Solo The first step on a long long road I

[Coren]

3th of fall 512 The first blizzard of the fall season had arrived, taking with it the early promise of winter as it choked the air with thick snow and harsh winds. Making it a hassle for any vantha to go outside as it reduced the visibility to nearly nothing and the strong winds tried to rip whatever you where holding out of your arms if you weren't careful. So coren had decided to stay inside and study the book he had bought last season in deeper detail. He had given it a few cursory glances during the busy day's last season and had marveled at the fact how his knowledge of projection aligned with some parts of animation. Both of them where about the astral body only projection was about manipulating one as it it shouldn't be manipulated. While animation was trying to create a working soul, astral body included, though it was a highly simplified soul they created. He cleaned some scraps of paper from his rickety wooden desk making some place and putting everything he needed for the moment on the desk. Some paper for making notes and ink to take notes with. Before grabbing the thick volume and carefully laying it down on the table before cracking it open, skipping the quick introduction and the supposed history of the discipline, having read them a while back, and dove straight into the methods of the magic discipline. After a half a bell of reading through the book He began lining up some facts in his head. Since the process of animating things usually starts with procuring a shell for the Life principle that is fit for the purpose the golom is going to have to fulfill. That was the first hurdle he would have to overcome. Metal would be preferred, but he doubted he would ever be able to get enough metal to build one decent sized golom even if he managed to learn the trade, metal was infuriatingly scarce in avanthal. Wood was a better choice, less durable so he would need to repair his creations a lot more, but wood was a lot cheaper to get around here. But there still was the trouble of learning it. Even though he wasn't welcome in his hold anymore, the other holds still considered him part of it. So he doubted it would be easy to learn how to work wood, that was the snowsong's terrain so he had to talk them into breaking their monopoly. He decided to put that on his later to do list and looked closer to the other steps. After managing to acquire a shell one would set up the animation circles. The first one was called the source, where one would place the objects whose soul one was going to use as a template, while in the second circle one places the shell the life principle was going to end up in. When all those things were done only then one could start the animation process. From what coren gathered from the book it was pretty simple, the process had 4 phases. The first was the creation of the soul core, nothing fancy, just creating the foundations where the rest of the phases rested upon. The second phase involves the creation of the persona, the next layer of the soul, in a normal soul this was where the persons memories and personality reside. An animator's work was a lot more crude then a real soul so it wasn't even close to the real deal unless the person doing it was a true master of the art. But one created something called directives, rules that that would create the golom's behavior. The third phase was giving the golem more then just personality, but imparting the information it needs. The fourth and final phase before the awakening of the golem was the shaping of the astral body and 'engraving' the knowledge to use its astral body to move. While also linking the golem's awareness to the senses of its shell.

[Coren]

Coren read over the entire progress once again, it didn't really seem that hard to do. But then again, most things looked easy when you where just reading about it . The doing usually was a lot harder so the next thing was trying out a simple project. He stretched his fingers as he let his gaze slide over the few possessions in the rented room. He instantly rejected a few, the chairs and table where just plain bad shells. What use would animating those things? Scratch that thought what would he even animate those things at all. His gaze stopped when it fell on the hardy chest against his wall. Maybe he could do something simple with that. Let the lid open when one speaks a command word, though on second thought, the chest did not have anything with which he could hear the word, so that was impossible. Maybe if one knocked in a certain pattern. Coren stood up and took the few steps needed to bridge the distance to the chest and he knelt down in front of it. Giving it a closer look. It didn't look particulary valuable, so if he ruined it or botched the job badly enough that it suddenly began trying to 'bite' everybody trying to use it he could just fork over some cash for a new one. He quickly began to take his clothes out of the chest, dropping them on his bed before he tried to figure out how to go about the animation thing. He could use the last of his ink to create the circles on the ground and he could use himself as the template for the soulcore. He paged back to the appropriate page in the book to recheck some simple facts about putting necessary memories and directives into it. He knew he was the one controlling the information transferred from the source to the animated thing. But he wasn't really sure on how exactly one did that. After a few more chimes of rereading the only things he found about it were the fact that spilling blood to activate the circles created some kind of link to the circles, making him able to control the information that was going to be transferred. But nothing much else was said about it. He guessed it was like with projection with this part, it was something you could only learn by doing. Books only helped up to a point with it. He shut the book and took a piece of paper. With his inexperience he didn't think it was going to be a good idea to just jump into it, he didn't know how he could mess up something that looked this simple, but he really didn't care to find out.

[Coren]

The first thing coren needed to write down on the paper where the directives he was going to need to give the chest. His aim was to let the chest open up when he tapped on the lid three times in a certain pattern on a certain spot and to let let it close again when he gave one other harsh tap on the same spot. So he guessed there would be three directives, the highest one would to be open up when given the right command, the three taps on the specific spot. The second one would to remain closed at all times. While the third one would to deactivate the first directive by tapping once on the right spot of the lid of the chest. He wrote them down in the order of importance he thought they should be on to be the most effective and wrote down which things he would most likely have to explain to the animated thing . -Open up the lid when given the three taps on the specific spot. -concept of open and what the lid actually is. -Impart the specific place on the lid. -Give it the knowledge to count to three -Be closed -Concept of closed. Ties together with the concept of open -End directive one -the idea of ending Coren looked over the small 'plan' he had created and gave a nod yes. He could work with this at least. He stood up from the stool and looked over the room, trying to judge how he would do the part with the circle, his room was fairly small, and he needed enough room to both house the two circles that would be quite large to house him or the chest. After a bit of reorganizing he cleared up enough space for the two circles and grabbed a piece of charcoal from the unlit hearth and pulled up his sleeves. He doubted his ink would work really well for this. He hunched down and drew a nearly perfect circle by using himself as a pivot. That was the easy one, the circle that had to contain the chest was to big to create like that. He put the piece of coal in one of his pockets for a moment as he walked over the chest and lifted up the heavy wooden object with a strained grunt and walked a few strained grunts before unceremoniously dropping it close to the circle he already drew and sat down on it as he regained his breath checking if the location of the chest wasn't to close to the circle he had already drawn. He still needed space for both the path between the two circles not to mention to draw the circle itself. He stood up from the chest he had been sitting on as soon as his breath had returned to him and he checked the distance between circle and chest and frowned a bit. The distance might be just enough for everything, but that would be cutting it close and coren didn't like not having room for errors when doing something he was still inexperienced in. He grabbed the chest and with a grunt of effort began dragging the chest a feet or two away from the other circle to make more room. He pulled the piece of coal out again and slowly began drawing the final circle around the chest. Cursing a few times at the awkwardness of the charcoal he was using, but eventually he managed to draw something resembling a circle around the second chest and the path that connected the two. He brushed the charcoal dust of his hands as good as he could and gave his work a lookover. It was a very basic and not really neat setup , but according to the book it should work. He thought about adding some glyph's to it so it would be more functional but decided against it, charcoal wasn't easy to work with and he didn't know enough about animation circles right now, it might end not well. He pulled his sharp eating knife out of its drawer,walked inside the source circle and sat down. Coren just steeled himself and made a quick and small cut a finger on his right hand and let the droplet of blood fall on the animation circle. At first nothing really happenend and coren was about to leave the circle to check with the book if he had done something wrong, but then he suddenly felt something strange. A bit comparable as if he was standing in the middle of a stream with a strong current. Coren took a few moments to regain his composure before he thought back to the instructions of the book. The first phase was to create the core of the animation's soul. He closed his eyes and tried to focus. He needed to create a copy of his own soulcore. It felt like a stream, and he guessed that it felt like that because of the stream of djed flowing through the source, himself now, towards the receiver and he had some control over the stream thanks to the link to it forged by his shed blood. He slowly began guiding the stream through him, his soul and thus also the soulcore, he concentrated and tried to guide the stream tightly on the core of his very soul, making sure no unnecessary data was carried with it. After an entire bell he felt something from the other side of the stream, a sturdy response. He couldn't help but smile, it seemed his work had thrown of fruits and the soulcore was finally ready and strong enough to at least survive. He cut of the flow and stood up, he felt exausted of concentrating for such a long time, he gave a quick glance at the chest in which he knew rested a newborn life principle. It could survive him taking a small break to clear his head so he didn't make any mistakes at least.Coren carefully tiptoed around the entire setup as he walked towards the door, intending to go on a small walk to air out his mind a bit.

[Valkyrie]

Coren :

Experience
1 Writing
1 Drawing
3 Animation
1 Organization

Lore
Setting Up the Animation Process
Four Phases of Animation
Determining Directives for An Animated Chest
Using Yourself as a Soulcore Template


Other
N/A

Notes: Good job on introducing Coren to animation! I liked how you had him struggle to transfer the knowledge he had gathered from the book into actual application and think through that though it could have been emphasized a touch more. While you didn’t do much of the actual animation process in this thread you did spend some time preparing for the process which I felt was worthy of points since you can’t exactly go through with this process haphazardly. Well you could but I doubt it would have very good results.

You Will Be Collected if Worthy

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