[Flashback] Power, not Knowledge

[Hadrian]

15th Fall, 506 A.V. "Did you bring the money?" asked the older boy. Young Hadrian, chlorine blue eyes wide with a goodly amount of health fear, nodded. "Right, well. Hand it over." The younger student did so. They were in a garret apartment underneath a building nowhere near nor affiliated with the University. How the young first-year had even gotten here was not a particularly interesting or unique story. He had arrived in Zeltiva, fresh-faced and excited, only to run afoul of a bar brawl when he went exploring the places where sailors drank their grog and kelp beer. A bit roughed up, but mostly unharmed, he had escaped before the real rollicking began. Still, now he was afraid. He didn't know the first thing about fighting, but he was taking a course in the history of magic and some of the older students were mages in their own right. This one, a reimancer of some note among his peers, had let it be known through some student-only channels that he would initiate people for a price. This was of interest to some students, who wanted to get around the prerequisite classes before a university reimancer would initiate a student properly. "All right, bitch," he said. "On your knees." The smirk on his face was disgusting. Hadrian narrowed his eyes. He had grown up in Syliras, knew that the Golden Dragon had men and women for both men and women. Though he would spend his father's money on this, he wasn't about to... "You wish," he spat with youthful indignation. "Give me the money back." "Relax, kid." The upperclassman reimancer snickered at him. "Part of the ritual. Can't have you falling over and breaking your ickle biddle head, now can we?" Hadrian frowned, but knelt. "Hold out your hands." The younger student frowned suspiciously, but did as he was told. Quick as anything, the elder student's hand flashed out. There was a knife and a quick bite along Hadrian's palms. "Son of a whore!" Hadrian shouted, surprised more than hurt, though when he squeezed his hands into fists, it did hurt. "What the..." "Hold them out." The older boy cleaned his knife, though it had been so quick, it hardly needed it. And then he began to concentrate until milky smoke began to emanate from his own palms. When enough had been produced, it moved as if intelligently toward Hadrian, who knelt there frozen, afraid to breathe. The gaseous res toyed with him, twined around his fingers before entering his wounds, coiling around his neck before entering his eyes, nose, and mouth, and finally enveloping all of him before forcing its way in through his pores. It hurt. Hadrian screamed. Time passed. It seemed like eternity to Hadrian, but in fact it wasn't so very long at all. When the res left him, he fell over, to worn out and trampled by energies not his own to care that his face was grinding into the dirty floor. His initiator crouched down beside him. "Quickly now," he said, strain telling in his voice. "What you felt inside you... reproduce it. You have to do it now. It will get more difficult if you wait." "What?" Hadrian asked, dazed, but he heard and tried to obey. This older student was an acknowledged... well, not expert, but he was expert by student standards. Hastening to obey, Hadrian attempted to replay that feeling, but pushing it out instead of allowing it inside. Nothing happened. "Oh come on," the other complained. "Hurry up. I got it on my first try." Suddenly the sound of his voice was not only sickening, it was nauseating. Hadrian vomited on his shoes. "Gods damn it!" he shouted. "Ugh!" It was res on those shoes. Hadrian immediately saw images of fire, imagined his tormentor's shoes catching fire, but nothing happened. "It's not working," he complained. "I can't set it alight." "Well, your first element might not be fire. Try earth... you seem to enjoy wallowing in the dirt." He began to wipe off his shoes with that same handkerchief he had used on his knife. Hadrian tried imagining that res as dirt. Nothing. He tried making it disappear in a puff of air. Nothing. Finally, he tried to transmute it into water. The reimancer's handkerchief was suddenly clean, though wet. "Water," he grunted. "Makes sense, you little..." "Water?!" Hadrian protested angrily. "But I wanted fire." "Tough luck. You don't always get what you want."

[Hadrian]

"All right, well, another satisfied customer." Zan smirked down at Hadrian. "I'll just be on my way..." "Wait, but you haven't taught me anything yet!" Hadrian protested, blood boiling at both the gods' choice for his primary element and Zan's desertion. "You paid for initiation, kid. Nobody said anything about teaching you. If you wanted instruction, you should've waited until you were ready to take a class with one of the reimancy professors. Besides, you have no life; you've probably read up on all the basic exercises already." He exited, entirely unmoved by Hadrian's sense of logic and justice. Zan was right, however. Hadrian had done as much preparatory research as possible. Left to his own devices, Hadrian stared at his hands, though the bleeding had already slowed. His rage, though, had not. He was in pain, exhausted, and upset, and suddenly it felt as if his blood really were boiling. He bit back a scream as res began to pour out of his wounds, a strange liquid mixed with his blood. As the res spilled down onto his knees and, thence, down to the floor, he struggled to regain some kind of control over it. Gradually, the flow began to respond to his will, slowing, then stopping, the wounds cleaned out and hopefully soon to scab over. The mess on the floor drew his chlorine blue gaze like iron to a magnet. Concentrating again, he tried to make the res return to his hands, but to no avail. The res felt slippery in his mental grasp and, rather than wear himself out further, he focused on something he had already accomplished once: transmutation. He tried again to make it light on fire, but the gods, apparently, had spoken. All he could manage was water. And the water was murky with his blood now. A puddle of clouded water was all he had to show for his initiation and Zan's bribe. Perhaps a master pyromancer might have given him fire as Zan could not or, at least, had not, but there was nothing to it. More advanced reimancers were known to pick up more elements. Perhaps he would manage that... But for now, he struggled to his feet without putting his hands down and dirtying his ritual wounds. He wanted to get out of this place and leave the mess to someone else.

[Hadrian]

Hadrian didn't always do well with blood, so when he got to the wall, he leaned against it. His eyes shifted from the wounds on his hands to the mess of bloody water in the middle of the room. A little light-headed, he decided to test things out a bit before he tried to walk home or anything similarly heroic. In his arms, he could feel energy flowing almost like blood pumping toward his hands. The effort caused a sweat to break out on his upper lip and his forehead, his flesh feeling alternately clammy and just overheated. But the effort paid off. Pressure built up in his hands, and he focused it as best he could toward his fingertips, which felt almost like they were going to pop. Finally, they did, though not with blood, but merely an almost painful release of res from the pores all over his hands, but mostly through the fingers and fingertips. He was exerting a certain amount of control, he realized, pleased. "Petching Zan," he muttered. Concentrating, his lower lip caught between his teeth, he began to transmute it again. He could call water, then. He sighed. He supposed there would be useful tricks he could do with hydromancy if he was clever, but he still did long for the brute strength of fire. There was little brutal or strong about him otherwise. Hadrian continued to push the energy from his core out through his hands, trying to see how long he could maintain the reaction that changed energy into water. It felt like he was bracing against himself, almost like trying to pass a particularly troublesome stool, and finally he stopped, breathing heavily and sweating profusely. If he didn't gather himself and stop expending energy, he might not be able to make it home after all.

[Hadrian]

The power flowed freely now, drawing energy from his core, moving without his direction now. The transmutation of djed to res continued without undue effort, as well as the transmutation of res to water, but he was starting to feel dizzy. Trying to ease off on the flow of energy didn't seem to help, and he truly began to panic. Hand slipping on the door, water continued to pour off of his hands, conjured and seeming without end. The traces of blood were lost in the continued creation of the element, though the lightheadedness might not have been all from the power drain. He batted at the door once, twice, and then got it to open, stumbling through and up the stairs to street level. As if to mock him, the sky was pouring rain, a fall storm from Makutsi to send everyone indoors who might have helped him, and hide his crisis from anyone who might be watching from a window. He could feel the reaction along his palms, knowing that not all of this water was from the heavens, and he tried to hurry home. It would be worse in his mind to pass out on the street, raised as he was by the queen of etiquette. His body shook, and he didn't think it was the autumnal chill. He tasted something metallic in his mouth as if he had bit his tongue. Frightened, he began to go over the list of symptoms of overgiving through reimancy and quickened his pace, pounding down the street toward his cottage; or should he run to the University and hope one of his professors could help him. Decisions, decisions.

[Hadrian]

Eventually, he arrived home, water still seeping out of his palms, but not so much as when he had first stumbled out onto the street. His clothes were soaked by the rain and he trailed water from the sky as well as from his own magical reaction across the floor and into the kitchen. Taking a candle, he held it into the banked fire until it lit, then went around the room lighting yet more. He put a log on the fire, stoked it into more violent life until it began to lick up the length of the wood. Next, he hurried back to the kitchen and began shoving food into his mouth for fear that he would starve himself, his power feeding on his body. There wasn't much fat on him to burn away. Finally, slumped on the floor and leaning against a cupboard, he stared at his hands, hands that wept beyond his control. He dared to use a bit more power, blinking several times in frustration, cursing, and finally blinking his meager Auristics into being to see what was happening. What he saw may or may not have been a hallucination, but his hands were burning brightly, like two blue stars the size of his hands had taken up position there, and were making a woozy effect on his vision similar to Syna burning herself into the retinas for a time. Everything around his hands was a wash of colors and patterns that made him sick to his stomach, but he couldn't afford to lose the potential energy in his stomach, so instead he blinked, trying to banish the Sight. He had more luck with that than he did with the out of control reimancy. He got up and staggered over to his bed, falling onto it as the room continued to spin, then narrow into tunnel vision, and then disappear. Though Hadrian was out for the count, it took a few minutes for the magical reaction to stop. But gradually, the production of water slowed and ceased, and the heat of the newly stoked fire gradually dried the place. END

[Daoloth]

Let me unveil your rewards Name:Hadrian XP Award: Reimancy:2,Auristics:1 Lore Award:Jumping to conclusions,The feeling of getting initiated,Vomiting on your “teachers” shoe, getting scammed, queasy from blood,The grip of overgiving, Additional Notes I really enjoyed grading this tread Hadrian and If all your following ones are as good as this one then I got no problem with the mountain of them in my office anyway as always not content with your awards? don't hesitate to PM me about it, I'm still fairly new.