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Johanna has elected to spend the night after that little mattress-shopping episode getting very drunk and seeing if there's any available ladies in this town. There seems to be exactly one bar not frequented by demons (she's not prejudiced, but she'd rather not land a mantis-woman for a one-night stand), so she stops in for a pint.
Her search is unsuccessful; there's a couple of gay teen witch-girls, but she's not keen on sleeping with someone who could be her grandniece, and anyway they seem less than interested in her slightly dusty charms. She gets miserably drunk, sobers up miserably with a whispered invocation, and makes her miserable way home.
...She spots someone lurking, out the corner of her eye. She knows from lurking, it was a whole unit in Watcher training. That is a vampiric lurk. Recalling last night's incident, she decides to investigate. From her purse, she retrieves an unobtrusive spraycan of sanctified Mace, and she strolls very casually into the occupied alleyway.
bishopric
bishopric
"Oh, I meant energy-wise, I wasn't thinking of- power within the pieces themselves. But that makes sense. I'm used to, you know, eye of newt and all, but there's no reason you couldn't just infuse objects in and of themselves. That's very clever. Kudos."
kingsidecastle
"Thanks. I'm interested to see what chess magic looks like from a major practitioner who isn't me; I've taught it before, but not very thoroughly, and I didn't really keep in touch."
bishopric
"Ha. Sorry to disappoint, but major I am not. I have enough juice to clean my teeth and lift an end table off the ground. I've met fifteen-year-olds with more raw power."
kingsidecastle
Chris shrugs. "I didn't quite mean it in terms of power. More... fluency, if that makes sense. Although power is nice too."
bishopric
"Fluency... maybe. I'd be more confident if it was a divination-based discipline. With sight, I'm so fluent I might as well be fucking Shakespeare. But I may turn out competent here. It'd be nice, certainly."
kingsidecastle
"I haven't had a ton of luck getting divination out of chess magic, but it's not exactly my personal strong point. And theoretically it fits both of your primary metaphors. So you might be able to work with that. Which would, in fact, be exactly the kind of thing I'd be interested to see."
bishopric
"Ooh, I could be interesting! At any rate, it's always nice to get another angle of penetration to layer onto my glasses. Not that anything can properly hide from them anyway at this point, but I do like to cover all my bases."
bishopric
Johanna takes them off (with some relief at no longer having to look around the sparkles) and hands them over for inspection. "They may not work so well for you, but I've got the teensiest little drop of divine blood in me that gives me a couple of powers. One of which is that I can glow very prettily-" she demonstrates the very pretty glow - "and another of which is a bit of witch-sight. I have a sixth sense dealie for magic, and the glasses focus that into properly seeing the nature and form of spells. Plus they let me see through illusions. And I can see like a hawk with them on. I've got another pair I call the 'reading glasses,' for tougher cases; those on, I can understand every magical detail of whatever I'm looking at, no matter how well hidden. But they give me migraines for fucking weeks looking at anything worth looking at. So I usually leave them in my bag."
kingsidecastle
"That is a very pretty glow! Well done." Chris inspects the glasses, peers through them, shakes her head, and hands them back. "I'm useless for any divination that isn't wrapped in chess metaphors, so it's no surprise these don't work for me."
bishopric
"Huh. I'd've expected them to work decently for anybody with power, but maybe they're more personalized than that. And. Uh. Thank you."
bishopric
Fuck.
Johanna polishes her glasses in an unconscious Rupert impression, fervently thanking her vaguely Semitic skin tone for its lack of tendency to blush. "S-so, um, what next?"
Johanna polishes her glasses in an unconscious Rupert impression, fervently thanking her vaguely Semitic skin tone for its lack of tendency to blush. "S-so, um, what next?"
kingsidecastle
"Well, I can probably put all this away for now. Is there anything you'd especially like to accomplish? I'm better at constructing spells when I have a real goal in mind," says Chris, getting up to return the various chess pieces to their box. "It probably makes me less effective as a teacher."
bishopric
"Well, I, um, maybe we could do, like, a ward? Watchering is pretty high risk. And it's your specialty and all."
kingsidecastle
"Sure. I can do those. Specifics? Warding what against what? On you directly, or on a focus object you can carry?"
bishopric
"Hm, I've got- maybe a ward against bullets? I'm good on anything the Sumerians thought needed protected from, but they were notably lax about firearms."
kingsidecastle
"Sure," Chris says cheerfully. She picks out Johanna's bishop (glass), its twin, their frosted-glass counterparts, and all four rooks from the matching set. "I'm afraid I can't tell you much straightforwardly about my system for placing pieces; it's all by intuition at this point. But for this purpose I'm thinking either square within a square, or alternating octagon. Probably square within a square. For really concrete physical things like this, it's more important to be tightly focused than smoothly integrated."
bishopric
Johanna tries to follow. So... the shapes... she can see it, kind of. She certainly understands the focus of the square-in-square, doubling and shrinking in. The octagon works too, it's- elegant. It is what it is. "What if you did a four-way symmetrical long cross form? That seems like it'd be sort of... very narrowly focused in. Maybe not robust enough for a ward, though, probably more- a divination, a curse- no, curse would be outward. Maybe the call for a summoning. Or an analytical divination. Yeah?" She sketches out what she's thinking of on a notepad.
kingsidecastle
"Hmm. Yeah. I see what you mean about the focus," says Chris. "But that has more of a point to it, rather than a wall. Walls are very much my specialty. This is the basic form I'm thinking of for the square within a square."
She draws eight points on a fresh page: white triangles at 'north' and 'south', white circles at 'east' and 'west', and within that a second square with black triangles at 'east' and 'west' and black circles at 'north' and 'south'. One north-south line connects the white triangles and black circles; one east-west line connects the white circles and black triangles. Then she draws the lines of the outer square, the lines of the inner square, a diamond linking all four circles, and a diamond linking all four triangles.
It comes out looking about like this. Although Chris's lines aren't quite that neat.
"Self-reinforcing, with all those internal alignments. No matter where you hit it, you're up against the strength of the whole figure."
She draws eight points on a fresh page: white triangles at 'north' and 'south', white circles at 'east' and 'west', and within that a second square with black triangles at 'east' and 'west' and black circles at 'north' and 'south'. One north-south line connects the white triangles and black circles; one east-west line connects the white circles and black triangles. Then she draws the lines of the outer square, the lines of the inner square, a diamond linking all four circles, and a diamond linking all four triangles.
It comes out looking about like this. Although Chris's lines aren't quite that neat.
"Self-reinforcing, with all those internal alignments. No matter where you hit it, you're up against the strength of the whole figure."
bishopric
Johanna considers it. "That's... hm. Walls, yeah. I don't think I could... do that. Looks very sturdy, but- I'd be more about latticework than just stonewalling. It's just so easy to bleed off their momentum bit by bit. Like, maybe I'd do a kind of- hm." Hesitantly at first, but gaining confidence, she scratches out an increasingly intricate figure on her pad. The end result looks like a chaotic mess of angles and painfully straight lines, patterns forming and breaking apart within it. Its lines, though straight, bend in weird optical illusions.
It's very... bishopy.
Johanna looks at her paper contemplatively. "You know, I just may be good at this."
It's very... bishopy.
Johanna looks at her paper contemplatively. "You know, I just may be good at this."
kingsidecastle
"You just might!" says Chris. "If you had Liesel to sit for the royals and knights, and wrote up or improvised a decent metaphorical journey, you could absolutely cast that. I wouldn't even need to participate. But now I'm wondering if we can get the rook style and the bishop style working in the same diagram somehow."
She thinks. She draws. She unearths several more colours of pen and a ruler.
She comes up with this, drawn very neatly.
"That's me, that's you," she says, pointing to the black circle and black diamond respectively. "That's my focus stone," the sunburst. "Red is frosted, blue is glass, octagons are pawns, our respective pieces come in our respective shapes. I'd put down protective stones at any unoccupied intersection to get my floor to cooperate. I think we could actually pull this one off. What do you think?"
She thinks. She draws. She unearths several more colours of pen and a ruler.
She comes up with this, drawn very neatly.
"That's me, that's you," she says, pointing to the black circle and black diamond respectively. "That's my focus stone," the sunburst. "Red is frosted, blue is glass, octagons are pawns, our respective pieces come in our respective shapes. I'd put down protective stones at any unoccupied intersection to get my floor to cooperate. I think we could actually pull this one off. What do you think?"
bishopric
Johanna looks sidelong at a bit of asymmetry, but it seems good overall. And it's putting together their strengths very neatly. "Sounds like a plan. I like it."
kingsidecastle
"In that case, you can help me lay it out," says Chris. She digs up all the matching pawns and starts placing the rooks in a square surrounding the center of the room. With enough squinting and imagination, it's possible to see exactly where in the geometry of the floor every piece should go.
bishopric
Johanna does rather a lot more squinting than Chris, but lays down her pieces in turn. "I'm sure this floor arrangement is very useful for your purposes, but I think when I grow up and become a big scary witch I'd rather just use chalk. This thing gives me a headache."