Inside the warmth of his shelter Ulric decided that there wasn't going to be any systematic way to figure out how a totally unknown entity like magic worked. He was a child handed a calculus book and told it could let him build a rocket ship, if he could only figure out how.
First, it was important to throw away preconceptions. Nothing was true. Everything was possible. Only that which produced no effect at all was invalid. A bell tone, a flash of light, a spiritual familiar, bodily transformation, a puff of smoke, anything could indicate progress towards mastery and he wouldn't know what form it would take until he tried.
Stacking wood on the fire to drive off another godsdamned wave of chills, Ulric then sat cross legged on his bed, closed his eyes, and tried to empty his mind of all thought. Minutes passed slowly, as he concentrated on nothing. The goal, for now, was simple. Feel the core. Try to examine this new part of himself. Attempt to detect any force or energy that moved or flowed from it. Clear the errata and hum of his brain so that he could perceive something he'd never felt before. Don't think about the Watcher's perfect tits. Do not think about the Watcher's perfect tits. Do…Not…Think…
"Fuck." he sighed aloud. He was the biological equivalent of peak adult again, in an extremely healthy body, and, fever be damned, it had been three years since he'd been laid. He was now at half-mast, and his concentration was ruined. Ok. So, Ulric was not exactly a monk. Why did books and movies make it all seem easy? You just sit down and do some magic, no big deal. At no point did getting a rubbery one fuck up Gandalf’s business. Maybe it was because he was so old.
"Fuck." Ulric repeated. He was going in circles. Maybe he needed to put his hands to work to find focus. He'd never really been the sit and do-nothing type. Ulric's mind relaxed when he had something to tinker with, some kind of task to occupy him. The only time he'd really done mostly nothing was in the hour or so before sleep when he drank whisky and sat in his chair before a fireplace, trying to drown existential dread of the sunrise.
So, he gathered up the near finished leaf kilt and began running vine through leaves. He'd completed one full turn around his waist but decided that wasn't enough protection. If he ever ran into thorns or briars, he'd need a lot more to comfortably pass through without shredding the skin of his legs. Then he set about making another pass, the repetitive motion and gentle dance of flame granting him what stillness hadn't, peace of mind. In that sort of tired fugue, no thoughts ran. There was no need, his task was before him, it required only motion. The flicker, rise, and fall of fire made its own music in accompaniment. Time fell away and it wasn't until halfway through a third loop of leaves, when a rather intense hot spell caused him to sweat so much it stung Ulric's eyes to blinking, that he at last glanced up from his work.
No magic. Progress with things. A better frame of mind. But no magic. And he was starting to really feel like shit.
Ulric, now so close to the end of his project deliberately set himself to finishing the kilt by stringing the last of the leaves and then loosely wrapping the remaining three meters of this vine around the vines holding the leaves, to make a loose vine belt from which the covering leaves hung. If he found any palm type fronds it would be possible to attempt a basket weave to make containers or reinforce this crude garment. As of now though, this was as good as it would get.
Taking the kilt/skirt to the rock pool Ulric put it over his head, threaded his shoulders through and then let the skirt settle on his hips, just as he'd measured. A tied in set of double loops and a quick release knot saw the skirt closed and secured to fit using an additional run of vine around his waist that didn't have leaves running on it as a belt. Thinking about his set of knives Ulric fashioned a coiled vine sheathe for one of his long bladed glassresin knives and tied it to the belt.
*PING*
"What?" Ulric looked around and saw nothing. He wasn't imagining it, there had been a clear bell-like chime. It'd had an echoey quality like it'd been ringing in or near his head. Hold the empty skull jokes, please. This new event bore investigation. He was in the middle of a forest of untold age, had been moving through tens of kilometers of it with no sign of large life, other than the unknown terror roar, and hadn't detected even the faintest sign of sapience. Looking around his shelter, he didn't see anything that might have fallen over or made contact that could have produced the noise.
Absent any source for the sound Ulric decided that it was some sort of auditory hallucination and he was perhaps sliding into a different phase of the mana sickness to which he'd yet to find a solution. Only one way to know for sure.
“Status”, he whispered, concentrating on his personal essence. He couldn’t help but feel a little moronic, saying it out loud.
[Status]
Okay, Ulric thought as he examined the status, there's some new stuff. The mana sickness was now inflicting significant negative penalties. Probably the reason why he'd been feeling so run down. It looked like, at some point, his core had been full for long enough to take on the status of saturation. He didn't know what it meant, but it was evidently important enough to merit a line in the status, although it appeared positive as its boost was somewhat offsetting the penalty from mana sickness. As to the tone he'd heard, it probably had to do with this new title. He had gained enough proficiency in this clime to have gained a degree of familiarity. The status indicated that this had tangibly improved his dexterity in this environment.
That sort of made sense. His hands felt better able to follow his intent and he fanned his fingers in sequence, watching the deft play of tendon and muscle. Did he cause the change in status or did the change in status cause a change in him?
"Fascinating…" he whispered. The status truly was a link to the Akashic record. A real time universe memory, which snapshotted and could even communicate with the beings with which it interacted. This live update and notification were evidence that the connection was two-way. His actions weren't just being recorded; the record was also reflecting back on him through the status.
The Watcher had indicated that there was a linguistic aspect to this connection. Some kind of species language? Was he actually thinking in a language other than English? Had the tuning enacted some sort of subtle cognitive shift in which his language symbology had been translated into this world's native human tongue?
Questions. Questions that only led to more questions. This entire world was a massive puzzle and Ulric couldn't be more thrilled about it. If not for the spookiness associated with an unknown organ which might as well be a closet particle accelerator for all he could figure out how it worked.
Check that, he knew way more about how a particle accelerator worked than this black box of a core. It's ability to inflict some kind of status effect on him was concerning as was the seeming inability for him to tap into a natural ability to utilize the mana it housed. The Watcher had made it seem like using mana was a completely intuitive process. Perhaps this was a side-effect of his prior life's mental conditioning. Magic had always been an impossibility. Like flying. Why would his brain have a natural inclination to do something it had never been able to do before? It was entirely possible that he was subconsciously restricting himself from an expectation that nothing would happen.
Maybe it's kind of like that galaxy far, far away. You either did magic or you did not. There was no attempt to direct the mana, you shaped reality to your will through a conscious effort that was without doubt. Definitely an angle he hadn't considered before. His problem could boil down to a simple one of attitude.
That thought made him snort a brief chuckle, his sense of sardonic mirth uncontainable. The power of positive thinking would be the key. Wouldn't that just be rich?
Ulric decided he'd had enough sitting inside his teepee. He'd been there for several hours between the abortive meditation, the work on his bomber new leaf kilt, and his examination of the problem of magic. Setting a few larger sticks in the fire to build up coals, and grabbing his spear, Ulric decided to head down to the rock pool for some water and then try to find a plant leaf that could be used for basket weaving.
Spear in hand, Ulric exited the teepee and thought about his magic problem while he walked. His core was saturated. His system was full of excess magical energy and responding negatively to it. The pseudo-fever had intensified proportionally to the mana saturation and he was experiencing a substantial loss of bodily integrity, enough that the status reflected it. So, this wasn't just in his head, a stress induced malaise, he was actually experiencing feedback from the operation of his own body. Normal biological systems didn't operate this way. Nothing evolved to produce a secretion which killed itself for no reason. Unlikely that creatures born with a core would constantly be sickened by its function. He was probably doing something wrong. Maybe the people and creatures of this world naturally exuded mana, sort of valved it off passively. Maybe he didn't because his core was producing a higher-than-normal amount thanks to Watcher fuckery dialing it up to eleven. Maybe his cells had a mana acclimation period and this was a normal response to first exposure. Maybe he was just full of shit and trying to put a good face on it.
Having reached the rock pool Ulric drank deeply, the cold water a relief from the heat under his skin. Deciding he'd sweated enough to justify some hygiene, Ulric undid the knotted vine belt, glassresin knife securely thereon strapped, and stripped off his kilt.
Some handfuls of water wetted his body and he went over to the rocks to find a relatively smooth stone with which to scrub himself, in the way of the Romans. His skin was puckered with gooseflesh, that water friggin cold! He found a useable stone relatively quickly and went back to his pool, wetted his body again, and used his improvised strigil to scrape the filth from his skin.
When he was satisfied that he was clean enough and also tired of that steady wind freezing his nipples off, Ulric got his kit on and saw his way to the sunlit clearing. Here was what you thought of when you thought of a magical forest. Just a color orgasm. Blues, greens, eight shades of yellow, a shade of crimson redder than Wyoming's electoral ballots, this kilometer long break in the otherwise endless dim forest was like a gem encrusted pillar. The passing of the giant had made a way for the young children of the wood to express themselves in floral joy.
He'd tested some forty varieties of plants for skin toxicity and allergy. Unfortunately, Ulric had not gotten around to trying for ingestion, he'd been distracted by the glassresin. He needed food, hunger was setting in with insistent pangs.
It was relatively late in the day by this point, the twin suns having dipped below the dense canopy and cast a sort of vivid yellow-orange ambiance on the world. Ah. The golden hour. Aptly named, he thought.
Ulric needed a basket. It was too late in the day to risk a digestive fiasco inside his shelter before bed. The thought of shitting himself inside his shelter in the middle of the night, or scrambling around with shards of broken roots, rocks, and what have you in the dark was not a pleasant one. So best to occupy himself with a low-calorie project like trying to remember his blind date from a decade ago where they'd gone to a basket weaving seminar. It had been fun, from what he recalled. The whole day really. The weaving. Dinner. Sex. Cuddling. Sex again. And waking to find a beautifully handwritten note thanking him for a marvelous evening followed by a notification that she'd been married and his attention had inspired her to try and make it work. Fuck. He'd made himself sad.
Dying and being reforged had solved many of Ulric's problems. It had not, unfortunately, solved the one where he'd made himself miserable and had a tendency to let his mind eat itself over past events. Enough, he told himself firmly. New life, new possibility. This world had magic. He had magic. He would not allow himself to be consumed by a past that he could not change and did not, in any way beyond identifying mistakes not to be repeated, matter. He had been granted what so many people longed for at their death beds. A second chance. His would not be wasted.
He promised.
Inside the warmth of his shelter Ulric decided that there wasn't going to be any systematic way to figure out how a totally unknown entity like magic worked. He was a child handed a calculus book and told it could let him build a rocket ship, if he could only figure out how.
First, it was important to throw away preconceptions. Nothing was true. Everything was possible. Only that which produced no effect at all was invalid. A bell tone, a flash of light, a spiritual familiar, bodily transformation, a puff of smoke, anything could indicate progress towards mastery and he wouldn't know what form it would take until he tried.
Stacking wood on the fire to drive off another godsdamned wave of chills, Ulric then sat cross legged on his bed, closed his eyes, and tried to empty his mind of all thought. Minutes passed slowly, as he concentrated on nothing. The goal, for now, was simple. Feel the core. Try to examine this new part of himself. Attempt to detect any force or energy that moved or flowed from it. Clear the errata and hum of his brain so that he could perceive something he'd never felt before. Don't think about the Watcher's perfect tits. Do not think about the Watcher's perfect tits. Do…Not…Think…
"Fuck." he sighed aloud. He was the biological equivalent of peak adult again, in an extremely healthy body, and, fever be damned, it had been three years since he'd been laid. He was now at half-mast, and his concentration was ruined. Ok. So, Ulric was not exactly a monk. Why did books and movies make it all seem easy? You just sit down and do some magic, no big deal. At no point did getting a rubbery one fuck up Gandalf’s business. Maybe it was because he was so old.
"Fuck." Ulric repeated. He was going in circles. Maybe he needed to put his hands to work to find focus. He'd never really been the sit and do-nothing type. Ulric's mind relaxed when he had something to tinker with, some kind of task to occupy him. The only time he'd really done mostly nothing was in the hour or so before sleep when he drank whisky and sat in his chair before a fireplace, trying to drown existential dread of the sunrise.
So, he gathered up the near finished leaf kilt and began running vine through leaves. He'd completed one full turn around his waist but decided that wasn't enough protection. If he ever ran into thorns or briars, he'd need a lot more to comfortably pass through without shredding the skin of his legs. Then he set about making another pass, the repetitive motion and gentle dance of flame granting him what stillness hadn't, peace of mind. In that sort of tired fugue, no thoughts ran. There was no need, his task was before him, it required only motion. The flicker, rise, and fall of fire made its own music in accompaniment. Time fell away and it wasn't until halfway through a third loop of leaves, when a rather intense hot spell caused him to sweat so much it stung Ulric's eyes to blinking, that he at last glanced up from his work.
No magic. Progress with things. A better frame of mind. But no magic. And he was starting to really feel like shit.
Ulric, now so close to the end of his project deliberately set himself to finishing the kilt by stringing the last of the leaves and then loosely wrapping the remaining three meters of this vine around the vines holding the leaves, to make a loose vine belt from which the covering leaves hung. If he found any palm type fronds it would be possible to attempt a basket weave to make containers or reinforce this crude garment. As of now though, this was as good as it would get.
Taking the kilt/skirt to the rock pool Ulric put it over his head, threaded his shoulders through and then let the skirt settle on his hips, just as he'd measured. A tied in set of double loops and a quick release knot saw the skirt closed and secured to fit using an additional run of vine around his waist that didn't have leaves running on it as a belt. Thinking about his set of knives Ulric fashioned a coiled vine sheathe for one of his long bladed glassresin knives and tied it to the belt.
*PING*
"What?" Ulric looked around and saw nothing. He wasn't imagining it, there had been a clear bell-like chime. It'd had an echoey quality like it'd been ringing in or near his head. Hold the empty skull jokes, please. This new event bore investigation. He was in the middle of a forest of untold age, had been moving through tens of kilometers of it with no sign of large life, other than the unknown terror roar, and hadn't detected even the faintest sign of sapience. Looking around his shelter, he didn't see anything that might have fallen over or made contact that could have produced the noise.
Absent any source for the sound Ulric decided that it was some sort of auditory hallucination and he was perhaps sliding into a different phase of the mana sickness to which he'd yet to find a solution. Only one way to know for sure.
“Status”, he whispered, concentrating on his personal essence. He couldn’t help but feel a little moronic, saying it out loud.
[Status]
Okay, Ulric thought as he examined the status, there's some new stuff. The mana sickness was now inflicting significant negative penalties. Probably the reason why he'd been feeling so run down. It looked like, at some point, his core had been full for long enough to take on the status of saturation. He didn't know what it meant, but it was evidently important enough to merit a line in the status, although it appeared positive as its boost was somewhat offsetting the penalty from mana sickness. As to the tone he'd heard, it probably had to do with this new title. He had gained enough proficiency in this clime to have gained a degree of familiarity. The status indicated that this had tangibly improved his dexterity in this environment.
That sort of made sense. His hands felt better able to follow his intent and he fanned his fingers in sequence, watching the deft play of tendon and muscle. Did he cause the change in status or did the change in status cause a change in him?
"Fascinating…" he whispered. The status truly was a link to the Akashic record. A real time universe memory, which snapshotted and could even communicate with the beings with which it interacted. This live update and notification were evidence that the connection was two-way. His actions weren't just being recorded; the record was also reflecting back on him through the status.
The Watcher had indicated that there was a linguistic aspect to this connection. Some kind of species language? Was he actually thinking in a language other than English? Had the tuning enacted some sort of subtle cognitive shift in which his language symbology had been translated into this world's native human tongue?
Questions. Questions that only led to more questions. This entire world was a massive puzzle and Ulric couldn't be more thrilled about it. If not for the spookiness associated with an unknown organ which might as well be a closet particle accelerator for all he could figure out how it worked.
Check that, he knew way more about how a particle accelerator worked than this black box of a core. It's ability to inflict some kind of status effect on him was concerning as was the seeming inability for him to tap into a natural ability to utilize the mana it housed. The Watcher had made it seem like using mana was a completely intuitive process. Perhaps this was a side-effect of his prior life's mental conditioning. Magic had always been an impossibility. Like flying. Why would his brain have a natural inclination to do something it had never been able to do before? It was entirely possible that he was subconsciously restricting himself from an expectation that nothing would happen.
Maybe it's kind of like that galaxy far, far away. You either did magic or you did not. There was no attempt to direct the mana, you shaped reality to your will through a conscious effort that was without doubt. Definitely an angle he hadn't considered before. His problem could boil down to a simple one of attitude.
That thought made him snort a brief chuckle, his sense of sardonic mirth uncontainable. The power of positive thinking would be the key. Wouldn't that just be rich?
Ulric decided he'd had enough sitting inside his teepee. He'd been there for several hours between the abortive meditation, the work on his bomber new leaf kilt, and his examination of the problem of magic. Setting a few larger sticks in the fire to build up coals, and grabbing his spear, Ulric decided to head down to the rock pool for some water and then try to find a plant leaf that could be used for basket weaving.
Spear in hand, Ulric exited the teepee and thought about his magic problem while he walked. His core was saturated. His system was full of excess magical energy and responding negatively to it. The pseudo-fever had intensified proportionally to the mana saturation and he was experiencing a substantial loss of bodily integrity, enough that the status reflected it. So, this wasn't just in his head, a stress induced malaise, he was actually experiencing feedback from the operation of his own body. Normal biological systems didn't operate this way. Nothing evolved to produce a secretion which killed itself for no reason. Unlikely that creatures born with a core would constantly be sickened by its function. He was probably doing something wrong. Maybe the people and creatures of this world naturally exuded mana, sort of valved it off passively. Maybe he didn't because his core was producing a higher-than-normal amount thanks to Watcher fuckery dialing it up to eleven. Maybe his cells had a mana acclimation period and this was a normal response to first exposure. Maybe he was just full of shit and trying to put a good face on it.
Having reached the rock pool Ulric drank deeply, the cold water a relief from the heat under his skin. Deciding he'd sweated enough to justify some hygiene, Ulric undid the knotted vine belt, glassresin knife securely thereon strapped, and stripped off his kilt.
Some handfuls of water wetted his body and he went over to the rocks to find a relatively smooth stone with which to scrub himself, in the way of the Romans. His skin was puckered with gooseflesh, that water friggin cold! He found a useable stone relatively quickly and went back to his pool, wetted his body again, and used his improvised strigil to scrape the filth from his skin.
When he was satisfied that he was clean enough and also tired of that steady wind freezing his nipples off, Ulric got his kit on and saw his way to the sunlit clearing. Here was what you thought of when you thought of a magical forest. Just a color orgasm. Blues, greens, eight shades of yellow, a shade of crimson redder than Wyoming's electoral ballots, this kilometer long break in the otherwise endless dim forest was like a gem encrusted pillar. The passing of the giant had made a way for the young children of the wood to express themselves in floral joy.
He'd tested some forty varieties of plants for skin toxicity and allergy. Unfortunately, Ulric had not gotten around to trying for ingestion, he'd been distracted by the glassresin. He needed food, hunger was setting in with insistent pangs.
It was relatively late in the day by this point, the twin suns having dipped below the dense canopy and cast a sort of vivid yellow-orange ambiance on the world. Ah. The golden hour. Aptly named, he thought.
Ulric needed a basket. It was too late in the day to risk a digestive fiasco inside his shelter before bed. The thought of shitting himself inside his shelter in the middle of the night, or scrambling around with shards of broken roots, rocks, and what have you in the dark was not a pleasant one. So best to occupy himself with a low-calorie project like trying to remember his blind date from a decade ago where they'd gone to a basket weaving seminar. It had been fun, from what he recalled. The whole day really. The weaving. Dinner. Sex. Cuddling. Sex again. And waking to find a beautifully handwritten note thanking him for a marvelous evening followed by a notification that she'd been married and his attention had inspired her to try and make it work. Fuck. He'd made himself sad.
Dying and being reforged had solved many of Ulric's problems. It had not, unfortunately, solved the one where he'd made himself miserable and had a tendency to let his mind eat itself over past events. Enough, he told himself firmly. New life, new possibility. This world had magic. He had magic. He would not allow himself to be consumed by a past that he could not change and did not, in any way beyond identifying mistakes not to be repeated, matter. He had been granted what so many people longed for at their death beds. A second chance. His would not be wasted.
He promised.
