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| Tweet Topic Started: Feb 17 2014, 10:25 PM (990 Views) | |
| Smitejr | Feb 17 2014, 10:25 PM Post #1 |
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Kursten walked down the street, work concluded. The library wasn't particularly busy, it rarely was, but there were a few students that came by that needed his particular specialization. They usually went away wondering what someone with his knowledge was doing in a mere library, but he just did the usual, shrug and say "Who knows?" Sometimes they took it as some great mystery, but in reality it was just something that paid the bills as he worked. His work on the Book was proceeding smoothly. He was understanding more and more of the archaic text each day, which was pretty good for a language that just seemed to be completely nonexistent anywhere else. In all his research, he hasn't found a single tome with similar script, let alone a translated piece. Still, he was tired, and he'd worked enough for one day. When he went to cross the street, a car zoomed past the crosswalk, hitting him square in the body at high speed. Drystan bounced, flying into the air, and landing down a good ten feet away, blood trailing at his feet. Needless to say, the car zoomed away, hoping to outrun any police that might be called for him. At that speed, no one could survive...at least no one normal. "Well...that ruined my day..." Kursten murmurs to himself. |
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| Smitejr | Feb 26 2014, 06:38 PM Post #41 |
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Kursten nods up from his notepad, he tried his best to get as much as he could down, but a fair bit of it tended to get garbled up in Destiny's very fast speech. "Oh, I'm sure I'll be satisfied. I can imagine how hard it would be to record all of this down, especially if it hasn't been a process over generations! Heck, most magus family's don't know how exactly their unique traits work, there's always new things to discover and learn about bloodlines. And while you aren't probably magi proper, the comparison should work..I think..." He finished his own stew at about the same time that they did, using his own abilities tended to make him ravenous himself. Still, when he was done, he leaned back in his chair, feeling sheepish again. "Uhh...shoot, I probably should have tried to take my time with it more...I'm sorry. The stew was really good, though!" He's been told eating quickly was impolite, and that conflict with his all but innate desire to pack food down as fast as possible was hard for him to reconcile. At least he wasn't too hungry anymore. Standing up from the table, he clasps his hands together and nods at the entire table. "Thank you so much for the hospitality." With that, he turns to look at Destiny specifically. "Do you mind if I see your notes now?" |
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| SarahSyna | Feb 26 2014, 11:05 PM Post #42 |
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Destiny wiggled her feet under the table. 'I'm sure your hackjob done without the help of previous research will satisfy my interest' wasn't a traditional compliment, or even intended to be a compliment at all, but she was happy with it. Hey, you take happiness where you can find it. "Oh, don't worry about the stew." she said. "Next time, we should race, because we all finished pretty fast! " Harry twitched at the mention of 'next time, while Tru snickered to herself for a totally different reason and then covered it up with "Thanks. Dad and I made it. I cooked, he worried until it boiled faster." "Honestly. I get no respect." Harry said with a little huff. "Nope!" Destiny said with a laugh as she got up from her seat. "I'll do the dishes, dad, just not right now." "You should do them now. And don't show him anything else, understand?" She looked at him, confused. "Something else? So... I get in trouble if he see my sock drawer or something?" Harry groaned. "...something like... just, just go." She skipped around the table and kissed her father's cheek. "Thank you, dad! I'll do the dishes soon as we're done! Come on, Kursten, follow me!" |
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| Smitejr | Feb 27 2014, 01:22 AM Post #43 |
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Kursten frowned a bit. He felt like Harry should get more respect...he was the oldest in the house, after all. Still, he didn't seem to be truly upset...it was probably just them living a different life than he had. When he said that he wanted the dishes done now, Kursten immediately walks towards the sink and begins cleaning them, whistling softly as he does so. "It's fine, Destiny! I'll take care of it now. I'll be up really soon, I promise!" As he runs the dishes under the soap, he thinks aloud, completely oblivious to the fact that other people can overhear them. "Hrm...I'm not sure about this. I don't think there's much else to see...I wonder what all the fuss is about..." Was there some kind of secret here, possibly related to the pyrokinesis? It was all so exciting! When he finishes, he calls up. "Okay, sorry about that! I'll be up really soon." With that, he all but bolted up the stairs. |
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| SarahSyna | Feb 27 2014, 02:13 AM Post #44 |
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Harry and Tru waited for Kursten to be up the stairs before looking at each other. "You don't think he's..." "No, dad. But she's going to be pretty upset when she figures out her new friend thinks she's dull." "I'll go hide the curtains." ---- Destiny's room was on the smaller side. It had a soft blue carpet and little furniture. There was what had been a bunk bed one and was now a top bunk with a desk and spinning chair underneath, a coffee table with books stacked neatly atop it two rows down by four rows wide, and a very low set of drawers with a cushioned top put exactly under where the skylight let in the most sun. What she did have a lot of were pictures. Posters, cut outs and stickers coated the white walls, a series of corkboards dominating the wall nearest the bed. There were pictures of dismantled guns that had each part labelled, autopsied corpses with notes written onto the photos in marker, a good few of her with people from Harry and Tru, to a handsome young man in a black coat, to both girls when they were much younger, in the arms of a couple. Each picture was stuck in place very, very carefully, each 45 degree angle and barest overlap deliberately checked and double checked to be exactly right. Destiny was on her spinning chair, the cushion of which was wrapped in clingfilm, pulling off her shoes and grumbling to herself in a low voice. There was a box atop the desk besides her, along with a two foot metal pole that was somewhat sooty. "In here!" she called as she heard him on the stairs. "The one with the open door!" |
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| Smitejr | Feb 27 2014, 02:26 AM Post #45 |
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Kursten wanders through the door, and the first thing that hits him is all the pictures. Blinking, Kursten inspects them. "Huh. Not the normal way these things are presented. You ever think of getting a scrapbook? Or frames?" Looking through the different ones, he sees the ones that really didn't seem to fit. "You didn't look like the kind of person interested in guns...but there's nothing wrong with that!" he says quickly, trying to avoid coming off to accusatory. "Really!" As he moves in closer, he sees the box by her. "Umm...do you have the notes? I'd really like to see them!" Cowing down a bit, he rubs the back of his neck. "If that's alright...I'm sorry for making you wait like that..." |
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| SarahSyna | Feb 27 2014, 03:30 AM Post #46 |
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"Oh, I do have a gun, dad insists. And guns are actually really interesting when you look at them and how they work and at the history that we have on them." Destiny said, pulling out the box onto her lap. "But really I have those because they're for my other project, which is kind of related to this one." She laughed as she lowered the box onto the floor. "Don't worry, it takes me awhile to take my shoes off." she said, sliding off after it. She started to take out the things in the box which included dozens of small little photo albums with thin card covers labeled 'D 7' or 'E 12', thick journals with loose sheets kept in by the elastic band around the books, a stack of five cds in slender jewel cases taped together and a small flask with a red wax seal around the top. "These are the notes. The family tree I keep on the corkboards, since it's easier to add to that way. And these-" she passed him a few of the small photo albums, "-are some of the pictures of the fissures, tracking their progression over the years and comparing mine, Tru's and Erin's. My dad, my real one, helped me take the pictures when it started happening to me and Tru. Those two-" she tapped two, one labelled 'D 4 - 6', the other 'T 4 - 6' "-are the earliest. The other two are the most recent, the ones called 'D 17' and 'T 17'. That's just... basic stuff, obviously. But it helps track the rate of progression and to come up with an hypothesis." There were roughly twelve photos in the first photobook opened up. Each one showed the same small, thin arm with one of the fissures forming on it. The fissure in the picture, which formed on the back of the index finger, looked much worse than the ones Destiny had currently, maybe just because it was on a child instead of a near-adult, or because it looked big enough to be splitting her finger in two if it had been a real wound. The second one, the one marked with a T instead of D, was much the same except that the arm was a little less thin. On the third and forth photobooks, which had far more than twelve photos each, there was less of a difference between the markings themselves than the difference in the girls. Destiny's fissures looked larger and more glaring because of her thinness, but according to the measurement matched Tru's in everything, except for length. Tru's fissures just reached the length of her forearm, while Destiny's had reached her elbow. Other than that, each fissure was the exact same in width and pattern, and photos could have been swapped from one photobook to the other without any dramatic difference if the two hadn't different builds. "Dad took one picture every three months. I take more now, of course. For one, I have more of them now." she said with a light smile. |
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| Smitejr | Feb 28 2014, 11:18 AM Post #47 |
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Kursten nods. "I'm sure they are! They seem like very deceptively simple mechanical devices. I haven't spent much time looking into them, though." When he looks inside the box, he sees the widely varying different mediums for notes. That surprises him, based on her descriptions of it, he expected rather sparse, written notes. This was way more than he even imagined. Flipping open the first scrapbook, he sees the effects of the fissures on the young girl's arms. "Wow...that looks awful." While the effects of his grimoire on his own body weren't anything to frame on the wall either, the way the fissures seemed to split the younger Destiny's arms looked stomach-flipping. "And do you know what caused them? This information is astounding, they have such an effect so early on. Most magus traits tend not to develop until you reach adolescence...another thing that makes this look very unique." The other photo sets were much less horrifying, though the effects of the fissures were still very prominent. He at least had the fortune to go back to looking relatively normal after the Grimoire had it's fun, albeit with light scars crawling around his body like patchwork. The effects of whatever it was that lay in her bloodline seemed to enjoy wreaking havoc on the human body. "I wish I could go back home...I'm sure the family would have something there in it's library to compare it to. The city one is good...but I can't say I've ever heard of anything like this before, and I wouldn't trust it to have all that much research on something like this. Turning back to Destiny, Kursten tilts his head. "Did you come up with a hypothesis for this?" |
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| SarahSyna | Mar 3 2014, 12:20 AM Post #48 |
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"Oh, it looks much worse than it really was." Destiny lied. "I mean, it's kind of a very angry, uh.... blister, at first. Barely even noticeable to look at when they're just starting off, just rosacea and a squishy swelling. After a while, the swelling hardens, and then it bursts open. That's mostly happened to me by accident. After that, they just slowly open further." she explained, using the photobooks at a visual reference. She petted the books. "If you're wondering how I've managed to have so much information despite only starting this myself, it's because my family actually keeps very good track of itself, so I've always known who to visit." she said cheerily, then added "That and they all like to bone. A lot." She shook her head at the memory of almost being trampled by a piper's battalion of under-tens. "It's just like swarms and clouds of little kids everywhere whenever I go over there. I think they might be trying to outbreed every other family in existence or something. Oh, and my real dad started helping me when I first got interested and that was when I was small, so some of this is actually his from when I was a little girl." Destiny picked up the small flask and started tossing it from hand to hand, and a clinking of metal against metal could be heard inside. "I was able to go around to a lot of them, which is how I have this much data. But I don't have the data I need. I mean, I can show you some very neat little tricks and things. I can tell you the side effects of each ability that's manifested so far, and the different tells for each before they're fully developed. I can even tell you the probable threshold an individual can reach based on their ability and height, weight and physical endurance. But I can't tell you why any of it is possible." She looked at the books and photos, scowling. "I have all this information but I don't have the one little bit of information that I need to begin to fully understand all of it! It's so fucking irritating! There's family stories of people making deal with magi or using crystals but I can't even start to look into those and they make no sense anyway, because why wouldn't either just result in traditional magic? I mean, we can't even use crystals so I find it hard as hundred-year fudge to believe they're related, but that's honestly the best kind of lead I have, and I can't even follow up on it." She put down the flask with a sigh, then paused. "Wait, you can't go home?" She looked horrified. "I'm so sorry for complaining so much about my small problem! I hope your problem's nothing that can't be resolved! Oh butts, I didn't mean to be so self-obsessed." Edited by SarahSyna, Mar 3 2014, 12:24 AM.
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| Smitejr | Mar 3 2014, 09:19 PM Post #49 |
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Kursten frowns, but accepts Destiny's explanation. "It would definitely need magic to look nearly that bad without being awful...but then again, this is magic we're talking about. So I guess it could do something that horrific without actually causing that much damage...maybe..." Kursten wasn't convinced, but he let it go. You couldn't go around unraveling something as complex as magic by second-guessing every strange event that happened. He'd be disappointed if he found out that he was being misled, but that wasn't a very high priority. He nods as they said that they kept good track of themselves. It was a common practice among magus families to track every branch and path, and keep eyes on their development. Since the typical goal was to continue the line of history to allow building up of magical knowledge, it was a necessary practice. However, Kursten was sidesmacked by Destiny's latter comment. "Uhh...you want to...err...run that by me again?" When she explained, he tried to speak, but found that no words came out of his mouth. He closed it, then tried to speak again, to little success. This time, he takes a breath, and takes out his notepad. "Okay. That's not extraordinarily surprising. You just..just caught me off guard with that." His mind almost goes to make a question, before he scribbles in his notepad to distract himself. "Do they want to have a lot of children in order to create a sure chance that a few of them will be successful in reaching their power? Or do they just...err...enjoy it, do you think?" Kursten couldn't avoid letting his cheeks grow red at that, and shakes his head back and forth to try and clear it as she continues. "That's fine. Most magus families don't know what let them start, and what drove their family down specific specializations and magical traits. Origins are a very mysterious subject...though if you find them, it generally helps you significantly in reaching your true potential. And all that information is very interesting!" He hopes that makes her feel better about missing the information she seemed most interested in. He knows how having one little fact elude you feels like, and he wouldn't wish that on anyone. When she seems to latch on to his story, though, he raises his hands. "Uhh...no, it's fine. Yeah, I can't go home, but we were talking about you, right?" He didn't see how his situation was really relevant. "It's...err...it's nothing. You really don't need to feel bad about anything." He shrugs. "But let's get back to talking about you, my situation isn't really interesting. Which abilities are you capable of, and are the side effects serious?" |
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| SarahSyna | Mar 4 2014, 10:21 PM Post #50 |
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Destiny squirmed her bare feet as Kursten kept wondering about the look of her fissures. Bugger it all, she never thought she’d be thankful when someone changed the subject to her family’s rampant sex lives, but there she was, letting out a little huff of relief when Kursten did exactly that. “Oh, I think it’s a lot of fun with the right person!” she said brightly, before amending her statement with, “Well, I’m assuming that it is, since there’s a whole industry about watching people doing it and all. I don’t know personally since, as Tru puts it, no one tried to slip me the sausage sandwich. Honestly, that’s just an utterly disgusting metaphor and I don’t even eat pork to begin with!” She made a face at that before continuing on. “Well, firstly there’s the fire, obviously. The quantity doesn’t really seem to matter; it’s the actual manifestation that uses up energy. Usually, I can manifest flames for roughly half an hour before I physically have to stop. Unless I’ve taken a sedative or painkiller beforehand, then I can go on longer. “Secondly, I’m completely resistant to all forms of fire that I’ve tested on myself so far, including that of other pyrokinetics. It even carries over to my clothing and things that I’m holding, but not anything touching something I’m holding or wearing. I tested that a good bit. A surprising amount of my family is willing to set me on fire when I ask, so it’s a good thing it doesn’t hurt me at all! However the big side effect is that while I can’t be burnt by fire, I still... kind of... feel it. But a more interesting part is this!” She reached behind her and picked up the sooty curtain rod she had left there. She held it near the centre like a spear, and put the tip of it against the largest fissure on her arm, the one that started at the knuckle of the middle finger. She took a breath, clenched her teeth and the fissure forced open like two battered, cracked lips. The fire licked out at the air in an almost hungry fashion, but didn't escape. Destiny steadied her aim again, and then she drove two feet of metal pole right into her arm without hesitation. She held up her arm and the curtain rod, which she was still clutching, and showed Kursten. “See? It just kind of disappears in there!” |
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8:46 AM Jul 11