combinatorial explosion | Glowfic Constellation

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The strangers have six casters, in their group, that Qiri can count. Qiri's group has four counting him, and they got split up awhile ago when the strangers started that earthquake. Qiri is stuck with Master Huo. Master Huo is dying, but since Qiri is chained up he can't use that to escape, or attack Master Huo. The master's magic is uninjured, and he can reach Qiri's from where he lies, and Qiri is sitting there, goosepimpled, enduring it. He wonders if Master Huo might be in enough pain to distract him, if Qiri tried to wrench his magic away, but he doesn't think so. He can squirm around a fair bit under Master Yu and Master Zao if only one of them is using him for a spell - and if he wants to earn himself a beating - but not Huo.

He doesn't get nauseous anymore, like he did when he was a kid. So there's that.

Huo's casting a healing spell, moving Qiri's magic around this way and that to set it up. Qiri assumes it's going to target Master Huo, but spells don't know who anyone is. Qiri can't distract himself, not with his spine tingling and all his magic cringing under the slide of Huo's. Instead he tries to concentrate on something less directly sensory: how's the spell targeting? How is Huo going to make sure it heals him, and not Qiri's irritated skin under where the chains sit, the injuries to his fingers from the last time he irritated Master Yu, the probably broken toe sustained in the earthquake?

He figures it out when the spell is probably almost over: it's going to target the most injured person, and Qiri is a little banged up but Master Huo's got an arrow to the gut and a slice through his thigh that's probably going to bleed him out before the abdominal wound can kill him. It's objectively pretty impressive that he can concentrate enough to make his magic force Qiri's through the motions he wants.

Then, dimly around the cloying sensation of Huo's magic over his, Qiri notices a group of the stranger mages approaching, standing close together, back to back to back, doing something -

And he and Huo are banished somewhere else.

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"- then why do people do what he says?"

"I mean, he's not the kind of mad where he's wrong, just the kind of mad where you can't guess why he's right. He's won us centuries of peace and safety, no one else was managing that. And the Noldor like him because they remember what he was like before the war."

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"Oh."

"Technically there's also a King and if the King and Lord Maedhros disagree I think we're supposed to listen to the King and I think Lord Maedhros isn't the King on account of being mad. But I'm not sure. The Noldor complicate their politics."

The movie starts. It features scared Elves cowering in a mountain valley, beset by monsters and hunted down by Melkor.

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"This is just a story, right?"

"It happened but a long time ago. All these places are radioactive wasteland these days."

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"And you can show it over again like with how I wound up here got showed over again? What's radioactive?"

"It poisons any living thing that goes there. And this is actually a recreation with actors because we didn't know how to put memories in a replayable format way back when all this happened, but yes, we can play it over and over now that we have it in a replayable format."

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"Ohhh, actors."

"I think Oromë might've starred as himself."

Oromë goes hunting monsters, and stumbles across the Elves. He's very surprised; he wasn't expecting them to exist yet. He goes to war with Melkor to make Melkor stop preying on them.

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The story is very absorbing.

Oromë asks some of the Elves if they want to go to Valinor with him, and a few heroically agree to check it out. Valinor is miraculous and full of wonders, and they return to guide their people there. "Because it's a Noldorin movie," she says.

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"Did this part not happen?"

"Some people went to Valinor. About half of people didn't. It's probably accurate about the ones that went, I think."

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"Oh. So a movie by somebody else would focus on the people who didn't?"

"Yeah. And on the ways the Valar were creepy and weird. - they were."

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"I'm not going to meet any of those, am I?"

"No. They live in Valinor. People wish they'd come help, because we're losing the war, but they won't. And since you're human you won't even end up there when you die."

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Qiri nods.

"Anyway that's a movie. Are you sure you don't wanna go to the gardens or anything?"

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"It sounded like they wouldn't let me."

"They said exploring was awfully open-ended. Going to the gardens isn't open-ended, it's specific. What're they even scared of?"

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"I don't know! I can't even do magic by myself and it's not like I'm a monk or something."

"What's a monk?"

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