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--- campaign:carve:2024-06-11 [2024/06/11 20:00] – pinkgothic
+++ campaign:carve:2024-06-11 [2024/09/03 21:51] (current) – pinkgothic
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 No one had asked anything of Leila yet, but it was clear what she was here for - if either of them threatened to bleed out due to a miscast, it would be primarily up to her to do something about it. And if the spell went wrong and the entire bunker turned to pudding, well... once she'd cooled off and the sorcerers had decided they were ready, she ought to be at least partly suited up again, and have emergency breathing masks at the ready to give to her friend and his assistant, as fast as possible.
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+**Nymphetamine**:
+She was intent on making herself useful. And if that meant doing a bit of grunt work, than she was ready for it. Finally shucking out of her suit, she got it straightened out neatly and then returned to the main room where Nyarai was moving the table. If it was a large table, Leila would rush over to help her move it without a word, though it appeared as though Nyarai had mostly gotten it into place by the time she was there. "Is there anything I can do?" Free up the sorcerers to their own business, while Leila made sure the first aid supplies were well within reach in the main facility.
+**pinkgothic**:
+Nyarai pulled a few cheap chairs that the facility had to offer into a lazy triangle near the laptop, gesturing for the others to sit. "Let's talk about what we're about to do," she suggested. "Mateo, you're her teacher, put it into words she's going to understand," she prompted.
+Mateo slipped down into a sit, twisting partly toward the laptop, dispelling a cute fractal screensaver. It might have been the first time Leila had ever seen one of those, really - it had been decades since anyone //needed// a screensaver, after all. The application in the background was still largely opaque to her, some kind of bespoke sorcerer note-keeping tool overflowing with jargon. "Let's see," Mateo commented. "So, in layman's terms, the idea we're pursuing here is basically a step where we //disassemble// the atoms into their subatomic components before trying to modify them. We think it'll be easier to do this destructively. So... ah, imagine a square piece of paper that you want to turn into a smaller square. Rather than cut off the edges, you first shred it into smaller pieces, then, like a puzzle, you put those smaller pieces together until you have your smaller square and some extra components. Then you burn the rest."
+Nyarai was nodding along mildly, not interrupting her friend, quietly opening up a suitcase with their sorcery toolset as Mateo explained the methodology.
+"Then our analogy breaks down, because we want to increase the size again, except this time we do it directly and see if it works. We've done non-mass-preserving alchemy in the first step, we've just obfuscated it, so in the second step we're doing another non-mass-preserving alchemical spell to see if it will take," he mused.
+"Do you want to tell her what can all go wrong, or shall I?" Nyarai interjected.
+"I mean, we've been over the categories of possible errors--" Mateo began in a casual objection to repeat himself again.
+"Right," Nyarai cut him off, though her voice was gentle as she did it. "Bleeding to death, or habitat integrity loss. Let's go through //why//, though, I want Leila to understand the forces at play a bit more." She glanced across at Leila with a stern, but now almost motherly expression, like someone teaching a child an uncomfortable truth. "There are several possible breaking points here. The first is that the sequence of spells has not been done before, otherwise we'd not have to test them out.
+"Of those spells, the most crucial one of the sequence has not been tested before, it's one the algorithms think exist and we think it's plausible it does. It happens to be the one where we... 'disassemble' is the word Mateo used, I believe, where we disassemble the atoms. This is an //immense// amount of energy we're playing with - particle accelerator amounts of energy, except multiplied by the mass of the chunk of matter we're working on. If physics protests enough, or rearranges the pieces before we can move on to the next step of the spell-casting, it might well be about as friendly as a chunk of TNT exploding in our faces.
+"Mind you, we don't think that's likely, but we still think it's about 20% likely, which is much more than any margin of error you'd usually want.
+"The next issue is that this is a sequence of four spells. The fourth isn't time critical, so we can let our bodies heal up before we try it, but the others are. Between the two of us, Mateo and I are going to mess up three arms. At least one spell will be cast with something other than our dominant hand to draw it... unless you want to help out."
+There was clearly more in her list of things that might go wrong, but she was pausing to give Leila an opportunity to say something.
 **Nymphetamine**:
+There was quite a bit to absorb with what Nyarai was telling her. And while Mateo had gone over the risks before, this seemed dialed up to an eleven. Though, to be honest, she had anticipated that given that they were having to go to the outpost in the first place. She had her tablet out, and a stylus, taking some notes down of what Nyarai was saying, not just the risks, but the spell's components, the chains of spells. Leila had probably had hull breach protocols drilled into her upo her arrival on Mars, so she at least understood that. First aid was a valuable skill wherever she was, so she was confident that she'd be able to patch them up before either of them bled out. Her role there was clear. The dangling invitation to help out meant sparing one of them their dominant hand, which was probably best considering what they were doing. Commited to helping out, she nodded. "I'll help. You can use one of my arms." It just seemed like a calculated risk in addition to all the other risks they were calculating their survival on.
 **pinkgothic**:
+Nyarai was quiet for several awkward seconds, processing Leila's comment, perhaps trying to gauge whether she was just being polite and ought to be rebuffed. Then the long moment passed and she nodded in acknowledgement - no 'thank you', not yet, just an acceptance of the joint fate.
+Then she resumed her monologue: "The other issue that might happen is the destruction of residue. That, again, is a lot of energy -- more likely to result in a catastrophic implosion than the first step. Less guided obliteration has been done, but this will need to be specific to subatomic particles, which is a slight change to the grammar of the spell.
+"Which brings us to the last issue. We're in uncharted spell territory. We've slaved over the theory of this for a while now, but at the end of the day, one of the steps might turn out to be a complete dud, nevermind the usual potential of simply messing it up. I hope that, if it happens at all, that it happens early and we don't have to abort halfway through the sequence, since otherwise we'll have two problems, but if it happens at all, someone is going to be losing a lot of blood quite quickly. Even if you act fast, you might not be able to save that person."
+**Nymphetamine**:
+There was a chance of dying, in so many different ways. Exploding themselves, bleeding out. None of these fates were pretty. But the least she could do, after nosing her way into this experiment, was help them in some way. If that meant offering up her own blood, then she seemed committed. As committed as she was when she had talked Mateo into teaching her sorcery in the first place. Nodding, she tried to process her thoughts. Nothing in life on Mars was ever uncomplicated, nor guaranteed. "I understand what you're saying. I'm here to help, in whichever way you guys deem best. You're the experts, as far as you can be an expert in sorcery..."
+**pinkgothic**:
+Nyarai eyed Leila with some mild scepticism, as though inherently suspicious of yea-sayers. Then she leant over to the table, grabbing a small block of silicon, turning it in her fingers as though it might reveal something to her, before glancing back at Leila. "If you do offer your arm," she said. "You can't wear a space suit. If this place depressurises, we're all dead." It wasn't a complaint - evidently, she was just making an observation. Leila could help either by being able-bodied if there was a breach that didn't also kill them, or become part of the spell-casting, not both.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+It was clear as day on Leila's face that she hadn't really thought of that particular detail. Her face was drained of colour, and her eyes widened a slight bit, just enough to be noticeable. Lips pursed into a frown. But a slow nod followed. "I understand." It was a terrifying situation to be in. "If you think it's best that I remain suited and ready.." Trailing off, she just nodded again, firmer this time in her resolution to help. "We'll cross that bridge when we get there."
+**pinkgothic**:
+Nyarai shook her head, albeit with a mild expression. "No, Leila, you need to start making your own decisions," she said, with a motherly firmness.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+It was a bland look that she favoured Nyarai with. "I'll remain suited and available for first aid. It seems more prudent than offering up an extra arm, especially given the dangers that are all around us."
+**pinkgothic**:
+Nyarai nodded, her expression almost painfully neutral.
+It was Mateo who broke the encroaching silence, glancing at his official sorcerer companion: "I could cast the final spell on your arm."
+Nyarai snorted in amusement. "Oh, so I'll be the one with two wrecked arms?" she said, faking her outrage for five seconds, before resolving with: "Yeah, of course, that makes sense. I don't think I've had someone else cast using my body before."
+"We //do// know it works," Mateo reminded her.
+"I know, but it just feels wrong," she added, shrugging one shoulder listlessly, but cut off her own argument with: "Better than casting with a mangled arm, though."
+"Practise the glyphs?" Mateo offered.
+"We're both sick of practising the glyphs," Nyarai summarised.
+"So..." Mateo mused. "We... start?"
+"Yeah," she said, but kept nodding lazily a while longer. "Yeah, let Leila finish getting suited up again, I'll make sure we've got Tincture... maybe you can set up the experiment." She thrust the cube of silicon at Mateo.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+She didn't interrupt their conversation, as it was quite important, but now that she had settled to be the paramedic and repair engineer should anything happen, she was determined to fulfill that role. So back in the suit she went! Already getting her gear on, she was stepping into the spacesuit, pulled it up over her shoulders. Fastening it up, she left the helmet off but was going to keep it on hand nearby.
+**pinkgothic**:
+While Nyarai mixed the ingredients for the alien ink, Mateo rearranged furniture. The chairs were moved aside again. He hovered over the smaller table that Nyarai had shifted to the centre of the room, considering its surface, using some kind of implement he'd brought with him to check //something// about it - maybe whether it was really aluminium - before giving a small huff and moving it aside again. "Yeah, it's a aluminium-silicon alloy," he said, by way of idle explanation. "We don't want to cast on that."
+Instead, he crouched down on the ground, touching fingers to the dust, bringing that up to his face with some curiosity, then shaking his head. A moment later, he was taking a second block of material - a chunk of iron - and setting that down on the ground, before placing the block of silicon onto it. ...that sure was one way to ensure there was no silicon in the supporting surface.
+Then he was at his laptop, reviewing notes. "Silicon to aluminium," he said, a review for himself and Nyarai, and new information for Leila. "One more electron from the outer shell, but the shell configuration is the same. We'll be removing an electron from 3p, and a proton from the nucleus. Neutron count stays the same. So the elimination procedure is two up quarks of forty-two, one down quark of forty-two, one electron of fourteen."
+About at that moment, Nyarai finally looked down at the two material cubes. "Seriously?" she said, gesturing at the tiny tower.
+"Do you have a better idea?" Mateo arched a brow.
+Nyarai grumbled something under her breath, but it evidently wasn't a better idea, lest it would have been considerably more intelligible.
+"We can sit on the ground," Mateo suggested.
+"Ooh, like around a campfire," Nyarai commented sardonically. Hopefully nothing would actually catch fire. Mellowing out again instantly, she glanced across at Leila, and smiled with an obvious spirit of adventure. "Ready?"
+**Nymphetamine**:
+Watching in fascination, Leila was quiet as she got everything arranged to her own liking, well away from the sorcerers' set up. Their suits were left open for ease of quick dressing, and the respirators were lined up nearby. She had the first aid kit opened and the most pertinent objects arrayed out on one of the rejected tables that Mateo and Nyarai had moved out of the way. Once she had everything to her liking, she could pay attention to what they were doing, the new information welcomed. It broke down to some hard science-y information, as all sorcery seemed to, but she understood most of it, in the broad strokes of what they were attempting. Sitting on the edge of her chair, quite literally, she watched in curious silence. "I'm ready! Let's get this show on the road!"
+**pinkgothic**:
+That said, Nyarai passed a sorcerer's pen to Mateo and the medical pen for the nerve blockers. Mateo was asking "You counted--?", but Nyarai cut him off with "-- the milliletres in accordance to the runes, yes." Another thing that could potentially go wrong, however unlikely given the years of practise sorcerers had in being careful with their craft.
+"And this is the right pen for me?" Mateo checked. "Yes," Nyarai confirmed, holding up another in her other hand. "This one's mine and you're not getting it," she said, with a dark playfulness. "Yours has enough for the third spell, too."
+Mateo frowned mildly, considering the trade-off in his head - either they'd have to refill between spell two and three, or there was a risk they'd have Tincture in a sorcerer's pen that wasn't being used, possibly for hours. But it wasn't a truck of the stuff and he wasn't quite paranoid enough to care. "All right," he said. With a flick of his hand, he turned his laptop off and leant to push it as far to the wall as possible, then settled down into a cross-legged sit on the bare floor, the two pens first in one hand, then rested in his lap.
+Two almost simultaneous jabs later, and the sorcerers had applied their nerve blockers. Then the both of them worked on their runes, a quiet, studious-looking sequence of gestures. If Leila had no prior context, it would look like simple body art.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+She observed in silence while the pair begun their work. Not wanting to be a disturbance, she tried to hold the fidgeting back. It was such a tense period of time, watching them as they began to draw upon their arms after their nerve blockers were taken. She only knew the cursory sorcery, and she was at a distance from them, so she could not parse everything that they were scratching out on their flesh. But that hardly mattered.
+**pinkgothic**:
+Sensibly, the casting happened on the block itself as the surface for the glyphs. Physical contact with the substance that would be transformed was, as far as Leila understood, not strictly necessary - it was a kind of area effect, to small degree - but would certainly make things easier, as the spell would definitely eat through //that// silicon first, and presumably exhaust itself  with the precise block size instead of moving on.
+The first step was disassembly, and whatever Leila was expecting, it wasn't what happened. The simplest way to describe it was to say that, like a pufferfish's reflex, the block was suddenly twice as large with rounded, fuzzy edges. Even so, that description would have been insufficient. The most striking aspect was that there was something deeply, alarmingly wrong about it - it didn't look like any substance at all. It looked like she might imagine the void between the subatomic particles to look - like nothing at all, yet letting nothing at all through, including the light that might otherwise pass through it. An iridescent super black.
+...at least nothing had exploded. Yet.
+And at least Nyarai knew what she was doing, completing her own set of runes just beside the shuddering anomaly.
+For a second, it looked to Leila like she could see something pass through them, but it might have been a trick of the light. Then the cube of amorphous, cursed //stuff// imploded quietly into a chunk of misshapen aluminium with a halo of visible energy that could make anyone uneasy.
+Instantly, Mateo was on the final step, grabbing Nyarai's wrist with his good arm to pull it out into a posture he could work with. For a second, it looked like he might forget the nerve blocker for that arm, but he had one at the ready. All the rapid motions seemed quite careful and deliberately, like a well-rehearsed dance. Then he was drawing the runes on her arm, resting it against his left thigh as an impromptu table.
+It was hard not to worry about them now that they were both bleeding on the floor. But in actuality, it took Mateo about fifteen seconds from first grasp of her arm to completing the drawing, not nearly long enough for either of them to even start feeling remotely woozy.
+The substance beside them was rather more worth their worry. The halo of energy wanted to be plasma and it was clearly politely holding off, but rapidly losing interest in its task of relative stability.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+As she watched on, the scene grew stranger and stranger. She couldn't have described it properly had she even tried. Her concern should have been on Nyarai and Mateo, and it was, to an extent, but the eyes were drawn away from them to the amorphous void-stuff that was nothing like she had ever witnessed before. It was all that she could do to tear her eyes away from it and back to the two sorcerers. She did not surge forward to assist, knowing that neither had asked for her help just then, and despite the blood, they both seemed more or less alright and in control of what was going on.
+**pinkgothic**:
+Then Mateo's drawing was finished and he arranged the result of his labour with his good hand, using Nyarai's palm as a stand for it. A moment later the construct he'd made rose under guidance of his own hand and came to touch the edge of the halo.
+Abruptly, the halo of energy imploded. The implosion was violent, a loud thundercrack of disappearing matter and space, a whipcrack's worth of shockwave traveling through the room, stinging at Leila's skin even through the suit. Mateo shouted something, more angry syllable than word - but when he thudded onto his side from some unbalancing, it was in a room that was, while physically literally rattled, wholly in tact and normal, minus the residue of spellcasting that glittered like honey on the ground near the glob of aluminium.
+With a grunt, Mateo pushed himself back up, beginning to tend to Nyarai's bleeding arms with the syrup, fixing up her dominant arm first. He was, however, getting visibly paler and his breathing was quite visible, as though it now took greater effort for him to breathe.
+He didn't call to Leila - there was no medical emergency, after all, not yet, and for all the application of the residue was straight-forward, he was in a better position to apply it to himself and his fellow licensed sorceress.
+However, with Leila's helmet still off her suit, she could tell that something was sounding like a distant, thin whistle somewhere.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+Watching carefully, she couldn't have pinpointed how the explosion began. She was just suddenly clapping her hands over her ears insinctually, though it did so little that her ears were still ringing when she lowered her hands. It took her a moment or two to realize what she was hearing, the whistling sound a tell tale indication that the energy had punctured the thing material of the outpost.
+Leila sprang into action, jumping onto her feet after ascertaining with a quick look that Mateo had Nyarai well in hand. With far more care, she began to investigate where the sound was coming from. Standing still, she focused on *hearing*, noticing first the sound of Mateo's efforts, and their breathing, then her own. But beyond that in the lingering silence around them, she tried to pinpoint the sound of the whistling. She had yet to put on her helmet but she turned to look back to the two sorcerers. "I think there's a hull breech..." She gestured for silence, however, turning her head about to direct her ears towards the sound.
+**pinkgothic**:
+The high-pitched nature of thin whistle made it hard to pinpoint, but she was mobile and could walk around, trying to follow the direction it was loudest in. Unhappy with the gradual drop in pressure, her ears popped, disrupting her search.
+Mateo, meanwhile, looked up from his own work to acknowledge what Leila had said, confused and paralysed for a moment, his own gaze scanning the room. It wasn't what he was supposed to do, though, and it was Nyarai who gave a curt shout. "Focus!" she grunted, biting down on one pale lip.
+The sound was coming from a corner of the thick window. A tiny chunk of glass had been punched out of the inner pane and become a projectile for the second. Mars' thin atmosphere barely registered relative to the two orders of magnitude higher pressure that Earthlings needed; it wasn't quite a vacuum, but the air was happy to spill out nearly as fast regardless.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+Turning towards the direction she seemed to think it was loudest, at least before her ears popped, she rushed over towards that side of the hull. Repair kit in hand, or hanging from her shoulder, her eyes scanning the pale 'wall' that separated them from the hostile Martian surface. Taking a deep breath of the thinning air, she steadied herself, Nyarai's sharp reminder to focus probably directed at her. Locating the spot, she began to fumble through the patching of the hole, hoping it was only the one.
+**pinkgothic**:
+A proper fix would need to target both window panes, but to mitigate the issue, she would have to prioritise the inner one. It meant shooting the insulation properties of the window to hell for sure, though they were probably past that point already - at some point they would have to send someone to replace the thing wholesale. Whatever vacuum had existed between the window panes was happily filling up with gases now.
+Fortunately, sturdy, thick duct tape was all that was needed to stop the metaphorical bleeding.
+On the less metaphorical end, though--
+"Mateo!" an exhausted Nyarai barked with distress.
+"Still here," he said, but he sounded faint and distant. He was, at least, tending to himself at this point, but it looked like they had both lost a lot of blood to their little experiment. He didn't look like he wouldn't be able to finish to patch himself up, but he did look like he was going to pass out approximately two seconds after he did.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+That tell tale sound of pulling on duct tape echoed inside the room. Using something to cut it apart (scissors or a knife, etc), she covered the hole with the tape, and then another piece. A third, just in case, before she was turning back to her associates. Mateo had seen to Nyarai's wounds, but not much on his own. Now that the leak was dealt with, even if in a shoddy way, she rushed to Mateo's side, a quick examination of what work he might have already done on himself before she picked up where he left off, or started altogether. The thick salve was slathered carefully over his wounds, perhaps a touch over generous with it, but better to be safe than sorry. Both sorcerers were in sorry states, but it was Leila's job to make sure they didn't die. Once she was satisfied with the healing salve, she found the gauze to wind around his forearm.
+**pinkgothic**:
+The two of them lay in something of a pile by now, having narrowly escaped falling unconscious. The blood on the floor made for nasty stains, but it wasn't anything they couldn't deal with later. For how, Leila's first aid training was kicking in, and once she'd wrapped their arms up in gauze that hopefully wouldn't turn out to be necessary, she remembered the best thing she could do was to get them water. Water and maybe some iron supplements to help their bodies fight the anemia.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+Once she was satisfied with her quick little patchwork on the window, and then their first aid, she went to collect a couple of water pouches, and the supplements that had been laid out near by. By now, her knees were a rusting scarlet. Her gloves she had removed for the first aid, laid somewhere nearby, discarded earlier and without thought. Returning to their sides, she knelt again between them or near them both water, helping one, then the other to drink if they were too weak to manage the pouch on their own.
+**pinkgothic**:
+It was Mateo who recovered quickest. While he had over-exerted himself considerably more, he had bled only from one arm for the duration of the spellcasting, and didn't need to worry about anemia nearly as much as Nyarai. "I'm sorry," he whispered once he gathered himself enough for it, still lying down. "I wasted time. I should have just... ignored the breach, let you handle it."
+**Nymphetamine**:
+"It's alright," she said in that quiet voice, the one that dismissed the notion of his responsibility. She managed a weary smile for him, knowing that he and Nyarai had a far more harrowing time than she had. "Are you... are you okay, Mateo?" It was such a banal, stupid little question, all things considered.
+**pinkgothic**:
+"Will be," he assured her, minimalistically. "Good that you were here," he added. It briefly seemed like an absurd statement - if she'd just patched up the seal and said nothing, he'd be in a better state now - but obvious with a moment's thought: They couldn't have both patched up the window //and// fixed up their arms. If they'd been here by themselves, they probably would have asphyxiated and freeze-dried.
+**Nymphetamine**:
+An awkward pat of his shoulder above the gauze and wounds followed his reassurance, her smile lingering quietly as she gazed at him. Now that the worst of the danger seemed to be passed, she sat back on her heels, assessing their situation further.
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