Familiarization with Fire (Solo)

[Eridanus]

Day 30, Spring of 512 AV
Late Afternoon
DOI Headquarters

Eridanus finished the last of his report, replacing the quill back on his desk and giving a sigh of relief as he leaned back into his chair. The city was a mess after the whole djed storm and monster invasion fiasco, and the many illusions in the city were wonky. He had just returned from an inspection with a higher ranked agent and was expected to prepare a written report for that mission.

He did not quite expect to handle this amount of paperwork. He supposed that it made sense for a government agency, no matter how secret, to have a sense of accountability in the form of a paper trail, but he was still not used to it. He was a person of action, and honestly speaking having to sit down and write after every mission was mind-numbing.

The only benefit he could foresee was that the downtime forced him to spend at least a moment of reflection, for his mind often wondered while he was taking care of the less mentally intensive paperwork like copying notes and filing. Rolling the report up into a scroll, he stood up from his desk, passing by that agent's cubicle and handing him the report wordlessly.

At least that agent bothered to give a nod of gratitude, unlike some of the snooty higher-ups.

[Eridanus]

The vantha headed to the recreational rooms where the DOI had a bunch of large rooms that were usually unoccupied unless there were meetings scheduled. Usually official permission is required to use those rooms, but it was a known secret that as long as no one booked the room they could use it for their own purposes as long as they kept everything in place when they left.

As he walked down the confusing winding staircases to the training rooms below he passed by a fellow surveyor Johann Yonkvik. They had met each other around the department a few times and had built up an interesting dynamic where they insulted each other in a friendly manner.

"Horny boy," Johann smirked, making a play on the ethaefal's horns while commenting on his sexual nature. He supposed that the nature of his divine seeming attracted the opposite sex quite easily, though he was pretty sure it had nothing to do with his horns.

Humans and their lingo...

The vantha was in his mortal seeming, and unlike his celestial self he had no qualms playing along with the human, for there was a spark of a playful and youthful personality in his mortal subconscious.

Sticking his tongue out, he raised his arms in an act of a comical gorilla and began blabbering nonsensically. It would not make sense if it was taken out of context, but Johann was also a Morpher who favored the form of a silver-backed gorilla for strength. Strangely, that was the only full-body template the agent knew.

Suddenly, the morpher pushed Eridanus down the stairs, and the vantha's eyes widened in surprise at this uncharacteristically hostile act.

[Eridanus]

He fell.

And fell.

Only to realize that he was somehow falling upwards.

It did not make sense, but then again little in Alvadas did. Against the normal flow of gravity he fell all the way back up the top of the stairs, and when he regained his footing he gazed crossly down at the laughing morpher.

"Very funny, monkey boy," He replied in a snarky tone before heading back down the stairs in as haughty a manner as he could to salvage what he could from the situation. It was not difficult when Johann was crying tears of laughter as he held his stomach from finding the situation too hilarious for him to handle.

"Hrmph," The ethaefal muttered, embarrassed, before he quickened his pace towards downstairs.

If his luck had failed him during that bout with Johann Yonkvik earlier, at least it helped him for he found an empty room that was unused by other agents like him who wanted spaces for self-training. If he had to he would share, but he preferred to be alone. Much less judging, much less socializing, and more practice and thus more results.

He shook his head, opening the door and letting himself into the room. The darkened room lit up, though there were no candles or flames to be found. It was simply the illusory marvels that the DOI created to achieve this effect within the Underground.

[Eridanus]

First of all he wanted to protect his privacy; no point finding a room by himself if everyone outside could see what he was doing. Maybe it was a result of wizard psychology, or maybe it was his own personality, but he found it disturbing to be watched especially when he wanted to be alone.

First off he began gathering djed within his palms, pushing the astral expression of himself from his body onto the various windows of the room. Like magical butter, he smeared the substance onto the windows, the little window on the door, and the open space below the door.

He started off with the djed on the windows, and he began weaving the djed threads to task against light. That would ensure that the room would be black to those who look from the outside. When he was done tasking the shields on the windows, he proceeded to task the window on the top portion of the door, though allowing clearing the shield off the corner to allow light through to show people that the room was being used.

The last one was the shield below the door, and it was this shield that he tasked to block both light and sound. Double tasking was indeed a useful ability that he unlocked from constant use of shielding, not to mention he felt quite relieved when he could produce enough djed to shield more than his little finger.

[Eridanus]

Done with the various shields in place, the vantha returned to the middle of the room where he cleared an area for him to sit down. Settling himself comfortably in a cross-legged position, he brought up more djed, shaping the indefinite substance around his right hand up to his wrist. It was wearing an invisible glove, and though he knew that physically he could not feel the djed, he felt it psychologically anyway.

When he molded it into a consistent shape, he mentally weaved the arbitrary pattern of an elemental template onto the shield. It was up to the specification section of the tasking pattern to decide which element, and as such he wove the pattern of emotions and of passion into it. The core elements of fire, raging strength and burning hunger, it was all weaved into the shield.

The shield shimmered red momentarily as he finalized the tasking, and the vantha fidgeted into a more comfortable position. The preliminaries were finally done and he could proceed to his real purpose. He did not have much time to practice his reimancy since being initiated by the Crimson Edge mage, Eryss Waldu, back in Sunberth. He was often rushing here or busying there, and he did not want to see such an underdeveloped skill go to waste.

Indeed, the lessons by the wily wizard were beginning to be forgotten and he loathed to see that happened. After all, what was the point of going through all that pain for nothing? Staring at the scars on his palms from the ritualized wounds made during initiation, he set his jaw determinedly.

Eryss had warned about the fickle heart of fire, but he knew better. The shield that his right hand wore as a protective glove should protect himself against unintentional backlash.

[Eridanus]

Eridanus closed his eyes, breathing deeply as he calmed his mind and his rapidly exciting heart. It was always a thrill to delve into magic, and the lure of reimancy was grand especially compared to the other magics. He had not summoned his res for over a season since that day in Fall, and the anticipation was making him nervous.

He was slightly apprehensive. What if he found that he could not summon res? Would that mean that he would have go undergo another session of the nerve-wracking initiation?

Shutting down those thoughts and the accompanying fear, the vantha urged his mind to only look at the present and matter at hand. There was no point getting distracted over mere speculation. He was a being of logic, and he should know better than to be beset by the emotional frailties of mortals.

Reaching into the core of his astral body, he tried to recall the feeling he had when he was in the woods back in Sunberth. It was a different sort of feeling than the other magics, for all disciplines of magic required djed. Yet, the method of calling was all different even if it was the same substance being consumed. Flux, Auristics, Shielding, Reimancy, they all used djed but the feeling was different.

He controlled the use of his myriad of disciplines through the feel of the djed, which was why recalling that feeling was important. That feeling would help him summon res instead of djed for shielding, or instead of merely redirecting djed streams to his hand.

With that feeling strong in his mind, he coaxed the djed to pool in his arm, pushing it out through the scars on his palms. A bead of pure white formed above one of the many scars in his palms, and inwardly he whooped in triumph.

[Eridanus]

Not daring to be complacent, he continued coaxing the djed out from his body, manifesting as physical res that was visible by everyone who possessed mundane vision. His res was naturally gaseous and formed a perfect sphere like the shape of a full moon. Similar to the moon, it possessed a hypnotic glow with its pure white brilliance. He continued pooling res, increasing the size of the sphere until it was roughly half a finger's length in diameter.

Enough for starters.

He did not want to go too far today, and so he closed his hand such that he was pointing a single finger at the sphere of res that hovered there contentedly. Using his mind as a control and his finger to help direct his focus, he willed the arcane ball to rise up and down, pointing the way as the sphere lazily complied.

He was indeed rusty.

Eridanus shook his head briefly, though he could not have expected better. He was not a prodigy in magic; he cannot expect to have automatic talent in a discipline that he had so little practice in.

Drawing his finger in circles, he put the sphere of res - and his mind - through its paces, making it do somersaults and going through imaginary hula hoops. Increasing the acceleration of the res, he began increasing the pace of his finger movement, and the sphere struggled to follow, at times some of the res disappeared due to lack of focus. When that happened he was forced to slow down and summon more res to replace the ones that disappeared.

[Eridanus]

The beginner mage twirled his finger in a wide arc horizontally, and strained his mind as he brought the sphere of res in a circle around his body. The hardest part was when the ball went out of sight went it disappeared behind him, and it required utmost concentration to make sure it continued its circular path and not derail, or worse, disappear.

Breathing a sigh of relief when he spotted the sphere reappear from the other side, he gave another small twirl with his finger and watched the sphere of res follow his physical and mental urgings do a tiny loop-de-loop before it hovered just above his finger.

Recalling Eryss' reminder that he should only ignite the outer layers of the res so that he could maintain control on it, he began bombarding the sphere with mental images of energy. Not large explosions or infernos, instead he sent images of weakly kindling fire and gently flickering flame.

Slowly, the surface of the res began to glow a soft maroon color, and the soft crackle of a kindling flame became music to the vantha's ears. The surge in excitement that was unbidden caused the flames to violently grow for a split second before he controlled his emotions, clamping down on the propagation of the flames.

[Eridanus]

Fire was borne of passion, but ironically passion was the downfall of many a fire mage. What a mage needed was ruthless, cold-hard logic. Reimancy was as much as a science as it was an art, but if one were to rule with too much heart and not enough logic the flames was bound to consume the user.

The smoke that came from the fire was odorless, for it was magical fire fueled from astral energy. In fact, he was not even sure if there was smoke emitted at all. It might just be his logical assumption from centuries of watching normal, non-magical fire burn on candles and torches.

Inwardly he knew that he had only a limited time with the res for fire required substance to burn, and his control over the tangible djed was not fine enough for him to command the flames to consume miniscule res for sustenance. Sooner or later the core would be consumed and the flames would dither to nothingness.

In the meantime, he moved the res, though he grimaced a little when he could feel half the core ignite as he did so. Controlling which part of djed to burn while the res was stationary was hard enough, doing it while moving proved to be harder than he expected.

[Eridanus]

Instead, he focused on keeping the res stationary, minimizing the consumption of res as much as he could while focusing on the growth of the little flame he created. Occasionally tiny flames reach out to lash towards his hand, but the flame was absorbed by the shield he created. It did not matter anyway, for even without the shield the tiny flames were insignificant enough to be ignored.

It was only a matter of time, despite Eri's intense attention, when the flames subsided, having consumed the supply of res that sustained its magical existence.

The ethaefal scowled and rubbed his temples, he supposed that he had been unknowingly frowning as he stared at the flames, eager to keep it going as long as he could.

Eridanus shrugged, using one hand to sweep the djed off his other hand in a wiping gesture, effectively dissipating the shield from his hand. His shields were already strong enough to sustain themselves without need of continued focus from him, and so doing so was not required but merely a habit from the times when intense concentration was required just to keep the shield there.

As such, the various shields scattered throughout the windows and door remained in place, though they would fade soon enough. If they remained strong before he left the room he would of course, out of courtesy, remove the shields. For now, it was time to meditate and reflect on his thoughts on reimancy.