September Event Log

[magicademymods]

September Event Log The Magicademy has a special treat for students this week: Combined Classes. The Curriculum-by-Curriculum education of the Magicademy lends itself to viewing each Curriculum on its own, not part of the greater whole that is magic. So in lieu of normal lessons this week, Professors are joint-teaching classes to show you what you can do by merging magic together. Profs. Porfsin & Kith: Making Modification Fantastic If Diatu students love anything, it's expressing their individuality by wearing unique clothing, particular ones similar to home in the case of the Sundered. Working together, the good Professors will teach you a basic and beloved trick of wizards everywhere: combining Modification and Fantastics to make a spell that provides you with clothes that are outstandingly fashionable and flamboyant on the outside, but fit perfectly and comfortably despite their flair. At last, the secret of how wizards can swoop around in dramatic capes and flowing robes without constantly tripping! Of course, the potential for mayhem is pretty high in practice. Shrinking clothes, accidentally creating a scarf 250 feet long... Professor Trammel has loaned them his familiar, a top hat named Decorum, so it is on hand to quickly deploy wide black censor bars in the event a mishap leaves you perhaps offering more in the way of an Anatomy of the Sundered class than you might expect. But if you work hard and give it your all, you might come out of this looking good indeed! Profs. Loshakle & Mala: Advanced Warding A lesson Professor Loshakle hammers home in his classes: the more broad the spell, the weaker its effect. A ward against fire specifically will repel so much more fire than a general ward, but of course the fire ward is entirely worthless against lightning. Today, these two Professors show one way to get the best of both world: a Predictive Ward. The theory is simple: Suspend an Intimation effect within the ward's construction, then make the ward manifold-responsive -- or in other terms, capable of shifting its focus from one danger to another. The Intimation spell predicts the damage and preemptively shifts the ward to full effect. Simple! Enjoy testing them. Since it involves hurling some things at each other. What better way to test a ward than practically? Profs. Trammel & King: Pocket Summoning One of the problems inherent to Discovery is the danger involved in creation. For example, if you desire a large quantity of water for whatever reason, you need to create it all at once -- you can't create it ahead of time without a way to transport it, for example. Sundering offers an intriguing possibility that actually is much safer than most of its uses: opening a portal into a small pocket dimension, where you can Discover and store whatever you might need, and release it later in small doses or full-tilt. Now, mess up the Sundering spell and you could end up discharging a large volume of water or stone or pudding out of midair at a terribly inopportune time. But don't worry! Several groundskeeping golems are on-hand to help with the inevitable messes. Also Professor Trammel knows how to clean clothing. You might need that help. Headmaster Camillah Birony: ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO ATTEND THIS CLASS This opportunity is unique. For all her flaws, Headmaster Birony is unquestionably a master wizard, who has developed an entire branch of magic hereto undiscovered by wizardkind. The art of working magic on magic, or as she calls it, "Metamagic". "And it will be the third Metacurriculum! Wizardkind everywhere will develop and master these powers that I have paved the way for! AND THEY CALLED ME MAD!" she yells to the sky, before flinging her hands wide and laughing maniacally. So! You get to start very basic: Modifying a spell to last longer. Pick your favorite spell, any spell, and cast it. While its magical energies still exist in the pattern your will has imposed on them, Modify them. A simple equation. Add 1 to them. Multiply them by 2. Whatever works for you. You don't get much more instruction than that, says the Headmaster, because you have to figure out how to make it work for yourself. More than most magic, this depends entirely on your will and your determination. Everything else is just trappings -- take what you want from the foci of Modification, that will help, but find your own path forward. And unlike every other lesson, this one is utterly safe. At the first sign of a spell getting out of control or going haywire, Headmaster Birony squelches it like a bug beneath her heel. Not even literally, for a pleasant change!

Comments

[magicademynpcs]

Professor Trammel looks over at Headmaster Birony, who shrugs.

Assuming that the whole 'natural twenties and crit fails' thing is, perhaps, not germane to the discussion, he gamely continues on. "Yes, that is precisely what is happening. We are attempting to understand what happened, why and how. Once we do, we wizards will convene to Codify, by which we mean, write this process into the Curriculum of Sundering so that it falls under that Curriculum properly, and thus is properly subject to its foci. But we cannot do that until we understand it better."

"Which is why," Headmaster Birony added, "we're getting really annoyed at being called incompetent, by the way!"

[gender_neutral]

"Given the information offered to those who are trapped, it is the obvious and logical conclusion. Perhaps if you allowed those of us with an INT score above seventeen to be part of the process we could not only be of assistance, but if the task is indeed as difficult as you are making it out to be, then we can as well aid in placating our fellow kidnapped students. It is one thing to be told by those who have little to gain from sending us home and a potential lot to gain from keeping us here to say that we cannot go home, and another altogether to know that those who desperately wish to return home are working with you and similarly stymied."

[magicademynpcs]

Professor Trammel presses his hands together in front of his face, leaning into his fingers as he thinks.

"It is difficult to put this politely to you, but you do not have the founding you need. Recognizing that you are a student of what your own world calls magic, I'd ask -- would you ask an apprentice to cast the mightiest of spells?"

[gender_neutral]

"Then give me that founding. I am an Elf with a high INT and a high WIS score. I am not some novice human who needs to fill half of every day sleeping! I would give the spell to the apprentice if I felt it was within their capability to succeed or that there was something they could learn from the resultant and expectant failure. I have dedicated the hundreds of years I have been alive to the pursuit of magical knowledge. There is nothing that anyone with a life span that rarely breaks into triple digits can learn that I cannot about magic."

V had to add the 'about magic' with a charisma score like V has. Not to mention Dex.

[magicademynpcs]

"That is precisely what we are doing with the lessons here," the Professor explains. "As for involving you more, you have seen the results of experimentation from our most skilled and knowledgeable researchers. Can you imagine that involving those less skilled would produce better results?"

[gender_neutral]

"You are keeping all of us to the same pace," V said dryly, "rather than ascertaining our skill and streamlining those of us who could actually be of aid."

[magicademynpcs]

"You all started with no skill at all!" Headmaster Birony says with a bright smile.

More discreet, Professor Trammel clears his throat. "With all due respect to your previous learnings and endeavors... In watching you teach and in listening to you discuss, we have serious concerns that your skill in your own form of magic is a handicap, not a benefit. You are trying to shape the Curricula to serve you as you believe they should, rather than working within them to shape them to serve you how they can. In other words, you have learned habits that are not bad for your world and magic, but are very bad for ours, and to put it further indelicately, you seem uninterested in mitigating that."

[gender_neutral]

"I am progressing with both. I refuse to be willfully blinded to other opportunities just because everyone here says that things are only this one way."

[magicademynpcs]

"Ah HA!" Headmaster Birony practically shoves Professor Trammel out of the way so she can point a triumphant finger at V. "That's it! That's just it! It IS this one way BECAUSE we say it's this one way! It's definitional!"

[gender_neutral]

"And we could all define THAT" V pointed at a window "As a chair. We could all say it is a chair, change the definition of that to chair, and we still cannot comfortably sit on it without a massive amount of magic. Toy choosing to use narrow definitions for your veiw of magic does not actually alter what magic is!"

[magicademynpcs]

Headmaster Birony looks at V oddly, then points a finger at the window and sketches out a surprisingly-complicated mathematical equation in midair. With a puff of magic, the window is abruptly a chair.

"That point is, forgive me, exactly wrong," Professor Trammel says, as if the Headmaster hadn't made a point behind him. "The Codifications do exactly define magic as we are capable of wielding it. That is their purpose. You could, in fact, look at them as a great magic whose sole purpose is to define magic according to strictures, so that humans - ah, forgive me once more, so that non-dragons may use magic in any functional way. That means venturing out of them is impossible in any normal circumstances, and we must instead expand them from the inside. Your methods of magic are fundamentally and inherently incompatible with ours."

[gender_neutral]

"AND YET THEY EXIST!" V found the transformation of the window to be petty and small, rather than impressive. Way to intentionally miss the point. "Our ways of doing magic EXIST. And thus your definitions need to be broadened!"

[magicademynpcs]

"Yep. Broadened." Headmaster Birony smiles. "Not forced. Not like how you're doing it. Because magic here, if you don't play by the rules, generally goes crazy. Dragons can use it, we can't. You want to play by your rules, then fit them into the ones already here, 'cuz if you decide to start up a new game you're gonna have a bad time. That's what I keep trying to tell you."

[gender_neutral]

"THEN BROADEN THEM!" By all the elven gods it was like talking to Elan except more frustrating because there keeps ALMOST being hope here.

[magicademynpcs]

"We are. Do you truly believe the process is instantaneous?" Professor Trammel regards the elf with aplomb that becomes more enforced the louder he's addressed. "It requires time, education, skill, commitment, and comprehension."

[gender_neutral]

"Progress is not generally accomplished by a stubborn repetition of "but it does not work that way"!"

[magicademynpcs]

"Or a stubborn repetition of 'but it should work that way!" and "I am right and you are wrong!"?" Headmaster Birony says, with the sweetest smile.

Professor Trammel, despairing quietly of the Headmaster ever learning tact, lets out a faint sigh. "We are not saying 'it doesn't work that way'. We are saying there is a process to accommodate change, and we are employing that, while pushing outside of the process has a far greater chance of doing harm to many than it does to seeing you home. I respect your stay here is unwelcome and involuntary, but we cannot condone that much general gross risk as a solution when another way exists, even if that prolongs your stay."

[gender_neutral]

"All of existence depends upon my party successfully handling a multidimensional reality devouring being! You seriously think they have any chance at all of succeeding without me? "

[magicademynpcs]

"Well, if I may, we're not in any position to judge that." Professor Trammel has to be honest, if respectfully courteous.

[gender_neutral]

"I know you are not, which is why I am informing you!"

[magicademynpcs]

"You were asking us!" Headmaster Birony says, still insistently not helping anything.

[gender_neutral]

Have a wordless scream of utter frustration.

[magicademynpcs]

"I believe Professor King theorizes that it will be possible to return you to your proper time as well as place," Prof. Trammel interjects. "If we do the thing properly."

[gender_neutral]

Okay, now you have V's full attention. "Time? As in all that I have learned here, but no time will have passed at all back among the party? This whole side quest will not have actually removed me from action?"

[magicademynpcs]

"Yes. That is our hope and intent. It is not a promise, but we believe it can be done. In fact it may be easier to do it that way than any other."