on writing!