Willow
Feathered Lands Tribe Home, Feather-branch Forest, Savriâ
Lunging forward with absolutely absurd speed, which her opponent couldn't possibly hope to defend against, Willow’s fork caught the largest stuffed tuber for herself - Sweeping it from the grasp of a disappointed looking Kent. She flashed the quiet man a bright smile, “Gotta be faster than that if you want the best grub!” She popped the scrumptious morsel into her mouth without further boasting.
Her triumphant statement earned her a glare from her victim and an amused look from Naomi. They had joined Skeetha and several of her friends for something like brunch. As it happened, the Kobolds observed two formal meals a day. They were enjoying the first, which consisted entirely of vegetables. Despite their sharp teeth kobolds were apparently omnivorous.
Plates piled high with food were passed around for each guest to pick what they wanted and Kent had been taking the best looking bits before they got to Willow every time. She’d interpreted it as an act of war and responded accordingly. The treacherous villain was now eating his just deserts! Or maybe I’m eating the deserts? These kobolds know how to cook!
The little tubers, one of which she had just liberated from Kent’s grubby paws, were like miniature sweet potatoes with a delightfully crispy outer skin. After they were cooked, the kobolds cut the top off of them, scooped out the innards, and mixed the potato-like goop with some other stuff to make an absolutely incredible stuffing which they then put back into the hallowed out root.
The night before had been enlightening. They’d learned a ton about the drama between the kobolds, some factions, and a guild. More importantly, Willow and Kent had been in mental sync and had both skillfully driven the conversation toward the most important topic imaginable. In the end, they had managed to extract a promise from Skeetha that she would teach them more about magic. She’d been surprised to learn they were pretty much “babies” as she put it, but then became thoughtful when Willow had explained them being there unprepared was all Madrick’s fault.
In the end, Skeetha had told them she’d explain the basics of “the craft” and also the other various uses of mana she knew of. She claimed there were endless uses for mana, all of which Willow wanted to learn. There was something that particularly spoke to, and excited, her about magic in general. All that Willow and co. had to do was track down where the pop-hoppers had gone. Easy as eating ma’ma’s apple pie!
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“She tricked us!” Willow declared as the sun slowly began to set that evening.
Kent snorted and rolled his eyes as he dropped his over-sized pack, “I don’t think it counts as tricking you when they told us it probably take a while to find them… Not to mention giving us tents and packs so we don’t have to sleep on the bare ground under open sky.”
Naomi and Willow followed his example, letting the heavy packs fall to the ground. Willow immediately began stretching, feeling stiff after carrying it for so long. After a moment, the others joined her. She wasn’t sure why they hesitated, stretching felt great after a long trek carrying a heavy bag! She let out a satisfied groan as she relaxed from her deep back-arch and looked around.
“Yep. Definitely tricked us. This stupid forest looks exactly like the rest of the stupid forest! We haven’t even seen any more of those cool trees that use glowing rocks as roots!”
“That is a really weird way to simplify how they explained the sunsquat trees work.” Ken muttered as he made himself busy pulling poles from his bag to put up his tent. For some reason he seemed to be avoiding looking at Willow, his face slightly flushed.
She ignored the odd behavior and started pulling out her own tent materials.
“Willow, Skeetha literally said she didn’t expect to see us back for a month or more.”
“I thought she was being dramatic! You know, for like, effect! Nothing takes that long!”
When she stood from retrieving her tent poles she found Naomi and Kent both staring at her.
Naomi ventured, “You didn’t ACTUALLY think that… Right?”
Sighing dramatically, Willow gave in, “No, complaining is just more interesting than looking at the BILLIONTH feather-branch tree which looks EXACTLY like every other feather-branch tree. What in God’s good name is this adventure?! Why would Madrick, a clear mad-man, decide to drop me in the middle of nowhere?! Shouldn’t I have been sent to somewhere with droves of enemies? Or a clear objective? Or SOMETHING?! I want action! Adventure! Not tromping around a forest looking for stupid little weaklings who can’t even give me a challenge!”
By the end of her rant, Willow was pacing and glaring at everything, hands balled at her sides in clear fury. Seeing both of her friends looking at her with concern, she forcibly calmed herself. Out of habit, she entered her focus. She was immediately reminded that despite the annoyance of the start-stop nature of her ‘adventure’ she had magic. That made it all worth it!
…That makes it mostly worth it.
As she just stood there, letting the effects of her focus draw her emotions in to fuel itself, she suddenly realized another property of the new and improved magical version of her focus. Using her focus to calm herself down was a habit formed as a way to return to a state of calm if she lost control of her emotions, something that didn’t happen too terribly much anymore but had once been a true problem.
Back when she’d first started building her focus it had been step by step through careful meditation. She’d pursued it as diligently as everything else in her life and it had eventually begun to pay off. After months of repetition and work, she’d created a mental space where she could funnel her emotions when she got angry, or scared, or upset, or sad, or whatever. That had been the original purpose of her focus and it had only grown from there.
It seemed her focus had the same capability, but way stronger. As she pushed her emotions into her ability, she felt them drain away almost instantly. More than that, she could tell her use of mana had slowed significantly. As she dug deeper, allowing her focus to draw in more and more of her emotion she saw the cost drop to nothing. She felt a twinge of excitement, I can keep this up forever if I let it take my emotions! The excitement was gone before the thought ended.
Still, she could logically see how important the capability was. She could also acknowledge that when she let herself feel again, she would be excited. A burst of anticipation flowed directly into the active ability. She noticed that her active mana ball-thing was actually growing. Each new discovery prompted more excitement, which in turn was consumed to build her mana.
Currently, the ability was working at its ‘base’ level. Speeding her up by double - or slowing the world around her to half its normal speed. She still wasn’t exactly sure which. Naomi and Kent were both still looking at her but didn’t look worried that she was going to go off like a bomb. They seemed more concerned about her as a person.
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That was different. If she’d started ranting and pacing like that on Earth anyone who knew her would have started edging away, fearing she’d relapse to letting her anger control her. Despite that not having happened for years.
She pushed the distracting thoughts into her focus, another function she’d used it for forever, and the extraneous thought vanished like a popped bubble. Curious, she tried to recall what the thought had been. It returned easily and was banished again just as simply. Suddenly, she felt like she’d stumbled into understanding a bit of what this mana aspect she was using was. It’s control. Control over myself… But if it’s control over myself, why is color drained from my surroundings?
Naomi had started asking a question and was now looking around, so Willow fed all of her thoughts into her focus while she patiently waited to hear what she was saying. “Are you okay? Your face went all blank.”
Willow told her lips and eyes to smile. She watched to see if it would fool them and felt a jolt as her mana increased quite suddenly due to the suppressed humor at the horrified expressions on their faces.
She dropped her focus, letting out a deep breath and explained, “My focus was a meditation aid before I ever used it to help me in fights… Apparently the magical version lets me do all of the meditative stuff I could before, except amped way up.”
That peaked both Naomi and Ken’s interest and they both started talking at once, before stopping, looking at each other, both trying to start again, then Kent waved for Naomi to go first and leaned back with a slight smile.
Taking the offer, Naomi asked, “What’s a meditation aid? How is it ‘amped up’? When you smiled at us it was like a CGI model. Super uncanny and creepy” She shuddered and Kent was nodding along.
“Weeell… A meditation aid is like an anchor to help you return to a meditative state more easily. Some people visualize entire scenes and they ‘return’ to the scene when they meditate. Some people picture a fire, or imagine a sound like the crashing of waves. It’s probably even possible to use a smell as an anchor… Not sure. Anyway, over the years I started imagining my focus as something like a control center…”
She trailed off with a ‘ah-ha’ look on her face, then shook her head and continued eagerly, “It has inputs and outputs which I can adjust as I need to. When I ‘enter’ my focus it’s like hooking that control center up. Every thought is analyzed before it’s acted on, every image from my eyes is examined in detail, every sound is cataloged, and so on. That’s how it helped me fight, it made me feel like the world had slowed down. Maybe it sped up my brain, or maybe I just felt like it did. Either way, it worked.”
Taking a breath, she realized the others had stopped setting up their campsite and that the sun was getting dangerously low. Or rather, the light was rapidly diminishing. The mist still blocked the sun, which was apparently normal according to Skeetha. Not important right now.
She quickly stepped over to begin working on her tent again before she continued, “Before that, though, the main thing it helped me with was controlling my emotions. My pa-paw has a bunch of nicknames for me, ‘fire cracker’,‘little hurricane’,‘firework’…”
She trailed off for a moment, then shook her head and continued, purposefully avoiding looking at Kent and Naomi, “I was really bad at controlling my emotions as a kid. I got in fights a lot. I got suspended in my first week of middle school for attacking a boy who pulled my hair and said I looked weird.”
Sighing, she finished pulling the last pole through the tarp-like tent lining and started bending it to meet with its pair on the ground. Her voice became melancholy, “It was tough. Most kids were scared of me. Adults always said I was a bad egg. My ma’ma just told me ‘You have the true fire, child’ and my gram-gram told me ‘If you were in the ol’ country we’d make one mean witch out of you!’ though I think she was kidding. Probably.”
Clearing her throat as she finished connecting the last piece of the tent frame, she grabbed the stakes and started working to secure the tent to the ground as they’d been shown. Getting back on topic she tried to lighten her tone, “So I needed a way to control myself. I met coach, one of my dad’s old friends from college, Jim Conahey. Coach had recently returned from active duty as a marine and had started a dojo to teach a bunch of martial arts and other things. When he saw me fly off the handle for no reason he walked right up to me, tapped me on the shoulder, and told me the ‘sit down’.”
The memory brought with it a bitter sweet smile and some tears, which Willow chose not to wipe away as she stood from driving the last stake. “He was the scariest person I’d ever met. I dropped right onto my little eight-year-old booty like God himself had given the command. He and pa-paw had a quick talk and from that day on coach was in my life. He told my parent, ‘She just needs some discipline. Get her some and she can use that energy of hers to move mountains.’ Then he’d looked at me and smirked, that little scar on his mouth stretching in a way that scared me so much as a little girl.”
Flopping down in front of her tent, she watched the others finishing up as they worked slowly so they could still listen to her, “He was so right. Every day after school I spent an hour at coach’s dojo. The first thing he taught me was to meditate. He told me, ‘’Before I teach you how to conquer the world, I’m going to teach you how to conquer yourself. Discipline starts in the mind. You control your emotions, then your thoughts, then your actions. Then your actions can be used to effect the world. Control your mind. Control your thoughts. Control your body. Then you can learn to control your environment, your opponent, the world.’ by the end coach was grinning at me in a way that I later learned meant he was mostly joking. But coach never just joked. Even his jokes had some nugget of truth in them.”
Taking a deep breath and blowing it all out, she wrapped up her story, “So long story short… Coach taught me to meditate. He walked me through meditating hundreds or thousands of times before I started being able to do it by myself. I was a young girl after all and sitting still and focusing on one thing is hard for anyone, much less a kid. But coach always wins. He did exactly what he told me he’d do. He taught me how to control myself through meditation. At first I had to stop what I was doing when I started getting too emotional, go find somewhere to sit, and meditate.”
She laughed, the sound like a cracking whip striking a clear bell, “If before kids were scared of me, now they thought I was weird. I stopped getting into fights though. Eventually I learned to ‘turn on’ my meditation. I thought about it like ‘focus really hard and I’ll meditate fast!’ which… Well it’s not really how meditation usually works, but I was a kid and I was really used to meditating so somehow my little squishy brain figured out a way to make it work!”
Kent and Naomi were both done now, both sitting in front of their own tents looking at her as they listened.
“So that was conquering my emotions. I learned to use my focus to control my emotions. To return myself to calm when I needed to. Then coach started working with me to tuning my mind and started teaching me stretches and exercises to ‘start getting your mind and body in sync’. At the same time he started walking me through new meditations which were meant to help me learn to filter out unnecessary thoughts when I wanted to. I eventually extended my focus to do that too. Then I just kept adding more and more into it as coach taught me more…”
She trailed off, staring into space as she relived old memories.
After a few minutes of silence Kent cleared his throat, “Thanks for telling us. It sounds like you had a really interesting childhood.”
Naomi nodded her agreement as Willow’s eyes focused back on them, “Yeah, and your coach sounds intense.”
“Bah! Coach is just a big softie! He just tries to look and act all scary. He’s secretly a big teddy bear. Ah, I also kind of downplayed how much my parents helped with it all too… My ma-ma always encouraged me when I felt like I wasn’t making any progress and my pa-paw forced me to practice when coach wasn’t around. I was really blessed…” She pulled her knees up to her chest, suddenly sad, “I miss them.”
Silence reigned for a long while as they sat in a thoughtful silence. Willow hoped the others didn’t feel uncomfortable. She knew some people didn’t do well with sudden quiet, but it felt nice to her. Comfortable.
Eventually, her thoughts returned to her focus and her focus. She smiled and pushed a thought to her UICI.
NEW MAN ASPECT NAMED!
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CONGRATULATIONS!
You have successfully created and registered a unique, previously unregistered, mana aspect DISCIPLINE into the CHM!
To reward your efforts, and for meaningfully contributing to the CHM database, 500 R2-EB has been awarded!
CONGRATULATIONS!
You have registered a meaningful description for your unique mana aspect DISCIPLINE
DESCRIPTION
Discipline, as taught to Willow Gagné by Jim Conahey (AKA: Coach).
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