That method does not work, either.
--M. J. Young
Hum.
Alright, other things to try:
- Chill the metal spiral of my spiral notebook
- Alter the electric charges of the spiral and the metal tip of my mechanical pencil (one up, one down) in the hopes of generating a spark
- Try to absorb light without re-emitting it
If that last succeeds, I'll need to think of something to do with the stored energy, but otherwise I think I'm done experimenting for today. Cast the cleanliness spell and get back with my booty.
Makes me wish I'd brought my locks, but perhaps another time.
You feel like you've made contact with the spiral binding, but you can't change its temperature. You try charging one end of the pen, but you can't seem to move enough electrons where you want them before they move back, and the total effect is negligible.
You attempt to absorb the solar radiation within yourself, and suddenly you feel the slip in your mind--you've been here before, but it's not at all fun. You have just strained a mental muscle. You have Brain Burn, with photosensitivity to boot.
And I was really rooting for the full reflective shield....
This is going to make it difficult for you to do much of anything for a while, I expect. Your plans?
--M. J. Young
Heading home with my burrs.
Does "much of anything" include shopping? Going to work tomorrow? Just how crippling this is will affect what I plan to do. I may need to ask for extended medical leave from work.
Fortunately, this will provide an excellent opportunity to practice my Darkness invocation at home. I'll use it whenever I'm feeling too much pain, restricting the area to a few square feet in my corner of the bedroom. Listening to music off my laptop sounds like a nice way to spend time in total darkness.
Whatever happens, I don't expect that my practice regimen will be disrupted; at most, it would shifted into the dark hours. I also don't see much reason that I couldn't continue to fix dinner on even-numbered nights.
I am concerned that brightly lit public spaces - such as perhaps Mel's kitchen, or the stores from which I would procure my remaining ritual supplies - may have become off limits to me.
I just realized that my previous post assumed bodily photosensitivity. Is that the case, or is it strictly visual?
Oh, and let's not forget the cleanliness spell before heading back to the bus.
I apologize for the confusion. The photosensitivity is strictly visual; light striking your eyes intensifies your headache drastically. Even with your eyes closed, the lights on some of the busses will be intense.
Your cleanliness spell seems to have worked, although even in the late afternoon shade it is painful to look at yourself.
You have gathered your burrs and now must find your way out of your secluded campsite to the bus stop with a splitting headache intensified by light. Ideas on how to accomplish this?
--M. J. Young
I should have dropped a wingnut at the bus stop.
All right. All I really need to do is get to where some other people are, explain to someone that I've gone blind, and ask for help getting to the bus station.
From above, I know this about the park:
The park isn't exactly vacant, but those who are present tend to congregate in particular areas--the playground, the ball field, the picnic tables--and there is enough in the way of wilderness trails that you can get off by yourself pretty easily.
Thus, the steps I need to take care of are:
1) Get back to the trail I used to here.
2) Follow the trail back to an occupied area.
3) Find someone who will either help me to the station or fetch someone who will.
Step one should not be difficult. I'm not so dense as to stray far from a wilderness trail in an area I don't know well, so the distance involved should be short; also, even though I am for the most part deprived of my sight now, I still had it a short while ago and ought to remember the direction I need to travel in order to return to the trail.
Using my 1@5 Tie T-Shirt Blindfold T2@1, I'll convert my shirt into useful medical equipment. If I walk slowly and take a peek from under the blindfold every ten seconds or so, I ought to be able to follow the trail the way I came. The occasional peek will be painful, but it will not kill me.
Once back in a place where people gather, it shouldn't be hard to get someone's attention given the T-shirt on my head. I'll do my best to open with, "Excuse me, could you direct me to the bus station?", and I'll wing it from there.
Embarrassingly, perhaps, I do not yet have a tech bias on you. What's your top tech skill? The top one I have listed is your 7@1 first aid, and I'm sure you've got at least some electricity skills, yes?
You tie the blindfold securely (even without the socks?) and take the few steps back toward the path. Here you start back toward civilization, occasionally bumping into a tree where the path turns, or rubbing against bushes when you wander a bit from the center, and taking periodic peeks to see the way.
You soon reach the picnic area, and hear voices. They start to quiet; it's evident you've been noticed.
"Excuse me," you say, "could you direct me to the bus station?"
There's a skipped beat, and a child's voice says, "Mommy, why is that man wearing a shirt on his head?"
--M. J. Young
I like explaining things, so I'll make sure I'm the first to answer the child's question.
"The shirt is so I won't be able to see anything. When you tie something around your eyes like this, it's called a 'blindfold.' I've got a very bad headache, you see; the light hurts my eyes.
"Actually, that's related to why I need help finding the bus station."
___
My computer skills are limited to use; the little HTML I know is what's needed to format text on sites like this one. I've programed graphing calculators before, both with very simple dice programs and simplistic text-based games; I know that's very low-end programming, but I mention it in case it's technically 11@1.
Aside from that, I can change a battery or a lightbulb, and I built a primitive two-way intercom from a kit when I was maybe eight years old. (The two speakers were connected by about six or eight feet of wire.)
Is that enough?
Oh, and the socks were an innovation I added when I got brain burn the first time; the original trick I learned omitted them. There's no sound-proofing without the socks, and it's slightly more difficult to get the shirt properly tight, but the function of the blindfold isn't significantly impaired.
"Oh, you poor boy," a woman's voice says. "I get migraines like that; I know how you must feel. I've got some Motrin here; would you like some? Harry, help this boy find his way to the bus stop, O.K.?"
"Yes, Mama." Harry's voice is young, prepubescent, but not preschool.
--M. J. Young
I'll accept the Motrin courteously, despite not being quite sure what it is. I'll take it on the off-chance that it'll help.
Wikipedia tells me it's ibuprophen, and it lists headaches and photosensitivity among the possible side-effects. I'd thought maybe it was actually migrane medication. Oh, well.
I'll make sure to thank the mother and Harry for their help, and I'll thank Harry again when I get to the bus stop. I'll answer any questions he has for me, but otherwise I'm not feeling up to making small talk.
Once on the bus, I'll ask the driver to wake me up when we get to my stop (I'll tell him which one it is), and I'll sit near the front so he'll be more likely to remember. Even if I don't go to sleep, I certainly won't be watching out the window for my stop, so it'll be useful to have someone watching for me.
You've never heard of Motrin? What about Advil? Same stuff. It's an asprin-like analgesic with many of the same effects but more predictable, and can be taken safely in larger doses than either Asprin or acetaminophen (Tylenol), and has few drug interactions so it can be taken with a lot of other medications. The over-the-counter dose is 200mg, and prescription tablets run to four times that dosage. It's not good for ulcers, but not as bad for them as asprin.
The first bus ride is from the park back to Clinton, where you'll have to wait at a roadside bus stop for the bus back to Perth Amboy. It's a fifteen minute ride, but your bus stop is the end of the line. The bus driver of the park bus will make sure you're on the right side of the street, but you'll have to ask whether it's the right bus for Perth Amboy, as there are other buses that come through there, headed for New York City primarily.
By the time you reach Clinton, the headache has been dulled a bit; whether it is from the medication is, of course, something you can't know for certain. However, that's as good a guess as any.
--M. J. Young
I can ask every bus - or alternatively, my fellow riders-in-waiting - if this is the bus for Perth Amboy until I finally get on it. Failing that, my ticket's good for a few days; I can sleep on a bench and keep trying tomorrow. (It's July, I'll be fine sleeping outside.) I don't think it'll come to that, though.
I've got forty-five cents in my pocket. Once I'm back, I'd like to find a payphone near the apartment (preferably by memory of one's location) and call Mel, telling him I've injured my eyes and won't be coming in for at least three days. (There's no way "I've got a headache" will cut it.) Failing that, I'll put on a shirt, wait for nightfall so that at least I'll have the gaps between streetlights where I can peek at where I'm going, and walk down there.
You make it home; Alice is at work, apparently. It takes a while to find a payphone, and Mel is curious about how you injured your eyes, but with some difficulty you manage to get the message to him.
After about four hours from when you were at the park you feel the headache worsening some.
--M. J. Young
Grin and bear it. Practice using the darkness spell in the corner of Alice's/my room, as mentioned above; periodic successes should ease my pain somewhat.
Most of my practice will consist of performing the spell over and over with a missing component - that is, speaking the words rather than singing them, or humming rather than pronouncing the words, or moving my hands but without the black cloth, or standing rather than sitting within the pentagon, or some similar minimal difference that will allow me to practice the ritual with no danger of the magic actually being called forth. Every so often, of course, I will perform the spell in full, but in this way I hope to drain the stress and tension out of these "actual castings," making them merely another variation of a familiar routine. I.e., please let this be practice and not botchable. My photosensitivity is motivation for practice and rewards success, but is in no way a problem which I hope to resolve through skill performance.
If casting the spell with the area reduced would count as a new use, however, I would like a single roll for that.
__
In any case, I probably won't be sleeping before Alice gets home – even though I've got tonight off, I'm usually working until 6 AM. I don't want to dump a load of information on her right after she gets home, but I will tell her that I've managed to give myself a terrible headache and that I'll be taking off work for a few days, and that I'll tell her all about it tomorrow.
If she gets home while I've got some darkness in effect, well, we can have that overdue conversation about magic.
As I recall, the coming AM is the 24th of June, my ceremony is slated to begin on the 27th, and I have yet to actually procure my supplies. I hope to buy every last thing on that list over the course of the next three days; but for tonight, I'm not worrying about it.
It seems likely to me that you missed what I almost missed from being away so long: the reason your headache worsened about four hours later is that the ibuprofen pain reliever was wearing off. You would probably make that connection at some point, if it weren't for the long delay.
You practice the darkness spell multiple times. It happens to work just as Alice comes in the front door.
--M. J. Young
That's right. If there's headache medication about and I know where it is, I'll take another dose when I notice the first one wearing off.
Quickly tie the black shirt around my eyes (nothing fancy, just a standard blindfold) and step out into the living area to greet her. Three talking points:
" 'Morning, Alice. How was work?"
"Yeah, I've managed to give myself a bad headache. Quite incapacitated myself. I'll be staying home from work a few days, though I can probably handle dinner tomorrow."
"Oh, and don't mind the patch of darkness in the corner; I was just practicing some magic when you came in."
Now it's my turn to be uncertain about what's happened already. Have you and Alice talked about magic before now? Is she aware that you do magic? I know that she is aware of your mental powers, but I'm not sure even she would think this was the same thing.
--M. J. Young
Your uncertainty is understandable. Although I make the comment in an offhand manner, the fact is this is first Alice has heard of magic in connection with me. I'm not even sure what her concept of magic is, deprived as she has been of all fantasy fiction. (Does that extend to fairy tales? I should have checked back when I was sending her to the library.) I'm a little apprehensive about this conversation, actually, not least because I'm not sure that any eavesdropper wouldn't take "magic" to be code for "illegal psionics." I'm sure Alice won't make that mistake, but her reaction is a separate problem.
No, the closest I've come to bringing this subject up before was when I showed her my shopping list for the supplies for my holy-symbol ritual, and I never told her why I needed the stuff. I'm sure she dismissed that as another instance of my usual odd behavior; it's not the first time I've made an odd list and talked to her about it.
- "'Morning, Alice. How was work?"
"Oh, Mel was in one of his moods. You know how he gets--nothing was right because he burned a steak and had to make another, and so he had to find fault with everyone else. But that's just Mel, and it makes for a frustrating shift but not a serious problem. How was your day? Apparently not so good. What's with the shirt?"
- "Yeah, I've managed to give myself a bad headache. Quite incapacitated myself. I'll be staying home from work a few days, though I can probably handle dinner tomorrow."
"Poor baby! Did you get some Tylenol? I know I've got stuff in the bathroom cabinet."
I am assuming that this is where you would have looked, and that you would have found it, so you took it. You took Tylenol, which did not work as well as the Motrin you took before.
- "Oh, and don't mind the patch of darkness in the corner; I was just practicing some magic when you came in."
She freezes.
"I'm sorry, I don't think I heard you right. Did you say you were practicing--no, I'm not even going to say that. I must have heard wrong."
--M. J. Young
"I'm sorry, I don't think I heard you right. Did you say you were practicing--no, I'm not even going to say that. I must have heard wrong."
Somehow I find myself feeling vaguely defensive.
"It's not - bad magic. I'm not sacrificing chickens or anything. It's just, you know, a little chanting, some, uh, symbolic dance . . ." I'm straying off message. "Look, the effect will dissipate in a few minutes anyway. I just didn't want you to be surprised."
"Oh--I didn't mean--I just, well, I don't think most people believe in magic. There is magic in children's stories, but everyone knows--I mean, everyone thinks--I don't know what I mean."
--M. J. Young
"Oh. I'm sorry, I've had a long day. Thing is, you're probably right - or mostly right, or right for most people. Sometimes certain rules don't apply to me, and this could be one of those times. It could be there's not much magic here at all; I know I've had trouble, having to get pretty fancy for what I'd have thought would be pretty simple effects. Or it could be that there's plenty of magic, but since everybody thinks there isn't, nobody tries. It wouldn't be the only thing nobody knows about, right?
"But yeah, I really can't do very much, at least not yet. Basically it's just the darkness, and a bug-repellent charm I worked out, and - oh, hey, lemme try something. Stand still."
I take a deep breath and try to use this spell on Alice:
1@2 Cleanliness M3@1, caster gestures with both hands while saying, "Dicen que El Hijo se senta al lado de Dios. ¿Que está al otro lado? / Limpieza," cleans caster and on-person equipment; 6 seconds, sound vital, -5 SM
I know it says "caster" in the description, but that's because the only time I ever used it I was casting it on myself. I don't think there were any sit-mod associated with that choice, so I think I have room to stretch the spell to clean a target other than myself whom I touch. The touch is the only difference in ritual from when I cast the spell earlier and is intended to keep range from being a factor. (The assumption would be that it was unnecessary earlier, because in a sense I'm constantly touching myself, and both hands were already required for the ritual anyway.) I'm looking at this as a new use of the same spell.
If the spell succeeds (or if I can't tell either way), I'll say, "There - feel any cleaner?" (I know that working in a restaurant kitchen always left me feeling distinctly grungy by the end of the night, and I imagine it's the same for waitresses, especially in July.)
If it fails (for whatever reason - improper target or just plain bad skill roll), I'll probably assume that I need to devise a separate spell for cleaning other. Once I become aware of its failure, I'll say,
"Hmm. Darn. I guess I need a Purify Other, to complement my Purify Self. But . . . ah. I'll be right back." Then I head to my backpack, grab two loose wingnuts, and return to try the following spell:
Cleanliness (Other) M3@1, caster holds one wingnut in each hand and gestures with both hands while saying, "Dicen que El Hijo se senta al lado de Dios. ¿Que está al otro lado? / Limpieza," then touches the target with the left-hand wingnut, cleans target object and its contents/adornments or a target creature and its on-person equipment; 6 seconds, sound vital, -(5-2n) SM
The only ritual difference is the addition of the two wingnuts, whose material component value I have left undefined, and the only difference in effect is that the spell targets either another creature and its equipment or another object and its equipment-analogs. I'm not sure if the expanded target range would warrant a sit-mod. Note again that I'm only inventing this one if the one I have fails.
Your first attempt produces nothing at all that you can tell; nor does she seem to have noticed anything. However, you rush off and return, creating the new ritual, and instantly she is clean.
"O.K.," she says, "that was weird. So, then, you can do magic, too?"
--M. J. Young
"Well, yeah, but only a little. It's basically just that, and what I've already said, and a pretty cool Light spell - I'd show you, but, y'know, headache. A little sensitive right now.
"Oh, hey, speaking of, there's something I'm planning on doing starting Friday - is it Friday? The uh, 27th, anyway - and it's not really magic, but the more I think about it the more it seems, well, kind of related . . . anyway, remember that list I showed you yesterday? That's all stuff I'll need for it to work, and I was planning to go out these next couple of days and pick it all up - minus the Velcro, I found a replacement - but I didn't anticipate this, so . . . I guess what I'm asking is could you go out with me and help me get it all? I mean, I know what it all is and what will do and what won't, and you won't clutch your head in agony if you walk into a store with florescent lights without a blindfold; we'd be the perfect team. It would probably eat up the afternoon, but we could make it like a scavenger hunt. Fun times."
That's probably about the best 'go shopping with me' pitch I can give while blindfolded and throbbing-headed. Here's hoping she has nothing better to do.
"Sure. Just let me get a show--no, never mind the shower. Funny, though. I'm clean, but I think that the shower relaxes me? Well, anyway, let me get a bite to eat so I'm not shopping hungry, and then we'll go. Get your shopping list. Want a sandwich? I'm making tuna fish."
--M. J. Young
--no, never mind the shower. Funny, though. I'm clean, but I think that the shower relaxes me?
"Yeah, that's the downside. I guess the spell's mostly for when you can't get a shower due to circumstances. And I might start using it for the dishes, if I can get that to work."
I would adore a sandwich, and I tell her so. While eating it, I comment further.
"I suppose I could come up with a ritual for the relaxation, too. Only, I'm not sure it wouldn't work too well, if you know what I mean. And besides, I'd need my Spanish to English Dictionary, and it'd be a pain to comb through that right now. Literally.
"Er, the pain would be literal. Not the comb. I'm rambling."
__
The list is here:
•Bubble-bath (at least seven uses' worth)
•Cabbages (two)
•Duct tape
•Paper (lined & unlined)
•Crayons (five colors, including orange)
•Mixing bowl (plastic)
•Sidewalk chalks (five colors)
•Pen (blue or black)
•Inkpad (like for stamps or fingerprints)
•Sugar bowl
•Matches (big box)
•Play-Doh
•Toothpicks
•Oranges
•Sugar
•Fireworks (tiny ones)
•Orange drink powder
•Chocolate (to melt)
•Horseradish
•Lemons
•Sports energy drink
•Whiskey
•Cranberry juice (unsweetened)
•Seltzer
•Orange Juice
•Bongos
•Parcheesi
•Chess
•Checkers
•Trouble™
•Twenty hot dogs
•Fourty-three hot dog buns
•Sweet pickle relish
•Cole slaw
•Ketchup
•Mustard
•Onions
•Paper clips (286 minimum)
•Balloons (uninflated)
•Helium
•Pump (for helium)
I'll bring $300.49 in local cash, which I hope will cover this. (I have plenty more money, but traveling with over three hundred dollars makes me feel weird.) I'm also bringing my notebook, mechanical pencil, usual pocket contents, black shirt blindfold, and five loose wingnuts.
Just for reference, have I already rolled for the availability of these items in this world? I am particularly curious in relation to Trouble™ and helium, which might be trouble in one way or another, but if I already cleared them as existing here, then I'm not rolling for them again.
Also, helium generally comes in compressed tanks, and is forced out of the tank into the balloon by the pressure.
"That's interesting. So to do magic, you have to speak Spanish? Is there some secret magic society in Spain that taught you this?"
The conversation begins as you begin shopping; you will walk to the first store, as it will be close enough.
--M. J. Young
Yes indeed you did roll for availability already, back when I showed Alice the list on the day before I left for Round Valley State Park. As I recall I got a very good roll, and the only problematic item on it was Velcro (never invented to Alice's knowledge). I have since replaced said problem item with burrs (hence the trip to the state park), and in Alice's expert shopping opinion, I should be home-free.
"That's interesting. So to do magic, you have to speak Spanish? Is there some secret magic society in Spain that taught you this?"
"That seems like the more likely story, right? But actually no, I've never even been to Spain, and the closest I've come to Mexico is working in a steakhouse kitchen. I'm figuring this all out as I go, with just a few cryptic comments from a magician I met to go on. The first spells I tried were in English - didn't work. So then I thought, 'what's one thing all mystic incantations have in common?' Well, it's right there in the question. They're mystic. How could my arcane mutterings be properly arcane if any fool could listen and tell me exactly what I'm saying? Alright, so cast the spells in ancient Sumerian, problem solved. Except I don't know ancient Sumerian, or Egyptian, or old Chinese or anything, really, except a tiny bit of Spanish left over from school, and I don't have any reference works except for a beat-up Spanish-English Dictionary (With Grammar!) - also left over from school. So, not having much choice, I tried it in Spanish.
"And it worked.
"Same spell, just translated. Flipped a few words around so it'd still rhyme, sped up the rhythm in a few places: hey-presto, magic."
She gives you a quizzical look, the sort that has one really raised eyebrow and one really lowered one.
"It can't really be that easy, can it?" she says. "I mean, the way you put it, anyone could do it; so why isn't anyone doing it?"
--M. J. Young
Shame on me--let me cover a bit more. Second of two posts.
As you continue this conversation you make the rounds of a few stores acquiring the items on your list.
--M. J. Young
"It can't really be that easy, can it?" she says. "I mean, the way you put it, anyone could do it; so why isn't anyone doing it?"
"I . . . don't really know. No one was doing it in Columbus, either. While I was there, I met someone who had been a magician elsewhere, and his theory was that power comes from some sort of 'magical battery,' and that the battery at that time and place was too low for magic to really work. Still, I don't know if he actually tried any magic or if he just assumed that it wouldn't work because no one else could do it.
"I had a teacher who mentioned that sometimes people like me are exceptions, that we'll be able to do things that no one else in a world can do. But even so, he too seemed to assume that what everyone else could do was a good indicator for what he could do. He even drew conclusions in reverse: he was able to use - " here I catch myself - "he was able to do some other things, not magic, that no one else around was doing, so he assumed that there were aliens out in space somewhere who could - which kind of goes against the 'sometimes we're exceptions' idea, you know? Funny thing was, he turned out to be right. About the aliens, at least; I'm not sure they had, uh, that they could do what he could. Makes me think.
"So, why not? Well, I guess I've come up with two hypotheses. One is, I can do it because I'm me, and no one else could do it even if they tried because they're not me. I'm kind of hoping it's that one, because here's number two: number two is, it's not me. Maybe the 'magical battery' is low, and maybe it's not, but magic is at least possible for everyone. The reason I'm hoping it's not that is that it would mean there's some reason, something or someone I don't know about, making it the case that no one thinks magic exists and that no one, to the best of your knowledge, has ever tried and succeeded at using it.
"And, it occurs to me that there might be a way to test it. You know, experiment, disprove one hypothesis or the other. Or both, I suppose."
_
When we hit the helium supplier, I trust I will be pleasantly surprised at the discovery that I can cross the pump off my list. How are we doing for costs?
You are pretty much on budget. There are questions about how much you want on some things--paper, Play-doh, all the food items for which you did not specify a quantity, and balloons; Whether you want a four pound bag of sugar or just a box, or if you want brown or confectioners or cubes instead of regular sugar; whether you want baker's chocolate (which is very bitter) or semisweet; whether you want expensive or cheap whiskey. She also asks about some of the items, like cabbages and crayons and chaulk, as to what you're intending to do with them, but it's more like she's curious than like she's challenging anything you're doing.
Yes, the shop that sells the helium tanks explains that the gas is compressed and does not require a pump to dispense it into balloons.
It's late by the time you're finished, and not a few people have asked about your blindfold along the way, and the headache is returning.
--M. J. Young
Paper - tons. Let's get a thousand sheets for now, and I'll get more if I end up needing it.
Play-Doh - three standard containers, two of them orange and one not. (Blue if they have it. I like blue.)
Lemons, pretty many. Enough to drink nothing but lemonade for a day. Maybe eight? Oranges, not so many. Maybe three.
Relish-through-mustard - enough to go with hot dogs for a meal or two.
Onions - enough to go with hot dogs for a meal or two, plus two extra onions. I think that comes out to a total of three onions.
Four pounds granulated sugar. For the chocolate, some semi-sweet and some candy bars. Mixing the semi-sweet junk with real chocolate ought to make it sweeter, and the idea here is meltable sweetness.
For the whiskey - anything that will burn will do. So, cheap?
Purposes: The cabbages will be "made examples of," the chalk is for hopscotch, and the crayons are for decorating the paper. I happily entertain any follow-up questions.
_
Edit: I realize I haven't left you much to respond to in the way of keeping the action moving; perhaps I'll come back and post again before you make it back on the board, or perhaps not.
Having bought a fair quantity of Play-Doh in my life, my experience suggests it comes in multi-colored multipacks. The traditional four-pack is red, blue, yellow, and white; I believe that the eight-pack contains orange. There are now fifty colors, but I'm not sure there would be that many in the world in which you find yourself. The only time individual colors were sold was when there was only one color, white. You can buy either two eight packs (which would each contain one each white, red, blue, yellow, green, purple, orange, and I don't know what other color) or two four packs and mix your own orange from the red and yellow to make two cans; by changing the blend you could make one orange more red and the other more yellow, or you could mix it all together and get a uniform orange color.
It takes a few hours and a few stops to get everything, and your head is pounding by the time you're done.
--M. J. Young
As long as I'm mixing colors, I only need the one four-pack to get two cans of orange, right? And that leaves me with a blue and a white left over, which is one can more than I need.
Once we're home, I will express satisfaction with the trip, gratitude to Alice for helping me once again, and regret that I will have to postpone her first experimental magic lesson until the 'morrow on account of my headache. For now, pain meds, darkness practice, and soothing music from my laptop, in something approaching that order.
(No, you're not forgetting an earlier reference to magic lessons; this is my first direct mention, although I alluded to it earlier with my 'experiment/hypothesis' comments.)
I don't recall whether I rolled a general effects roll in connection with your botch, so I'm not certain whether the duration of this headache has already been determined. Rather than search through old posts for what might not be there (particularly since I can't use the date stamp to pinpoint the specific post) I'm inclined to roll for it now--unless you know that I rolled for it already and either know the roll or know where to find it.
You manage to fall asleep, uncomfortably, listening to music in the dark. You awaken in the dark with your head pounding, still wearing your blindfold.
--M. J. Young
As near as I recall, you put off rolling until it mattered, and when it mattered was "not yet."
That's it. Something needs to be done about this headache. In this case, "something" is magic.
Now, I'm not about to try to mess with the brainburn directly - I know next to nothing about it, so that would be akin to self-trepanning with a hatchet - but I think I might be able to do something about the pain. Thus, off with the blindfold, and after a few painful minutes with my dictionary (I looked at maybe five pages of it), this is what I try:
"All men seek it, but those who have it gain nothing. Please, give it to me.
"You ask what I want? Please: 'no pain."
Yes, it's a horrible riddle, but I don't care. My head hurts.
I sit crosslegged in a ring of five wingnuts and make begging gestures with both hands while pronouncing the following incantation (sound necessary): "Todo gente lo buscan, pero esos que lo tienen no ganan nada. Por favor, lo me das./ Preguntas que quiero? Por favor, 'no dolor'." TF 0:20 (five for the wingnuts, fifteen for the words), +9 somatic +12 verbal +5 material; removes persistant pain for hours (or days, if that's closer to baseline), M?@?.
There's no specific listing for relief of pain, so I'm not sure if that's a necromantic M13@1 Block Pain, a curative M2@1 Remove Pain (lumped in with Remove Fatigue), or some other listing (perhaps M8@ illusory pain relief, or M10@8 Physical Effects?). I'm trying it, anyway. If it helps, I'm looking for temporary, long-term freedom from discomfort which in no way addresses the underlying cause. (I'm afraid of tampering with my brain; this is the same reason why I probably won't cure my nearsightedness anytime soon.)
If it's too dark to read in the bedroom after I remove the blindfold, I'll head into the bathroom to do my translation.
Edit: I read up a little on what I consider to be the two most likely candidates, the variant on M2@1 Remove Fatigue and the reverse-effect variant of M13@1 Cause Pain. (If it's something else, it's curved out anyway.) It seems that with a time factor of 20 seconds, I could get roughly RS/5 hours of effect at baseline with the necromantic, working from the description for the long-term version of the skill. For the M2@1 Remove Fatigue variant, I think I would incur a -17 sit-mod for time, but in return would achieve a fixed duration of twenty-four hours (again working from the description for the base skill). Add in the +26 from ritual factors, and we'd have a finished skill, either a M13@1 with +26 or a M2@1 with +9 -- unless the skill would be bonused for affecting the self only.
I'm inclined to go with the 13@1 necromantic version.
unless the skill would be bonused for affecting the self only.This would be a very unusual limitation for a necromantic skill. My thinking is that I could give you probably +15 for it, but it would have to be stipulated that you could not ever use this skill to relieve pain in someone else; if that is not stipulated, you could in theory use this skill (in a new use) on someone else at some point.
Your choice.
--M. J. Young
This would be a very unusual limitation for a necromantic skill.
But not entirely without precedent; I don't imagine there are very many wizards running around turning other people into liches, after all.
I took a few minutes to think about it, and I've decided that I will make the stipulation. The gestures and magic circle imply it, and on top of that, my wording is very specific. Of the three kinds of necromancy - sadistic, selfish, and morbid - this is the second, so I feel justified making the restriction.
Block Pain in Self M13@1 caster arranges five wingnuts [must be wingnuts; contrast with material requirement for Create Darkness] in a pentagon on the ground and, sitting crosslegged within it, makes begging gestures with both hands while pronouncing the following incantation: "Todo gente lo buscan, pero ésos que lo tienen no ganan nada. Por favor, lo me das./ ¿Preguntas que quiero? Por favor, 'no dolor'." Arcane magic, 0:20, lasts RS/5 hours, sound vital, self only, +41 SM.
I calculated the sit-mod based on +9 for both arms and both legs, and +1 for each of the five wingnuts. If you disagree, then obviously the sit-mod will be slightly different.