This post has the following content warnings:
Elodea is getting worried.
It's been three months since she got teleported to this godsforsaken wilderness, and she hasn't found anything resembling a hint of how to find civilization yet.
She is really not looking forward to whatever her curse does to make up the backlog.
"Everything you've ever said about how magic works for you has sounded completely insane."
"If you don't know what a wizard is I suppose the complete lack of books on my person might be less than perfectly reassuring but I promise you I need a spellbook to get my spells every morning." She considers. "And that I need to prepare spells to cast them."
"You...write...them? Out of notes? After doing research? Spells are complicated, you can't fit enough to be useful into your head at once without magic."
"If you don't feel like being helpful, we can always leave you there," Nesifra says dryly.
"I would love to help you kill my asshole ex-boyfriend, I just have no control whatever over when he shows up to creep on me. And have no way to initiate contact with him. And have neither the ability nor the inclination to find civilization at the moment. I could probably be more helpful about describing the local magic system, if that's what you mean, but I wasn't previously prioritizing anything other than explaining the extent to which I am helpless to inconvenience you in ways other than not being capable of dying if you feel like killing me."
"You certainly asserted that you're helpless to inconvenience us. I'm not sure you managed to explain it."
"Right now the spells I have available to me are another casting of the spell I'm using to communicate with you and a couple of spells that produce light. I suppose if light is harmful to you that could make me non-helpless. One is Dancing Lights, which allows me to create four lights of approximately lantern intensity that I could manipulate the position of. They would last for sixty seconds. The other is simply Light, which makes a single targeted object shine like a torch for, for a wizard of my tier, two hours and fifty minutes. In order to prepare any other spells, I would need a written record thereof, which conventionally come in the form of spellbooks but can be written on individual sheets of paper just fine, or even tattooed on my person. As you can see, I have no tattoos. In addition to my spellcasting abilities and my divinely inflicted attributes, I have a racial immunity to magical sleep. I can't think of how to prove any of this to you. I can expand on how wizardry works if you like but I'm seventeenth-tier and people who are advanced in a craft and haven't specialized in teaching are notoriously bad at explaining things to beginners so you're going to have to ask specific questions."
"It does seem... unlikely, from our perspective, to have a form of magic so obscure that no one knows how to do it without a book in front of them," she says. "And even if that much is true, it's hard to imagine that you would be genuinely unable to recreate any of the books from memory, given a little time unsupervised to experiment."
"Excuse me, it's complexity, not obscurity. I'm a perfectly competent wizard! I could, in fact, recreate some of the spells--but nothing high-level, not from near-scratch. I suppose I could throw a ball of acid at you if I really wanted to but honestly I don't see that going well for me. Also? I would need writing materials. And even if you're not willing to let me go yet can I please have some clothes or something I'm fucking cold."
"If I were going to give you clothes I would have to create them by magic," she says. "And our magic is fueled by pain."
"If you have complaints, you can take them up with our god," she says, amused. "I don't recommend it."
"I have complaints with you having complaints with my nice non-torture-powered magic system!
--I guess that puts the comment about how you're not going to torture me any more because of the curse into a new context," she adds to the male one, whose name she still doesn't know.
"Oh, I'd still want to torture you for fun either way," he says. "You cry very nicely. But it's going to be really annoying trying to murder a god without a good source of power. You would've been perfect, too, with that immortality thing."
"Somehow, I don't think I'm going to be able to take that compliment to heart."
She's quiet for a moment.
"What makes you think you can kill a god?"
"I don't know what that means. And attempts on the lives of gods are usually committed by people who believe they're going to succeed, and they usually fail."
"It's our ancestral duty to conquer the world and restore our banished creator to his rightful place," says the king's sister. "A god as petty as yours sounds like trivial prey in comparison."
"I mean, I admit his personality isn't very impressive, but there's not actually a correlation between personality and power level as far as gods go. Also, can I just register an objection to the idea of restoring a god who'd invent a torture-based magic system, I can't imagine you'd actually take it into consideration but if I'm going to be cooperating with you to kill Elexarin I want it firmly on record that I am opposed to torturemagicgods."
"Thank you."
She sighs.
"The curse...doesn't acknowledge women. If you torture me it won't interact at all. I am not happy to admit this but I really want that asshole dead."
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
