Thinking with magic

[thinkingwithmahous]

Who: Marco, Harriet
What: Marco tries to explain how he uses magic in hopes of helping Harriet learn new tricks
When: The 11th, around noon
Where: Ritual Park in Incendia.
Warnings: Nothing yet

Marco could do this anywhere, and he'd liked the park in Incendia, even if it wasn't QUITE as well maintained now as it was when the fissure was reseting everything every morning.

He was lounging against a food cart next to a shimmering portal that led back to Keystone, waiting for Harriet to show up as they had agreed.

Comments

[thecompletionofthings]

Harriet walks through the portal with her senses already attuned to shinma Nirupadhika, feeling the spacetime distortion.

[OOC: What does Harriet feel? Is it like a wormhole, or a flat surface that transmits anything touching it to a paired surface, or what?]

[thinkingwithmahous]

He leaned over and watched as she poked at the portal, faintly amused. "They don't bite."

[It's folding space. Feel free to make up what that looks like to magical senses, but to mundane senses it feels like walking through a doorway IE like nothing.]

[thecompletionofthings]

[OOC: I'm going to interpret that as being similar to an Einstein-Rosen bridge, a.k.a. wormhole. That seems to be what people have in mind when they say "folding space," mostly. I'm also going to assume that it looks more or less like in the art you posted to the hot-or-not meme.]

Harriet says, "OK, so you've bent spacetime to reduce the distance between two points to zero. The interface has a definite, non-zero extent and duration. Some weird-ass edge effects too. Is the band of light, is that a byproduct of the space-folding, or is it a byproduct of *how* you fold space, or what?"

[thinkingwithmahous]

[They look more or less like the portals from Portal, but with the gold coloring on both ends.]

"Um."

He let all that wash over him. "I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what I'm doing here. I don't know HOW it works even a little bit."

[thecompletionofthings]

"OK," Harriet says agreeably. "What's it feel like? When you do it?"

[thinkingwithmahous]

"It's just like moving your arm. You don't think 'I want to contract these muscles and relax these muscles in this sequence so as to grip that cup over there', you just...grab the cup. It's entirely intuitive."

Hopefully she'd see why he had been hesitant about giving her tips on portal creation.

[thecompletionofthings]

Harriet starts to frown a little. "I get that, OK? I mean, so's what I do. But…does it feel like moving an arm that doesn't physically exist? Do you say words to yourself? Do you visualize something? Is there a sound, a smell, a taste?

"Like, I can sense what you do, when you make a portal, or dismiss one, or when I'm close to one. It's a property of shinma Nirupadhika. To me it's somewhere between a tingle on my skin, a sense of tension in muscles that aren't really there, and a whisper in my ear. So I want to try to reverse-engineer that. Learn to cause what I'm currently only able to sense, right? So I'm going to talk to everyone I can who has teleportation or space-distorting powers, and study them doing it, and find out what it feels like when they do it, and learn what theoretical knowledge, if any, they can share. Hopefully once I'm soaking in all that I can put something together for myself."

[thinkingwithmahous]

"I can definitely feel them..." He said thoughtfully, scratching his head and thinking it through. "They want to be anchored to something. A wall or opening works best. I guess it's kind of like...a tugging feeling? I'm sort of pulling two places together, and they want to snap back to where they're supposed to be."

[thecompletionofthings]

"OK, thanks. So this may be a weird request...? I would appreciate it if you could make a portal slowly while I watch. Like, go through the usual process you do, but taking as much time as you can without thinking about it and screwing yourself up."

[thinkingwithmahous]

"Okay..."

Marco holds both hands out. He doesn't know WHY. He can make the portals with pure thought if he needs to. It just feels wrong to do it without hand gestures.

What he ends up doing isn't QUITE what she asked. The portal is either there, or it isn't. The new portal appears immediately, but it's merely the size of a pinprick. Then from there, it starts slowly stretching out wider and wider.

[thecompletionofthings]

Harriet squints and scowls, but her attention isn't on what she's seeing. Instead, she's listening/seeing/feeling/smelling shinma Nirupadhika as it rolls in to swallow the distance between the two ends of Marco's portal connection.

"…Hhhuh. OK, that was informative at least… How do you set where the endpoints will be? Do you visualize them before you start?"

You saw nothing

[thinkingwithmahous]

"It's more tactile than visual, I think? But more or less."

Re: You saw nothing

[thecompletionofthings]

"Once more...but can you stop right before the portal appears? Like, reach, but not make the final connection? I'm really grateful for this."

[thinkingwithmahous]

"That's...I'll give it a shot?"

He tried again. There was a surge of magical energy in Marco's body as he built up the power to make a portal. Then he tried to make half a portal.

It didn't really work. There was a sort of shimmer in the air as SOMETHING happened, then all the energy just sort of dissipated into the air, and everything snapped back to normal.

"Guh, this is hard. A portal is either there or it isn't, man."

[thecompletionofthings]

"Nonono that was perfect. Thanks! I'm gonna try it now, OK? So kiss your ass goodbye as all of Incendia vanishes into Nirvikalpa." Harriet grins.

She thinks about how she abjures Nirguna to shape a construct, what it feels like to reach out and push away the shinma, leaving a desired shape behind. Imagining the four-dimensional tubule of a wormhole from the side of one festival stall to the next, she pushes—

There's a flare of non-light as the wormhole forms and then collapses in on itself, its ends not actually anchored securely to the walls.

"Dammit," Harriet says.

[thinkingwithmahous]

Despite the failure, Marco was impressed, and possibly a little bit annoyed at how quickly she was figuring out his one trick. He repressed that feeling for now.

"Dang, you almost got it."