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--- campaign:carve:2023-06-11 [2023/08/22 18:50] – pinkgothic
+++ campaign:carve:2023-06-11 [2024/06/18 20:53] (current) – pinkgothic
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 Very carefully, he clicked the Pen back out of its hold, setting the flask down. He stared at the Pen for a moment, frowning mildly. Then he set it down on the table, and, wordlessly, leant back to the cabinet again, fishing for something else.
-<!--
+**Nymphetamine**:
+Watching with quiet fascination, Leila was quiet, not wanting to disturb him, or perhaps remind him that he was showing an outsider these things. The last thing she wanted was for him to realize what he was doing and worry about either getting caught or in trouble. Quite interested, she leaned forward, peering inside the vial before he began to fiddle with it, explaining patiently like she actually was his apprentice or such. "Why the delay? Or are you not allowed to tell me?"
+**pinkgothic**:
+"Sec," Mateo muttered, not turning back to her at first. Then, after some more seconds, he leant back toward the table, this time making a soft shooing sound for Haffy and nudging gently at her shoulder to get her off his lap. He was holding another pen-like object in one hand. "Tincture is a weird thing," he said. "Weird things happen if you just store it. So, you know, better not to."
+He paused, pressing his lips together and looking at her for a moment, clearly working on something in his head. "How squeamish are you? Because I'm going to use this right here and now to avoid the storage problem, and if you don't want to see that, you should go out for a minute or two after I draw the runes."
+He was still holding the other pen-like object in one hand, hovering the tip vaguely near the bare nook of his left elbow. No doubt it struck her as odd that it wasn't the Pen with the Tincture he was holding.
 **Nymphetamine**:
+He was giving her the option to stay, and that was something she was most definitely going to take. Looking up to his face away from the Pen and the Tincture, she gave him a little grin of encouragement. "Um. Not //that// squeamish," she said with some bravado in her voice. But she was far too interested to see what happened then to want to leave. "My stomach's strong." This was added as an afterthought as if she needed to make that known to him. The last thing she wanted was to just vomit all over his nice, neat apartment. "If you haven't been able to tell, I'm really curious about this..."
 **pinkgothic**:
--->
+He was looking at her with a mild trace of scepticism, but it didn't take over. Instead, he nodded mildly, shaped his breath into something like 'okay,' then nestled the tip of the other pen-like object first into one point on the inside of his elbow, making a bit of a face after one second, then realigning it with another point, and finally a third. As he set it aside, she could see tiny red dots where he'd placed it.
+Not bothering to comment further, he rested his left lower arm on the table and turned his palm up, then grasped the Pen with the Tincture in his right hand, and said: "I'm going to make a photon funnel, because that's two runes, which is about as many as I'm willing to do for demonstration purposes, and so happens to need the amount of Tincture I have."
+His attention was firmly on his arm now, the tip of his tongue poking out past his lips for a moment of almost comic focus. The tip of the Pen set down on his skin, and he drew - and she could see that it was more of a light scratching than anything else, tiny, dust-like specks of skin flaking off in the process, less intense even than a light scratch from a cat but for the Tincture that came in its wake.
+It didn't act like acid. Instead, it seemed to seep into the skin as a pigment, leaving behind a slightly rusty look, somewhere between aged metal and a dry scab, except perfectly level with the skin. The shapes Mateo was drawing had an almost geometrical precision, looking nothing like hand-writing and everything like stencilled characters.
+It was very clear where one rune stopped and the next started, but they were more rectangular than anything usually called 'rune', drawn orthogonal to the direction of his arm. One looked like an elongated 'T' with two trunks, like a simplified, stretched Pi symbol. The other was four circles in abutting pairs, combined with a line.
+Then he set the Pen back down, grasped his left hand in his right, pressing his thumb quite firmly into his palm, and stared down at what he had drawn. The rust colour was gradually darkening further, and developing strange fringes that looked vaguely like frost.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+It wasn't everyday that someone like her got to see a sorcerer at work. And whether this was for demonstration only or not didn't seem to matter much to her. She was fascinated, leaning forward in her chair so that she was against the table for a closer look. Watching eagerly, she didn't exactly know what the Tincture was doing, the thin scratching seemingly not at all that painful. Maybe just a little annoying. The Tincture soaked into the skin like a sponge, left in its wake the rusted red markings in its wake. Leile's eyes blinked a few times as she tried to process that, but then he was going on to continue writing/carving these runes into his arm. The symbols meant nothing to her, and she had no idea what their roots might have been. THere wasn't a lot of blood, so she wasn't so sure what the warning had been for, but maybe just a teeny bit glad for it regardless. "That's... that sure is something... what language are the runes in? Do we even know?"
+**pinkgothic**:
+Instead of answering, he grimaced, gritting his teeth in a way that was obvious even just from the tension in his jaw. For an instant, he closed his eyes, then gave a shaky exhale, letting his expression change to one as if he'd bitten into a lemon. The frost-like edges of the runes had formed almost ridge-like protrusions now, faint but unmistakable, their texture seeming vaguely like fuzz. Mateo let go of his left hand, then took a deep breath and //plucked// at the rune closest to his elbow.
+It popped out of his skin, taking a thin chunk of firm, cherry-red stone with it that might have once been muscle mass. Blood welled visibly into the indentation as he set the top of the 'T'-like shape down on his palm, its twin legs pointing upward. He repeated the same motion with the other rune, carving another wound into his arm with the motion, then slid the circles of one end down over the T's limbs, inching them down a little. For a confusing moment, the impression of the substance became simultaneously glass and stone, like iridescence, and Mateo pulled the length of second rune to the side so it curved, shaping it into a wider circle, then slipped the circles of the end over the limbs of the 'T' shape as he had done with the other, locking the geometry into place.
+Lazy drops of blood began to trickle down his arm and onto the table, firmly ignored.
+He pushed the circle all the way down the other rune, folded his left hand's thumb over it manually, with the aid of his right hand, as if to trap it in place, and then //flicked// at one of the two vertical limbs of the first rune, making it chime against the second.
+It should not have chimed. At most it should have made a sickly wet sound, or a knocking like a stone on stone, or a tinker like glass on glass, or literally //any other// sound than something more befitting some kind of eerie, alien tuning fork.
+The light in the room //puckered//.
+It dimmed all around them, crowding into an incandescent glow near the fingers of Mateo's right hand. It was as though the light in the room was draining to the fingers and only from there leaping to their eyes. It made it hard to see what //exactly// he was doing, but there was enough reality left to see that the runes themselves had lost all cohesion, and that Mateo was dragging his luminescent fingertips down his left arm, guiding the oily substance to his wounds.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+Leila watched with fascination as Mateo worked, performing this strange sorcery that she should've known more about before taking a job on Mars, and did not. Enraptured by the display, she held her breath until she realized she was doing so and then softly, slowly exhaled so not to distract him. She did not want to disturb him, even by breathing. Saying nothing, the whole display felt so peculiar and different. She hadn't known what to expect from his display, but apparently, it was not this. As the light flickered and dimmed, she just squinted a little more, as if that would help. But still, arrested with awe, her mouth a little slack, she stared at the circle that he had created from the blood of his own body.
+**pinkgothic**:
+Mateo was silent but for his breathing, which had taken on a slightly laboured note, although with a strange undercurrent. The glowing fingers clasped themselves against his wounds, a papery and reverent exhale escaping him. Long seconds passed. Then he let go of his arm. The redirected light followed his right hand away from it, making it quite unclear to what extend the wounds were still there or not.
+"It's not a language," he said, finally. "Any more than it is a language when we build NAND or XOR gates in computers, even though those have specific shapes and connections."
+He carefully moved his hand closer to her, letting her inspect his fingers. It wasn't precisely the fingers that were luminescent - it really was as though the light in the room were being lensed by something to near the fingers, lighting them as though in strongest sunlight, subsurface scattering and all, but there was no //source// of light beside them, nothing glowing out at her like a small sun. It was evidently really just redirecting existing light, draining it from around him.
+"The runes are components in machinery," he concluded his explanation.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+Looking at the extended hand, her brows rose in the dim light. Not a language, he said. She didn't reach out to touch the luminescence that seemed faint atop his fingertips. Still, she was very much interested in what he had done, and what was shimmering there on his hand. "That is... *Amazing.*" It took a few moments to come to that conclusion, but now that she had, she was greatly fascinatedby the whole prospect and process.
+**pinkgothic**:
+"I take it you've never watched a sorcerer spell-cast before?" he asked, conversationally. The scene was eerie - the casual, matter-of-fact conversation they were having, sitting in his kitchen, while Adhafera was presumably meandering around near their feet, all the while the 'photon funnel' continued to distort the visual appearance of reality. ...when would that stop, for that matter?
+**Nymphetamine**:
+"Never," she confessed in a quiet voice. "This would be the first time. It's... so interesting. 'Interesting' doesn't seem like a strong enough word to describe it, though." A thin smile surfaced on her lips at this, pressed thin in consideration. "It's just not every day you see a sorcerer at work... though, what *does* work look like for you? Are you just researching for other spells?" Surprisingly naive about the purpose of sorcery, she was immensely curious in the matter, regardless.
+**pinkgothic**:
+"Yeah, most of the time," he nodded. "Like I told you the other day, it's a little bit like the protein folding problem. Artificial intelligence churns out some ideas based on all known spells, humans review it for feasibility by cross-checking against a bunch of... rules, I guess you could call them, heuristics for whether something is viable, and what it might do, and depending on the results, someone tries the combination eventually, or it's just added to a database with the note 'this one will probably kill you in creative ways, don't do this one'." He shrugged a shoulder, the motion almost invisible in the current lighting.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+Nodding to this, she could see how the application of AI checking the feasibility of some of these spells would be a valuable tool. "I guess dying in creative ways is frowned upon by your superiors," she said cheekily, making a joke out of it, despite realizing that it was very much a real danger when one was using their own blood to power these spells. She reached for her tea cup, mostly as a means to wet her throat, feeling parched, though she was sure that was just result of seeing the esoteric arcane.
+**pinkgothic**:
+It took a bit of fumbling to find the cup, more of a shadowy outline than a solid object in the altered illumination of the room. "Not that many sorcerers, statistically speaking," Mateo explained the policy, as though it needed explaining. "And usually 'die in creative ways' involves a lot of collateral. You might try it on Earth, where the environment can absorb more damage, if you think you can get away with it, but here on Mars, no one likes experiments marked as dangerous."
+**Nymphetamine**:
+"That's totally reasonable," she said, still speaking quietly out of respect for what she was seeing. "I'm sure no one wants to die in a creative way, collateral or not." It sounded rather dangerous over all. Giving her new insight on Mateo, really, since he had become one of these sorcerers, presumably recruited for reasons. Leila smiled though unseen, speaking in the darkness as she was. "Well... Thank you for the demonstration. I hope it didn't hurt too badly."
+**pinkgothic**:
+"It wasn't //pleasant//," Mateo quipped with some amusement. "But the drug cocktail helps. It's mostly nerve-blockers. I don't know how the old Mesoamericans did //any// spell-casting, though, without painkillers." Somewhere past the drained, washed-out light was a grimace. "Especially the higher-tier spells."
+**Nymphetamine**:
+He couldn't see that grin taking over her face at his kinda sarcastic remark. "I'm sorrrry! But I am really glad that you showed me, nonetheless. So thanks!" After thinking over it for a moment before saying, "There are certain types of plants that can help with pain... but probably nothing like what we have in the modern era, with synthetically crafted drugs."
+**pinkgothic**:
+"Anything strong enough to block out the pain of a piece of your flesh being carved out of your arm, though, that still leaves you lucid?" Mateo asked, half sceptical, half curious. It was good that his tone conveyed both states, given his face was still mostly vague outlines in the swirl of unnatural shadow.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+Her laughter answered him. "Nah, of course not... nothing would be like that... But who knows? They figured out sorcery, maybe they had concotions that we haven't discovered yet?" Leila did not sound convinced. "But I concede to your point on this one. At least so far as paleontology is concerned that is." While she might not have delved too far into mysterious ancient plants, she was willing to concede that maybe the Mesoamericans were just bloody insane to be carving up their flesh.
+**pinkgothic**:
+The trick with the light was still ongoing. Mateo sighed. "Well, I guess I'm not painting today." For a moment, it was ambiguous whether he was referring to his likely still damaged arm or the situation with the light. Then he chuckled: "This is going to take something like another hour to wear off."
+Not that the nerve blockers were likely to have a better dispersion. Weren't they typically something that lasted a day or two with lingering after effects? But maybe whatever the sorcerers used metabolised more quickly. And maybe more intensely.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+Leila looked around the room for a moment, noting the dimmed lights that did not want to brighten. "What a strange side effect," she murmured, almost to herself, and certainly full of wonder. The botanist wasn't sure if the trade off price for the powers of sorcery were equitable to the literal carving into their arm, and spilt blood, were worth it, however. But still, there was a morbid fascination that would not go away no matter how logically she approached the situation. "I'm sorry your demo messed up the lights..." She felt a teensy bit guilty for that, for robbing him of his hobby today. "But thank you for showing me! It's... It's so weird and cool."
+**pinkgothic**:
+"If you're into self-mutilation," Mateo quipped, but his tone was good-natured, and nothing she could make out from his face suggested otherwise. That made it sound like the nerve-blockers were pretty good at their job, at least. "We've tried to use animal flesh, but that doesn't seem to work. Like many things in sorcery, we don't know why."
+**Nymphetamine**:
+She laughed a little at his quick wit and smiled, shaking her head. "I wouldn't say I'm *into* self-mutilation... I'm just definitely curious about how self-mutilation becomes the arcane. What quality is it about humanity that animals lack, that enables sorcery?" But that was probably a question that many before her and many after that would ask themselves the very same thing. "I know, I know, rhetorical question, but a fascinating one!"
+**pinkgothic**:
+"We don't know," Mateo repeated, but not sternly. "//My// theory is that the geometry of runes we know about - and the heuristics for finding new ones, to most part - are tied to human topology and chemistry. There's clearly some error-tolerance, but there's at least one tale of a sorcerer who couldn't spell-cast, which... did not end well for him. It's hard to get it confirmed, much less find enough data to speculate what caused it - could be as mundane as shaky handwriting. But my guess is something was off about his blood chemistry or skin composition, and would have needed other runes entirely."
+**Nymphetamine**:
+Leila was a botanist, not a biologist, so she had little to contribute to his theory. Instead, she just shrugged, still smiling as she watched him. Hands reached for her tea cup, or fumbled in the poor lighting for it, eventually reaching it and bringing its lukewarm contents to her lips. Once she had taken a sip, she set it on the edge of the table, her one hand cradling it so that she might easily find it. "To be the sorcerer that could answer that question!" Shaking her head ruefully, she sighed. "Well. Do you enjoy it at least?"
+**pinkgothic**:
+"Do I enjoy carving up my arm?" Mateo rephrased cheekily. Instead of answering the question, he touched on her previous comment. "'Being the sorcerer' - I notice the prospect of potentially bleeding to death if you mess up doesn't seem to bother you much. Why is that?"
+**Nymphetamine**:
+"If it's my time, it's my time," she said rather fatalistically. But she gave the question some serious thought, pursing her lips and furrowing her brow as her face scrunched up. "I don't know. It seems all so *controlled* and precise... Though, maybe that's just an outsider looking in with no experience whatsoever. Maybe I'm just naive? When was the last time someone bled out anyways?"
+**pinkgothic**:
+It was still hard to make out his face, but there was an unmistakable change in expression. The pause slightly overstayed its welcome, almost to the point of discomfort. Then he spoke: "Remember Nam-Trung?" About two months ago, they'd lost Nam-Trung. Leila hadn't been anywhere close to him and not in the loop of cause of death, and the rumour mill had sanitised it as 'a work accident'. It told her that the Martian rumour mill was far too polite.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+He couldn't see the fall of her blase expression, but it knit into concern. She nodded, then thought better of it and said, "Yeah, I had heard about that. Someone said he fell off from a loose railing or something?" It hadn't been in her department, and she knew no one in her personal circles who had known the man himself. Frowning then, he could hear the sigh. "I see your point. Definitely something to treat with more respect. Sorry. I didn't mean to be so flippant about it."
+**pinkgothic**:
+"No need to apologise, just don't romanticise it," Mateo chuckled softly. "Otherwise you'll just blunder into death if you ever try sorcery."
+**Nymphetamine**:
+"Fair enough, fair enough. Though, don't really know how I'll ever get to //try// sorcery." There was something a little wistful in her voice about that. Like maybe she was perhaps longing for the chance to try sorcery, even though it was so dangerous. She wasn't a thrill seeker or an adrenaline junky, but she definitely had romantic notions about sorcery in general that were quickly disspelling in this conversation with Mateo.
+**pinkgothic**:
+His shrug was visible even in the artificial twilight of the room. "Mars has the highest density of sorcerers anywhere, possibly with the exception of the ancient Mesoamericas. The laws that work for Earth might not apply to Mars forever."
+He meant it as encouragement - maybe she'd be allowed to be a sorcerer eventually, if she truly wanted it. But as it was, it instead served as a reminder that it was highly illegal to do anything with sorcery unless you had been trained.
+...and had a permit. If it were just a matter of training, maybe she could convince Mateo to train her, and be allowed sorcery on a technicality, but presumably someone had to vet her in some way before training was even formally allowed.
+Maybe she could talk to Arthur Biker, feel out where the seams of the law happened to be. At the very least, it might prove a fun past-time, even if it was fruitless - just make the bureaucrat's head spin a little, just for fun.
+Or maybe she could just ask Mateo directly. He'd been friendly so far. He didn't seem like the type that would report her for asking, making the worst outcome a 'no'.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+There were options for Leila. Depending on how bold she wanted to be, how much she might want to pursue sorcery. If she did at all. It didn't seem like something you would just casually try your hand at. Lips pressed into a thin line as she considered those possibilities. She had already asked him how he had gotten his training. Silent for far longer than was polite, she eventually spoke, a smile colouring her face. "I dunno... You ever thinking about taking an apprentice?" She was not sly enough to warrent the coy tone of her voice, but she was most definitely curious about this particular idea.
+**pinkgothic**:
+Mateo's glowing fingers smeared light across his forehead in a slow, somewhat pained gesture, made absurd for the surreal illumination. He was quiet, but from all she could tell not out of frustration or anger, but a kind of creeping resignation. She could hear him breathe, slow and deep, as though he were dragging the consideration of it through his entire body.
+Finally: "The strictly correct answer to your question is 'no, I did not'." It did not sound like it was a rebuff.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+Clearing her throat, she smiled sweetly, unseen in the faded light. "What's the incorrect answer?" she asked, prompting for candidness. "I won't tell anyone. I think this conversation has overstepped the boundaries of strictly legal concerns...  but for what it's worth, I won't speak or breathe a word of this to anyone..."
+**pinkgothic**:
+"That question doesn't make any sense," Mateo sighed tiredly.
+Apparently, that was the response she was getting - he wasn't saying anything else. Maybe it was a comment of semantics; she'd asked if he was ever thinking about taking on an apprentice, he hadn't previously considered it, and there was no additional information to be gained from its inverse. Whether he'd consider it //now// was a different question, and by appearances, he wasn't volunteering an answer to it unless she bothered to ask it.
+Or maybe she just had to wait a little, given how he still seemed to be massaging his forehead.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+Leila just sat there for a moment, looking at his shadowed features. She was sure that her own expression was partially occluded by the dim light, so he couldn't see the note of disappointment that lit up there. "I'm sorry." The apology was a little hollow, meant to smooth over any transgressions she might have made, because she was overstepping her bounds. "I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable..." If that's what happened. Not entirely clear because she didn't know Mateo that well. (This was their longest conversation to date!)
+**pinkgothic**:
+"I think you should go home," Mateo said, finally. There was a kind of sadness to his voice, a hint of some distraught emotion at the very edges. He didn't sound angry at all, but clearly he needed some space for now. Maybe Leila'd blown it - but it seemed even more sure that she was going to nail the coffin shut if she said much more this evening.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+Nodding in the faint light, she rose from her seat. That directive to go was very easy to read, no confusion there. She considered apologizing again, but that would make it sound it artifical. "Good night, Mateo," she said softly as she moved slowly towards the door, navigating the somewhat dark room by memory alone. Pausing at the door, she hesitated, as if she would say more, but she finally just opened the doorway, light from the hallway spilling in and a bit too bright for the dark adjusted eyes. She departed without much other fanfare, her sigh heard; or perhaps that was the sound of the door sliding closed.