Needless to say, Ed got absolutely destroyed. Forget eleven, Ed could barely keep track of one. At one point he ended up clumping them all together and treating them as a sort of unit, but that didn’t work very well when Liah was able to actually pass the ball around, if he spread them too thin, he was unable to micromanage, but if he clumped them up, she would just throw a pass.
That said, he did manage to get one touchdown. The first time he clumped, he’d clumped them on a fumble and since he somehow recalled number twenty was a rather prominent track member, he was able to form a sort of primitive screen with the rest of his players before sending him rocketing through with a focused ‘touchdown’ suggestion.
Sadly, after that Liah’d permanently put a guy on twenty so there were no more tricks there.
By the time it was all over Ed was beginning to feel a sort of mental strain and before he’d even noticed, his stamina bar seemed to have dipped into a rather dangerously low zone as well.
Was that seriously how it worked? He hadn’t even been moving! In fact, he still wasn’t really moving. He was just sort of laying there on his spotting block, catching his breath with an arm tossed over his head because apparently just thinking too hard was enough to set him panting. Ed was seriously considering a boycott for this shitty game design.
“How’d you get them to move so smoothly? “ He said between pants. Putting aside the ethical concerns, it was a little creepy how natural they’d all looked. In fact, her team was even exchanging laughs and backslaps now as if his team wasn’t standing like a bunch of iced corpses across from them. Oh, right.
He released his control and the team blinked around in confusion, a couple simply collapsing to their knees.
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Liah washed them with a sweeping glare, little pink indicators briefly flashing into existence above their heads before they started slowly but very visibly relaxing, as if something somewhat important had just left their heads.
Liah was examining him somewhat contemplatively now.
“We’re not using the same technique. I’ll say this right now since you seem rather ignorant. The Thrall spell was developed off the back of a stolen Witch one. I am using the original, you are using the mage version.”
She tapped her fingers on the chess board that had risen out of the table.
“The mage version is better. I would have learned it too if my mother wasn’t so hell bent in the old ways. Fucking bitch.”
Ed winced. “So you can’t actually give me any tips?”
`”No,” She started spinning one of the knights between her fingers. “I could, it just depends on the subject.”
Well, if he eliminated anything to do with the spell itself… “How’d you track them so easily?” He recalled some sort of spell tracking technique mentioned by Helig in passing but if witches and mages were entirely different things (surprising), then maybe there was some trick to it.
“That…” She raised an eyebrow. “You know distance on the Veil’s like, totally separate from the whole.” She waved her hand at the players, they were resting on the sidelines now. “Physical thing right? Is that the right word for it?”
“Um, what?”
“Ok,” She swept the chess pieces aside, then put a handful of pawns back onto the board. “So you know you got the whole spell bubble thing?” She pointed to a pawn, “Say it’s on one of your football players.” She nudged another pawn closer to it, “Then you got another on the guy next to him.” She cut off their head knobs and moved the bodies away from each other, “If you move the bodies, the bubbles stay stationary.”
Err, what? No that was impossible, the sort of ‘bubbles’ as she put it had definitely been moving and it had been nearly impossible to track them when he’d sent them on paths.
“Well, stationary in the veil. Didn’t you read Helig?”