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In Paraasilan, Esmaar, a pair of roommates are about to break a rule that, compared to the one about running in the corridors or even the one about unlicensed teleportation, is there for a good reason.
In unison, they complete their shared spell.
Teah in Elcenia
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"I can actually see a little even when you just talk, but yes, please - and if you make me a sophisticated map that displays even extremely tiny to-scale replicas of what you're doing or have done, it should work on that too."
you-wish
"Huh."
The book updates. It looks like a wash of shimmering, sparkling multicoloured light racing over the pages where he records more things.
"I'll have to think about the other thing a little..." which involves going off and doing a tick's worth of other prayers, and coming back and updating the book again. And putting a library creature on top of it to see if Kaylo sees persistent Teah-magic (answer: yes, the library creature is extremely shiny and throws little rainbows as it dances around on top of the miracle index and flutters its little wings).
The book updates. It looks like a wash of shimmering, sparkling multicoloured light racing over the pages where he records more things.
"I'll have to think about the other thing a little..." which involves going off and doing a tick's worth of other prayers, and coming back and updating the book again. And putting a library creature on top of it to see if Kaylo sees persistent Teah-magic (answer: yes, the library creature is extremely shiny and throws little rainbows as it dances around on top of the miracle index and flutters its little wings).
"What are these things for?" wonders Kaylo, coaxing the library creature onto his finger.
you-wish
"They carry stuff! I mean, originally I just thought I might as well look for useful books and might as well mark the ones I found and they were the first thing I thought of to do that, but they're library creatures. You can ask them to fetch stuff or put it away. They could probably carry you if you asked, they're pretty strong. And they're little and fluffy and cute!"
Teah is so proud of his library creatures. And their littleness and fluffiness and cuteness.
Teah is so proud of his library creatures. And their littleness and fluffiness and cuteness.
Kaylo shoos the library creature off his finger. "Okay. So I can see stuff you did that persists autonomously - I wonder if magic things like that in your world persisted after Korulen and whoever it was summoned you? - and I can see things you're actively doing and if I'm understanding the rest of this correctly I can see what you're paying attention to if I squint at least within this room, I need to revise that part if I do another draft..."
you-wish
"Magic things like that better have persisted after they summoned me, can you check or have somebody check? Still thinking about the map, it's coming, don't worry." He handles another couple ticks' worth of prayers, updating the book three times during this interval.
And then there is another wash of rainbow light, on the wall this time, starting slightly above Kaylo's eye level and proceeding down and to both sides in the next thing to no time at all. What's left when the initial burst fades is an exact scale model of the world, omitting people and small objects but including plants and buildings, even underwater - and all the water is represented by actual water, so the parts where the oceans go through are transparent, showing the wall behind them. The model is dotted with rainbow shimmers under Kaylo's analysis, and as Teah goes off prayer-granting again, a dozen more appear in rapid succession - although most of those fade again almost immediately, one-time effects instead of persistent magical constructs. His attention expands and contracts and transfers from place to place almost too fast to follow by eye, giving the impression that he is in at least ten places at once, but in fact he only ever does one thing at a time.
"It'll move around if you ask it to," he adds. "Figured it'd be handier that way."
And then there is another wash of rainbow light, on the wall this time, starting slightly above Kaylo's eye level and proceeding down and to both sides in the next thing to no time at all. What's left when the initial burst fades is an exact scale model of the world, omitting people and small objects but including plants and buildings, even underwater - and all the water is represented by actual water, so the parts where the oceans go through are transparent, showing the wall behind them. The model is dotted with rainbow shimmers under Kaylo's analysis, and as Teah goes off prayer-granting again, a dozen more appear in rapid succession - although most of those fade again almost immediately, one-time effects instead of persistent magical constructs. His attention expands and contracts and transfers from place to place almost too fast to follow by eye, giving the impression that he is in at least ten places at once, but in fact he only ever does one thing at a time.
"It'll move around if you ask it to," he adds. "Figured it'd be handier that way."
"I can summon a person from your original world, or scry on something, if you tell me who to grab or what to look at. There's fine. Damn, you're fast - this is all serial, though, isn't it? Are you literally pausing infinitesmally midsentence to go handle things on other continents and pick back up with me?"
you-wish
"Yeah! Well, not mid-my-sentences, most of the time. But between 'em, and while you're talking, and I guess sometimes when I pause between words. Hmmm..." He answers five more prayers while he's thinking. "You know what, check on the maze fountain in Toronto, it's big and obvious and if it's not magic anymore it'll be easy to tell."
"All right." Kaylo sends a library creature to the library, since that is what it's for, to get him a book with transworld scries. He goes on supervising the play of magic across the map. "Are there any things you do in parallel?"
you-wish
"Not exactly. I can think about more than one thing at once, and I can look at more than one thing at once, but I prefer focusing on one thing at a time. So maybe if I'm doing a sweep to see how everybody I'm keeping an eye on is doing, I'll glance over a bunch of them at the same time, but if two of them look like they're in trouble or up to something interesting I'll check out one and then the other."
"Could you talk to more than one person at once?"
you-wish
"By going back and forth, yeah. But not talking to both at the literal exact same time."
"Could you manifest your voice as a harmonizing choir?"
"I don't particularly want you to do it, I'm just wondering where it falls apart - could half the choir be coming from that side of the room and half from that side of the room?"
you-wish
"Yeah, probably. And, I dunno - I can do things that take effect multiple places at once or almost at once, like when I cured shrens. But with things like that I kind of line it all up first, work it out, and then do it as one thing. I guess if for some reason it was a really good idea, I could compose what I was going to say ahead of time and then I'd only have to start two different sentences in two different places and let them both run to the end by themselves while I was doing other stuff. But if I'm going to talk using my voice I'd rather not do it with a bunch of - recordings."
"Say more about the lining it up?"
you-wish
"Like... I figure out what I'm going to do, and I get it all worked out in detail, but I don't do any of it until the last second and then it all goes at once."
"...Is your memory perfect?"
you-wish
"Not in the long term. But for things like that, when I'm right in the middle of something, it is."
"At what point do you start forgetting things?"
you-wish
"As soon as I move on from something complicated like that, the details stop being so fresh, but I can still get them back. I used to lose things while I was out, when my body woke up, but obviously that's not happening anymore. And when one body dies, I lose almost everything on the way to the next one. I only know there's been me for as long as there's been people because I looked, and because things I learned how to do when I had a different incarnation come back really fast, in a way things I'm doing for the first first time don't."
"When you get a new body is it already an adult or close to it or do you get born in fresh ones or what?"
you-wish
"I get born in fresh ones, or at least I did this time. This one wasn't born yet when I got attached, so there were about six months when I was 'on' all the time before he was born and started being awake sometimes; I don't know how usual that is, I never looked hard enough to find out."
"Do the - characteristics of the body have anything to do with what you get up to while you're on?"