open thread for one-post episodes showing what your character(s) get up to this semester, optionally timestamped
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(Week 6)

Alexius wakes with a shudder on a sweat-dampened mattress. He had never before experienced a nightmare that vivid. He lies still, panting, and waits for the feeling of stabbing pain to subside. 

It doesn't. 

Alexius thrashes in a panic - a mal, it has to be a mal, it got in through the vents or under the door - but it's like moving through syrup. Syrup filled with knives. Pricking his skin, cutting, draining. 

Poison? Some kind of paralytic? Think, you have an eidetic memory, what sort of mal - no. No time. Desperately, hoarsely, Alexius grinds out the syllables of his affinity-boosted antitoxin. He has no idea what's affecting him, but it feels toxic. His only option is to dump what mana he can into an antidote and pray it sticks. 

Nothing changes. As if mocking him, another wave of agony scrapes across his skin. But something isn't right. The pain clears his head, lets him focus on the wrongness. Alexius has been cut before; the pain doesn't match. And Alexius doesn't smell blood. 

He has exactly one weapon that might work, if he can keep his head and mana long enough to use it. He gasps out the mal-solidifier and feels something slimy and cold materialize on his forehead. He grasps at it with clammy fingers and rips it clear - there is blood, this time, but only a trickle - slamming it into the wall.

He can't afford to spend more mana on this; he'll be back in debt as it is from those two spells alone. Swearing, he draws his knife from its bedside sheath and doesn't stop stabbing for thirty seconds straight. 


Night hag. An invisible, incorporeal mal. Juvenile, this one, barely old enough to pose a threat to freshmen. Small enough, and subtle enough, to get past the school wards - through the vent, or under the door, or hiding in the room since the door last opened. Subtle enough to dodge or delay the wake-up ward, too. The antitoxin couldn't work, because the drain wasn't physical. But that fact had probably saved his life; the antitoxin wasn't potent enough to handle most full-blown mal venoms anyway, not at his level. The mal had tried to drain Alexius, not through his blood, but through his lifeforce - like a maleficer. And like a maleficer, it had caught on his affinity and choked. 

Alexius leans back from the Mal Studies textbook with a worried sigh. He'd been lucky - on many levels. Lucky the mal was young and weak, lucky his affinity bought him the few seconds he'd needed to wake up and fight it off. It would have gotten him, he knew, affinity or no, if he hadn't reacted in time. 

Not today, damn school. Not today. 

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(end of October)

It's morning. It's time to get up, time to go join the crowd and walk the path where Misaki saw an ambush yesterday, yet another person dying suddenly in purple foam. It's morning. It's time to get up and join the crowd.

It's morning. It's time to get up and join the crowd.

The crowd passes without Misaki managing to join them. She rolls over. She doesn't get up. She squeezes her eyes shut and remembers the sky, and remembers her mother's laughter, and remembers that book she was reading for Chinese practice and set aside without finishing.

She's going to -

- she doesn't want to think about it.

She goes so far as to acknowledge that she doesn't want to go to class if it wouldn't be fun, because if she doesn't enjoy herself now, she never will.

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Warning: Death

Kevin keeps up his front of a positive attitude until the end. When he keeps making bad trades, trying to build up a reputation as a good sort to trade with - but everyone just sees a sucker, just stares at him when he tries to establish an actual friendship, a real relationship. His only real repeat business was Shop stuff from that poor Chicago mundie.

When he has to barter for healing, and then barter for homework help after being trapped by a mal for hours, and then his first attempt at artificing goes bad and bites him and he smashes it and he needs healing again-

He just keeps making more mistakes.

He keeps up that smile, that fake confidence that he's gonna make it, just you wait and see, until something lobsterish drops down from a shelf in the supply room and he trips over a box scrambling away, and a second-year blows it up with lightning but, well, that's a lot of blood. And his leg looks kind of... Purple-black. It's spreading.

He smiles and offers the second-year his room number to make the end fast and painless.

Link for convenience to his intro

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Wendy is in shop again, and has her materials. She touches them all in turn, the leather, the cloth and thread, the metal. The sketches and notes and measurements. A small shield, small enough to be a reasonable thing to attempt, light enough (hopefully) to not get in her way most of the time. Of course, it's also how you use it. Light and fast. Light and fast. Even a small shield helps a lot if it gets in harm's way quickly, and holds malice at bay. A bit of tough leather, which she has carefully measured and cut into straps while singing to the tune of a nursery rhyme about holding steady, holding fast, skin and sinew, without which the whole would be incomplete. "Bind and weave, snug and tight. To resist cut and slash and malicious bite."

But the star of today's show are rods of iron, ready to be purified and alloyed and hardened into steel. Alas, titanium or aluminum is too valuable and finicky for her to try to actually try to work with them, as of yet. She's going to make a low alloy steel with some actual purified charcoal rods the shop gave her and some nickel and tiny ball bearings of chromium in a finger-thin vial. The process for making proper alloy steel, at least according to a library book, she goes over once again.
 
She has spells for seeing the crystalline structure, and just how much carbon and oxygen is getting bound up in the metal. She slowly heats the raw iron while carefully preparing the workspace and centering herself. Her arm is going to be very, very sore by the time she's completely done here... But that's something to worry about later. First, the alloying. She sets up the furnace. Begins working the bellows. Carefully edging up the heat and airflow until it's ready - and then the nickel cut into little strips goes in, a bit at a time, gently gently. And then the chromium. Chromium is a proud metal. She can just picture it, shiny and valiant, gleaming in the sun. Combined with the magnetic potential of steel and the corrosion resistance that nickel will bring, it will make the whole thing that much tougher.

She has incantations for helping metals blend smoothly, too. Maybe not to a perfect monomolecular lattice, echoing repetitive lines about the purifying crucible and the blood of the earth and the will of the smith go in - and mana goes in, dribs and drabs she can afford- Pressing her will into the forge as she tends it, insisting the alloy will shine, and gleam, and defend as it was always meant to- The chromed steel comes out as forgings, into her ingot molds. She likes how the alloy comes out. It's a good alloy. She watches it cool, helping it along with a modified Christmas carol belted out at medium volume - not too quiet, not so loud as to disturb the whole room or attract mals.

-Mal check. She got a bit too into it there. Nothing, even after a quick stanza of detection.

Okay. She has her base material, several large ingots mixed to perfection. Apparently you're not supposed to weld things like this, but she has spells that promise to align the molecular and magical structure so that two pieces of metal forget they were ever separate. She double-checks her measurements again, rolls the metal back and forth in her hands, casts another spell to look down at the crystal structure by feel more than anything visible... Even with just a minute or two of sanding the ingots to deburr them, to make the best possible base for further work, it looks good to her spells, and she has a good, solid feeling about it as it lies there, gleaming just slightly. There's still a lot to do, like a LOT, but this will have to be it for today. Her shop run group is looking pretty impatient to go by now.

Too bad about Kevin.

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