Completed I Have a Magnetic Personality II

[Evarista]

24th of Summer, 517 A.V. The shallow beach waves lapped Evarista's bare feet lazily, but she didn't pay it any heed. Her foggy eyes, with a hint of silent amazement, were drawn to something in the water... to something she had not expected to ever see again. Several seasons ago, she had visited the lakeshore to have dinner with her acquaintance, Hadrias, the owner of Ravok's whisky distillery. When taking a stroll along the beach, she had come across a fish with some, one would say... mystical qualities. The encounter didn't end amicably, but Evarista had been determined to return later to unveil the strange creature's secret. However, every time she'd been to the lakeshore since then, she had failed to find such a fish again. Now that the general weather conditions on the beach had worsened, she hardly found any opportunities to come here anymore, and had therefore given up on the hunt. Today was just supposed to be a walk, since the weather was nice. And today, without even wishing for it, she saw something familiar move in the water only a meter away from her. It was the unmistakable, snake-like shadow of a "zapper", as Hadrias had aptly called it. Maybe even the same zapper that had zapped her back then. Could it really be that Rhysol was now giving her an opportunity to serve the accursed fish its just desserts? Already savoring her victory, Evarista molded her right forearm into a two-pronged chitinous fork, unblinking gaze never leaving the target. A moment later, the fork was thrust into the water, sinking into the sand on either side of the snakelike shadow and pushing it down. While Evarista was not particularly fast, the attack was sudden enough to pin the zapper to the bottom. The trapper wouldn't get an opportunity to gloat, however, as a painful shock pierced her entire body, and she felt all of her muscles contract, as if controlled by magic. Exactly the same as last time. Well, the hallmark of a fool was committing the same mistake a second time and expect different result, so there was nothing strange there. Although her entire body felt numb, the girl still managed to cough up some silk and glue, half-spitting and half-barfing it at the loathsome creature with some force. Obviously upset by such discourteous treatment, the zapper began thrashing about to free itself from the sticky goop, but only got more and more tangled in it with each movement. The aggressive crackling sounds were obvious signs that it was trying to repel the attacker, but Evarista had already withdrawn the fork from the water, waiting for her prey to seal its own gluey doom. The zapper tried to swim away, but being almost entirely coated in the tar-like goo restricted its movements to impotent thrashing in the shallow beach water. The angry crackling noises soon grew quiet, before vanishing completely. Did the fish spend its powers? Still twitching slightly from the tension and the recent assault on her nervous system, Evarista extended her fork towards the thrashing fish and poked it tentatively, ready to withdraw at any moment should it try to zap her again. No zapping came, so its zapping powers were indeed spent, at least for the time being. Finally relaxing a little, the girl adjusted her fork to a long pincer and grabbed the fish firmly by the midsection before pulling it up on the beach. A moment later, the glue-coated and exhausted zapper wriggled weakly on the sand before her. "Heh heh..." Although some muscles in her body still twitched uncomfortably, Evarista stared at her defeated foe gleefully. It was time to turn the tables.

[Evarista]

Evarista crouched next to her captive and took a preliminary look at its aura. Just like last time, there was nothing magical or otherwise amazing about it. At first glance, it was just a normal fish. She would need to peel back some aural layers to uncover what exactly made this fish so different from the others. She didn't want to limit herself to just looking, however. The object of her study was a of comfortable size to be examined through more senses. Touching, tasting and smelling the aura would tell her things that looking at the smudged colors never could. She has already experimented with this holistic approach before, and understood that she'd have to make it a habit if she wanted to examine complex models more easily. Her cheeks produced a wet noise as they split open like a fleshy flower, pitch-black and bright yellow stripes wrapping around the slick chitinous surface as it hardened. A forest of clicking mandibles, half reminding of palps and half of legs, grew out of her face, stretching towards the aura hungrily. On the fores of the mandibles rose a dense forest of tactile hairs, ready to pick up anything that all except one of Evarista's known senses could: touch, taste, smell, hearing, and the arachnid sense of vibration, but not sight. Sight was a distraction. At the same time, she sealed her eyes and ears, focusing her attention fully on her new organ. She's done this before, but never so intently and seriously, and the anticipation of what she would experience next put her on edge. It felt like diving into honey, when the generated limbs sunk into the aural corona of the creature. Appearing to the eye as nothing but rays of color, an aura was far from intangible. On the contrary, it was thick and rich in texture, assaulting each sensillum with a wave of experiences. Evarista didn't want to see the tactile hairs as a bouquet of senses gathered in one place, but rather as one unified mode of "experience" something, in a way that was more than the sum of its parts. The initial excitement soon turned to a feeling of drowning. The new whirlwind of sensations overwhelmed her quickly, making her recoil and lose balance, landing on her backside on the sand. Her mind was receiving too many foreign signals at once, and shutting off her human sensory organs only intensified the incomprehensible chaos that assaulted her nerves. It felt akin to putting your hand into a boiling pot, while you bit down on a cactus and injected tabasco into your nose all at the same time. She had to tone it down. Focusing her attention on the mandibles again, she pulled in two-thirds of the tactile hairs, absorbing them back into the unfeeling chitin. This should dull the senses enough to work with; it was easier to adjust the amount of sensilla than their sensitivity. Thus prepared, Evarista wobbled back to a crouching posture blindly, and to her satisfaction, didn't need to open her eyes to find the aura again. She could "smell" its direction, and the smell emanated much farther than the visible colors. Prepared to pull back in case her mandibles were still too sensitive, she gently sank them into the honey-like texture again, feeling the once-dampened tension rise again.

[Evarista]

This time, the experience was much different. Rather than an assault on the senses, touching the aura was more like licking an ice cream cone with the very tip of your tongue, trying to determine the flavor. It was not an explosive torrent of sensations, but a deep sea of subtleties, countless tiny pieces of information to be gathered, examined and put together to form a whole. A more scholarly mind would have been excited by this, but Evarista was merely intimidated. There had to be a different approach. A different way to imagine. Yes, this whole thing bent entirely around the imagination. While visual aura readings were very much "what you see is what you get", this everything-except-sight reading was trying to puzzle together your own image in your mind's eye. So, rather than trying to build a whole from many parts, it was easier to imagine a big picture first, and add the details later. As if feeling her way around a marble statue with your eyes closed, Evarista tried to imagine an auristic shape that she could examine, and then work out the individual features. First of all, what was it a statue of a person? Male or female? Thin or pudgy? Long or short hair? Where's the nose and ears? Is there perhaps more than one nose, or more than two ears? The shape in her mind quickly took the shape of an oblong fish, similar to the physical form. This wasn't necessarily a good thing. Since Evarista has seen the zapper before, her auristic image of it was "poisoned" by the old visual input; the aura and the body didn't at all need to have the same shape. But for now, this would work. What was inside that shape? It was easy to think of auristics as a way to look through something as if it was semi-transparent, easily seeing the individual parts. That's how she's always done it before. But with her new sensilla, it felt more like she was inside of the aura. It was the difference between examining the interior of a room while peeking in through a dirty window and doing the same while being comfortably inside the room itself. An altogether far more intimate and revealing experience. That was it. That was how she had to think. Now, all that was left was to crystallize everything her sensilla picked up into shapes and colors that her limited human mind could understand and learn from. Inside the zapper were... discs. Tiny ones. Many of them. Countless rows of well-ordered disc-shaped building blocks, connected together by shimmering strings. The loose ends of these strings disappeared into the vortex of the zapper's "mind". The mind pulled the strings like a puppeteer. What happened once they were pulled? What did the discs do? Without realizing it, Evarista accidentally grazed the zapper's skin with her ever-moving mandibles. The angry but helpless animal attempted to zap her again, apparently having regained some of its depleted powers. What Evarista saw almost made her recoil. The "mind" didn't pull the strings, but sent something to travel along them. Like a package. A message. A signal. No, not one signal, but countless signals, each destined for one exact disc in the vast and immaculately arranged rows, and each reaching their target at the same time. It happened infinitely fast, but Evarista was somehow able to follow the entire process as if it was in slow-motion, and was enraptured by how perfectly everything happened. It was a beauty the likes of which she could never see with her normal eyes, and it was hidden right here, in something as pathetic as a beached fish.

[Evarista]

She wouldn't get to stay mesmerized for long. The electric jolt coursed through her sensitive feelers, making her jerk backwards reflexively with a wet gargle. Once her mandibles disconnected from the aura, the mental picture was lost momentarily. The current was weak, and the numbness passed quickly, but the auristic impression remained. When the "message" reached them, each of the discs released something. Energy. She didn't notice it was there before. Each of those discs was like a tiny wound-up spring. She didn't notice it because each spring was so tiny. But a million, maybe even a billion of those springs releasing at once? That's where the force came from. Massive force. But it wasn't a real spring, and the force wasn't mechanical. It wasn't like throwing a punch. She already knew that from experience. Crawling back up onto her knees blindly, Evarista steadied herself and found her mysterious companion again, once more without opening her eyes. She stepped inside the "room" again. Even through her body was completely immobile, save for subtle caressing motions of her mandibles, her mind was racing across psychedelic landscapes infinitely fast. It was already slightly addictive. She could see herself doing this strangely deep dive with other things... or even with people. The zapper was a beautiful start. With its discs and the threads and the perfectly timed messages. She knew she could begin replicating it. It took her a long time to find the right approach, but once she did, once she "stepped inside the room", her understanding developed quickly. The discs were special, and her human body had nothing like them, but they could be built. They looked like discs, but they were springs, not physical ones, but energetical. As the spring was wound, the energy accumulated in the disc under a sort of pressure. Putting it in terms Evarista herself was comfortable with, it was like shaking a champagne bottle. The message that arrived on the shimmering string was like a corkscrew opening the bottle, sending the contents inside bursting into a foamy fountain. Each disc was like a tiny bottle, and when all the bottles were shaken and uncorked at once... It began to make sense. Inside of one of her hands, she was already building the discs, one after another, strange materials displacing the human flesh. They had to be arranged in perfect rows, just like wine bottles on the symmetrical racks in the estate cellar. To the cork of each bottle was attached a string, going into her "mind". While she couldn't perceive her own mind in the same way she was examining another, connecting the strings to it was an intuitive matter. The strings themselves were nothing alien, either: her own body was already full of them. Once each bottle was connected, all she had to do was to wind up the springs. Almost without noticing, she placed her palms together and rubbed them together. The discs reacted. Even though, once again, they weren't literal springs, the mysterious energy in them was not completely disconnected from the physical world and physical stimulation. The only thing left was to pull the strings. Release the springs. Uncork the bottles. All at once. Pull all the strings as one. A now-familiar sensation coursed through her hand, up her arm, and all the way to her mind. The discs ejected the energy, washing over her senses in a tingling wave. Evarista was tempted to open her eyes to make sure that she wasn't touching the zapper by accident, but resisted. This was her. The discs she made were relatively few, and the sensation was subtle, but it was definitely the same thing. She's finally done what she wanted to do ever since her fateful encounter with a (the?) zapper almost a year ago. Now, she was a zapper all her own.

[Evarista]

Once the initial sense of satisfaction wore off, Evarista returned to reality and recognized the fact that she wasn't done. She had the main part - the energy discs - but there was still the dryly practical question of how she was supposed to zap anything other than herself. Obviously, this energy could be transferred by touch, and Evarista was fairly confident she's be able to jolt someone else by touching them, just like the zapper did. But by doing that she'd also jolt herself. That wasn't the intention. This power wasn't worth much if it meant she risked barbecuing herself with every use. What made the zapper immune to its own powers? Further examination of the aura revealed little at first. She even put herself through another jolt by touching the animal and following the trails of the energy as it coursed through its aura. If the energy did course through its body, that had to mean it hurt. The animal was ostensibly not protected from its own weapon at all. That didn't make sense. Even if all zappers were born masochists, they wouldn't be able to function while constantly jolting themselves along with anything they came into contact with. Or so she assumed, so she had to look harder. After waiting a few chimes to calm herself down and allow the zapper to recharge its discs, she poked it again, trying to follow the current of the energy as best as she could, slowing down everything in her mind so that it could better be examined. This time, she noticed something she didn't notice before. As the current travelled, it seemed to dissipate somewhat around the zapper's "mind". And not only the mind itself, but also the pulsing "body's mind", which Evarista assumed to be the heart. A mess of other functions were gathered around one side of the zapper, whereas the other side was dedicated to energy disc storage. Between the two parts was a sort of insulation, made up of familiar materials: fat, bone and cartilage. It wasn't completely zap-proof, but it had an effect. In a rather faithful imitation of the barrier, Evarista began growing some chitin behind the wrist of her zapping hand. The process was internal, a replacement of existing tissue with sheer chitin. She needed to know what it looked like. Withdrawing her mandibles from the fish for a moment to clear her mind, she cracked open her eyelids, expecting the sun to sear her eyes. To her surprise, it didn't. It felt like she'd been on a trip to another universe and back, but apparently the whole thing didn't take long at all, since her eyes didn't need much adjustment. Peeking down at her hand, she didn't see anything out of the ordinary. The chitinous barrier was beneath the skin, padded with a subtle layer of fat for good measure. The discs themselves were tiny enough the they could be positioned inside of her palm and fingers without changing the hand's appearance. Since her wrist was rather lanky, it didn't take big changes to wall it off. The extra tissue restricted the movement of the wrist, but that didn't seem like a big problem in this context. Bringing her mind back to the discs and strings, the girl rubbed her hands together. There was an extremely subtle tension; she wouldn't have picked it up if she hadn't already experienced it. The discs were ready to go. Unlike the zapper, she didn't have to simply sit and wait for the discs to recharge. In this way, she has already surpassed her model. Another small jolt. Her fingers twitched uncomfortably, as if grasping something invisible in the air that only they could see. She still felt the tingles travelling through her arm, but it was weaker. The insulation worked somehow. This was going to take practice to perfect, though. Sighing deeply, Evarista put her hand in her lap and averted her eyes, looking out over the lake for a moment. She then wobbled up to her feet and brushed the sand off her skirt absent-mindedly; her thoughts were already more occupied with dinner. All this psychic activity made her hungry. The young aristocrat was about to walk back to the pier, but paused in the last moment. Shaping a chitinous pincer, she reached down, picked up the zapper by the end of its tail and flung it out over the water, watching it disappear with a splash. Maybe she would meet it again. As an equal.

[Sayana]

Don't forget to edit/delete your grade request. If there's anything I may have missed, please PM me and I'll be happy to look into it.

 

Evarista

Skills

• Observation: 5
• Fishing: 1
• Morphing: 4
• Endurance: 3
• Auristics: 3
• Biology: 3
• Investigation: 4

Lores

• Fish: Zapper
• Endurance: Withstanding moderate electric shocks
• Fishing: Trapping fish with chitinous fork
• Fishing: Using silk and glue to ensnare a fish
• Auristics: Wholistic approach using all senses
• Auristics: Utilizing mandibles for sensing an aura
• Biology: Series of 'sprung' discs inside electric zapper
• Biology: Sending signals along strings from mind and heart
• Morphing: Bioelectrogenesis
• Morphing: Protective chintin and fat barrier

Comments: I really enjoyed the detail you put into the thread and in this case I awarded investigation in addition to biology. Let me know if you'd prefer 'research' instead of investigation.

Also, please update your expenses to include Summer 517 AV seasonal expenses.

Your Grader,

Sayana

Boxcode design: Firenze