combinatorial explosion | Glowfic Constellation

rockpaperscissors

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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"How does your kind work?"

rockpaperscissors

"I've got an invisible thing attached to my back, and if somebody else who has one - of a different kind, they can't be the same kind or it doesn't work - there's twenty-eight kinds - uh, if someone with a different kind touches theirs to mine the right ways then spells can happen. What spells depends on which kinds we are."

"And you don't like any of the kinds?"

rockpaperscissors

"It's not really like that."

"What's it like?"

rockpaperscissors

"Um, they relate to each other differently like in how they're shaped, but I don't think there's much to like or not like besides the people attached to them? I'm not sure, maybe there is and I'd like it fine if I met someone who was... box radical or something."

"Oh, it's the kind of thing that's better if you like the people?"

rockpaperscissors

"The magic's invisible but it still feels like they're touching me. Or, uh, felt, Huo's dead and Yu and Zao are I guess on another planet."

"I guess it's good that no one here is magic, since you don't like it."

rockpaperscissors

"Lord Maedhros" (this comes out like mei-zhe-rou-se) "is but he didn't seem to want to, so that's good."

"Huh, that's weird."

rockpaperscissors

"It is, since he wasn't before."

"Why doesn't he want to do magic? If it'd win the war that'd be really good."

rockpaperscissors

"It seems like it'd be hard for two magic people to win a war and I don't want to do more magic anyway."

"Oh."

rockpaperscissors

"To do anything really big you need more people. The strangers who sent me here had six. About as good as you can get with two is - healing like Master Huo used me for, and that's only one person at a time and it takes awhile."

"If it heals people into magic people you'd have more pretty quick, though."

rockpaperscissors

"It doesn't usually do that. I think maybe it could only happen since Lord Maedhros didn't have a body and the spell didn't know he wasn't supposed to have one with that attached."