Luck to you!  I'm not sure I have brakes.  I was gonna send this one through from my end though.  Since I can now with the precedent of you having done it.

And, with those few minutes spent assembling the pen well and truly passed, she passes the pen through the sigil.

There you go, one pen full of magically conductive/magical (and probably regularly-conductive) ink.  I don't expect this trick to keep working with the same sigil, it left a noticeable drain to keep the port open, as was, let alone what I expect caching on the network level will do to the underlying sympathetic connection I relied upon to get this there - but making one fresh isn't exactly hard if we need to send things over the Internet again.  ...Well.  I wouldn't find it hard for me so much.  Not sure if I'm just absurd.

...Also, now that she can make a magically conductive ink, she has many ideas for how she might use it - like finally making her damn lightsaber.

So now I have a pen that popped out of my screen. ...Did you know I was alone or?

I really do think you're moving too fast, Alex.

Please don't go off on a tangent somewhere and crack your soul open by mistake.

...I was not thinking about whether whether you were alone would matter, for which I do apologize.

...And I appreciate that you're worried about me.  I really do.  I'm not going to rush into danger.  I just...

I can't stop, or else I'll stop.  And I can't stop, or else I'll stop.  Magic is the singular best thing to have happened to me in a good long while, and I was in one hell of a funk, beforehand.  So I may be leaning into the mania a little bit.  But...  It's a hell of a lot better than the depression, and I can make real things.  Real change.  The thing I've been craving my entire life - the ability to turn wanting into having done, with a few intermediate steps - has just dropped into my lap.  And I want a lot of things that I had no way to do, otherwise.

She scribbles down "Elbereth" on a Post-it.

So I get where you're coming from.  And I'm not going to wilfully do risky shit.  I just...

My ability to do things is like a shark.  It moves, and moves, and it has to keep moving or die.  And right now I am finally fucking moving.

OcularStone is typing...

OcularStone is typing...

OcularStone is typing...

Hug.

I'm not you and don't know your brain. Maybe advice here does the opposite of help, sometimes people want to vent and sometimes they actually want advice.

I wonder if you could try focusing the 'finally moving' on certain things? Like paying the doctors back specifically, or dealing with the weird traces specifically.

Maybe I should make an issues tracker list with priorities and poke you constantly about progress on each open issue. It sounds like kind of a nightmare to me but my ADHD seems to be on a lower level than most. To the point where it might not even be a thing.

Just...

I have worked hard in my life to cultivate the dao of chill. Petty shit just ultimately does not matter if you don't let it matter. Take it easy. Haste makes waste. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Etc.

Just words, i know

Maybe super precise control exercises, or

OcularStone is typing...

le sign

Here, have a woodshop tutorial video I found. [link]

Aaaand that's all I got.

Oooh, woodshop.  Useful!

...That sounds like the sort of investment in my life I should be paying you for.

And yeah I've got the 'pay the doctors for their stuff' sorts of things ticking away in the back of my mind.

-- oh right, that was one of the things I wanted to work on with recent novel capabilities.  Thanks for reminding me!

Gonna go get started on that -- wait.  Aw, geez, I have class?  Where the heck did the time go?

(Lost to research binges, clearly.)

Anyway I have math to go suffer through.  (Suffer, because it's distracting from magic.  Though I suppose I do have some magicky math questions...)  BBIAB.

Nothing interrupts normal university class operations.

If browsing the internet for news she sees a news story about one of the Boston magical girls, Star Sweep, causing collateral damage.

Well, she's not really browsing browsing, but occasionally she ends up opening a new tab in mobile Chrome, and that has random news articles.  Like this one.  She'll even open it this time.

...Oof.  Ouch.  That's not good.  Hm.  What's the damage? ...Mostly property damage, but that's cold comfort, given that property is a lot less squishy than people.  What could be done about it, too...

...Well, outside of mass producing Elbereth wardlines, so that there aren't monsters in the first -- hm, but that might well cause problems for perfectly copacetic Lilim, and she can't be contributing to that.  Maybe some sort of attachment for MG spell-foci?

Like, Elbereth would work for her house because it's her house and she wants to keep everyone out of it and she can also anchor a threshold over the thing so that it's.  Fair.  To humans and Lilim alike.

But like.  Arbitrary use of that and that alone, would be what one should call, bad.

So she's thinking she ought to do the...  Was it MGLN that had, like, mages shunting their battles to a pseudoreal dimension so that the battle didn't actually wreck shit? - but maybe kind of, in reverse?  Sideways?  Fuck it, she'll let that percolate for a little while.  The general idea of a rider on the spells that makes the damage temporary - perhaps fueled by the force of the spell itself - is still a good one.  Maybe she'll ask M. De Gaulle if he wants to collaborate.  It'd give him something to hold over the Puchuu.

...Wow, this article is treating the magic cops like she wishes more articles treated the mundane cops.

It's kind of shocking.  Refreshing, in one way, and vaguely terrifying in another because she's certain that this messaging would stop the instant the government got its hands on the reins of magic.  Loose cannons her ass.

These photos of the damage are not going to stop her from having her own kickass energy sword, despite the mess.

...She'd better figure out how to practice checking her fire, though, yeesh.

As it happens, it is from her physics class (her teacher worked for NASA at one point!  That's fucking cool!) that she gets a useful answer to her Banach-Tarski woes, having had no luck with the computer programmer of a math teacher she had: As far as her physics teacher knows, as long as she's operating on an enclosed volume, the math holds.  ...She is now wondering if that means Klein bottles are right out, or what.  Maybe she'll try it and find out, later.

Regardless, she earmarked this timeblock for the dressing-room body dummy.  Even if she's going to shoot a quick email to M. De Gaulle on the thread with her inquiries about combat.

...Having just seen the news report so heavily on collateral damage in Boston, it occurs to me that some way of affixing 'dreamlike' qualities to at least the effects of a magical girl's spellwork on things they oughtn't be targeting, and thereby allowing it to evaporate when everyone 'wakes up' after the fight's done, ought to go over well with the Puchuu and the government both, since I'm sure neither like infrastructure damage.  My gut instinct is that it ought to be reasonably plausible to make that work as an enchantment laid on their foci.  Given the way the Puchuu dream, or rather, the ways they don't, though - well, I think this is a service only humans could provide, and I thought you might appreciate the idea, given your (rightful) whole thing.  I've got about half a solution to it from the frameworks I already have lying around, I think, if you'd like to collaborate.  Mostly the part that virtualizes the magic so one can perform such an abstract operation as that upon it; the actual dealing-with-magic-itself tools I have are rather coarse as of yet.  (Though I've no doubt that given that prompting I am about to suddenly delve into a vaguely adjacent field of symbology and loot it for spare abstractions.  Perhaps something patterned off the trigrams; they're pleasingly binary, I can work with octagons, and the general idea of feng shui seems like a useful hook...)

--AM

Anyway.  She's got her project to start.

Humans are 70% water...

Hm.  Three water, quintessence, two vitae, gold, ...hexagonal?  Well, maybe, but actually no.  Hexagonal but with a hook.  The magic can be the hook.  Or, no.  So there's a ring of three triplex-waters, bonded to vitae-quintessence-vitae, and then the gold, ninety degrees off the plane.  Sort of like a scale, or chainmail, or...  Something.

And that sort of particle can be used to build almost arbitrarily from an anchor point.

She just needs to...  Well, just is a bit of a stretch, when it's about basically live-printing a 3D model of arbitrary properties.  ...And really, she should do this more granularly.  So perhaps a full ring of vitae/quintessence for the skin - so it can carry the signal back - and then triplex-bonded water in a chain...  Muscles and bones, still.  Earth?  Earth.  Well, she could just literally do it out of calcium.  Though what about more exotic materials...?

She'll keep it 'earth'.  Like the skin is vitae.  ...The muscles, though.  Those should be...  Thing-shaped.

Earth-vitae?

Yeah, earth-vitae.  And Earth-vitae-vitae for long-twitch, or whatever.  Ligaments...  Will be vitae again.  ...Eyes.  Oh no.  Eyes.  That might be.  Difficult.

...Water-vitae-water-vitae orbs, but then she needs to pigment them -

Oh, hell, hair.  Uh.  Keratin.  So earth-earth-vitae, plus...dye...adjacent or within.  Yeah.  Actually, she'll do that as a staggered crossbonded chain...or maybe a crosswoven one.

Dyes are going to be a pain in the ass.  She'll have to actually consult the biologists, see what chemicals they can code for.  ...Hm, and then there's the whole hair curliness thing.  Though that seems...  Reasonably plausible to do by playing with what's bonded how.

...Annnd she needs to get the keratin, through the flesh.  Well, the skin.  Shit, that's mucking with what she has.  Maybe if she makes the follicles and cuticles run over the surface...

...Anyway she's got...  Most of what she's going to need.

...Maybe she should make a crawler to print the stuff in situ.  She probably could, even.

...Though, the question there is not so much "could she do it", as "would the design not be utterly creepy".  Utterly creepy designs are bad.

...Hm.  She could do little wheely things.  Just sort of...  Select the arm that's just moved to the forwards point on the triangle, F D Q R C Tab V ...

...This is getting a little into the range of metaprogramming, live, but hey, she does have TIS-100 to draw from.  She thought she was going to have to use it for this anyway!

...Oh, hey, she could use that general model for internal work, too.  Hmm.  This system might get 3D on her.  ...It'd be easier to code in anyway, if it was cubes.  More processor connections to work with.

...So she'll... mount the cubes in A-space and start writing the code.  And lay the pipes.

The 'down' layer is out, to a series of crawlers, controlling which arm-programs run - the top layer is input processing, reading measurement adjustments that she's going to need to feed in...  Actually, hm, there's also the question of reservoir selection - wait a minute she literally has hex codes for - no she doesn't PHYSICAL OBJECTS Alex - You know what she's just going to see if she can mock this up in the Minecraft TIS mod.  ...Any minute now.

Aaaaaany minute now.

Anybody?  Bueller?  Bueller?

...It's time for more food.

Around this time, Sebastian finally responds.

Mlle. Marche,

You have posed several questions to me since I was last able to respond, so I will respond in order.

1. Unless you specialize in combat, the three key things to remember that are: Don't Get Hit (Dodging is a lot more effective than shielding, and the Joseph Joestar Special Technique is a good one!), Hit First (If it truly comes to a fight, do not hesitate! He who hits first oft wins.), Fight Dirty (Ambush, stun, horrible poisons, sticky goo, go for the eyes and groin, etc. If you're already fighting each other, anything goes.)

2. My contact who wants a silver monocrystal hexagon rod is open to meeting you via video call or in person to discuss what he wants it for, but wants you to know they will want you to agree to a mild oath that will inform the other party if secrecy is broken (and nothing further) before telling you the full details. They have offered healing potions, combat stimulant potions, shielding artifacts, and magical martial arts tutoring as potential trades.

3. Some of the Puchuu have artifacts that do something like this; They shift especially large fights into what is described as 'halfway into the spirit world' or 'within a barrier world'. The use of these appears to be sharply limited in some way, as they don't ALWAYS use them. Perhaps they are limited in number, or have long recharge times, but who knows really. One of my best dream healing techniques riffs on 'waking up from a nightmare' and another on 'it looked worse than it actually was'. I have applied dreamlike qualities to a whole fight before, but what tends to happen is another magic user breaking out of the dream and re-affirming reality, which is easier than making the world dreamlike in the first place. It is much easier to put everything involved to sleep, generally speaking.

My apologies for flooding your inbox, first of all; I have a bit of a motormouth behind the keyboard.

re: 1.: Ah, the basics.  Indeed.  Always remember that the best way to avoid getting hurt in a fight is not being in a fight.  But "hostile plane shifts are a live threat category" was more like what I was thinking of.  ...Ugh, defenses against those are going to be a pain to find useful metaphors for.  I'm actually going to have to start digging into Hume counters and SRAs at this rate.

re: 2.: I...Hmm.  On the one hand there is nothing objectionable to that oath.  On the other hand I can't actually promise that I'll remember what's secret when I get caught up in something that touches on any incidental knowledge I pick up from that chat.  On the third hand, if it's just that he needs a cultivation resource like the offer of mystic martial arts training implies, if but vaguely - then I think that I likely don't actually need more details on the specific reasons it has to be this cultivation resource.  Well, unless I'm intending to also cultivate, and furthermore cultivate the exact same Way.  Which would be stupid.  His Way is, well, just.  Definitionally, not my Way.  It's his.

re: 3.: Yeah, making the fight itself dreamlike couldn't possibly work.  It's all too real, and everyone knows that.  But could you perhaps draw on especially the force of bystanders' "fuck, this can't be happening to me" to phase-shift incoming damage away from them?  ...Notwithstanding that the idea was more like - getting a friendly mage to cooperate with making their otherwise-real attacks be carried on a dream, and effectively relying on hostile forces rolling to disbelieve what would otherwise have been dreamlike damage - that, when interrogated, becomes very real.  Weaponizing the way that they won't be surprised enough to let reality blink, as was.

...Admittedly a lot of that explanation is post hoc, but I'm reasonably confident it'd work.

...Oh!  Can you tell your guy that I still need the preferred dimensions of his crystal?  I can start it cooking anytime, but I do need to know when to stop it.

Thank you,

--AM

After about 20 minutes:

For defense against esoteric threats, the best thing going for you is your own innate resistance. Most people don't want to be unexpectedly plane-shifted, have a grenade teleported next to their head, have their dreams eaten, etc. And as a person and, moreso, a sorcerer, your opinions on these matters are fairly weighty. It tends to take at least one factor such as a sympathetic link (I.E. from hair), major power differential or extreme specialization on the caster's part, or physical proximity for exotic attacks to work. In the end though- There is no perfect defense, and an often effective one is a support network who would warn you of apparent threats and avenge you.

I'm not sure I understand your meaning about shifting incoming damage. My dreamwalking is a wispy sort of thing, much more metaphorical than practical. Interfering with their will to fight, I would understand clearly... Perhaps I simply don't have the context you have, unless you mean the reverse of dream-healing? Phantom wounds that are forced to become real? A gruesome thought...

Hah. After I informed my friend of your inference, he said 'you may as well tell her, then, I'm clearly not the only one who's read xianxia'. Yes, they are for cultivation, specifically to try and create completely pure energy. I'm not sure it will work like he hopes, but I'm happy to connect a craftsman and a customer either way. The latest design for the ritual space (or array, or formation, I'm not sure on his terms) has fifty four slots that are exactly 0.4 cm on each side, or 0.8 cm from vertex to vertex, and they should have a length of 7.2 cm. Plus six more rods exactly double in length and width. We're aware that this is a lot of silver. He's willing to pay in cash or bank transfer for materials, in addition to whatever magical trade you want. If the first attempt doesn't work like he hopes, he may well want to keep trying different sizes, too.

...Oh, hells, I should really definitely get a spell that can reliably obliterate any samples of my blood or hair, like, yesterday.

I think I do mean the reverse of dream-healing, but more in the way of the logical converse than the direct opposite.  Phantom wounds that your opponent forces into reality, by the same token of being too powerful for dreams to affect.  Like you wrapped a blasting-spell up in a bubble of being-a-dream, and it will only pop when it touches something potent enough to warrant blasting.

...If I stick with the usual method - well, my usual method - of refining the silver from carbon (via what I shall call shenanigans) - and I see little reason to not do that, given the sheer amount of atomic recombination I'm doing to make the crystal itself - then I think my material outlay is, like, a bag of charcoal from the nearest Home Depot, unless I've horribly futzed up the unit conversions - though I'm hardly going to argue if he wants to save the factor-of-thirty-two slowdown from the refining tower by throwing some silver at me.  ...Well, I could cut it down to factor-of-eight, but still.  If he still has any past attempts, I daresay I could save yet more still on every relevant factor by just - rebonding them, if they're the right size or larger.  And speaking of which, he should maybe try the largest size first.  It's much more annoying to add a layer when I'm operating in atoms, than to shave something down.  ...My magic outlay is as-yet unmeasured, speaking of crafting-process concerns, and I really need to get around to figuring out how the heck Lilith built the solar-power-to-magic ritual dryads use, or some other way of generating passive manaflow - but yeah.  It should just be a matter of time.

-- AM

As text conversations sometimes go, Wren replies to her offhand question from earlier at about this time:

MGs with day jobs? Kinda depends. When they're teens or young adults, not really. A lot of them still go to school because a 'normal experience' is important or something but... I don't really know in detail, I guess. But older/semi-retired ones who've gotten tired of fighting or caught on to the bullshit or just fallen out of peak form and motivation usually have vocations, at least. Few people ACTUALLY want to sit around doing nothing all day, even if they could live off selling mana once a month.

True that; I'm sure I will always have something to tinker with, but I'd go spare otherwise.

...There's a very stubborn part of her that is convinced that simple iconography will work to resolve her power problems, squaring up with a part of her that thinks there's no damn way it could possibly work like that.  It is yet to be seen which part shall win the ensuing fight.

...Though, she does have a lot of iconography to draw upon.  Even without studying up on trigrams, she could still tap a variety of fictional sources.

...Hey, d'you know if making reference to fictional magical systems with, eh, heavily associated, gribblies, is likely to accidentally cause those gribblies to exist in your general direction?  Warhammer's Chaos is utterly fucked but I want to steal the Winds because they're unique...

...Oh, hey, there's always mirror magic.  It worked for Lilith Weatherwax, why shouldn't it work for her?

...Actually she might ask this question of De Gaulle, as well.

...There's actually a question that's been nagging me, as I set out to build more useful metaphors: If I draw from a lore that carries some very horrible gribblies - e.g. Warhammer (Fantasy, not 40K, and really not the new stuff either -) - on a regular basis, how likely is it that sheer associative inertia will accidentally reify said gribblies despite intending anything but that?

--AM

Anyway.  ...No, horrible brain goose, put the Excrucians back, you don't know where they've λ-been!

(...She's going to end up λ-reifying herself a Deceiversona, isn't she.  The idea's bitten her.  This is her life now.  Fuck.)

...And she still hasn't reached out to the Force properly!

Maybe that could help, somehow, with her power woes.  It is, after all, the power of the universe, merely leveraged upon the fulcrum of her soul.

Anyway.  She needs to actually do that if she's going to, well, do that.  And she's done with her classes.  So it's probably time to settle in somewhere and meditate.

...Maybe she should make a holocron or a kyber crystal or something.  She's more prone to the sort of flow state she thinks would work best for this, when she's actually doing things.  And it's not like she wouldn't have uses for a magic computer!