[Flashback] The Professor's Daughter (Azilis)

[Hadrian]

"Well, that's certainly proof of the usefulness of auristics," he said, not a little awed by the story about her father's prowess, though she was hurrying him past just how she and her brother had stayed alive using magic. Perhaps they were just natural savants, the way children sometimes were according to what he had read. "Anyway, no matter what your focus, whatever discipline, I think auristics will help. And, you know, it's in your blood." He offered a smile. "But yes, please show me your technique. Every different explanation seems to help me a bit. But... I thought only master aurists could mask their own auras. Are... are you a master already?" Savant indeed.

[Azilis Theroulde]

A blush flamed in her cheeks. “Me? A master? Oh, no, nothing even close, I still have so much to learn...” Although she wouldn't have admitted it ever, she found it a compliment that this boy four years her senior would think so highly of her. “The technique isn't about changing your aura, exactly. Even my father has trouble doing that. It's more of a...” She paused, looking for the correct words. “If you know someone else is reading your aura, and you don't want them to be able to see what's there, you can try to calm yourself – meditate, almost – so that the aurist can't read you as well. I mean, if the aurist is very good, it won't have much effect, but around those who aren't as skilled, it works well enough. By concentrating on one emotion – peacefulness, generally, or calm – it's almost like you're raising a shield against anyone who tries to read your aura, because you're clearing your mind of all the outside thoughts and forces that aurists might be able to see. So you're not altering your aura, or suppressing it like a master could, because it's still you. Just a calmer you, if you get what I mean.” Azilis stopped for a moment, hoping that Hadrian wouldn't think she was lecturing him, or worse, boring him. Then another thought came to her, and she continued. “In my humble opinion, it's also a good way to get ready to focus on an aura, because the clearer your mind is when you read it, the more information you'll get. Does it sound useful to you?”

[Hadrian]

"It makes sense," he said after pondering it for a moment. "If you school yourself, school your emotions, then they see what you want them to see because that's what you're feeling... I wish I had that kind of discipline," he added glumly, "but I guess good things come to those who train and study... right?" He smiled, but it was still glum. There were times when the prospect of eternal study excited him, but now he was just a bit tired from all the intense alteration of his senses by sheer willpower. "It does sound useful. Perhaps we could work together regularly... schooling our emotions and trying to read each other. Like a game." His smile brightened, then. A little bit of healthy competition never hurt anyone.

[Azilis Theroulde]

“Well, that's what I've always been taught to believe,” Azilis replied, seeing the morose look that came over him. “At least, I hope so, seeing as it seems like I'm looking forward to a life of training and studying...” She shook her head ruefully. “I know what you mean, though. Sometimes it feels like this is all totally pointless, like I could study my entire waking life and never learn enough to make a difference, or know enough in any particular field to be able to do something useful with it.” “But we're both young, right? I mean, we have years and years to learn everything we want to know. Buck up, Hadrian.” She punched him lightly on the upper arm, to let him know she was only kidding around. “Ooh, I like games. I usually win them,” she teased, grinning. His words made her happy; she didn't have many friends in the city, and the idea of meeting regularly with someone who had the same interests as she excited her. “Bet you can't beat me. D'you wanna try centering yourself first?”

[Hadrian]

His brows furrowed, a flare of competitiveness lighting his chlorine blue eyes. Then he nodded, arranged himself comfortably on the bench, and began to count his breathing: in, two, three, four, hold, two, three, four, out, two, three, four, hold, two, three, four. With the regulation of his breath, his body and, to some extent, his thoughts began to come under conscious control. He wanted to ask her if she was looking at him and what she saw, but he merely observed the thought and let it pass over him. His abilities at meditation were limited, but he could generally calm himself down. What was more difficult was getting to that state without wanting to fall asleep. It was so difficult to get his mind to turn off that his sleep schedule was fairly erratic. Thus, given a calm mind, his body tended to want a nap.

[Azilis Theroulde]

Azilis leaned back against the wall behind the bench, waiting for Hadrian to slip into a meditative state. She began to do the same, straightening her back against the warm stone of the wall so that the passage between her throat and diaphragm was clear, and began to breathe deeply. Each breath she held for the double the amount of time she had breathed in. It was a technique her mother had taught to her flute-playing sister Thaelia long ago, to help her expand the reach of her lungs, but Azilis found it useful to concentrate on the workings of her own body and the elusive Djed that moved inside it. The technique was helpful for someone, like herself, who had next to no meditative training. For her, finding the currents of the Djed within herself was the difficult part; clearing her head had never been an easy task for her, and it was hard for her to concentrate her roving mind on one thing alone. But after several minutes she felt herself tap into her inner reservoir of Djed. She imagined it spreading through her veins until it reached her eyes, ears, and nose. When she was ready, she opened her eyes. Hadrian's aura blossomed around him, shimmering with color and texture. To her, the most prevalent color was a deep navy blue, signifying that he had indeed been able to concentrate on calmness and serenity. She continued to focus on the aura, and heard a sound like that of water tumbling over the stones in a brook emanating from it: a calming noise, as well, or so it seemed to her. After several more minutes of intense concentration, she began to feel the slightest tug on her eyelids, and saw the oscillations of Hadrian's aura begin to slow down. Either she was giving more Djed than she'd thought, or... “Hadrian? Are you feeling at all tired?” she asked, blinking away her auristic vision. “Or is that just me?” Her eyes finally settled; it was far easier, in her opinion, to break off an Auristic connection than to begin one. “Other than that, I couldn't get anything from you. Good work.”

[Hadrian]

"Yes," he said, his voice lower and more serene for the meditative state. His words were measured, and his breath too, even as he spoke to her. "The work with your father drained me, but this helps bring me back into equilibrium." Finally his eyes opened, clear and limpid beneath a smoother brow. "In fact, I want to study the Flux. Not to break my body with superhuman feats, but to control the djed within it and, thus, control my body. I have a feeling that there's a key to a sort of immortality there, better than what the Nuit have. You could still be... alive." But he brought himself back to the present test. It was a bit easier to pull himself back from tangents when meditating. With slow effort, he managed to overlay his normal vision with the auristic spectrum, trying with his methodical, measured pace to ingrain the working process into his memory so he could more easily bring it to the fore when he needed it. Her face was suddenly surrounded by light, and again he was surprised at how this augmented Sight revealed beauty that existed in the normal spectrum, but was somehow more easy to recognize now. "I know that I'm Seeing," he said, "but I don't know what I'm seeing. All the markers that I memorized... They just don't seem to apply to what I'm seeing. Poor echoes of reality, I suppose. I will just have to practice. But... I suppose you do seem calm. Tranquil. There's no red or orange agitation..."

[Azilis Theroulde]

“The Flux, huh?” Azilis' breathing was rhythmic and measured even as she felt the buzz of talking in her throat. “That plus magecrafting and auristics...what don't you want to study, Hadrian?” Her tone wasn't sarcastic, it was simply questioning; she truly wondered if, like herself, he wanted to get his mind around every piece of information that happened to cross his path. “To me, though the Flux seems like more than it's worth. It's so easy to overgive, to lose control...to do things you never dreamed you were capable of. And never wanted to be capable of.” Like taking a life, she thought, but didn't say. She was sure Hadrian was intelligent enough to be able to intuit the words left hanging in that sentence. And if it's not someone else you kill, it's yourself. She would have shuddered, but the calm that flowed through her veins like river water prevented her from doing so. “Be careful, okay? I want to hear how that theory of yours turns out, so you'd better keep yourself alive to tell me how it goes.” She quieted when he didn't respond, realizing that he was probably studying her own aura now. Breathe in, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and...out... As she meditated on her own breath, using the sound of it whispering through her lips as a concentrating point, she began to feel her own heartbeat pushing blood and Djed through her body. The image of a willow tree rose, unbidden, in her mind; it was like an inverted drawing of a lung she had once seen, where the bronchi split and then split again, until the labyrinthine vessels disappeared into the cavern of the body. She felt now as if she could feel and sense each one of the tiny branches of her body. But she realized that Hadrian was speaking again, and pulled herself partway from her meditative state. “I...I know what you mean. Nothing you can read ever prepares you for seeing a real aura, does it? All its different nuances...no wonder it's so exhausting. Just taking it all in is an effort in itself.” She felt a slight sting of irritation through the screen of her calm at the thought of expending so much energy and hardly getting anywhere, as had happened so many times in the past.

[Hadrian]

"All right, there's a little irritation now," he noted, but it seemed to flare quietly and disappear. He wished for a moment that his own parents had been professors of magic or something more exciting and intellectually stimulating than a merchant and his socialite wife. Of course, he did understand about complex systems thanks to his father's bits of wisdom regarding macroeconomics, but... "I wouldn't really use the Flux, though. I would probably just use it as a meditative tool. Learning to control the djed within myself, observing, and then applying what I learn to the flow of djed in magecrafting and the like. I mean, that's what I want to do... enchant things. But everything can be incorporated into magecrafting. "Perhaps if I ever mastered Flux, I could use it responsibly, but I don't really stand much of a chance in a fight so hopefully I'll make enough money to afford some good bodyguards if I need them, you know?" It was difficult remaining in a meditative state, holding a conversation, and maintaining his augmented vision, so he took a closer look at her aura so he could let it go, recuperate a bit, and then stop meditating as well. He looked at her again, really looked. The colors were still beautiful, and served to make her more beautiful in his eyes. While he couldn't have detailed specifics, he did feel like he knew her better. Perhaps his unconscious, intuitive mind had picked up information that his conscious mind had not. Time would tell, he supposed. He blinked repeatedly until his vision swam and then went back to normal. He completed a few more rounds of controlled breath before coming back out of his light trance. "I just want to know everything. They told me I had to specialize, so I chose magecrafting because it can incorporate everything... so in a sense, I thought I was cheating my way around the specialization."

[Azilis Theroulde]

Azilis shook her head. “Maybe I should think about magecrafting too, seeing as I feel pretty much the same way you do; I wish I could just study everything, instead of being forced to specialize in something. And what if it turns out I'm not actually that great at what I pick? Then what?” She considered his other, earlier words. “About the Flux, though. That's an interesting thought there.” She quieted for a moment as the gears in her head turned – slower than usual, of course, because of her semi-meditative state. “I guess you're right, though...the more you understand about your own Djed, the easier it'll be for you to apply it to other objects.” She had a thought then – what if she tried to read Hadrian at the same time he was reading her, as he was doing at that moment? Settling back into her sense of her own consciousness, she made another effort to pull Djed into her eyes. It wasn't as strong of a response, seeing as there were only so many times that a novice could go in and out of her regular and auristic vision, but when she did open her eyes, Hadrian's aura flickered in a thousand varying shades around his head. Seeing the complexity of his aura, even there on the surface when she had barely begun focusing, seemed to reflect his mental acuity. As she probed a bit deeper, she felt a strange connection forged between the two of them as she felt a sense of herself thrown back at her. It was an odd experience, to see a person in a way that represented the essence of who they were and know that he was seeing the same about her. Often, she had wondered what her own aura looked like to others – a futile thought, she knew, because each Aurist saw auras differently. Which was dictated, she supposed, through their own unique Djed – the concept Hadrian had spoken of earlier. But now it was as if a tiny corner of herself that she hadn't known was there was exposed to her; although she couldn't really tell what was in it, she had been alerted to its existence. How curious. Stretching her arms and legs, which had been still for too long, she broke off her auristic vision and fluttered her eyes closed. An after-image of sorts still hovered around Hadrian's form, coruscating with blues and subtle hints of purples and yellows, and she blinked until it was gone. A slight headache pressed itself against the inside her her skull, and she knew that later she would pay for trying to do so much with her auristic vision at one time, but she didn't regret it. “Mmm. That was good practice,” she said, her voice placid and her face serene. “What'd you think, Hadrian?”

OOC :

I shall be computerless from this evening until late Sunday or early Monday. Just letting you know so you don't think I've gone and died or something like that. 'Cause that would be bad.

Also, are we...almost done?