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Tumunzahar makes Menegroth look like a contract project. Which, the Dwarves assure her, it was. The stonework is astonishingly careful and beautiful, silky to the touch up close while from a distance it gives the impression of stretching on forever above, a sky of stone with crystals for stars. Vast natural cave systems are connected by dozens of perfectly smooth, gently sloped broad stone pathways from which the fall, if she fell, would be several miles down. There are handrails. "We use those to move materials carts," someone explains to her, "we're not going to be reckless."
There's an amphitheater, a place where a hundred of the stone walkways twine around to create space for a hundred thousand people to sit in close proximity, and someone is giving a lecture or a demonstration at the base of it, the seats closest to him filled with eager, tiny, bearded Dwarf-children.
And they spiral down, and down, and down, past waterfalls and egg-sized gemstones left half in the rock and halls of crystal. Everything grows gradually more ornate and more perfectly maintained and the clang of hammers fades behind them. "People say," her guide says, "that we only have a council instead of a single King because there were nine winners of the competition to design the throne so we couldn't just select one person to sit it." And they push open the doors to reveal, indeed, nine thrones so elaborate it would be hard to choose between them, and nine squat bearded people sitting them.
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"I don't know how much of an advantage being able to produce any sound at will grants you. I am rarely limited by ability to produce a sound I require, and while carrying an instrument into combat is a very real disadvantage you can eventually learn to achieve most effects vocally."
purposeful_glory
"I was actually wondering if the universe cares what tempo it's at."
"Oh.
That would grant you a combat advantage."
That would grant you a combat advantage."
purposeful_glory
"The most likely problem is that I can only produce illusions to the level of my ability to form a clear mental audition of the sound I want. I don't have to be able to, say, write it all out in harmonic dictation; but it has to be such that it would sound different to me if something were wrong. The other person I asked about this was Melian but she's a Maia - do you have the thing where you feel like you have a crisp memory of something but it turns out you can't count someone's freckles or, I suppose, in this case, how many voices there are in a chorus...?"
"Yes, we do."
purposeful_glory
"What my illusions do is they produce a genuinely crisp image which would produce the same mental image I have. So it won't look blurry, because I would have remembered that; but any distinctions that don't affect my memory of the experience at all don't make it in, and any ambiguously memorized experiences could be distorted. However, once I've got an illusion I can treat it like an object without it having to go through my head; audio ones do this less, but I could still speed one way up, make it quieter or softer, 'store' it as two parts and put them together when I wanted to cast - it would have to be continually making noise, though I could wrap it in a buffer so nobody else could hear it."
"I can't think of a reason that wouldn't work. And as you must have picked up, the main advantage of Curufinwë's method over mine is that once completed it doesn't require action and time to activate. If making a building crumble with magic, which is something I can do, took a few seconds instead of an uninterrupted hour -"
purposeful_glory
"I'd still have to compose the music or get it composed, but if I could be around while someone sang it to 'record' it and it really is pure sound and not anything I can't perceive..."
"Composing music is rather where my share of our parents' genius seems to have made its appearance. I can do that for you easily."
purposeful_glory
"What's a good test for that, then, some relatively brief song that doesn't collapse any buildings that you could demonstrate and I could capture and try in illusion form...?"
"Like everyone else, I have a until-recently combat-useless repertoire because Valinor priorities. Faster perception? The world seems to move a little slower around you, it doesn't affect how quickly you can move..."
He smiles again. "You should have something in motion nearby, or we should go outside, so you can notice it's working."
purposeful_glory
She makes a gently spinning image of the globe of Midgard.
And he starts singing.
It takes a minute. At first it's just a typically pretty Elven song, and then it does begin to feel like it is lifting them out of the air around them, and the globe is spinning about half as fast, and there's a feeling vaguely like swimming through a current. He stops after a minute. "I can technically keep it up all day."
It takes a minute. At first it's just a typically pretty Elven song, and then it does begin to feel like it is lifting them out of the air around them, and the globe is spinning about half as fast, and there's a feeling vaguely like swimming through a current. He stops after a minute. "I can technically keep it up all day."
purposeful_glory
She records the song, quiet, piecemeal, insulating some of it from some more of it. "If it just repeats indefinitely will it keep working or does it need to proceed through a series of themes to keep working...?"
"I can repeat it, but I'm never repeating precisely because the voice isn't precise, and there's an urge to suit the page and notes to the moment. I don't know what a perfect repetition will do."
purposeful_glory
"Let's find out."
And she snaps the bits of illusion together.
And she snaps the bits of illusion together.
And it plays, and at the same point in the song the globe slows in its spinning. Macalaurë looks delighted. "How many can you usefully have on hand? Also, I cannot do healing for the obvious reason but we have people here who can, in case you can think of a use for that."
purposeful_glory
"...No reason seems obvious to me. Seems redundant, but I should be able to have an unlimited number as long as I can keep track of them. And spell-pieces wrapped in sound buffer don't have the conspicuousness problem of visual illusions, unless someone happens to stick their ear in the exact middle of the buffer. Let's see if this still works if I speed it up."
It speeds up.
It speeds up.
"Can't heal and fight. We're not sure if it's a part of our nature or a cultural thing but if the latter every group of Quendi has it. The more blood you spill - and orcs certainly count - the more resistance you encounter trying to do a heal spell. Only with my kind of magic, my father's style doesn't involve force of will at all."
The speeded up spell makes the globe slow to a crawl.
The speeded up spell makes the globe slow to a crawl.
purposeful_glory
"...I don't have that problem. Anyway, I could deploy a song spell at range, which I can't do with my usual set; unless there are so many items on the menu here that I'm not going to be able to keep them straight might as well listen to one."
"Not that many, especially since most of what I can do is even less useful. As far as useful things go. I can make people less tired. I can make anything that hits them hit less hard. I can amplify my voice. That's actually a very simple series that most people weave into other songs, but I don't know how you can do that. Playing both at one shouldn't work, if you have two people singing you generally get a competition for which effect takes."
purposeful_glory
"I can amplify the songs without a song for it, unless there's something special about increased volume from magic-derived sources."
He shakes his head. "No, that's just so I have more range. They work on everyone friendly who can hear them. Probably everyone friendly to the singer, not the source."