This post's authors have general content warnings that might apply to the current post.
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
Ranara and her little daughter Azabel move to Urtho's Tower when the latter can say six words ("up", "mama", "milk", "no", "now", and "please") and hasn't started to walk yet. Ranara sets up to teach little children to read, ones who don't have evident Gifts yet - Ranara herself has Mindspeech, is all, with about a classroom's worth of range. Azabel sits in on classes, worn on her mother's back or later plopped in a corner with toys or, when she's only four, plopped in a corner with a book, younger than the other kids in the class. When Azabel has in fact sat through her mother's curriculum she is turned somewhat loose, to walk very carefully up and down and around the Tower, exploring.
smol bell in urtho's tower
small-and-alone
"I can get us a map from the library, I think. Probably we want to arrive near the village that's closest to the Plains, rather than right in the middle - we might still get harassed by bandits but at least we won't risk landing on top of some other clan... We should maybe pack a tent, with wards on it, I think it's more than a day's walk to get to Kiyam clan lands. And protective shields, and a comms artifact just in case we need to contact someone and we're both too tired to cast it directly over that distance..."
anticipating_night
"Good plan. I wanna invent a universal energy storage artifact - I'm not sure I can get it so you can tap it like a node but I think it ought to be possible to get it so you can recharge other artifacts with it."
small-and-alone
"Wow! That would be really neat and useful - huh, I'm sort of surprised I haven't heard about or read about it already existing, you'd've thought someone else would've had the idea..."
anticipating_night
"Well, I guess it's possible they did and it just doesn't work but it seems like it should work so I'm going to try as my artifact class project."
The teacher is a bit surprised, and then says she can't see why it'd be impossible; all artifacts store power, when you think about it, usually just enough to power the set-spell for a few days but still. It might be very hard to do a general-purpose one; set-spells tend to be 'brittle', with limited flexibility, so it might be a lot easier to design a backup power reservoir for one specific artifact than to solve the general problem. But it sounds like an excellent idea for Azabel's class project!
anticipating_night
She will try the general version and narrow her focus to a specific swappable power source if it doesn't look like she'll perfect the generic in time.
The generic one turns out to be incredibly hard, perhaps intractably so to stabilize a focus for more power than, say, what a shield-talisman needs to recharge. Doing less general versions is more feasible, though, and she can even reuse a lot of the design.
anticipating_night
She pokes at it till she thinks she's working on the most ambitious thing she can in fact finish by the end of the term.
small-and-alone
Ma'ar, for his part, planned out an artifact to replace having a tent entirely; it'll need repowering every day, but that should be feasible even from reserves, and it'll be much less weight to carry around and won't tear or wear out or get dusty. He thinks he can get it to both project a physical shield-barrier and an illusion to make their presence almost unnoticeable, and also to retain heat. He's making solid progress on it.
He finds maps of Predain to look at. Wow, in hindsight he made a really long journey to, eventually, reach Urtho's Tower.
small-and-alone
"Sure!" Ma'ar is very impressed with how Azabel's project turned out, even if the general-purpose version wasn't as feasible as they'd hoped.
small-and-alone
They'll still need to recharge that, but less often and it'll give them wiggle room if they have a particularly tiring or eventful day.
Both of them receive excellent grades on their projects, and do very well on their final exam in the Gate course; the teacher is confident they could both easily manage a Gate five hundred miles, if they know the destination reasonably well. And now they have the next two weeks conveniently off.
small-and-alone
"He could be pretty helpful to have around! And it'd be safer if he could fly us in - although maybe he can't carry both of us... My clan would be terrified of him, if they're still around, but I guess he could hang back for that. Do you think he'd want to come, if you asked him?"
