Well… wait. Joe took a break from forming his flower petal and thought of another idea. He made a very simple pattern where the point would appear in one location for one second before immediately appearing in another location without any intervening movement before returning to the first location once again. He imagined the point teleporting back and forth between the two places. Even as he thought it, the point began to teleport back and forth, spending about a second at each location. Oh… cool… so not Euclidean… but… that… then why is it so …
Joe went back to his flower petal, and began mentally describing the pattern once again. Instead of trying to form the pattern entirely at once, he guided the points along the prescribed path he wanted. Joe felt his eyebrows rise when he noticed the point began moving with his thought. Huh… lot easier this way. Joe continued guiding the point around until it had made its way back to the beginning and Joe released it to follow the pattern he’d described.
Joe’s satisfaction came to an end pretty quickly when he saw the points following a pattern that only a drunken college kid could have drawn, the petals mismatched and the final petal drawn into the last petal, covering it half way. Joe immediately growled and mentally expressed his disapproval and the point immediately stopped. Is that… Epiphany hit Joe and he tried a bit differently. Instead of tracing out the pattern of the petal, he imagined the perfect outline of the flower in its entirety and then asked the points to follow the outline as imagined. This time, the points followed it perfectly and it worked out well, although there were a few imperfections that Joe could pick out. Huh… knowing exactly what you want and visualizing it … that’s going to be tough.
Joe decided to try once again doing the entire construct at once, and was able to do it a bit easier, although he had a few hiccups. The first time, he made the entire shape and ask the points to follow the outline. All the points simply followed the entire outline of the flower, including stem and leaves. When he tried to give instructions to only follow the leaves or petals, they would end up going on one or the other, or sometimes not quite following through with Joe’s thoughts.
He’d almost given up after his eighth try when he had the bright idea to mentally color the lines differently. He gave the petal the typical daffodil yellow line, the leaves a very dark green, and the stem a lighter green. With that firmly in mind, he simply asked the points to follow their colored line, and all the points obediently went to each flower portion. Joe actually smiled brightly at that, relief escaping through his lungs as a long sigh.
Right. So… need to be very clear on what I want, including visualizing and making it do … exactly the right thing. Guessing that the screw up the first time was intending one thing but drawing another as my drawing didn’t perfectly match the flower shape I had in mind. The second time must have been just not being able to be clear at what flower, stem, and leaf… wait! The leaves! They were connected to the stem, so the point wouldn’t have been able to follow only the leaf. But… then … why didn’t it simply teleport… I didn’t ask?
Joe began berating himself when the realization hit. He’d made the same mistake as the first, visualizing one thing but intending something completely different. Two opposing commands ended up locking the whole procedure up, leaving the points paralyzed and unable to accomplish anything.
Joe then decided to see if he could have points follow snake like lines or in patterns. He was almost completely certain patterns worked, as he’d already seen the points moving as a group from his tests before. But, deciding to make sure, he had the points set up in a triangular shape then mentally viewed them as a group before setting them off on a simple figure eight pattern on a single plane. The points did exactly as he expected, but he was able to also have them maintain their original orientation or ‘turn’ with the pattern. Next, he set the points up in a line, designated a leader, then had all the other points play follow the leader with the first. The following points danced along behind the first, both exactly in line after the first or swinging around due to momentum, either as he envisioned it.
Struggling to stifle his grin, Joe moved on to other manipulations. But after playing with them several more times with various other patterns, he found himself uncertain exactly what use it was. He tried to remember a bit of what Garnedell taught him, and began manipulating them in other ways. They … hold mana, right? Isn’t that what Garnedell said? He willed the mana point to release mana, and mana began to pour out of the point about as fast as what he could do with his own mana. He wasn’t sure how to refill it, so stopped pretty quick, deciding to practice other things, alternating between working on his mana and mana points. Gotta remember… I can lose these… what would happen if they empty? Hmm…
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So, MP is full now, so… things I can do is manipulate mana, so… Joe thought about what might be useful then decided that if mana was what was needed to make spells, simply ‘spilling’ it out into the air was not very useful. Maybe… let’s try some shapes?
Over the next several minutes, while his mana lasted, he bent mana into a variety of shapes, able to send it out as lines, planes of various shapes, and three dimensional shapes as well. He didn’t need to simply send the mana out, but was able to compress it down to specific shapes. For lines, he was able to send it from his body almost like a spear thrust, but he was also able to send it out from himself parallel to his own body almost like a laser but one that was going vertically from the ground to the sky. Or vice versa? Is there a start and stop to this line? Or is it just… Joe fiddled with that idea a bit and was able to ‘feel’ some kind of difference between the ‘beginning’ of a line versus what he considered the ‘end.’ But, there didn’t seem to be any significant difference between them outside knowing what was what.
Regardless, he was able to send out lines in any orientation simply by willing it so. As for planes, they were similar to the lines although he was able to make planes of any shape and eject them from his body in any orientation, whether parallel to the ground or perpendicular on any rotation. Three dimensional objects proved to be the same, and he soon had cubes, spheres, shells, cones, cylinders, and any other shape he could think of floating away from his body.
Hmm… can I … keep them from wandering off, or is there only an initial push? Joe sent out another simple sphere, which proved to be easiest to him, for some reason, then tried to control it after it had been sent out. But, it seemed that after it had left his body, it simply continued on without stop until it degraded into the ambient. Distance didn’t seem to be a factor, simply time, although he wasn’t quite sure on that, either, as most of the mana that he sent flying from himself at high velocity escaped his sight be going through the walls or ceilings. Those that left him ‘slowly’ dissipated after a bit of time.
Wait, can I make a sphere around myself? That’s gotta be the beginning of a shield, right? Joe followed his thoughts and very deliberately pictured a full hollow sphere around his body. He’d made and shot little hollow and solid balls before, but this was the biggest construct he’d ever made.
It seemed to come easily enough, but the mana escaped from him in a cloud of mana before it came to almost exactly where he’d envisioned it to form before stopping and forming up a solid shell of mana surrounding him on all sides. Joe’s eyes widened at this, and he began grinning. So… can’t control it after it’s made, but can … given it some pretty … huh. So… wait! With a huge grin plastered his face, Joe excitedly started another idea but then blinked when no mana came out. He flipped up his status finding his MP empty. He sighed and set the idea aside for the next time.
Mana recharge time, so let’s look at mana points then. They’re like… actual points in space. They seem to hold mana. Then… which one did I use before? It should bit emptier than… there. Almost as Joe thought of it, he immediately knew which mana point was empty and he kind of blinked in surprise. So, how did I … know that? Just… instinctual? Joe spun his mana points around and danced them a merry jig, but while he seemed to have much greater delicate control of them, he wasn’t sure what to do with them. As he did so, another thought came to him and his eyebrows knit. Wait… my MP is down… so … then… how does the… He quickly brought up his ‘used’ mana point and evaluated it and noticed it had recharged a bit more, which also answered the first question he had. The MP in my status has nothing to do with my mana points MP… looks like?
He pulled up his status and looked at his MP and found it at about thirty percent after all his playing. He then began expending mana from his mana point and mana erupted outwards with ease. His MP, however, did not change at all. He stopped wasting his mana point’s mana and frowned. He then squirted out a little mana from his core and watched his MP on his status begin dropping again. He stopped squirting out mana and turned back to his mana points to all his personal mana to recharge.
He played with them a bit before taking a look at his mana again, finding it about half refilled and decided to try to stuff mana into the empty mana point. He did so, and the mana point filled up and felt… full, for the lack of a better term. He still had a quarter of his mana left, and wondered what he could do with it in relation to his mana points. Are they really just … mana capacitors? Or batteries?
He began playing with the points in other ways besides simply movements and tried anything he could think of. He began stuffing extra mana into one of his mana points, and felt it go from full to uncomfortably full. He pushed in some more and then began to feel pain, stopping quickly at that point. He turned to his other points but then stopped, deciding he would need controls, so… Maybe I can do one other thing? I have lots of points. Make some groups… one to experiment with, one for control?
He took a point from the experiment group and played with it in his grasp, twisting and twirling it around but found himself uncertain of what else he could do. He had movement and speed as well as filling and emptying and that was all he could really… think of right now. He brainstormed for a bit more before giving up on his brainstorming and returning to his mana point, focusing on it intently, willing to learn what he could on it.