[OPEN] Trials and tribulations / I've had my share

[pure_radiantics]

Who: Kairi and YOU!
When: March 24th 2017 - April 21st 2017 (January 18th 2019 - March 14th 2019)
Where: Leo's Temple, near the Meeting Hall, the Library, or anywhere else in the Far Shore
What: Training, of the Shinki Spell variety

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Option A: Training - Leo's Temple, near the Meeting Hall, etc.
[ No matter what day it is, Kairi and her fellow Shinki friends inevitably end up talking about spells. She's kind in her offers to talk about Spellwork after finally being confident in her mastery of several of them, but she always comes back to the same thing...

It's one thing to talk about it, it's another thing entirely to make the spell happen. It requires practice. It requires a real stare-down of one shinki against another, trying to overcome each other's willpower. And Kairi, well...

She's pretty sure that around the time she felt confident enough to explain spells to someone she didn't know that well was around the time that her will to defend against another shinki's spell started to increase too. Now she has another reason to keep up her training - with Hajime gone, she's at her 3rd god, and she doesn't want to lose another. Some of that she knows she doesn't have control over, but the times when she does? Fighting ayakashi? That's when she doesn't want to let Leo down - or by extension, Forrest.

So she'll go wherever her training partner wants to in order to practice today. ]

Option B: Research in a New Age - Leo's Temple, the Library, Hakkai's School, etc
[ The funny thing about knowing so many spells herself was that Kairi started to become even more curious about what other spells were out there. She couldn't contact Kazuma or Yukine anymore, nor Lavi or Izuku, so she resorts to going to the Library to look through the books on her own.

Maybe she'll find a new spell, or maybe she'll find more about the... theory behind spells, for lack of a better word. Kairi knew enough about the magic of her own world now to know that some things were predictable, or advancements of other spells and not really new spells at all. So what kind of "theory" made the Shinki spells work? And could she crack it enough to stop needing to learn individual spell names - especially with her old tutors all gone? ]

Option C: Wild(card) Magic!
[ If it's anything related to spells or magic from your canon's world, that would be cool to talk about! If it's anything else you can think of related to Shinki spells and magic in the Far Shore, that's cool too! ]

OOC: Plot with me at frudence

Comments

[pure_radiantics]

[ It's entirely not what she was expecting. ]

... Are you very new then?

[ She's cautious in her wording, not trying to be too insulting. ]

Because the spells that shinki cast aren't ones that gods can cast. So if you're a god I'm not sure that all of the material I'm researching would help you out... unless you're looking on behalf of your shinki, I guess... Mr. Velvet.

[ A last attempt at saving face in case he's the type to get offended easily. Some adults were like that, she found. ]

[hypomeneo]

[Huh... that's a reaction.

Note to self: anything that questions the strict binary here will throw people for a loop or worse. Good to have confirmed.]

I'm pretty new.

[In his second month, actually, but he's good buds with a couple of Ebisu's shinki and everyone's fresh off the apple cart in their view.]

... well... I'm not a god. I... uh... did say same rules as you, so that's the opposite. [HMM...] You said you're usually able to tell? ... is that a sense?

[He's cautious but thoughtful. That he's generally an incompatible shinki is not a mystery to him, but he's felt himself shifting slowly.

He hasn't wanted to guess what that could mean. There hasn't been any dread yet, so that's a good sign...]

... and no... what I'm looking for is information on the natural magic of this realm. Not what gods and shinki wield necessarily. The things that make up the land... stuff like that. I want to understand the foundations of everything here.

[SOULS for one. There's a crystal he's aiming to bag.]

[pure_radiantics]

Oh... not that kind of sense, like some people can feel auras and things, and I can sort of tell when ayakashi are around, or at least very powerful ones. No, I meant that- hm, how to explain...

[ She looks down and chuckles wryly a bit. ]

Newer gods and shinki have a certain way of introducing themselves, I guess?

[ Bucking the binary, among them; an individualistic flair, the I'm Someone Special sort of air, and not in the way that Hibiki was haughty, just... completely outside of the Far Shore. Removed from its concerns and that of the people who lived there - and Kairi considered herself a permanent resident at this point, after close to a year. ]

Natural magic...

[ That part doesn't really make sense to her at all. 'The things that make up the land' though, that's a bit closer to her understanding. ]

Oh! You mean like what connects the two worlds of the Far Shore and the Near Shore?

[hypomeneo]

[Waver nods, as he's very sensitive to energy in particular, even outside of Discerning Eye. It's a high level Caster trait, and one of the things that's innate is attunement to his own mana... which stretches to his own borderline.

Something he'll be teaching Ginia one day with hers.

There have been slow shifts, microscopic, and with how mutable things are here, Waver feels the need to be a bit wary. There is no telling, especially with his lack of memories. So that's a bit relieving... also a bit not.]

Oh. Oh. I'm sorry for the confusion.

[It's very mage to set oneself apart, though, in self preservation. To be insular, internal, outside the system. Mages do not see themselves as human, and even though they walk with humanity, speaking with one reveals how inhuman they are... how alien they think with their blue and orange morality. Waver in mortality was one of the rare ones with humanity - in death, keeping his humanity, reveals his blue and orange nature.

That said he is far from removed from the Far Shore's concerns and that of its people. Because one of Waver's most rare traits among mages is that he cares very deeply. He empathizes.]

Exactly that. Magic that effects the environment and people externally. The structural stuff.

[pure_radiantics]

Strange... I never really thought about that kind of thing as magic. I guess I thought of magic as something that people where I'm from just make happen, sometimes on purpose sometimes on accident. The... structural stuff as you called it... seemed to just be how things were? Two worlds being connected never seemed that odd to me before.

[ She now has evidence that she visited at least two worlds before arriving here, after all. ]

The light and dark in people that I can sense... the ties that bound some people together from my world... being able to summon a weapon, even though I was a shinki... it's so different than what everyone else does, I just didn't see it as magic.

[ But now he has her thinking otherwise. ]

[hypomeneo]

[... uh oh?]

All power can be seen as magic if viewed through the right lens. Our perception is very powerful. So are our beliefs.

[He'll just gently draw her away. He's not sure what is safe or not for her to know. And it deeply bothers him on so many fundamental levels about the need for ignorance - to reduce the shinki to a state of near non-self. Just why emotion and memory are so connected to blight. To sin.

They have a common root.

He knows this system.

And ahhh... beliefs... they construct the systems, don't they? Why not reality?]

I don't think it's odd at all. If gods can come to being through belief, why not the land itself? Mortals may argue all the time about what's a god, but so many are unified in their belief of Heaven.

[Aha. Is that part of it now?]

If belief constructs reality, well that would explain why the land is in flux, especially in the areas where the new gods reside. Small numbers of followers mean less stability, don't you think?

[pure_radiantics]

[ She takes note of the things he says, but a lot of it is the kind of thing she can only hear, nod in understanding, and not offer up a useful response for. He seems so much more studied in these ways than she is that she has to take him at his word. However, there's one thing that her history here can speak to: ]

I can understand what you mean about small numbers of followers meaning less stability... but I've seen new gods with very many followers suddenly vanish. Plus, if you look up the original myths of the gods that people here are, uh, standing in for... some of them are incredibly well known. I can't imagine how a god like Odin - my current god - could have needed an incarnation recently, and at the same time as a much more minor god like Forseti becoming his equal.

[hypomeneo]

That's a very good point, and then the follow up question becomes... are they actually the newest incarnation of the god or is that an illusion in itself, and they are just embodying their concepts?

[S I G H, Conceptual magic is always a head trip.

Waver danger #2: He thinks way too much about this stuff. Seriously. It's the magic teacher in him.]

That would suggest then while the followers might promote ties to the land, the mechanism bringing and keeping people here is quite different.

[In mortality, Waver would have said focusing on the how did they do it, the howdunnit is pointless for magic, and to primarily focus on why when conducting an investigation. He'll need to refocus now... the how, the who, and the why are all so very important.]

[pure_radiantics]

I'm... I'm sorry, but what's the... difference between the illusion idea you just had and... embodying their concepts? I thought that was what an incarnation was when it came to gods.

[ Head trip indeed. This isn't her specialty by a long shot, but now she might at least ask Leo about it. He'd know better. ]

If you can explain that to me, I think I might understand why you think the other part is separate too.