War Arrives: The Chill of Death

[Mathias Blackwood]

16 Cylus 720 | Mathias Blackwood | Storm's Edge

The dark of Cylus brought a chill with it that had affected everyone in Storm's Edge. The weather was imperfect and the monsters at the gates kept everyone on edge, but the cold was what would take them in their sleep. The cold was what would make their hands and feet too numb to effectively hold their swords- or in Mathias's case, effectively nock an arrow. Mathias found the warmest room in Storm's Edge (now that the fires had been put out) was the forge but when he arrived there was far too much work going on for him to justify sitting down and basking in the warmth of the flames that were forging weapons and horseshoes and all manner or needed instrument. So Mathias left the forge and instead found a large room in the fortress with a fireplace. Wood wasn't exactly expendable these days but there were still some pieces of firewood that he been deemed too dry to repurpose for anything else so Mathias piled it into the fireplace and lit it with a torch from the wall.

Build it, and they will come.

Someone had once proposed that notion to Mathias about building a bar in the middle of a cornfield and it had made no sense to him. Yet it made sense now that there was a fire burning in the fireplace of Storm's Edge that the volunteers would come in from the cold and that was just what they did. Mathias sat in a chair, wrapped up in a blanket that smelled like bacon and around his dozens of other volunteers were beginning to sit and warm their hands by the fire he'd built. He built it for himself but he could share... less the room filled up. That would be far too crowded for his liking... but he was alright with the handful of volunteers that had trickled in so far.

[Vega]

And here we go.....

"It's chilly, aye." Vega said, thumping her hands together and grinning at the man she was patrolling with. They were due to be making their way back, the small group of them - five in total -and she was pleased that they had managed to do quite a bit. However, as they'd patrolled around the walls, they'd found this one had holes in it. Vega cursed, quietly, in Rakahi. It was cold and they were hungry - they all wanted to get back to Storm's Edge. Of these things, there was no doubt. However, she looked at Eric and she shook her head. "If somethin' came through that, or the walls were breached there, because of us, I'd never sleep again." He nodded his head slightly and then gave her a gentle shove with his elbow. "Rumour has it you don't sleep now Vega." The redhead grinned. "Shush, you, I sleep when I need to." It was true, she really was barely sleeping at all, but Vega had the endurance to do that, and not to worry about it.

"We need to get this filled in. There were a whole bunch of rocks a bit back. Grab me yer pickaxe, an' I'll get breakin' them," she said and Eric looked at her like her head had dropped off. "You're going to go breaking rocks now?" Vega nodded. "I am. I'll be right back, in the meantime, get me the other stuff that's needed. I dunno what it is, I'm not a builder, I'm just the hard labour, so someone else can work that out, a'right?" Eric handed her the pickaxe and Vega gave him a grin. "No point lollygaggin' about, is there?" She was more than happy to go. And indeed, she broke rocks with the pickaxe until such time as she had enough of the rocks broken to appropriate sizes, so she scooped them into the Domain bag and carried them back. Wiping her forehead as she did, Eric looked at her and frowned, but Vega shook her head. "Cursed by Faldrun. I'm always bleddy boilin' up, so I am. He can jog on." Eric raised an eyebrow - it was well-known that Vega was blessed by more than one or two Immortals, she'd made no bones about it - but he looked surprised at her being cursed.

"What did you do?" Eric asked and Vega beamed.

"Punched him, right in the gob." Eric's eyes near fell out of his sockets but Vega just motioned to the wall. "Stop gassin', yer like an old woman, I swear. Come on. Lets get this sorted." Vega helped as they filled in the walls and she listened carefully, watching how it was done, how they used the straw to pad it out and so on. They worked and, as they did, Vega taught them all a song from her people, the biqaj. It was a raucous tune which had them laughing and working together - of course, her mortalborn abilities and her Daia mark helped there. But, it must be said, by the time they got back, they were tired, cold, and sore.

There was a fire burning, and Vega and the others from her group made their way into the room where there was warmth. There, she saw Mathias and she gave him a grin, "Heya, how're you doin', you a'right?" Glancing around, she frowned slightly. "You know, this is a good idea this. " She looked at him and her frown deepened, thinking about it. "You know, when we're on the ship, we can't have fires, so we have hotstones. Stones keep heat, so we put them in the fire, an' we use them to heat places.... we could do that, couldn't we? Here, I mean?" Vega looked at him and gave a grin. "Whatcha think? I don't know science or anythin' but I know that we did that. Have you got any ideas there? We could warm up loads of rooms, jus' from the forge alone."

She looked at him, to see what he thought.

[Mathias Blackwood]

16 Cylus 720 | Mathias Blackwood | Storm's Edge

"I'm colder than Ziell's balls." Mathias said to Vega, not really recognizing her voice at first, as he held his glowing hands out towards the fire. He was already familiar with the burning touch of a flame and so he did not record the sensation in his spark, nor did he bring his hands too close to the flames. He was trying to focus on the warmth rather than on the burning heat itself. If he could understand the warmth, he might be able to transmute it into various things around Storm's Edge. He could make blankets and clothes and armor all warmer to wear, but it would take time and it would take a lot of ether to maintain... and if he didn't maintain it the enchantments would cause the clothing and blankets to degrade, effectively undoing their efforts to get more supplies.

Then Mathias turned his head to see Vega and the others arriving, he felt it only polite to look at her while she addressed him. She spoke of hotstones that Mathias had never encountered. He didn't know whether she meant simple stones that were heated or if they were something more. Yet it gave Mathias the subtle nudge he needed to birth a complete idea. "I'm not familiar with the stones but it is a good idea. If you have one, I might be able to copy the effect with my magic-" Mathias paused, had he ever explained his magic to her before? He couldn't recall. "The stones I create will decay faster over time but they'd get the job done for now, unless you have enough of the stones to spread about Storm's Edge?"

Mathias was not certain he could duplicate the effect, but he'd give it the old Viden Academy try.

[Vega]

And here we go.....

"They might be well snug an' toasty, for all you know," Vega replied, when Mat said that he was colder than Ziell's balls. She grinned at him and they chatted. In that chatting, they grew between them an idea about ways to spread heat without fire which consumed valuable wood. Vega looked at him as he explained what he could do, and she frowned slightly. "Hang on a minute, lets go back a step there, sunshine," she said, her mind ticking over and over. He had just said what she thought he'd said, right? He had. "You have a type of magic what allows you to copy stuff?" She regarded him for a moment and then, she thumped him on the shoulder. Not hard - not at all hard, she was very careful in fact that she didn't use her strength - that would be enough to fling him across the room - but she did.

He didn't know, couldn't know of course, that this put him very firmly in the category of her friend. But violence often didn't mean that to other people, however, Vega's face broke into a broad smile and she spoke. "That's great! I've got this stuff. Hang on, look." And, from inside her pocket she drew out a small, stuffed pouch. She opened it and inside it was another pouch, filled with, "It's orange sand, from Scalvoris. It's always warm. They use it there, it's well posh, they put this under the floorboards, an' then all the floors are warm." She looked at him and Vega raised an eyebrow. Her eyes were swirling colours and she shook her head. "Stop pretendin' I barely touched you, you great wussie."

Motioning to the sand, she said. "Arlo an' I have got this stuff. Not enough, nowhere near, but could you copy it? Or give it to earth, we've got a whole ton of that. An' we could put it in bags under the floorboards - an' if it degrades, it don't matter as long as it don't degrade in a few breaks. So, the question comes, can you do that, an' if you can how much o'this stuff can you just warm up? Sand. Earth, don't matter. Jus' ... then it could live under the floor an' be replenished, you know?"

Looking at Mathias, Vega beamed a wide smile at him. "Come on, Sharpie, don't be shy." Sharpie, it seemed, was his new name. She did that. "Tell Auntie Vega all about it. Or I'll thump ya again." If he'd been a little bit younger or, a little bit less a mage, then Vega might have ruffled his hair. Thankfully, he wasn't.

[Mathias Blackwood]

16 Cylus 720 | Mathias Blackwood | Storm's Edge

"If I find out, I'll let you know." Mathias would let that be the last he said of Ziell's balls unless opportunity presented itself. They had larger plans in the works anyhow. When Vega called Mathias sunshine he raised a brow, it seemed a name more fit for Gennadiya who had been able to propel what seemed like sunlight from her hands. Everyone at Storm's Edge seemed to like nicknames (himself included) and they'd been forced into close proximity so suddenly with so many people, and more people each trial (thank the Immortals), that it was always going to be hard to remember names and what everyone chose to call you. Yet Vega stood out as Vega and Mathias wouldn't soon forget her. When Vega said his magic let his copy things Mathias held up a cautionary hand "Most books call it Transmutation or something like that, I can copy some qualities-" Before he could finish explaining, Vega thumped him on the arm and Mathias, with little to no unarmed skills, flailed a little in surprise.

As Vega presented the sand from Scalvoris, Mathias rubbed his arm where she'd thumped him, an action he abandoned entirely when she called him a wussie. Mathias looked at the sand as Vega explained what it did to him and his brow furrowed. Sand. It was coarse and rough and it got everywhere... it was also really just a lot of tiny. tiny rocks wasn't it? He didn't know if he'd have to go grain by grain or if he could transmute a lump sum of the material. He didn't even really know if he could learn the warmth of the sand... but he'd try. "I won't really know if I can do it till I try. Give me the sand and I'll see what I can learn from it," Mathias began, holding out his hand for the pouch. "And I'll need someone to go around and collect as many rocks as they can. It'll probably be easier for me to heat rocks than more sand."

Sharpie? Mathias could get behind Sharpie. It wasn't his choice of nicknames but that wasn't how nicknames worked. All that mattered was it made Mathias feel a bit more like part of the team which was a feeling he hadn't had in a long time. It had been Mathias against Idalos for too many seasons now. Being part of something bigger felt... good. Not necessarily right, but it felt good for the moment. If the bag of orange sand was handed over, which Mathias expected it would be, he would stick a single finger into the bag and begin rifling it around to try and submerge it. He could certainly feel the different in warmth but his mind couldn't immediately isolate it. As he feared it was the quality of granules and so it took more focus. The warmth of the fire was easier to register than the warmth of the sand, but with a little time Mathias would be able to figure it out... the warmth of Scalvoris sand... orange.

Once he had it, or some vague image of it, Mathias cleared off a table and took a seat. "I'll have to try them one at a time and eventually I'll have to stop. I don't know how many I can make before I run out of ether but I'll give it my best shot."

[Vega]

Sharpie and Auntie Vega.....

She chuckled as he flapped about when she punched him. "We have got to get you a bit sturdier, you know. Yer like a raggy doll." Motioning to his bow, she said what he already knew, "unless yer gonna use a crossbow, your strength an' endurance will impact how far an' how hard you hit with that thing. So, we might need to de-noodle-ify you." It was a thing, she was sure. Anyhow, he talked about what his magic could do and she listened, carefully, thinking about it. "Ok, so I reckon that is a good thing for you to try," she said, softly. "Cos, the thing is, if it degrades, we can't just turn the floorboards hot, cos then people'll be fallin' through them, but stuff underneath em, that's a good thing." As for the collecting of rocks and making them hot, she nodded. "I can do that, an' I can bully people here into helpin' me too," she frowned a little, thinking about it.

"You start with the sand, then," she said, as he cleared off the table. Then, she looked around and saw that there were a number of the people in the room looking at what was happening with interest. Vega grinned. "So, we need to collect up stuff for Sharpie here," she explained. "An' he's gonna try an' make it warmer. We need stones, big an' flat if you can find them. " She grinned at the men and women gathered and looking and she saw a few of them raise their eyebrows. They knew what was coming. "An' when I say we are gonna collect, then I mean - we are. So come on you lovely lot, lets get lively."

What that meant, of course, was a fair amount of mostly good-natured grumbling and grousing and then, within a few moment, Mathias had a number (quite a large number) of large, flat stones to choose from. There were a lot of those around. Vega, however, came back with other things, like a small bag of normal earth, and she asked him, quite seriously (but only once she had both thanked everyone who helped and made sure that talking to him wasn't going to make his (or her) head explode, she asked what seemed to her to be an obvious question.

"So, if it's about weight, can we jus' heat up feathers, an' if it's about number of things yer heatin' up," she said, gesturing to the large wooden table. "Then why not make this warm? I mean, I get about the degradin' stuff, an' so we don't wanna do that, but you get what I mean?" With an intrigued look on her face she asked, "How's it goin'? Is it workin'?"

[Mathias Blackwood]

Mathias Blackwood

War Arrives: The Chill of Death
16 Cylus 720

"Well we can't de-noodle me overnight but I'll work on it." Mathias replied when Vega said that they needed to make him tougher. She was right about strength and endurance having an impact on how far his arrows could go... how hard they hit target... whether or not they'd penetrate harder surfaces... a lot of things. He also knew that the bow he used most often had a fairly pedestrian draw. A bow with a stronger draw would go a lot farther if Mathias had the arm strength to use it. So he commit it to heart and would try to work on it in the future but they had more pressing challenges at hand. Vega turned the crowd into a workforce and one by one stones of all shapes and sizes were brought to Mathias who instructed the volunteers to set the stones on one end of the table and to leave the other empty for him.

"I'm not really sure if it is a size or weight thing. Every time I do it, it taxes me differently. But do we really even have enough feathers to fill the rooms?" It had been a while since he'd performed the steps. He'd relegated his magic to it's most immediate used but as Mathias began to wave his hands over the open portion of the table, it all came back to him. Wisps of blue ether trailed off of Mathias's hands as he moved them in a circle over the open table and in a few trills the wisps collected into a sort of fog of blue, fog-like ether. Mathias picked a small round stone, the first he would test, from the pile and put it into the field of ether he'd created. Basking. That was what Sylvia had called this step of the process. Submerging that which you wanted to transmute into a field of your own ether... and destroying it.

After about a bit, which may have seemed like a long time for the spectators but passed quickly for the mage trying to focus on the warmth of the orange sand, a shimmer began to pass over the stone, turning all it touched translucent until it had consumed the whole stone. What was the next step? Mathias thought for a moment and then it came back to him. Painting. Sylvia's choice of name for the step. Perseus had called it detailing but Mathias had to agree that painting sounded better. Mathias urged his ether- charged with the quality he meant to inscribe, into the stone. It was not the whole fog but the portions of it around the shimmering translucent stone seemed to seep into the it. After another bit or so of the fog like ether passing into and out of the stone the final step came. Reformation. Mathias had to pull the stone back into the real world. He had to create it again. It was here where his mistake became clear to him. He'd focused on the sand but not the stone. As he tried to will the stone back into existence, he thought of the warm sand. Another shimmer passed over the stone which reformed with orange streaks that had not been there before.

Flaws? Mathias reached into the field of ether and pulled the stone out. His spark warned him it was brittle a moment before the top half of the stone broke off. Mathias caught it but gripped too tightly and crushed half the rock into... well almost sand... but it was warm sand. Mathias held it out to Vega "What do you think?"

Human Male

Transmutation Mage
Glowing Silver Hand Veins

“The archer is the true weapon; the bow is just a long piece of wood.”
~ Sebastien de Castell

[Vega]

Sharpie and Auntie Vega.....

He spoke about "de-noodling" and Veag grinned at him. "If I can help you, then I will. Gimme a yell, Noddie-Noodle" When he asked if they had enough feathers to fill the room, she shook her head and gently touched her mostly-closed fist against his arm. Not even noodle-arms could feel that the gentle touch of her hand against him was anything except a feather-light tap. "That were an analogy, dweeb. I don't think we've got enough feathers, not unless there's a chicken farm here what nobody's tellin' me about." If there was, Vega thought, she'd be finding it and getting some eggs for breakfast tomorrow morning.

Still, he wasn't sure whether it was amount or size or what, and Vega gave a slight shrug. Looking at him, she watched what Mathias did as he worked. Vega had to admit, she admired him for his ability to do this - as a mage, she recognised that he must have done a lot of learning and - as far as she believed - mages were all clever. Mind you, she considered, and Vega suddenly grinned. "I'm a mage too. Defiance. Jus' a tiny bit, I hear the elements singin' to me." Vega shrugged slightly. "Nothin' like that, that's tootin' sure."

She watched him, as he worked and Vega had to admit to being fascinated by it. He worked with the sand and she watched him. She took the stone from his hand, feeling the brittleness of it - it crumbled beneath her fingers. She looked at the debris and she nodded. "That looks to me like it needs to be in a bag, an' then it'll be a bag of warm sand. That'll work, won't it?" Vega examined it, looking at how much it was consistent both in terms of how hot it was and how consistent in terms of the consistency of the crumble. She nodded her head. "This'll work. I'll make it work." Get her, Vega thought - sounding all like she could make decisions.

But then, of course, she grinned. "Even if I have to pound everyone here till they listen to. Come on then, noodle-boy. Lets get on, yeah?" Nodding at his work, she added. "Stop lollygaggin', will you?" And so it was that Vega decided that Mathias was in charge of making them warm.

[Doran]

Mathias:

Knowledge:
Transmutation - The Warmth of Scalvoris Sand
Transmutation - Learning qualities from granules
Transmutation - Maintaining an ether field
Transmutation - Sylvia's version of the Steps
Mediation x 3
Discipline x 2

Loot: -
Wealth: -
Injuries: -
Renown: -
Magic XP: Yes, for Transmutation.
Skill Review: Appropriate to level.
Points: 15

Vega:

Knowledge:
Leadership x 3
Singing x 5

Loot: -
Wealth: -
Injuries: -
Renown: -
Magic XP: -
Skill Review: Appropriate to level.
Points: 15

- - -

Comments: I like that you mentioned that the monsters aren’t the only thing that poses a problem, but that the cold constitutes a danger as well. That’s an important factor. Transmutation definitely comes in handy in that regard. The conversation between Vega and Mathias was well-written and entertaining to read. Their speculating about Ziell’s balls was especially amusing in my opinion!

Enjoy your rewards!