man will be lifted by his own creation
Next Post »
« Previous Post
+ Show First Post
Total: 1882
Posts Per Page:
Permalink

"How long will the second thing take?"

Permalink

"I think at least - three, maybe even six months, unless I do another recruiting round to get more mages in total, and that would be time-consuming in itself." 

Permalink

"I'm going to see how long the microbes take to die if I don't feed them. If they can last a while that way we can construct relatively portable little containers of them, full of an initial batch of food and growing till it runs out."

Permalink

"That makes sense. I do think we could transport a large number of them quickly, with Gates and magic to help carry them through." 

Permalink

Nod nod.

Permalink

"Well, we'd better get back to work."

Permalink

"I should probably make a trip back to Haven and at least try tweaking the Web alarms to catch gryphons, we don't know for sure that the Star-Eyed would interfere directly–" 

Permalink

"It would possibly reveal that we know about Iftel's army, though." 

Permalink

"And She and Vkandis were probably working together last time Leareth died."

Permalink

"Yes." Slight shiver, and he reaches to put his arm around Belrun. "I - suppose it might act as a deterrent, if She thought an attack was less likely to catch us unawares, but...on balance I think we should hold off on revealing it. I will think on it further." 

Permalink

"Mmm." 

Permalink

Belrun leans into the encircling arm, pats his hand.

Permalink

They get back to work. Leareth still slips by to kiss Belrun fairly often, though it's just as often because he's worrying about Vkandis' gryphon cavalry and wants reassurance as it is because she's being excellent. 

Permalink

Vanyel gets the hang of killing microbes and extracting their life-energies as power, and he can do a lot at once. He's also very comfortable with concert-work so he tutors Leareth's mages, who are improving a bit faster than Leareth's median prediction. 

Permalink

Belrun does SCIENCE. But a lot of the work is just assembling containers and feeding microbes and seeing about how many there are in various containers and that can be delegated so some of her SCIENCE is done trying to stuff Gifts into monkeys.

Permalink

It's tricky! Even once Vanyel confirms that she's given them Fetching and he can see the channels, the monkeys seem unable to use it, except occasionally completely at random. 

Permalink

"I suspect you need to give them the corresponding brain region that a Gifted person has," Leareth muses. "Nayoki would be able to See it directly, I think - perhaps she could concert-See it with me and then I could share the result with you?" 

Permalink

"Good idea!"

Permalink

Nayoki is called in. 

Permalink

Leareth suggests they grab Vanyel as a test Fetcher (he minds much less having Mindhealers examine him than Belrun does.) 

Permalink

Sure! Vanyel will happily Fetch a ball across the room and back a few times, and do the floating-around rather than teleporting kind of Fetching with it too. 

Permalink

It's nice to see Van cheery.

Permalink

Once they've done a few test runs, Leareth drops out of rapport with Nayoki so that he can instead be in rapport with Belrun and show her the memories of which bread-bits in Vanyel's mind moved or lit up when he was Fetching. 

Permalink

"Nayoki, your metaphor is weird," Belrun mutters, taking notes with a lot of swoops and half-drawn diagrams.

Permalink

"That is what everyone tells me." 

Total: 1882
Posts Per Page: