1 Soul Bound
1.2 Taking Control
1.2.3 An Enchanting Original
1.2.3.22 Perspective
Bungo: “I still need to work a bit on the landings, but I’m getting better. I got through quite a few healing potions when starting out. Was that any help? What do you hope to achieve with your weather magic?”
Kafana: “Alderney wants help with stealth. I’m not too sure about invisibility. We might want to ask Grandmaster Light about that. But I might be able to come up with mist that obscures vision, or something like mirages? And if I could alter the acoustic properties of air, that would be great not just for muffling sound, but also for my sonic magic.”
Bungo: “Altering density and humidity on the scale of meters or tens of meters sounds doable. I’ve been trying to work out how to detect hidden people, by looking for changes in air displacement and the effect of their breathing upon temperature and humidity. No luck so far, though. I can’t keep track of the changes. Too much information.”
Kafana: “I think resonance patterns might be an easier approach. Shall we leave that to another time, when we can have Alderney try to hide from us? The big thing I’d like to do today is change the weather. I’ve seen Captain Nafaro call lightning down from the sky. I’d like to be able to drench a battlefield in rain, turn it to mud and end the battle, or stop a horde of orcs from chasing us, so we can run away. Didn’t the mega-scale group from CoThEx talk about creating tornadoes?”
Bungo: “Sounds unlikely. Look at the shadow of the rain cloud above us. That’s about a square kilometer, and those cumulonimbus clouds are as tall as they are wide. If every cubic meter of that cloud contains just 2 grams of water, it would still be enough to cause 2mm of rainfall over the square kilometer underneath it. That would be the equivalent of a big swimming pool worth of water ending up running down that stream, or a mass equivalent to 400 African elephants. Call it 4 hours of light drizzle, 1 hour of moderate rain or enough for a 10 minute heavy shower.”
Kafana: “That doesn’t sound so bad. I don’t need to lift those elephants up there. They’re already up there in the clouds. I just need to trick the clouds into letting the elephants fall. Gravity is on my side.”
Bungo: “What if the clouds need to be moved into position? The air holding the water has a thousand times the mass of the water itself. We think of clouds as being light and fluffy because they hang in the air, but they still have lots of mass and inertia, even if their apparent weight is reduced by upthrust. To move the clouds, you’d need to be pushing the equivalent of 400,000 elephants - the total elephant population of Africa. Think of trying to dock a mountain with a space station. Not even using Seeing to guide the butterfly effect is going to accomplish that.”
Kafana: “Hmm. Found any leylines yet? If there were a big enough source of mana around, perhaps I could pour it directly into a spell, like I do from my mana storage ring. Or round up a thousand strong mages, so each one needs to only lift 400 elephants?”
Bungo shook his head, and a few raindrops fell onto him.
Bungo: “Brute force doesn’t feel like the right approach. How about we start small, and see if we learn anything that gives us some clues? Want to build me a rain shelter?”
Kafana: “I’d love to have some percussion for this one. Let me set up an amplifier spell.”
A minute later she was ready to go, and Bungo was holding his shield over his head. Kafana was getting soaked but, with her water-aligned ring on, she didn’t mind in the least; she’d always liked the pattering sound and fresh earthy smell of rural rain.
The Ring of Francis the Navigator (UNIQUE)(HOLY)(ARTIFACT)
+50% attunement to the element of water
Water breathing
+15 to the skill ‘Swimming’
Sea Friend
Water shaping
This ring was a gifted to Francis in person, by the deity Mor
Durability: INDESTRUCTIBLE
It might not be as epic as the pearl, but it was her first artifact, and she adored it. She sang the chorus about sheltering from rain from a piece by “All About Eve”, not trying for over-kill, but instead concentrating upon using her Truesight to study how the magic accomplished the effect. Bungo cautiously lowered his shield, and she joined him inside a 5 meter dome from which the raindrops splashed playfully. She had a silly moment where she imagined them bouncing upon the surface like a trampoline, going “Whoopee!”
The rain-shelter seemed to be composed of a mix of air and water mana, with a gossamer web of order providing a framework for them. Drops of chaos from outside seemed to be slowly corroding the order. She described it to Bungo.
Bungo: “Does it feel the same as when you made the water dance, back when we exited Signora Moda?”
Kafana shook her head.
Kafana: “No. Part of that was water shaping, which doesn’t use my mana. The rest wasn’t my doing. There was a spirit of some kind living in the pool, which reacted to my Sea Friend attribute. It was expressing its joy at being with me.”
Bungo: “Oh. Hey, your pearl says ‘Weather Friend’. Does that mean you should be trying to make friends with the weather, rather than control it?”
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Kafana: “Like someone trying to move elephants by running ahead of them carrying a tasty snack, rather than trying to push them? Worth a try. Ok, here goes. You might want to find something solid to cling onto.”
Doing it from inside this shelter didn’t feel right. That wasn’t how you treated friends. She stepped out into the rain, spread her arms wide, standing on her tiptoes, chest thrust forwards into the wind. She used the amplifier spell to project her thoughts as widely as she could, like she would to the fishies.
Kafana: Hello new friends!
Sylph: Hmph, you put a barrier up.
Sylph: Am I pretty?
Sylph: Are you fun?
Three winged creatures flitted around her, changing size and colour as they moved, disappearing and re-appearing from one moment to the next.
Kafana: *wonder and amazement*
Kafana: Yes, you are very pretty!
She tried talking with them for a while, but didn’t get very far, and once they got over the momentary interest of someone noticing and talking to them, they went back to ignoring her. She returned to Bungo.
Kafana: “They didn’t like me much. I’m not interesting to them.”
Bungo: “I think they might have been air spirits, not weather ones. Your attunement is probably too low. I bet they’d talk to me; mine is 114. I’ll try later.”
Kafana: “So how do I find weather ones?”
Bungo: “My guess? Up there.” he pointed directly upwards.
Kafana: “If I make an amplifier loud enough to reach that far, everybody in Torello will hear, and both our eardrums will burst.”
Bungo: “Do you need your voice to reach them, or just your thoughts? Could you use resonance to target just the clouds? By the way, players in the local chat channel are complaining about the rain. If you manage to make it miss the city, you’ll be doing them a favour.”
Kafana took a single raindrop from her finger, and concentrated upon it, feeling for the resonance. Yes, there it was, a long way up, but lots and lots of them. She looked at her amplifier construct and consulted with Minion briefly, before setting about altering the structure, making the output as well as the input use mind magic.
It took a few false starts, and Bungo bounding half a kilometer away to act as a test subject, but 20 minutes later, she thought she had something workable. She dried Bungo off and gave him a cup of hot soup to drink, sitting on his boulder back in the rain shelter. The rain by now was pouring down, the original cloud having moved on and been replaced by others still bearing moisture from the sea.
Kafana: Hello Cloud Friends!
She concentrated on her visualisation of spirits inhabiting the clouds linked to by resonance with the rain falling near her. Thanks to Bungo, she couldn’t shake the image of the spirits being elephant-shaped. Ah well. Hopefully it wouldn’t matter.
No, not elephant sized. Not kraken sized. Bigger, much much bigger. She poured mana into her amplifier, slowing down her words, aiming them at a larger target, a watery chaotic one.
Kafana: HELLO. CLOUD. FRIEND.
Cloud: ?
Kafana: FRIEND.
Cloud: !
It didn’t seem to be picking up on words. She switched over to using pure images and emotions.
Kafana: *joyous chaos of a summer rainstorm pounding down, the scent of it, the drumming sound as it hit the surface*
Two minutes later she received, not an image, but something like a mathematical construct? A data stream? A proposed plan of action? It was a vortex of something (pressure? humidity?) shown as a 3D vector field, hovering over a contour map, no, a heat map, of the land surface below the cloud. Ack!
Kafana: {Minion, help!}
Minion: [Passing you over to an expert.]
Dinah: [Yo, Nadine! What’s up, gal?]
Kafana: {That cloud is not a fish! I wanted something cute. It’s doing maths at me.}
Dinah: [Relax, we got this. I think it’s cute. It’s like a golden retriever puppy, a bit chaotic but eager to please. Now first, look out over the city and bring up your map on 50% transparency.]
Kafana did and, a moment later, she received a thought image from Dinah, complete with a confident emotional feel, that laid the heat contours over what she could see with her own eyes - a “cloud’s eye” view, as it were. The water was cooler than the land, but not uniform, and the south-facing slopes and the city itself were the hottest parts. A small industrial part of Basso glowed the most. Ok, that wasn’t so bad, she could grasp that.
Dinah: [Now the swirly thing, that’s the air currents which make up the cloud, and the numbers attached show the pressure, temperature and moisture at each point within it. I think it is showing you its face. It’s saying “Look, this is me, haven’t I done well carrying all this water?” Try sending back a feeling of impressed admiration, and the location on the heat map showing where you are.]
Kafana did as advised, sending her location first and holding the image for a good 30 seconds, before following it with the emotion, and a referent to the cloud’s own identity.
A few minutes later, her weather sense warned her of a change heading her way.
Kafana: “Bungo, I think we might be about to get a little wet. Can you hold onto me tightly and put your shield up over both of us?”
1 minute. 2 minutes. Nothing happened, the rain continued dripping down normally. Bungo relaxed.
Bungo: “False alarm. Looks like there was nothing to worr…”
About 10 bathtubs of nearly freezing cold water smashed Bungo’s expectations, Kafana’s shelter and down over a 20 meter diameter circle. They were both instantly soaked to the skin. Kafana let out a scream of pain and surprise, though the actual damage was minimal.
Dinah: [Oh look, the puppy has woken you up by laying a dead bird at the bottom of your bed. Good boy, who’s a good boy then?]
Kafana spluttered, unable to put her feelings into words, but hoping Dinah was picking up on them anyway. Dinah laughed.
Cloud: *construct*
Dinah stopped laughing.
Dinah: [Ah. Having dropped 1 elephant’s worth of water for you, it is now offering to drop the other 399 elephants.]