2020-04-29: A Useful Trick
- Log: A Useful Trick
- Cast: Loren Voss, Lily Keil
- Where: The Cape of Breath
- Date: April 29, 2020
- Summary: Loren's 'lessons' with Lily continue, but go to places he doesn't quite like. Lily discovers the limits of education.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Movements at the fine levels are far more difficult than at the gross. It's like learning to walk, in a sense -- the first few steps are the stumbling ones, and in time we learn to walk, run, and eventually, dance.
The offer he'd made was a simple one: he'd give her some grounding in Jugend theory, with the idea that at least she'd be less of a danger to herself and others.
That's how he'd put it, at least. Its actual truthworthiness is of course a matter for debate.
In reality, his goal is simpler: gauge them, gauge their opinions of him, and plot out some way he could use these factors to his (and ultimately Solaris') advantages.
Their last meeting had gone... well enough.
But today he's asked her further afield than even that, in the direction of some strange burial ground, if just to the outskirts thereof. As some sort of 'gesture of good will', he'd even given her his sword, or at least offered it.
As if that, alone, would somehow render him toothless.
"...Good. No one's here," he says, still a distance from the ruin's entrance. He pushes his glasses up his nose with a pair of fingers. "This will do. ...So? Come on, let me see it. Your magic."
<Pose Tracker> Lily Keil has posed.
Jugend theory. So far, Lily finds it to be strange and highly regimented in a different way from her own magic, but not entirely without a few usful tricks. Whether she can trust him or not--she has interest in learning more about her powers and the powers of those they're fighting, and so it's good enough for now. Their last meeting was fine. This one...
"Hm," Lily comments as she sees the place, and does have Loren's sword at the moment, though this doesn't particularly tell her Loren is harmless. She's kept her attention on him, though she isn't expecting more trouble than usual... But here at the ruin.
"What, just generally?" Lily asks. "No specifics?"
She shrugs, and puts out her hand, conjuring a ball of fire that hovers over her palm, blazing along merrily; her markings light up orange-red. It grows to the size of a human head, and then narrows to a marble, before it becomes about the size of her fist.
"I could just destroy... that rock," she comments.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
He watches her, as she does it -- his gaze lingering on the flame that roils in her grasp, along with the markings on her flesh. Red. Of course.
As to what they mean, he has no idea. He'd done a little asking about on wild Ether users, and insofar as much is general to them at all, this part is: no one's filed reports on strange markings before.
The size shifts easily enough, he figures. Then again if she didn't have that one down by now she'd have a whole host of burnt villages behind her.
"Destroy it? What, with the fire?" he asks.
And he takes a breath, shuffling his awareness into that very rock... which begins to rattle against the ground where it rests.
Then slowly begins to grow in size. Draw from the earth. Shuffle it, layer it, and pull again. The same operation in minute, except replicated again and again.
Soon the rock's size doubles, triples. He's barely moved, and but for the intensity of his focus on the rock, no one might even know what he was doing.
"So... can you break it?"
<Pose Tracker> Lily Keil has posed.
The strange, circuit-like markings don't announce any particular meaning. They just glow faintly with the appropriate color, as long as she continues to exert Ether in sufficient quantity.
Size is fairly trivial; Lily just has to adjust the amount of power drawn into the effect, which is frankly a relatively small amount at these sizes. Lily's golden eyes reflect the flames' flickering as she lifts an eyebrow. "Not usually, fire isn't well-suited to destroying hard targets. You'd want to intensify from fire to try to melt through something like that, but that isn't strictly 'breaking'."
She watches the ston grow, considering the feeling of the magic in the air. He doesn't have to motion much for this; that's interesting.
It could be considered a challenge to do it with fire, but no. Instead, Lily considers breaking at its most elemental.
"Yeah, I can do that," Lily answers, and extends her hand. The markings abrubtly switch to deep violet as a small black spot appears near the rock. It spins and grows like a miniature black hole before suddenly becoming a wide blade that hacks down towards the rock. The force of its presence generates a thunderclap--
No, it's not the force. It's the sudden elimination of the air above the rock that does that, wind slamming back to fill the void. And maybe the rock's sound...
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Loren's seen them before -- several times. Blue, purple...
And of course, red.
But never in anyone else.
"Really? I could have sworn I'd seen you do it," he says, then rolls his shoulders in the very laziest of shrugs. "...Well, fine."
It's all a matter of concentration. Usually in the heat of a fight, he can't focus the way he'd rather, so the visual effect tends to be rather more... obvious. When he has the time to step back and think about what he's doing, he doesn't even need to touch it, or move, for that matter.
But it does mean that his focus on the rock, especially as he builds on it, drawing on not only his Jugend training but the work he'd done in Spira, over half a year ago, is near-absolute. He's not paying attention to Lily.
Not until he's done.
Her markings turn a deep violet. Loren's eyes widen, and here he shifts his posture, stretching out a hand towards the enlarged rock, which briefly glows with a white light. What is he doing--
The rock resists destruction.
For a few seconds. Inexorably, it's winnowed away, Loren's jawline tightening as it goes, turned into...
Into nothing at all, really.
"..." he exhales, dropping his hand. It isn't... supposed to work like that.
"So what is that, anyway? Wind?"
It's not wind. He knows better than that.
<Pose Tracker> Lily Keil has posed.
"You can destroy with anything if you're willing to put enough force in," Lily answers. She doesn't deny that fire could, just not that it's best suited. And she seems to have a lot of opinions about destruction, for that matter. But concentration... it goes a long way. Lily can cast without motions...
But she doesn't, generally, except for that one time in Aveh.
Lily's focus is likewise on her magic, but when she finishes enacting the effect she looks over at Lren and sees that white light glowing, recognizes that he's doing something, and pushes with greater force down than before. When the rock is gone...
Lily rolls her shoulders, and the markings fade. She loks Loren over, at his particular expression, and shakes her head at the question. "I have no facility for Wind," Lily admits. "Can't so much as make a breeze except by cheating with temperature changes in the air or something. No, it's..."
She trails off for a moment. "On Lunar they called it 'darkness', and that's good enough. Void, darkness; it's the power of...mm, 'unmaking' doesn't sound very scientific. Discorporation, I guess. If fire is 'neutral', then darkness is forward. Emotion strengthens it, but also makes it harder to focus. So it's one I use carefully."
"...Hey, Voss." She considers something. "When did you start using Ether, anyway?"
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"I guess," Loren says, in the tone of voice that suggests he feels anything but. Not anything. It's not like you could heal someone by fixing their wounds so much that they...
...now that's a weird thought, and one that Loren files away for later, perhaps.
In any regard, he's watching her--
Up until the moment when she opts to break it apart in that way, provoking an instant reaction from him. But he probably still remembers, doesn't he, those altercations he had with her in Aveh. They might go further to explain what he tried just now--
But he's not quite yet at 'unmovable object' to her 'unstoppable force'. To her 'darkness', as it were.
"Annihilation," he says, giving her that more scientific word she seeks. "So it completely removes something from existence." Or close enough -- perhaps if he had the right equipment he might find the scattered atoms of the rock. But there isn't even dust of it left, that he can see.
It's into this moment that she asks him something.
"...Around when I entered Jugend. I guess I might have been using it unconsciously before then, but usually if you're using it without training that's..." He wobbles a hand and grimaces. "...Anyway, the capacity is there but you don't know how to do it. You have to be taught." He considers her for a moment. "Or figure it out on your own, I guess."
No wonder rogue users are dangerous, he considers. They can't even rein it in properly.
<Pose Tracker> Lily Keil has posed.
Lily does take some satisfaction in succeeding, of course. But it's a fairly basic task, even if, "The attempt to reinforce it was interesting," she muses about it. But 'interesting', not disturbing or something that stopped her. But there--
"Yes, that's it. So far as I know, yes. Though it took time to learn to focus the effect enough to actually annihilate an object fully instead of just blasting it. So annihilation is a more advanced effect. I didn't really get that knack until after I started using my power in active combat."
Which she didn't do when she was younger, apparently. But she does ask a question--and she gets the answer, after a moment, thinking about it.
"So, school," Lily says. "Hm. That's why I was curious. I remember..."
"Well, as young as I can remember, around seven or so, I was using Ether, with enough control to conceal it. I guess that suggests I learned from someone, but I don't remember." She's not completely convinced. Maybe another difference...
"So, that seems like wind, does it?"
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"Tch," Loren grouses, sourfaced as he glances away from her. The worst part is, next time he might have to try and learn how to do that on the fly, and it'll be his body on the line and not just the fate of some rock. If he can't get up to snuff by then, well, it'll be a bad scene...
Great. So she didn't always have the ability to render rock (and other things) into so much nothing but learned how to do it from adversity. Hopefully that's the end-point of her powers and not some sorry predictor of more to come.
If van Houten were a rogue Ether-user...
Some thoughts are best not completed.
He looks at her -- not quite staring, but no neutral gaze, this -- for a good long moment. "...That's weird," he says at last. "Doing it that young. Usually..."
Usually you're at least about early teens before it starts manifesting, if it even does before Jugend. And maybe he's no great talent himself by comparison to certain others but--
He's still First Class.
This thing of Lily's bothers him.
"...Kind of," he says, pushing away from the discomfort. "The way it creates a, a void space," he says, gesturing vaguely. He's never been able to do anything with wind. "Wind's about movement, but also the gaps, and the connection across the gaps." Like lightning. Like pulling the air out of one's body. Like pressure-derived blasts that can cut a person open. "Or maybe something like earth. But..."
Earth, in the end, is about stress as well as pressure.
<Pose Tracker> Lily Keil has posed.
Not that she doesn't have other tricks that are about as bad. Like the golden fire. But she's always working to improve... which is why she agreed to this in the first place, naturally. As for it being the end... well, when does Loren get to have that kind of luck
"Usually?" Lily prompts. "How old does it usually manifest?" A beat, "I'm willing to call it unusual. That's part of why I'm interested in how others use it. You can learn a lot more with something to contrast."
So, it's kind of like wind. "Absence... Hmm. That's the effect, but..." She considers. "Focusing on the absence. It's an interesting thought. Maybe I can do something with that." She doesn't seem bothered--maybe she notices that Loren is, maybe she doesn't, but she gets a certain... experimental approach like this, where all that matters is the Ether.
"Ice is a little like that for me--the absence of heat, the opposite of fire. Then substance is... Well."
She doesn't go into that one yet. Instead, she lifts her palms, and the markings go red again as she conjures two fireballs. They bounce a little in her hands and she sets them to orbiting her arms.
"So, destruction. I had to learn how to spare what I meant to spare, and not what I didn't. That's why this exercise. You start with one or two, usually, and pick up speed. Burn yourself, and you start over."
"I take it your methods have some means of dealing with the effects of your own magic."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Never. The correct answer is he never has that sort of luck.
As for her question, he shrugs. Telling her this much won't hurt anything, as long as he's playing games. Don't you have to give a little to get a little? And it isn't as if she could weaponize it. "Early teens, or thereabouts. Mostly, you learn how when you enter Jugend." His aptitude had been slightly -- only slightly -- unusual, in that he'd already been picking up on some of the basics of what comes easily to him shortly before he signed up.
Which is to say, he was working out how to heal wounds far before he was working out how to hurt anyone else. Usually it's easier to project force outwards first, or learn how to heal and hurt in the same go. Or so he's been told.
But still, it was merely unusual. Not weird or rare.
Lily, on the other hand...
He pulls a face. The reason why might be obvious -- he's probably just managed to give her some bad ideas. He's... just not going to mention this in the reports and hope for the best in all regards.
"Huh..." he does utter, though. "'Cold doesn't exist'," he continues, as if quoting something, only to shake his head. "Thermodynamics. Figures." Before she moves on to demonstrate, and explains a little bit about how she learned how to do it.
"...You're pretty messed up, Keil," he says, as he looks away.
"...Sure. But we're not risking burning ourselves learning or anything." The real factor came into play with the theory, with the practice manipulating force, summoning it. And as he'd learned later, the field-effect dampening in the practice rooms.
Not that any of that did much good when van Houten blew up about 10% of their graduating class.
<Pose Tracker> Lily Keil has posed.
"I see," Lily answers. So, that's when. It's true that she doesn't know of any particular use for this knowledge, making it an ideal 'give' in that respect. Unless she's suddenly going to confront a bunch of Solarian preteens.
It might tell Lily something nice about Loren to hear that he learned to heal first. But, that doesn't happen today, either. She just gets more of a feel for the 'usual', though she's past feeling too bad for being strange at the moment. She has her reasons.
But she dosn't seem to notice his pulled face....
"I've been violating the laws of thermodynamics since before I learned what they were," Lily answers there. But he says she's messed up, and... "Heh. It teaches you to deal with pain, anyway. I had to have short hair as a little girl, because I'd keep burning it by mistake. I guess I keep it long now just because I can." But that veers onto something personal. Still, though...
"That's what's strange to me," Lily admits. "Maybe you've got some special environment or something, but it's weird that your spells just pass you by." The fire gets faster as she speaks. "That'd be a useful trick to learn."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
He shakes his head. "No, you don't get it, Keil. There is no such thing as cold. Just different degrees of heat. ...Until there is no longer any molecular movement at all, anyway. Maybe that's the only thing in the universe that's really cold--" He runs a hand through his hair as if agitated, pushing it out of his eyes for a moment, then lets his arm drop. "...Forget it. You won't get it."
He exhales a long breath.
"You're not any more messed up the more you tell me about this, you know," he says, looking away from her.
"...It's not weird, you're the one who's weird," he says, glancing back at her a moment before folding his arms over his chest. "Look. It's not that people don't. Just ask van Houten about it sometime. It's that we're not taught in a way that encourages us to. That's why people like you are a danger to everyone," he reminds her.
<Pose Tracker> Lily Keil has posed.
"So 'more heat' and 'less heat', then." Lily shrugs. "It really seems to bother you. Hold that thought." She 'won't get it anyway', of course. Lily has the brief frustration of the concepts she knows she could explain in another language... But that she doesn't know the words for in their shared tongue. She shakes her head, letting the fire burst out of being after a moment, her markings fading. It's fine.
"You're telling me the way you use your Ether hasn't impacted your life in ways beyond 'being obligated to use it for Gebler'?"
"Right, right, of course I'm the weird one," she says, in the tone of someone humoring someone. But he reveals the actually useful information next. They aren't taught in a way that encourages them to...
"So, 'standard' Ether wielders don't have that level of control, they just work around it," she concludes. "Less different than I thought."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"Who says it bothers me? It's just weird," Loren retorts, shaking his head. "Anyway, forget it." He seems increasingly agitated, particularly when she asks him--
"Why would it?" he responds, squinting at her in the wake of that question. "It's just something you learn how to do, if you're able to do it. And what do you mean, 'obligated'..."
He never had van Houten's problem. Or, for that matter, Kelvena's. His control is utterly normal in all the ways that actually matter.
Then she comes to a conclusion that, to judge by his reaction, he doesn't like all that much. "What? What gives you that idea?" he says, reaching up to fidget with his glasses. "We learn control by practicing the proper theory. All this stuff you're insinuating is..." He gestures, broadly, violently.
And then seems to catch himself, drawing a slow breath. "...Forget it," he says again, shaking his head. "Did you want to learn how to control it or not?"
<Pose Tracker> Lily Keil has posed.
He does seem increasingly agitated. A part of Lily wants to keep doing whatever she's doing just to see him irritated... But the rest of her remembers how strange he was acting in the first place, before, and doesn't continue on that first track. This doesn't mean she gets particularly gentle, though.
"I haven't worried about a hot day in the desert much in my life," Lily suggests for one. "I don't need to worry much about injury, because I can heal through any of it. All a wound costs me is time and pain." And the latter is such a trifling, unimportant thing. "...And do you really mean to tell me you had a choice in whether to attend this Jugend?"
Oh, he really doesn't like that conclusion. "You said yourself; there's no need to learn that kind of fine manipulation if you're 'smart enough' not to conjure fire close to your body in the first place. My appraoch has certain problems for which I learned to compensate that you never needeed to account for."
But, he asks that question. "Yes, I'm still interested. So what 'should' I be doing to call up fire?"
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"Aren't we lucky," Loren snipes back at her. While it's true that injuries -- generally, catastrophic spears through his gut not included -- are things he can mend in a matter of moments, the rest of matters aren't things that he can glide past so swimmingly.
Maybe it's different for the 'blessed van Houten', though.
"Of course. If you've got a high response--" he starts to say, before narrowing his eyes. "...Nice try," he finishes. "Short and only answer you're getting: yes. We don't have to serve if we don't want to."
Which means that he wanted to?
Which might matter more if he could remember why he'd wanted to.
"...That's not... ugh, you're infuriating. All I said was that we don't have to be so damn stupid about it like you apparently were," he snaps, apparently more than a little heated, before, in the middle of his fit, he apparently tries to dump the matter altogether.
"I don't use fire. Ice, I can tell you about. You need to form the appropriate metamorphic matrices to consolidate water vapor, then..."
He's going to go on about theory if he's not stopped.
<Pose Tracker> Lily Keil has posed.
"The point is, there's no reason to limit your Ether use like that. Eh... Whatever, you'd probably just call that dangerous." But a high 'respons'. If you've got that... Hmmm. "Color me surprised," Lily says. He actually wanted to. But then, he probably had a reason. Or maybe a 'reason'; she theoretically had the same choice, but in practice... What would she have done differently, with her father as he was?
"I'm good at being infuriating. Like I'm good at Ether."
Lily actually listens at first about the theory. For a little while. Metamorphic matricces off of water vapor...
"So, you need water first? I've got no facility for water. Just ice. Like I said, fire in reverse."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"And if you set yourself on fire and die while learning, you're still dead. It doesn't matter if you can't even get to that point without serious harm. The point's to-- oh, forget it. I'm not sure why I'm even trying with someone like you."
Even in this moment his reason -- his real reason -- slips from him, nudged aside by raw irritated emotion.
"I can tell," Loren says, finally slipping off his glasses to rub at the bridge of his nose.
He groans in response as she interrupts. "Stop making assumptions. If there isn't any, you can do without it, but it's easier to work with elements that are already present." It's how they were taught -- first, start with what you have, if you have it. Even when he heals, it's at least moving things in the direction and feel of earth, even if it doesn't so much as use a grain of sand in the process. "Waste not, want not. And they're the same damn thing, Keil."
To his point of view, apparently.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"And if you set yourself on fire and die while learning, you're still dead. It doesn't matter if you can't even get to that point without serious harm. The point's to-- oh, forget it. I'm not sure why I'm even trying with someone like you."
Even in this moment his reason -- his real reason -- slips from him, nudged aside by raw irritated emotion.
"I can tell," Loren says, finally slipping off his glasses to rub at the bridge of his nose.
He groans in response as she interrupts. "Stop making assumptions. If there isn't any, you can do without it, but it's easier to work with elements that are already present." It's how they were taught -- first, start with what you have, if you have it. Even when he heals, it's at least moving things in the direction and feel of earth, even if it doesn't so much as use a grain of sand in the process. "Waste not, want not. And they're the same damn thing, Keil."
To his point of view, apparently.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"And if you set yourself on fire and die while learning, you're still dead. It doesn't matter if you can't even get to that point without serious harm. The point's to-- oh, forget it. I'm not sure why I'm even trying with someone like you."
Even in this moment his reason -- his real reason -- slips from him, nudged aside by raw irritated emotion.
"I can tell," Loren says, finally slipping off his glasses to rub at the bridge of his nose.
He groans in response as she interrupts. "Stop making assumptions. If there isn't any, you can do without it, but it's easier to work with elements that are already present." It's how they were taught -- first, start with what you have, if you have it. Even when he heals, it's at least moving things in the direction and feel of earth, even if it doesn't so much as use a grain of sand in the process. "Waste not, want not. And they're the same damn thing, Keil."
To his point of view, apparently.