Four Days Later
Vey, at Sera’ suggestion, has decided to start tapping on the table instead of scratching at it. The lack of ability to claw something to release his frustrations was a little bit annoying at first, but the newfound sensation of musically tapping multiple fingers at once more than makes up for it. Of course, all of this would be unnecessary if he wasn’t frustrated in the first place, but alas, he is.
He’s made considerable progress on expanding his repertoire of 3rd tier spells, and has begun work on his first 4th tier spell, but Vey finds he’s hit a potentially insurmountable roadblock unless he comes up with a solution fast. So far, all of his spells have been usable with just mana, and most are versatile, but 4th tier spells are either flatly different, or he’s missing something. The current spell he’s working on he’s calling [Stone Shape], the long sought method of expanding/repairing/altering the dungeon, but the snag is nothing like he’s ever seen before.
For starters, it seems impossible to make a spell like this work fast, Vey’s currently at the point where using its effects over the course of hours is probably the timescale this requires, instead of seconds like most of his other magic. Also, it requires ‘fuel’ other than just mana; he doesn’t know why, but none of it works if he doesn’t have some sort of ‘focus’ and some sort of ‘offering’. Currently, stone dust seems to suffice for the offering, but he doesn’t have any sort of focus, so the spell is unusable. He doesn’t even know what a focus really is, beyond the vague and unhelpful system definition.
System Help
Subject; Focuses
Focuses are items or rarely other types of objects that assist in the casting of certain types of (usually incredibly complex) spells. The archetypical example of a focus is a cleric’s holy symbol.
Vey isn’t a cleric, and he hasn’t been able to get any more information from system help than that. He supposes that maybe a staff or something would work, but when he tried picking up the staff from that sorcerer girl, he knew instinctively that it wouldn’t work. The system help does say ‘item’, but Vey has no idea what an ‘other’ type of object would be, if it wouldn’t be classified as an item. Somewhat amusingly for them both, he tried using Sera as a focus, but that didn’t yield any results. It did give her an idea for a spell though, and that’s what she’s practicing now.
As he thinks of her, he turns to look at the raging roil of mana aura around her. Truly, she’s a monstrously powerful melee combatant now, at least in his eyes. After witnessing the aftermath of her applied combat skills and magics, Vey is almost certain that Sera is the stronger of the two of them, and he was probably only ever stronger than her in the past by sheer level, nothing more.
He does allow himself the concession that he shouldn’t have been trying to turn his wizardry into melee augmentations, that probably squandered some future potential somehow, but he didn’t have many other options back then. He internally sighs, and resolves to just ask for help. Sera learns from his magic and frustrations, maybe he can learn something from her.
“Sera, if you needed a spellcasting focus, what would you use?” Vey asks, taking care to only interrupt her training after she’s steadied her footing. While the sight of her falling over onto her butt would be funny, it would also be unproductive.
“I’d just use one of my swords… probably the longsword.” Sera answers without looking back at him and without much hesitation, so he prods further.
“Why your swords?”
“Mmmm…” Sera shifts her weight to a more comfortable position, and thinks to herself for a bit. Vey watches her back intently, noting the way her ears flick as she turns around to answer. “I feel like it’s supposed to be something significant to you, that you’d always be carrying on you. Ah! Maybe the reason you’re having so much trouble is because you’re always naked and don’t carry much?”
Vey feels like his skull was just hit with a brick at the revelation that his failure is, in fact, his failure. Truth be told, he tried wearing clothes once or twice, at Sera’s suggestion. It wasn’t uncomfortable, per se, but it was restrictive, and particularly restrictive in a way he didn’t like. He doesn’t use muscles and tendons to move his limbs, they just work, so having his freedom of movement restricted by fabric more sophisticated than the ‘weird belt thing’ he uses to hold his spellbook and a few pouches is very annoying.
“I… Can you think of anything I carry with me enough to use as one? I already know my spellbook doesn’t work…”
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Two Days Later
Sera puts her hand over her mouth to try and hide her smile and hold back her chuckle, but her ears betray her. She hadn’t expected Vey to take her suggestion of ‘make something to use as a focus’ seriously, but she really hadn’t expected him to carve a ‘staff’ out of wood using nothing but his claws. She’d been wondering what he was doing in the workshop while she trained, but the result is…
“Vey, it looks more like… a normal stick, with scratches in it… I know you put in a lot of work, but why use your claws and not just like… a knife?” She tries to maintain calm, and speaks in her best ‘I’m the woman of the house around here’ voice, but only sounds like a bad impression of her mother in the process.
“... I thought doing it by hand would be better… Do you think you could do it better?” Vey’s shoulders sink a little as he admits it, and Sera manages to discard the humor of the situation for something more practical. She takes a few steps forwards and puts her arms around him.
“Why don’t we try making one together, tonight? It’ll look nicer if we do it properly, and we can use what you’ve made there as a starting point. Want to try that?” She came up with her suggestion only after she started talking, and subsequently doubts whether or not that’s even possible once she listens to herself.
She pulls away and takes the stick from Vey, and starts examining it more closely. She’s not the craftiest or the artsiest, but all mortals have an eye for artistic aesthetic. Hence why she thinks the stick is an eyesore, but the amount of effort Vey has put in over the course of the day(and probably longer) means she can’t justify throwing it away. She hands it back to Vey, and picks up her longsword and scabbard, and sheathes it before setting it back on the table.
In the time it took her to do that, Vey has acquired a stack of blank paper, his favorite quill, and some of the last of the actual ink, not the approximation he makes with magic, and he looks downwards at his own feet in a way Sera has only seen him do a four or five times in the entire duration of their time together.
That look, for mortal race, would be associated with sheepishness, and it sort of is for Vey as well, but Sera feels that with him, it’s more to do with his lack of other ways of expressing himself. Not having a face or lips to convey emotion leads to him just not expressing his emotions nonverbally. However, in this case, she feels it is less sheepish and more like he's distracted by his own thoughts.
She’s yet to successfully deduce what evokes the same mixture of romantic fluster, tension, and genuine passion in Vey like head pats or a surprise kiss would do for her, but perhaps this might come close? The prospect that Vey's favored love language might be creating stuff together makes... so much sense that she's not sure even Vey himself would notice, with how much time he spends researching.
“Yes, together, Vey, I’ll show you how we used to make walking sticks way back when.”
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Vey finds something about sitting on the floor with Sera like this incredibly enjoyable. Enjoyable isn’t even correct, something about this feels blissful, as though he could do this forever. The incredibly monotonous activity of turning a small log into a serviceable staff by the two bondmates is something Vey is loving, in the same way that creating new spells is ‘fun’, only magnified by the ability to fully share the experience with Sera. He wonders if perhaps Sera’s insistence on sleeping together, kissing, that sort of thing, is because that is how she gets to feel the way Vey does right now.
Hours seem to flash by in seconds for him, and Vey can tell Sera is getting tired, but the majority of the work is done, the process of cutting, whittling, smoothing, and then carving and repeating is something he never expected to feel so… Good. The finished product doesn’t look like anything special, but he does feel oddly attached to it. Sera had suggested that Vey come up with a design beforehand, using his papers and ink, instead of using them to test whether or not it would work as a focus.
The result was that he’d come up with a sort of staff, as tall as Sera, with a second handle poking out of the wood about three fourths of the way up the pole at a ninety degree angle. Initially, he’d decided on this purely to use it to better rest his arms on it, if he was going to be walking around with it at all times, but then Sera suggested making the whole design bigger, and using it as a quarterstaff, with the handle letting it function as a more effective weapon in some circumstances.
She’d confiscated his solo attempt at a staff from earlier, and had begun working on that when not actively doing anything else. He’s still not sure what she wanted to do with it, but it’s about half its original length, but regardless, their main work is finally…
Halfway done. The shape, proportions, and basic carving are all done, but Sera insists that it needs to be dried and treated with something sealing before it could be brought outside. Sealing is an issue, they don’t have any readily available materials to do that with, but Sera pointed out that he could just make a spell for that, just something to waterproof and make it resistant to his own magic would work. Satisfied with that answer, and the product of their labor, as well as the labor itself, Vey finally allows himself to stop.
He looks up at Sera, at the dark rings around her eyes, and the way her ears are drooping, but the gentle smile on her beautiful face had not faltered once this entire time, and he understands. Sera had said without hesitation that her sword would be her focus because she always has it, but that’s not actually what a focus is for, he thinks. It matters that the object means something to you, that’s why a holy symbol works for a cleric, or a staff crafted by lovers would suffice.
He picks up the staff, and lets his mind ‘feel’ it for a moment, and he does feel something. Vey knows it won’t be a focus just yet, it needs time for that, but he can tell it will become one. He stands up, and sets it on the table, and reaches a hand down to Sera. She looks up at him. The silence between them as they worked has persisted for over an hour now, and the exhaustion visible on her face lets him know she won’t be breaking it now, but that’s fine, he thinks.
He reaches downwards fully, and picks her up in his arms, carrying her to the bed, and sets her down. She holds onto him for a moment, but quickly lays down as he crawls into bed with her. He doesn’t even get fully settled in before he can feel from the slowness of her breath and the calm in her aura that she’s already asleep. He dispels the [Permanent Light] anyway.
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Aura Armor (Active)
Aura Armor produces an effect identical to the [Mage Armor] spell, except its bonus counts as Natural Armor Class as opposed to an Armor Bonus. The Aura Armor is created the same way the user would cast [Mage Armor], and the same costs apply. The appearance of Aura Armor is slightly different, however; the caster’s usually invisible magical aura instead becomes visible, and solid, so the Aura Armor’s appearance is identical to the appearance of the caster’s aura.
[Warning-One of the effects of Foreverqueen’s Shroud(Attempts from hostile creatures to magically identify the individual, or any of their spells, skills, curses, and magical effects fail.) is incompatible with the effect of Aura Armor. To use Aura Armor, you must willingly disable this effect of Foreverqueen’s Shroud for Aura Armor’s duration]