Auristitecture (Solo)

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

Tock was heading home, planning on testing the rest of her Golems' auras, when she got distracted by something. She was passing by The Saville, which she had only just the other day finished repairs on. She stopped in mid-stride, staring at the false imitation-marble facade. Something was tickling at the back of her mind, but she wasn't sure what. Something about what the teacher had said in class, about some auras showing 'stoic signs normally associated with the inanimate...' Signs of the inanimate... auras indicating something artificial... living versus inanimate... real versus fake... She approached the building, looking over the facade she'd just done repairs on. She wore a contemplative frown, the gears in her head turning as she tried to puzzle it out. Finally, she stepped up very close, leaning near one of the stone blocks, and began channeling Djed. Reginald, the shop's assistant and owner of quite the large stick up his arse, spotted her through one of the windows. With some apparent reluctance, he came outside to see what she was doing. He saved himself from a possible shiv in the gut by not actually asking her what she was doing. Instead he asked, "Is something wrong? I thought the repairs were done..." Tock barely glanced his way, giving a small shake of her head. "Nothin' wrong, Guv," she told him. "Jus' checkin' 'er over..." She channeled Djed through her mind, focusing on he stone block in front of her. The texture and coloration of it told her expert eyes that it wasn't real marble, so the stone's aura likely wouldn't tell her anything she didn't already know. So then... what was drawing her curiosity? She couldn't out her finger on it, but something in her gut was telling her... there was something here to learn... "Well, please don't loiter," Reginald said. "We have a business to run here..." "Meh," Tock replied distractedly, dismissing him from her thoughts. The stone's aura was cold. Hard. Solid. Nothing unexpected. She moved around the side of the building, where she knew the REAL marble was. She began channeling Djed again, studying one of the blocks there. It sensed much the same. Though after a few minutes of study, she noticed the slightest of differences. The second aura was denser... almost heavier, and the color more pure, less cloudy. Which made perfect sense to her, since the pure marble was a heavier stone than the false facade. Though the difference was subtle enough to be lost on most people, just as most people lacked the expertise to know how the real marble was smoother to the touch. It was basic, obvious information, but it was information that was meaningless to those without the architectural education and training in stone carving to understand the meaning of it.

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

She started to get another headache and feel tired again, so she took a break from studying the aura of the stone, and sat down on the ground to rest. She crossed her arms, studying the walls with eyes long trained in the art of carving, and which had studied the architecture of Mura, Syliras, Ravok, and here. The building was old; pre-Valterrian, except for the facade out front. But it was mostly still in good shape, and her unskilled aura readings hadn't revealed anything to her about the structure that she didn't already know. She supposed that learning about the intricacies of stones' auras, and being able to distinguish between one stone's aura and another, had it's advantages. But she KNEW there was something more here than just telling the difference between real marble and the artificial kind. After staring at the building for awhile, unable to get her mind to zero in on whatever it was that was bugging her, she got up and started to wander. She passed by other buildings, stopping here and there to study the aura of a single brick or stone block. She kept the readings brief, resting in between each study, just trying to get a basic feel for the differences between them. She took notes on the differences between each type of stone's aura, noting the coloration, texture, and perceived density. She started noticing that bricks had a more structured, artificial look to their auras, compared to natural stone that had simply been cut into blocks. Some stones had a tinge of green to their auras, when there was a bit of moss growing on them. But still, as interesting as this information was, she wasn't finding anything strictly useful about any of it. But she just KNEW it was there. She just wasn't seeing it...

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

Tock went home for awhile, ate, and took a nap. She dreamed of bricks. Magic bricks, in her magic city, rising further into the sky than any building on Mizahar. Laying them out, one by one, scanning each one's aura before she set it into place. Making sure each one was the proper fit, the proper shape. Flawless. Perfect. She awoke and immediately grabbed one of her books from class, flipping through it madly, searching for the relevant entry. After a few moments she found it: a chapter detailing using Auristics to read physical injuries. According to the book, it was possible to locate injuries even if they were hidden under clothing or armor. She stared at the page for a moment, thinking about that. Maybe, if she knew what to look for, Auristics could also tell her if a stone was cracked or flawed. If there was hidden damage to the structure of a building. It could save a great deal of time and energy on a construction job, if she were somehow able to use magic to seek out damages, find out what needed to be repaired. Then one day, when it was time to build her magic city, she could use such techniques to ensure her city's buildings were perfect. To search out flawed stone, so she would know which pieces to use for buildings, and which were only suited for other things like simple pacing stones. Maybe she could find wood rot, termites, structural weaknesses, areas of high stress, and... and a thousand other things that were so hard to tell by hand. She immediately moved to her table and started scrawling down notes, theorizing on what sort of aura differences might indicate each potential problem. It would take a lot of testing to tell for sure what worked and what didn't, but she was confident she could figure it out. She felt like she had made a huge discovery. Maybe it wouldn't seem like much to others, but to her, this was a fantastic step. If she was going to make a magic city with magic buildings, then magic architectural studies seemed like a perfect way to start.

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

Tock gathered up her notes and hurried back out into the city. It was early afternoon; she'd napped through the rest of the morning. She stalked through the streets, peering at every building she passed. She drew some stares (like she often did) at the way she was leaning down, face pressed close against the walls she passed. People pointed at her and whispered when she started rapping her knuckles against some stones, her ear pressed close to the walls, trying to hear any signs of hollow interiors or other flaws. It took her a little while to find what she was looking for. She finally stopped in front of a random house, an old, graying building made from large stone blocks. Some of them had large cracks in them, and were badly in need of replacing. Others, however, looked perfectly fine... from the outside. But with her ear pressed against a seemingly solid stone block, a few raps of her hammer against it told the tale of unseen damages, the slightest hollow sound that she could recognize from her experience working with stone. If the block were cut from the wall and pulled away, she would find cracked, broken stone behind it. She grinned and stepped back. Slipping the hammer back into her belt, she looked over the wall, picking out a stone with a nice, long crack down the middle. She focused on it, readying her mind and slowly channeling Djed through her eyes. She was able to recognize the signs of the stone's aura right away, much like the stones she had studied earlier in the day. A cold, hard, square aura radiating just a narrow distance from the block itself. But the aura, too, was split. Cracked. Looking at the aura was like looking at her reflection in a broken mirror, two images hovering right next to each other. She studied it for a few minutes, then released the Djed, pulling out her notes to record this new information. She rested for a few minutes, taking a drink of water, then stepped back up to the seemingly solid stone. She took a deep breath, and focused on it. It took a bit longer this time before the signs became apparent. She had to continue focusing her Djed, letting the details of the aura slowly clarify and come into focus. It was a bit less obvious, since the damage was under the surface. Her head started throbbing again, but as the aura became clearer, the crack in the aura started to show. It was so subtle that she wouldn't have known what it meant, had she not studied the block with the obvious damage first. The break in the aura could have been mistaken for something she simply needed to focus more on, something that was too hard for her to study and define. But it was exactly what she was searching for.

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

Tock spent some more time studying the building, alternating between using Auristics to examine the stones, the foundation, and the support pillars out front; and resting her wearying mind by sitting and sketching the more mundane aspects of the building. She drew diagrams of the walls and pillars, including each and every crack in the building, carefully examined and traced out in charcoal right down to the spidery patterns the cracks made. Alongside the sketches she made notations about how the aura had appeared, with arrows pointing out each block she had sensed damage in. After several hours of study, and making her way around all sides of the building to sketch it, she had worked up a respectable blueprint, on the level of detail she would have needed if this were a repair job. Once she had the blueprints complete, along with a myriad of notations about the magical aspects of the study, she sat and reviewed her notes. There was still a bit of a mystery here. Each block studied had shown just the slightest differences in the coloration, density, and size of the aura. Everyone and everything had a unique aura, and she knew more skilled Aurists were able to recognize people they knew by their auras alone. The stone blocks, while the differences were minor and far more subtle, still showed similar signs of uniqueness. But she felt like there was a pattern to the uniqueness. One she couldn't quite put her finger on. She hadn't used Auristics to study every single block; just the damaged ones, and a random selection of the whole ones. Yet she saw some variations in the auras, based on her notations, that made her suspect there was something else she was missing. Like staring at a brick wall and noticing alternating colors from one brick to the next, indicating differences between old bricks and new, or between those exposed to the weather and those protected under a ledge. While subtle, a skilled individual could pick out such differences, and know where repairs had been done, or which parts of the building were more commonly exposed to the elements. She could also tell if there had been something covering a section of bricks, since there would be an outline over the previously covered area, like moving a piece of furniture and finding cleaner, brighter carpeting underneath. She had an inkling of a similar pattern here. Something showing in the auras. But she needed to study the pattern more to figure out what it was...

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

To try and figure out what the pattern was, Tock started a new diagram. She laid out the arrangement of the bricks on it, on a wide enough scale that she had space to make notations in each brick. Then she started scanning them one by one. It took hours, since each time she started to get a twinge of pain in her head, she had to stop and rest. She made notes about the coloration of each brick's aura, making up a system since she knew nothing about color and shades. Since all the blocks had the same dull, grey aura, she just assigned numbers from one to ten for how dark she felt it was, since she didn't really have a standard to go by. She assigned another set of numbers for how opaque each aura was, as well as noting how many 'fragments' each aura she could see, when cracks and flaws made the aura appear broken. By the time she finished going along the whole main front wall, she heard someone clearing his throat behind her. She ignored it, rubbing at her aching head, and continuing to take notes about what she'd learned. A moment later she felt a hand on her shoulder. She spun around, her hand going for her dagger. But it turned out just to be some moderately well-dressed man. Like the house itself, he had the appearance of having seen better days; his clothing looked like it came from West Street, but it was old and well-worn. "Can I help you?" he asked, looking her up and down. She looked him over for a moment, then dismissed him as unimportant. "Nah," she said, turning back to her work. The man stepped forward, trying to move between her and the building. Tock continued to ignore him, stepping to the side and leaning closer to the wall, continuing to take notes. Finally the man stepped quite close and said, "Excuse me, Miss, but this is my home. I'm afraid I have to insist you tell me what you're doing!" Tock continued ignoring him, except to distractedly answer, "'At ain't whatcha asked me, Guv." It took the man a moment to sort through the unexpected response, and then he cleared his throat and pointedly asked her, "Miss, what ARE you doing?" Twitch.

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

She turned a glare on him, but restrained herself. Her boss had been telling her lately that she needed to control her temper and her violent urges. Besides which, there were witnesses. "Ya done gotta lotta damage 'ere, Guv," she explained. "I's studyin' it..." He frowned and glanced at the wall, then said, "Well I'm sorry, but times are tough. I'm still recovering my finances after the storm. So I can't afford to get it repaired..." Tock shrugged and turned back to the wall. "Ain't tryin' fer ta repair it," she said, running her fingers along the mortar between the blocks. "Jus' studyin' it." He stared at her in confusion for a moment, then asked, "...so, you're not here to try and sell me on a repair job?" "Nope." He didn't seem to know quite what to do with that. He cleared his throat, opened his mouth, then closed it again. Then finally, he scratched his head and said, "Well... that's... that's fine then, I guess. So long as you don't hurt anything..." Tock didn't see any point in wasting further time replying to the man, and instead just began channeling Djed again to see what kind of aura the mortar itself had.

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

As the sun set, Tock headed home, quite exhausted from the long day. Even with frequent breaks in between, she had channeled a lot of Djed today. She was going to need to go to bed very early tonight, and maybe lay a cool, damp cloth over her eyes to soothe the ache that had settled in. She spent a bit of time organizing her notes, but couldn't concentrate enough to really study them. She ended up leaving them in a haphazard pile on her table, before turning in for a restless night, plagued by dreams of bricks piling up on top of her, weighing down on her until she couldn't breathe. She awoke feeling quite hung over, her head pounding, her stomach aching from the strain. She also had some blurred vision, an unfortunate side effect of yesterday's Djed use. As a result, she couldn't concentrate on auras or numbers anymore that day. Instead, she moved on to working on another of her projects, one that was more 'hands on,' requiring physical strain rather than mental strain. With everything she had going on, the purely theoretical project got shuffled down low on her priority list, occasionally forgotten. She would pull the pages out every now and then over the next few weeks, plotting graphs of the numbers she'd assigned to each stone block, trying to deduce the pattern she knew was there. But it continued to elude her for some time. Yet she knew there was a discovery there, waiting to be uncovered. OOC : There will be a "Part 2" coming soon. I feel like Tock needs an extended time period analyzing her initial discoveries before moving on to a new stage of experimentation and study. So the next thread on this theme will be coming soon.

[Cascade]

Adventurer's Loot Tock's Loot : Skill XP Reward Auristics +3 Architecture +2 Observation +3 Lore: A Golem Ate My Homework Bitey's Aura Blondie From Class Overgiving: Robbed Hearing The Signs of Overgiving Auristics: The Shifting of a Golem's Aura Auristics: Damage Changes Aura The Aura of Bricks Tock is a novice in Auristics but she used it multiple times in this thread despite her professor's warnings. I know Tock used Auristics extensively in this thread, but it seemed too much for her level, so I can only give you a 3 at most. I hope you understand! Just be careful with how Tock uses magic, it can come back and bite her in the ass if she isn't wary. Looking forward to the next installment! If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to PM me!