Completed Holding Down the Trigger

[Tsaba]

64th Summer, 513AV Tsaba sat at the small desk in her room. Around her, several books were open to example trigger glyphs. In front of her, parchment sat white and flat, awaiting her brush. And just to the right sat her single example of her Master's trigger glyph, on the fire reimancy scroll she'd given Tsaba to study. The scroll was carefully pinned out with stones, facing upward so that accidental triggering wouldn't fire directly at anything important. Tsaba suspected that the trigger would be the most difficult glyph to learn. A focus had one job: hold and reflect any magic. A barrier, similarly, had one job: don't let any magic through. But a trigger... a trigger had conditions. A trigger had to be primed with the right activation condition, and with the right task. That was rather a lot more complicated than rote-painting a single-purpose glyph. But Tsaba knew how to handle that. She pulled over one of the glyphing books, and began to read.

[Tsaba]

A trigger can be set with a variety of conditions. Generally, simple conditions are more reliable and easier; a novice in the art is advised to use basic phrases or physical contact trigger conditions without user discrimination. Similarly, while an expert may be able to activate or deactivate several kinds of glyphs using a trigger, the safest uses are the simplest, such as deactivating a barrier. The following is an example of a trigger designed to deactivate a barrier upon physical contact (safety-obscured with a diagonal line). The text was somewhat less useful than Tsaba would have liked. She looked at the glyph. It was indeed a trigger glyph; she could tell as much on sight, although the details weren't obvious. So. Same process as normal: find and build on a 'skeleton'. Complicated by the fact that so many of her example glyphs used different trigger conditions. She picked up her brush and began to distil common lines, seeking for a 'core' in each glyph. she was getting a better instinctive feel for the art, a better idea of which strokes were 'right' and which were 'wrong', and it wasn't long before she found the vertical-line-and-intersecting-cross pattern that she always used as a basis for the 'skeleton' of a glyph. She immediately prioritised those strokes, putting them first in the stroke order. Slowly, the page filled with clusters of strokes, abandoned attempts at the glyph. As she drew, she gained a better sense of what he was drawing. She could do it. She just needed to practise.

[Tsaba]

Tsaba was pretty sure that what was before her was a trigger. It wasn't a great trigger. Elements were missing. If she tried to use it on a scroll, it would probably... misfire, or something. But technically, it was a trigger. She copied it out again. She needed Dr Marin. The whole thing would work better with Dr Marin. Well. Maybe. More likely, Dr Marin would give her some wise-sounding but completely useless advice, then watch her critically while she drew another equally-flawed rune, then frown at it and tell her she would kill everybody with it. That was the problem with needing a teacher; you never knew enough to understand them properly. But what would her mentors say? Craun would amble over and peer at her work, then at her. He'd murmur, "You need to feel the whole element, Child. To know the pulse or the temperature of a body is useless without knowing of the whole. Feel not the components, but how they interact; find the disconnects to know what must he healed." Dr Marin would make her wait until she'd finished her own rune. Then she would give it a quick, but shrewd, glance, and say, probably without looking up, "This is an adequate early attempt, but not a usable glyph. If you used this on a scroll, you could very well release the energy immediately or unpredictably, or prevent the trigger from working at all. Do it again, and remember not to simply copy mine; the way you draw a trigger will look quite different." Do it again. It will look different. Don't focus too heavily on any one element; search the whole for disconnects. That would be a bit easier if she knew what the system was supposed to look like.

[Tsaba]

Tsaba drew the glyph again. She made a few lines smoother, easier to draw. She drew the glyph again. She knitted together some disconnected-looking strokes, turned three connecting strokes into a single jagged line without lifting the brush. She drew the glyph again. Tsaba filled half a page with trigger glyphs before looking once more to the example on Dr Marin's scroll. Then, having worked on what she thought the glyph should look like, she 'copied' that one with her own strokes, in her own hand. Several elements were immediately recogniseable. There was the spine, the djed strokes. There were a few elements reminiscient of her barrier runes, presumably to tie the trigger to the barrier. There were elements that she recognised from the runes she painted on her own body for the transfer ritual; spiky lines from her tongue, from her forehead. Probably related to specifying a word trigger? Could she add to it? Could she add the djas circles, specify that she needed to say the word? Would that work? Probably best not to experiment. Not yet. The runes that she recognised were buried in those that she did not. She traced them with a finger. They were mostly a mess of lines to her. The loop of lines tying the parts of the glyph together... could be Korad. The set of strokes that shaped the others in regimented order around it might be Dala. But she was only guessing; there was only one element that had to be there, that she was certain was there; only one element that needed to be there, because the very instructions on Dr Marin's scroll mentioned it. Tsaba traced the lines of the segment that had been difficult to draw, because it didn't 'flow'. It was several short lines that stopped uncomfortably, right between the lines reminiscient of her tongue rune (Canoch?) and those that looked like fragments of her barrier. The lines looked as if they should connect the two, but when she'd improved the flow of their drawing to link the two together, it had been wrong. The trigger word. Roza. She knew better than to whisper the word in a room with the fire scroll. But now that she'd recognised it, it was... its position was wrong. She'd drawn it as if it was part of the pattern around it, as if it was a link or direction. But it wasn't. It was the detector, the pressure pad on a mousetrap. It should be... separate. The lines around it should specify its use as a trigger word, rather than have it specify anything about those lines. (What would happen to a trigger with 'roza' as part of the glyph itself? It couldn't be a good thing.) Tsaba picked up her brush, and tried again.

[Tsaba]

Once again, Tsaba changed her stroke order. She kept the spine, followed by the rest of the skeleton, first. Then she filled in the rest with her best guess as to the order. But she left out the trigger word. She built the glyph with a gap, then stopped. Looked at it. It wasn't complete without the trigger word. But it was... structurally sound. At least, as far as she could tell. Satisfied, she filled in the rune that she was fairly sure was 'roza', the trigger word. The trigger had real structure, now. She nodded to herself. But how could she be sure? Perhaps she could... use it? No. No, that was too dangerous. Even linking it with a wall and no focus, even just to test it... no, she'd want to check with Dr Marin first. She'd want to be sure. Reluctantly, Tsaba started to put her materials away.

[Abstract]

Tsaba

Skills

+ Researching - 1
+ Drawing - 3
+ Observation - 1

Lores

+ The basics of a 'Trigger Glyph'
+ Needing but not needing a Mentor
+ How to draw a Trigger Glyph

Other:


Notes

Another nice Solo! I like how Tsaba figured this out on her own... trial and error and that stuff. It was an interesting insight on glyphing!

If you have any questions, comments or concerns about this grade, please PM me and we can work it out!