==Lude Activate! Session 31.1!== GMNotStoren> Despite the few souls now crawling upon and within it, the ship remains eerily quiet, although echoes of its occupants flit and tease at the senses. Preferring to remain apart from such a bizarre mausoleum, Tanan rests by one of the mooring pylons that yet holds the ship in place. And it is here that his musings are disturbed. * Tanan is sitting near the water's edge, occasionally looking at the side of the boat and occasionally writing in the book he's holding. * Vytor saunters over to where Tanan is, looking somewhat dirty and greasy from his pokings in the belly of the ship, and flops down next to him. Hey. Got a sec? * Tanan holds up his free hand for a second as he hurriedly writes something down. "Just a second, and sure." * Vytor nods, and rests against the ground with a soft sigh. * Tanan sets the notebook down with the pencil marking his place, holding it open. "Sorry. What can I do for you, Vytor?" I'm hoping you can give me an unbiased opinion of what happened after I was knocked out during that last fight. * Tanan frowns. "Mmm. Unbiased, huh?" * Tanan looks up at the ship, to make sure certain people aren't on deck and nearby. Please. * Tanan hesitates for a few moments. "There's... not really a whole lot to say. Emiria and Mars each decided the other was going to die. Emiria wrapped herself in darkness and went all.. Saki. Except more articulate. And Mars got really, really angry." * Vytor listens without a word. Mars was insisting that Emiria had to be killed. When we managed to subdue her, Emiria tried to finish her off. If the doctor hadn't beamed her up real quick... Emiria was going to run Mars through, wasn't she? Yes. I wasn't fast enough to stop her, I'm glad the doctor was. * Vytor looks troubled, at stares upward How is that a biological weapon from a eons ago recognizes a metalsmith from modern times as an enemy? I don't know that she recognized Emiria personally. But her aura... * Vytor looks at Tanan, puzzled now. "Aura?" I dislike the phrase 'vile and unnatural', so I won't use it. But you want to. * Tanan nods. "I could feel my spine trying to get away from that confrontation, whether the rest of me was coming or not." I don't want to give darkness-shapers a bad name here. I know a few people who specialize in that, back at the academy. Decent folks, if a little off. But I've never felt one manifest their power with that sort of.. vengefulness? Is that even a word? I don't get it Tanan. She doesn't seem like that normally. A little eccentric maybe, but I hardly expected that kind of a response. What does it mean? * Tanan shrugs. "I'm not sure. Usually, you're right. She's a little odd, but well within the tolerances for this little band. She honestly seemed like Saki. Except... Saki usually calms right down once the fight is over. Or at least reigns herself in. Emiria was just going to keep going, and seemed surprised at what she was doing when we stopped her." Do you think there's something going on there akin to Ryllan maybe, if not Saki? I don't know. If it was actually tied to the prophetess, I'm sure one of them would have reacted. We've all seen how Saki gets. With Emiria... who knows how much of it's just the way she is and how much is the stress of her power on her mind. What she does is a wild talent, no doubt about that. That's not that unheard of, but hers... Well, you should know better than I do, you're a smith yourself. We use silver because it reacts to willforce easily, Iron and steel are basically inert. There's no way she should be able to do what she does. Of course, she does, so saying that is kind of silly. But something we don't know about is going on. Maybe there's something like what Ryllan and Saki are going through, or maybe it's just the strain of using her will as a brute-force tool I admit, I'm still not sure how she does that. But there's got to be something there, even if is something mundane like...uh...iron-o-kensis? Mmm. No, it's not just normal telekinesis. You could do some of what she does that way, but the way she reshapes the metal is strange. It's almost like someone forging silver without a forge. And Iron instead of silver. ...she can reshape iron without a forge. * Tanan drums his fingers on his notebook. "Have you ever seen someone do that to silver? Honestly, you're talented enough with the forge that it wouldn't surprise me if you could learn to do it. Even then, it's not usually a fast process. She just rips things off the walls, out of the ground, whatever, and hey! There's some floating swords. It'd be creepy enough if it was just silver." There's still so much we don't understand though. Maybe it's something anyone could do, if they got their mind right. Maybe I'm over-reacting to her. She told me that its all about will. You have to wrap yourself around iron and master it with your will before it will respond to you. I can manipulate silver without touching it a little, but I need a forge, and I can't do it like she can. * Tanan reaches up with one hand, touching a seemingly random spot in the air. A small clump of snow appears by the end of his finger and falls into the water. "The right touch in the right place at the right time can do anything. But it's more like she's using a sledgehammer. I don't understand that sort of thing." Maybe is just a manifestation of her technique. Iron is hard stuff. If you try to manipulate it like silver, it either won't budge, or it'll break instead of submitting to you. We were discussing elemental alchemical theory a while ago, and the differences between silver and iron, and how they respond to the forging process. * Tanan leans forwards and reaches down to fish a little of it out. "Maybe. So then we're back to someone who apparently can break the will of the metal, so to speak, setting off the kill-reflex of an ancient weapon." Maybe Mars thought it was too close to home? We don't know how the allomanterels were made. * Saki is quite definitely preceded by the smell of dinner; despite the surrounds, she's proven pretty good at setting up a small camp stove and doing decent things with it, even though this far out from a town or decent surfaces the general ingredients are 'stew'. Rounding a corner on the lookout, she's carrying the trio's share - using a ripped-out slat of metal wall as a tray. I... No. It wasn't the metal-shaping that did it. It wasn't until she manifested that darkness that Mars singled her out. Huh. I wonder if Ryllan's passenger manifested under such a situation, would Mars have reacted similarly? * Saki heads up without much more than a nod of greeting, about to hand the bowls out; when she catches the tail end of the conversation one eyebrow raises up and she sits a discreet distance - though quite enough to hear - away instead. Neptune didn't, when he met the Prophetess. Well, his projection anyway. Would that make a difference? * Tanan smiles faintly. "I'm the expert on living weapons now? If I had to guess, I'd think it shouldn't. They're basically willforce projections when they're summoned like that. A weapon's a weapon, whether it's alive or not. If it's designed to do something, it'll do it. I wish we could ask the doctor about this, but I think Trune's sleeping on the ECC, and I don't have the heart to wake him." * Tanan compresses the remnants of the little piece of snow into a ball and tosses it back into the water Yeah, we should let him sleep. That business with Mars took a lot out of him. * Saki chips in, quiet and serious. "... it didn't... really feel the same." Ahh! * Tanan almost jumps, spinning around. GAH! * Saki - about as innocently as she ever gets - offers bowls of stew. * Vytor does leap into the air, which is impressive given that he was lying flat on the ground. * Vytor lands badly and ends up falling into the cold water with a loud splash. * Saki looks a tad nonplussed at Vytor's reaction, before sighing out a huff of amusement. "... I think that's a point to me." * Tanan starts again at the sound of the splash, turning towards Vytor. * Vytor comes back up, spluttering. How in the...are you all right? * Vytor hauls himself out of the water with a wry expression, "Well, I suppose I needed a bath and all." * Vytor flops down unceremoniously, and accepts Saki's offering with a smile, making sure to flick a few drops of water in her direction. * Tanan looks down, pinching the bridge of his nose as he shakes his head. * Tanan sighs, looking back up. "I think you just took a few years off our lives, Saki." * Saki - to her credit - doesn't flinch, but does manage to at least save the stew, something of a wry grin on her face. Once handed out she sort of hunkers over her own bowl. "I'd have thought you were used to it by now." * Tanan glances over at his notebook to check to see if it's still dry, then takes a bowl. "Thank you." * Vytor digs in, realizing he's somewhat hungry after minor things like combat and blood-loss. Thanks Saki, I needed this. * Saki does after a moment look up from her somewhat hunched position, nodding once before waving a fork absently. "... point stands, though. I'm not an expert but it wasn't... quite similar." Similar to what? * Saki frowns, trying to shape the words a little better. "... I feel like I could spot-- Ryllan a mile off. That... wasn't it." So whatever is going on inside her is different, but vaguely similar? Probably not connected to the Prophetess, at any rate. Or at least not directly. I'm not attuned to it like Saki is, but it really wasn't the same sort of feeling at all Why can you two pick up on this and I can't? * Saki looks perhaps a little lost, and digs into her food for a bit. "... I don't know. It was... shades of the same stuff? But nothing I get around the Prophetess." * Vytor sighs, "I wish I knew what this was all about." * Tanan shrugs. "I've been working with willforce my entire life, my sense for that's probably a little more developed." The prophetess.. it's hard to put into words. * Vytor finishes his stew, and lies back on the ground again with a soft splat from his wet clothes. She feels wrong, somehow. Out of place. Emiria felt... hostile. Angry. But still 'normal', if that makes any sense * Tanan takes a bite. "Mm. Delicious. We're spoiled, journey-food shouldn't taste this good." * Saki scratches at her head with the handle of the fork, accepting the compliment with another small nod. "... I've said the world feels wrong before. She... feels like the centre of that." Yeah, we're lucky to have you with us Saki, that stew was delicious, She as in the Prohetess or she as in Emiria gone bonkers? * Saki tilts her head, waving a hand. "Former. Sorry." * Vytor nods. I hate to say it, but...Emiria makes me almost as uneasy. I can sort of understand why Mars reacted the way she did. Uneasy? Just the way she acted and felt when that happened. That sort of reaction is... I don't know. She's made me nervous from the beginning though. * Saki considers that for a moment, then shakes her head. "... I can't say the same. Though I wasn't exactly paying attention." I admit is was way abnormal, but I figured that was more just not expecting anything like that. * Saki frowns, screws up her face for a moment, then sighs heavily. "... I don't like it much. We're still being led around, just by different people." Maybe we can get back to our research once we're finished with Pluto. The elementalors? At least we know their goal. Well, their immediate goal. And it sounds, thank heaven, like Pluto might not attack us. That would be novel. Agreed. * Saki deadpans, poking viciously at a tougher lump of stew. "There'll be tests." Ones that hopefully don't involve someone trying to kill us? * Saki makes a face. "... wasn't Uranus perfectly lucid and willing to try to kill us for sport? Maybe Pluto will be different? Maybe it's just the way they were made. Hmm. What do you call someone who'll fight you just for the sake of fighting you? * Saki huffs out. "Usually, a good sparring partner. ... when they start making me go insane and using spells bigger than the room, that's cheating." * Angoe is now known as Angie It'd be nice if she just would challenge us to a debate or something. I don't mind tests. I don't think Uranus was seriously trying to kill us either. But... it would be a nice change. Pluto's.. the dark one? At least she'll be safer from Emiria. * Angie descends the gangplank. She has a bowl in one hand and is stirring it with a spoon held in the other. I don't much care for the dark, though. I don't suppose bringing a lantern would make a difference? * Angie approaches the group, waving her spoon at them cheerfully. From up close it's obvious that she's gotten very dirty; her black shirt has a streak of white dust across it and one of the lenses of her glasses is smeared with oil. Hey, its Angie. * Vytor waves Heh. Maybe it would. Hey, Angie! * Tanan turns his head to look at Saki. "See, this is how you walk up to people." * Tanan winks. * Angie has a seat on a dockside crate and scoops the last of the stew out of her bowl. "Hey. What's going on?" * Saki raises one eyebrow, and doesn't comment from behind her bowl. I was asking Tanan about Emiria, Saki scared then fed us, then you showed up and said hi. * Tanan takes another bite and sets his bowl down next to his notebook. * Angie chews on the last of the stew, nodding thoughtfully. "What about Emiria?" she asks at length. It was about what happened to her during the fight with Mars. * Angie grasps her spoon between her index and middle finger and waggles it ay Vytor. "You think it's a problem?" * Saki tilts her head. "... I think we got about as far as 'different'." Not sure. I just never expected such a strong react between her and Mars. I've got a few inklings about that. Care to share them? * Angie purses her lips and raps the bowl of the spoon in the palm of her hand. Her eyes roam, searching for the proper words. "It's pretty different, yeah. There's someone else there, but it's not a prophet. The prophets seem really angry and hateful, but they seem like people still." Emiria doesn't seem like a person? * Angie drops the spoon into the bowl with a clatter and sets it down on the floor. She straightens back up, folds her arms, and looks up. "It's not her. Like I said, there's somebody else there. But it's not a person, exactly." She looks back Tanan, frustration written in her eyes. "It's hard to explain. I don't want to say 'evil' because that's sort of cosmo-religious but he feels like something inherently inimical to the world." He? * Angie shrugs. "That's just how it feels." * Vytor looks puzzled. * Saki shrugs lopsidedly. "... I suppose we've heard stranger recently." * Tanan stares at Angie. "...if you were willing to be 'cosmo-religious', _would_ you say evil?" That's true enough I suppose. * Angie looks no less confused about the matter than her friends. "I dunno! It's not like anything I've ever felt before. It was like it came from somewhere else." She shrugs her shoulders and scratches the tip of her nose. "I'd need to find something known to be evil to compare them, I guess." * Tanan reaches down, picks up his pencil, and writes something down on the notebook. I wish I could tell you more, but the spell's not really designed for this sort of work. It's intended as a simple diagnostic effect. I don't think Emiria noticed, but the other person definitely did. * Saki frowns at that. "... it's happened before, too. That might get worse if you refine it." Angie, did you learn anything when you scanned...whatever it is? * Angie nods glumly. "Yeah. Upside, though! It's at least something different, and he's not nearly as powerful as the Prophetess. All I call tell you is that he's fundamentally alien and...upsetting." She grimaces. "Like, upsetting to look at. " * Tanan sets the pencil back down in the spine. "Add that to the list of thing to look up when we make it back to civilization?" Alien? * Saki sighs out faintly, shaking her head and hunkering back over her bowl. "... I could really use a holiday." Well, this is sort of like a vacation. A vacation to a flaming ruin! Not my ideal vacation. * Saki slumps. "... oh good," she adds weakly. Maybe the sail out to the west will be pleasant I can't imagine a boat that size gets rocked around by the waves all that much Depends on the ocean actually * Angie brightens. "I'm looking forward to it," she says, without a trace of sarcasm. "It's been a few years since I've been to sea, and virtually nobody's seen the western ocean." That's true. * Saki doesn't look enthusiastic. "... it's strange standing on that thing." It's all.. steel and iron, cold and dead. I guess that's just how they built things back then. "What?" Angie looks dumbfounded. "Are you joking? There's nothing more alive than a ship. Maybe you'll understand when we take her out." Assuming we can get that thing working and seaworthy. * Tanan blinks. "Maybe a proper ship. This thing's..." "Emiria thinks she can do it," says Angie. She pauses for a minute and her eyes wander. She smiles and looks back to meet Tanan's eyes. "And if we can't trust Emiria, who CAN we trust?" We've been able to trust her so far. I still do. ...I can't. * Vytor looks oddly at Tanan. * Tanan picks up his notebook, closing it. "There's just something about her." Well, my mind is unchanged. Unless she does something to act against us directly, she's got my trust. She did try to kill Mars. That makes me a little nervous. * Angie rubs her mouth, sighing through her fingers. She gives a murmur of assent. "I kinda agree," she says. "She's totally nuts, but that's no big deal. Just don't let her get behind you when she's flaked out." If she's got some other person inside her that's driving her, then I don't think she was the one out to kill Mars. Tch. I suppose I don't trust the person that's sharing her body, then "Well, in a way it's convenient!" Angie smiles, making a show of brightness. "We can exorcise everybody at once when we figure out how." I can get behind that idea. * Tanan closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose again. "Who won't we have to do that to at this point?" Who knows at this rate? * Vytor stretches, having dried out a little. Hey Angie, can I borrow you a little later? I've been looking at the noocleer teakettle down in the ship, and I need some feedback on a few things before we start it up. We should probably do it to everybody, just to be safe. *She pauses, chewing on her own words.* Actually, it'd probably be a good idea to exorcise the whole world. Lot of weird stuff left over from the unravelling! Maybe if we aerosolized some kind of holy water and released it into the atmosphere? I... don't know if that would be a good idea. Wonder how much of that weird stuff would just go away and how much would manifest * Angie perks up at the mention of tinkering. "Sure! You know as much as I do, but it can't hurt to have two heads on it, and I did look over those reactor plans we got from the underground snow zombies." That information might help a lot actually. * Vytor stands and shakes off some of the water still clinging to him. "I'm going to head back to work. Angie, if you could catch up with me on aft deck two later on, I'd appreciate it." [02:50] "I gave the actual plans to Miz Vulcannon, but I've got a lot of it written down in my notebook." She grabs the stubby pencil from behind her ear and flips open her ratty, yellowed notebook. "Sure," she says, fanning through the pages. Thanks for the input Tanan, I appreciate it. Mm. Sure. Sorry I couldn't help. Its OK, you helped me if nothing else. * Vytor waves, and heads up the gangplank again, leaving wet footprints as he goes. * Tanan gives a half wave Seeya Angie. Bye Saki. * Angie bites on the pencil and begins turning pages with both hands. Untidy scrawls, sprawling diagrams, and jumbles of dots and shapes flip by before she finally settles on a page somewhere in the middle. She folds the book double and holds the page up to show Tanan. The handwriting is illegible, and the only other thing on the page is a spiky, asymmetric scribble. What's.. this supposed to be? * Angie spits out the pencil and catches it. "I drew him," she says. "It's not exactly what he looks like, but it's what he feels like, sort of." Is that supposed to be a person? If you squint at it it maybe looks a bit like the decepticon logo. But Tanan doesn't know what that looks like so the final piece of the puzzle remains tantalizingly beyond his reach. * Tanan frowns, tilting his head and looking at the image. "I don't totally..." He doesn't really look like much to me, Angie. Sorry. * Angie flips the book around and looks at the picture. "It doesn't really look like much, eh?" She shrugs, resigned. "Did you ever do PH in the academy? Phantasmagoria? Or any abstract illusionism?" A little bit. I'm sort of attuned to light, so that helps a bit. I'm not very good at it though. * Angie nods. "There's thing that you do where you try to visualize a shape in your head, but you don't actually picture the shape, you have to imagine the /idea/ of the shape?" Where words fail, hands may succeed. Angie gestures emphatically as she speaks, almost hitting Saki. "You need to try to imagine the essence of things because just the image hides important details. But the essence doesn't necessarily look anything like what you see see! It's sort of like that." Ah. I see what you mean. Unfortunately, since everyone perceives things differently, I'm back to still not quite understanding the drawing Yeah. Maybe if I scanned everybody and drew them we could perform a statistical analysis based on the, on like the long-ness and pointy-ness of the thingies? *She traces the lines with her fingers and smiles hopefully.* The thingies? Ha! Would be kind of interesting to see what everyone looks like, I suppose. I can't imagine it would be a good idea, though. Some of us seem a little... ...adverse to that scanning * Angie snorts with laughter. "A little. Maybe I could try to refine the ability, make it subtler or work better of whatever. Diagnostic magic isn't really a big area of work because of that subjective element, but I bet if you could standardize it some you could make it useful in general." Might be worth doing. Would be nice to know just what is really going on with Emiria, for instance * Angie taps the tiny stub of a pencil on the ledger and searches the skyline with her eyes. "Maybe we should ask Mars. I mean, when she wakes up?" * Tanan nods. "Yes. Hopefully she'll be calmer and able to explain things." Maybe even one of the others could explain. She really doesn't seem... well, I don't know. We'll see how she is usually. * Angie smirks. "What kinda history do you think she has with Chrissy? Ms. Vulcannon, I mean." * Ryllan comes out of the ship, knocking on one of the railings idly as he comes down, "This a private sort of thing, or can anyone join in the conversing?" Ha! I don't know, but I'd like t- Ah. Hello, Ryllan. No, I suppose I can flirt outrageously with Angie on my own time. What's up? * Angie raises a hand in a lazy half-wave and smiles. "Hey, speaking of people possessed by evil beings!" * Ryllan coughs, "Yeah, speaking of. Angie, what did you see when you..." He pauses, looking back and forth, "Scanned Emiria? You really seemed spooked." "If you're going to be late to these unscheduled meetings you'll just have to accept that you're going to miss information!" chides Angie, wagging a finger. She pauses for a beat and her eyes roam off to the side. "Well, you didn't get any stew. I guess that's punishment enough." She takes a deep breath. "There's somebody else in there with her. But he's not a prophet, he's something very different." There's more people with voices in their heads than not now, it seems Getting that way, isn't it? Do we know anything about whatever's in her? * Angie shrugs voluminously. "Like I was saying. It's not like anything else I've seen. Well, 'seen.' Felt?" She traces one finger along the lines of the jagged scribble in her notebook. "He's not as powerful as the Prophetess, I don't think, but he's much less human. It feels like he comes from somewhere else, somewhere bad." Sounds like an unfriendly then. * Ryllan sighs, "Great. Because having an amalgamation of however many powerful wizards after our butts wasn't enough." Yeah, but I figure, "whatever," right? We've got enough to worry about. We can probably take her if she wigs out, is the important thing. * Ryllan nods, "Good to hear." * Ryllan nods, "I assume you noticed that she really objected to Mars? More than Saki tends to object to elementalors?" More that Mars reacted to her, I think * Ryllan nods. She didn't seem too friendly either, though. * Ryllan frowns, "I think we need to talk to Webbly. They were weapons, right? The elementalors." I don't think that was because of what Mars was, so much as she was the enemy of the moment * Angie points skyward with the pencil. "Yeah, I'm thinking we want to have a talk with Mars when she wakes up. She seemed to recognize him. In the meantime, let's not tell Emiria about this. She doesn't really seem to know about it and it'd just worry her." * Ryllan nods. Yes... probably for the best. I don't think just Mars, though. Even before she wakes up, Webbly was their... designer, right? He has to know what they were designed to fight. * Tanan blinks * Tanan picks up his notebook and starts flipping through it. * Angie makes a sour face and shakes her head. "I don't think it's like that. The wars were between nations, right? I don't think this thing is from...here." Sweet heaven * Tanan holds out the book towards Angie and Ryllan, his thumb marking a line * Ryllan peers down at the book. * Tanan is clearly pointing at a section of the writing that's written in heavier, darker writing and has a couple phrases underlined. Unfortunately, the words appear to be total nonsense, some of the letters not even recognizable. Don't professors have to have decent writing to use the boards? * Angie leans in close, straightening her glasses with one hand. She stares wide-eyed at the line for a minute, then squints at it, and finally looks up at Tanan. What's wrong with my handwriting? It's horrible. Just read it aloud. * Tanan blinks, looks down at the book, looks back up at Ryllan and Angie, back at the book, then coughs. I uh. Yeah, I guess you wouldn't be able to read this. ...Probably should have just written this in Lunarian. * Angie arches a slender eyebrow. She's not really good at it so she sort of has to squint with the other eye to keep that eyebrow from going up too. * Tanan looks a little embarrassed. "Anyway! It was something Jupiter and Webbly mentioned, way back when we first found them. They were saying they were made by the people who opposed Zophar back before the world was destroyed." * Ryllan blinks as that sinks in, then whispers reverently, "Dear goddess..." Well... that doesn't mean she's connected to _him_. Maybe whatever she has is like one of his minions were? Some sort of demon? The way she went all dark and hostile, and Angie saying it seemed otherworldly... That's... not good no matter how you spin it. And, I suppose, makes it more imperative to go find the other Elementalors. * Angie scrunches up her nose in a frown. "We need to fish around in Webbly's robo-brain! He was saying something about some big coalition of nations run by somebody called Zophar, and there was somebody else called Althena? But he couldn't remember." Her exasperation lends an edge to her voice. That sounds familiar though. I really wish we knew what exactly happened back then. Or.. really, any time. Well, Niri has that book... But History is written by the victors, as they say. There's a whole big world out there, and enough has survived to be optimistic. There have to be records that made it through. Maybe even some more Webblies! Hrm. It'd be nice to know what the winners had to say about it, at least. Maybe I'll try to prod her into looking something up, or letting me see that thing. She'll probably accuse me of trying to assign her work or something though, knowing her. * Tanan chuckles. So promise her extra credit. That almost never works. She seems like an over-achieving sort. I'm not actually teaching any classes right now. I don't think I can give any marks. * Angie lets out air through her teeth and shakes her head. "Man. Professor Wardin." She grins. "You've got a hell of a racket going on!" Sure you are. Independent Study - Practical Willforce. * Tanan gives the two a tired look, then laughs. "I can't imagine anyone here will go back to the academy as a normal student after this trip." * Angie folds her hands behind her head and leans back precariously, kicking her legs. "I gave up on it. Got an offer to see the world and never looked back. I figure it'll be the same. But I admit it'd be nice to settle in for a while once all this is through." Part that, and part that we all have more extensive will-shaping experience than most of the professors at this point anyway. * Ryllan chuckles, "It's true enough. I've been watching, you know, everyone's shaping is much tighter than it was when we started. Maybe we can joint-teach a class on getting the crap beaten out of us and surviving." They could make it an element of the courses! "Go fight monsters in ruins." * Tanan laughs, actually looking cheerful for the first time since the conversation started. "I wonder if the elementalors would be bored enough to help. Today's lesson? One on one with Jupiter." * Ryllan bursts out laughing at that thought, "You don't like your students much, do you?" * Angie laughs far more enthusiastically than the joke warrants. At length she wipes a tear from the corner of her eye. "Eheh. It's true, though. I used to have a really broad base of ability but I couldn't do much well. My general skills have sort of atrophied, but I've got some very refined 'tricks' now. It's not as cool from a theoretical sense to be able to do three things well as it is to be able to do thirty things passably, but it's better from a practical sense. From a...practical standpoint." * Tanan nods. "I hear you. There's a lot of things I can do, but in the heat of battle, only a few that come quickly and potently enough." And as far as my students go, Ryllan? I like _some_ of them! I'm just saying, it's... educational. * Tanan grins * Ryllan nods, "It's practice, mostly, repetition... Can I apply the term 'muscle memory' to Willforce? it feels odd." Not quite the right word, but close enough to the concept. * Angie beams suddenly. "I totally owned Mars," she says, brimming with self-satisfaction. "I'd never used that technique before so I wasn't sure it'd work." Ha. Yes, that worked rather well. I'm sure they never expected an opponent to be able to do something like that, back when they were designed * Ryllan smiles, "You did good, Angie." * Angie twirls the pencil between her fingers. "I wonder what they DID do back then," she muses. "They didn't have Althena and they didn't have willforce, or at least not the same. The doctor said something about crystal matrices." I got the impression they were the first willforce experiments. Before that, I guess it was all stuff like what's on that ship there * Angie smiles and takes another long look at the steel ship. "She's a real piece of work. Not quite as much romance, but if we could make them that way we'd be sitting pretty." Built to last, I have to admit. Still. I'd like to see a proper willforce boat build in this style Oh, for sure. You might want to keep a backup power source, though. Oars if nothing else. Though I wouldn't fancy rowing a ship this size. * Angie 's eyes run across the length of the vessel. "Maybe you could have rowing robots." A thought occurs to her, and she crinkles her brow in consternation. "Row-bots," she says, sounding faintly surprised at herself. * Ryllan groans. * Tanan chuckles That was terrible, Angie. Well done. * Angie gives Ryllan an apologetic frown. "I didn't mean to." * Tanan stands up, stretching. "I think I'm going to try to find Niri. I'd like to get her to look at that book, see if they mention anything. As well as warn her to keep an eye out on Emiria's behavior. If Trune wakes up, we might want to let him know as well... but we should probably try to keep this low key for now." * Angie nods. "You can spread what I said about Emiria. Just see to it that it doesn't get back to her." She chews on her upper lip and frowns down at her notepad. Understood. I'll talk to you guys later... good luck with the ship. Sorry I'm so useless there. Just don't blow it up. Not blowing things up is useful. * Ryllan nods, "Will do." He stretches as well, "It's about time I checked on Trune anyway, he's probably fine, but... Just yell if you need me for somethin' aboard ship." He walks down the dock, "And don't blow anything up." * Tanan laughs, walking the other way. "Will do." ==Lude Over. Dismissed!== Session Start: Mon Mar 19 15:09:28 2007