tushanshu_logs | November catchall | and every city was a gift

Entry tags:

November catchall | and every city was a gift

Characters: Raine Sage, others!
Date: any November
Location: Keeliai, specifically apartment, Healers' Guild, and others
Situation: a few!
Warnings/Rating: none yet, will update if that changes

A | the usual suspects

Raine can usually be found either in her apartment in Earth sector, usually in the evenings or early afternoons of her few off days, or at the Healers' Guild. She doesn't vary her routine all that much, having relaxed a little from the worries of earlier months.

She's normally happy enough to greet people, though if you go to find her at the Guild she may be in her office and rather engrossed in administrative duties or magical research. Or both, where applicable. She is, however, easily roustable for emergencies.

B | others tba as necessary, inquire to Makari

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The majority of the building was in the same style as the hall, if a little more enclosed, somewhat less spacious and airy. Raine led Zatanna along the halls, evidently with a destination in mind.

That wince was a telling one. "Didn't go well," Raine repeated, thoughtfully, reserving judgment in favor of moderate curiosity. "How so? What was your approach, and how did things go wrong?" She could think of any number of possibilities off the top of her head, and it would be important to work through that problem if Zatanna did want to learn healing magic.

Oh, boy. Here we go...

"Well, my family's style is kind of...unique. At least, as far as any other magic style I've ever come across is concerned. We cast all our spells backwards. Nine times out of ten, it works just fine. The worst thing to happen was that I didn't have enough power to carry the spell to completion. But in this instance..."

I was being an idiot.

Never let the shortest batbrat hear her admit as much aloud, though. He'd never let her live it down. ...even more than he'd already refused to, really, considering everything else on his strike list against her.

"...well, I was trying a local cancelation spell. It should have been pretty straightforward. But the translation I read was wrong, and saying it backwards ended up having....the opposite effect." In hindsight, it sounded so obvious. "Rather than cancel out the charms I'd placed around my apartment at the time, it sort of...exploded magical energy all over the Turtle. Took me over a week to fix."

"If the translation had been correct, would it have worked properly?" Raine wanted to know. "Casting a spell backward seems like it might have deleterious effects in more than one circumstance, especially when crossing traditions. In this case, it does sound like it produced almost the exact opposite of what you intended, correct?" But that was with the translation error, as she'd said. Hm. "Do you mean only the... the incantation, then, or do you do every portion of any spell backward?" A pause, and then, seeing no point in being circuitous about the question, Raine followed that up with, "Why is that?"

By this point Raine appeared to have become completely distracted from the tour part of her goal, her feet marking a familiar path and all her attention devoted to the bright and shiny new magical problem that had been placed before her.

That was...a lot of question to which she could only shrug.

Would it have worked properly? A shrug. She had no way of knowing, given that she hadn't tried it again since.

Did it produce the exact opposite of what you'd intended? Yes and no. It had exploded magic when she'd meant to cancel, but the effects had been...pretty wild and random in their own right. Again, quite possibly due to the translation error.

"It's a language. Sort of. Like, if I wanted to fly, I'd say ylf instead. Or, if I wanted to levitate something, I'd say tfil ti pu. I have to say each word backwards, or else the spell won't work for me. It's an old family tradition stemming all the way back to one of my ancestors. He developed it."

"So you only need to reverse the words, not the sequence," Raine said. "How does that affect the casting of non-verbal spells? Can you learn non-verbal spells from others?"

She realized then, somewhat belatedly, that she'd strayed from her initial purpose. "My apologies. You were curious about the Guild. There are facilities both for teaching and for treatment, and both mundane and magical methods of healing are practiced and taught. I encourage everyone who has some capability to stop by to share what they can, even if they don't work here full-time; it's something concrete and helpful that we as Foreigners can do, especially since there are some kedan who can learn our magic. Teaching them has been a fascinating experience."

But Zatanna immediately shook her head at the apology. "No, it's alright. I don't mind talking about my magic."

Especially with a fellow user. She so rarely had the opportunity, after all, and it was always interesting hearing an outsider's perspective to her family's unique traditions.

"I'm sure I can, if I have enough power. I just never tried before. All my spells always had to be verbal, but...I remember my dad being able to cast some nonverbal spells in the past. Of course, he was one of the greatest, so it makes sense he could've done pretty much anything."

She offered Zatanna a little smile. "I'm told I can get carried away when it comes to things like this," she said, and with that little explanation was quite happy to move on to magic.

"My own skills -- my artes -- rely on arranging mana into specific patterns," Raine explained, for context in her own curiosity. "While there is often a verbal component, it's usually a mnemonic, rather than an incantation. This tradition has always been in your family, you said? Do you happen to know how and why your ancestors developed it?"

"That sounds like it requires a lot of preparation."

Which wasn't to say some of her more advanced spells didn't. The collaboration she did with several magic users some time back--now there had been some major prep work, all for a few minutes' worth of magic. But so very worth it, given what they'd learned.

"I know what my dad told me." In response to the question about her ancestors. "See, our ancestor Leonardo Da Vinci was--of all things--a scientist. And an artist, but the science part is especially important because of his journals. Anyways...since he was a young man, he would write all his notes backwards as a form of code. When my dad found those journals and started reading all his spells backwards, he realized that it worked better than anything he'd ever tried before.

"And, as his daughter, I guess I inherited the ability."

"Yes and no." Raine hummed for a moment, a thinking noise, shaping the explanation. "Learning the arte -- its peculiarities, and how much mana must go into it, and the correct shaping -- that takes a while, yes. However, once it's acquired, casting it becomes much simpler. Typically a learned arte takes anywhere from five to thirty seconds to cast, depending on the complexity and the caster's familiarity. The work is in the memorization and the initial acclimation."

Even five seconds could still be a great deal of time in a fight, but it was the rare spellcaster who fought alone.

"You have... a genetically based affinity for a writing habit?" Raine frowned. Surely not, but-- ah. "Ah. You speculate that your ancestor was also like you, and that the information regarding that inclination was simply lost until your father recovered his journals."

Okay, it sounded weird when she put it like that, but hey...Zatanna couldn't argue with the results.

"More or less, yeah. I mean, lots of magic users have their own unique style when it comes to certain spells or ways of casting enchantments. This just happened to be what works for us. I've been speaking backwards almost longer than I've been speaking forwards; it's practically my native tongue."

Raine nodded. It was nothing like she'd ever heard of, but it would be foolish to dismiss firsthand testimony, especially from an experienced mage. Therefore, she would take Zatanna's word for it.

"Stylistic differences do happen in my world, but the underlying principles are usually the same," Raine said, absently. "Making the stylistic differences mostly cosmetic. However, I take it those in your world are a bit more pronounced. You made reference earlier to a translation gone wrong having a deleterious effect; when you cast the spell, was it in the original language?"

She shook her head. "No. It was a translation. I was still speaking it in backwards English. Unfortunately for me, the translation was...slightly off, so that was one of the things we had to fix."

Raine frowned at Zatanna, an expression reflective of working through a problem rather than actually disapproving. "Then, how did you err? If the spell was in a language native to you, and if your magic is based in the words, surely you would have noticed any piece of the incantation that indicated an effect counter to what you desired." Assuming she was nearly as fluent with reversed English, but everything so far had indicated that was so.

But Zatanna shook her head. Only thanks to years of having mulled over ever last detail of that spell in her mind was she able to come up with a proper response to that.

"I didn't realize this at the time, but...I was drawing magical energy from the book itself. It was a token. The translation was written off in the margins, but I was attempting to invoke the actual spell that was written. It was meant to be a cancelation spell, but because I didn't use the precise phrasing required to tell the token what I wanted from it...when I invoked it backwards, it thought I was canceling the cancelation."

"Ah," Raine said, enlightened, and the frown cleared from her face. "Yes, that follows now. Thank you for the clarification."

She had no further queries down that line; she drew her attention back, for the time being, to the Guild, the space around them and Zatanna's initial purposes. "Did you have questions of your own?" she wanted to know.

Zatanna had to stop and think for a second about that. They'd already covered an interesting amount, and the tour she was getting already told her a lot she'd been previously curious about.

"Do you assign your members any homework?"

(It wasn't entirely a joke.)

Raine nodded, herself entirely serious. "While I would like to believe that most people with some experience know the importance of practice to learning a skill, more practically I've observed that the formal assignment of homework has a significantly beneficial effect on the retention of knowledge."

She offered Zatanna a little smile a moment later, wry. "I only assign homework to those who are studying directly with me, however."

The fact that she seemed mostly unaffected by Raine's answers meant two things: (1) she did know the importance of practice. On her own terms, of course. (2) she didn't have any immediate intentions of studying directly under Raine.

"How many students do you have right now?"

"Directly, and full-time? Five." Raine splays the fingers on her full hand by way of illustration. "Those who simply drop in from time to time, or study with other healers, or only assist but don't choose to study or teach-- it's harder to keep track of. There's always work to do, at least."

She nodded. Impressed.

"Not bad at all. You mentioned other healers, though--is Milyn affiliated with you lot at all?"

"Somewhat. This place originally reverted to Milyn, after all, and it was she who ceded it to me." Raine smiled a little, thinking back to the utter confusion following Milyn's declaration. "She assisted me in getting things running, and we cooperate on a variety of things, but technically Milyn is her own sovereign entity."

That she is.

"It's kind of funny how that works out around here. Stick around long enough, and you end up in charge of who knows what? You, with the Guild here. I remember one of the Foreigners is in charge of the Hotel now too. And, of course, there was the Welcome Center. Jack inherited that years ago from...an old friend."

Raine made a sound under her breath-- a quiet, neutral sort of a sound. Thinking. "The Midnight Hotel came with Anton," she said, filling in context. "My theory is that he put so much of himself into crafting it that his soul is somewhat entangled with it-- unless the building itself has a soul, but that's slightly less likely." She'd genuinely considered the possibility, however. "But I don't think you're wrong, either. Many of us have been here long enough to simply be folded into the city like any other."

Not that it didn't still bemuse her, sometimes, when kedan she saw every day greeted her like they were friendly, but it was less and less strange as time went on.

"An old friend?"

"Ah, so that's how it happened."

She had always kind of wondered. Just not enough to ask; there were far too many explanation that would have made sense to her, no matter which one was given.

"Yeah. More Jack's than mine, but she was still really sweet. Her name was Pepper Potts--you know, kind of like the one who's here now, only she was a lot older. She and an older Tony were...umm, how did Jack put it again?" She thought back to the old 'joke' between the three. "His 12% Parents? I think that's what they called it. None of them ever fully explained where that came from to me."

Raine couldn't honestly think where twelve percent came from; it didn't have any immediately obvious mathematical basis. "An inside joke, I suppose," she said thoughtfully, more interested by the other Pepper Potts. "Older? The same woman in the future, or a-- a version of her from a different universe or reality?" It would certainly involve some timeline gymnastics if the former were the case, and she was more inclined to think the latter.

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