diatuooc | Test Drive #3

Test Drive #3

Lightning Crash

The weather over the floating island of Ascelion during spring months is best described as "hellacious"; its elevation puts it right among the worst of stormclouds and fuels their thunderous fire as they sweep past it and electrically scrape against its sides. Rain is frequent, but lightning is almost constant, along with thunderous rumbles that roll across the city and the open spaces of the Magicademy like waves.

But today is particularly bad. Webs of electricity crackle through the sky, jumping from cloud to cloud or grounding themselves on towers of the Magicademy angrily. None of them seem to endanger the students, but there's a first time for everything, isn't there? As titanic fury threatens to tear the sky in half, do you risk stepping into the outside? Does the infrasonic rumbling trigger fear or terror in your gut, as such deep waves are known to do? Perhaps you've learned a spell that will protect you. Or perhaps you've poorly learned a spell that may or may not protect you...

Wand Wrong Way

The rumors around campus speak of a small and musty store deep in the Merchant District, on a side road to a side road, where only those in-know go to find items that would surely draw too much notice if displayed publicly. Powdered dragon tail, eye of sphinx, swords Forged with magic-cutting spells, and most valuable of all, the Gateway Wand. Surely this legendary wand, in which the full power of Sundering hums, could get you and your friends back home.

Rumors are pretty lousy with directions, though. The Merchant District offers ample chance to get lost, to get distracted, or to stumble down the wrong alley and find hoodlums all too eager to extract "tolls" from the lost and seemingly helpless. Does your adventure become disaster? Does this rumored shop even exist?

Pantalones Giganticus

At its heart, Modification seems like the most simple of schools. What could be more simple than arithmetic? Therefore, Modification also has the steepest and most shocking learning curve of all, as it rapidly balloons to more complicated mathematical expressions, more variables in the formulae, and above all more chance for error.

So really, the mistake is an honest one. Any hurried student, probably in their third or fourth year of study, could accidentally introduce an unnecessary factor into their equation. That is probably why your pants are now sized for someone four times large than you. (Not four sizes. Four times.) Worse, this has happened to EVERYONE -- the entire population of the Magicademy, student and staff and faculty alike, are trundling around in blown-up bloomers, too-large trousers, not-conveniently-sized knickers... you get the idea.

Now the bad news: to fix the error in formula and restore your pants to normal size, someone else has to get in them with you.

Labwork

Not every magical disaster is caused by some wayward student you don't know. Many of them are caused by you instead. To wit: you're on the spot in one of the magical labs, being called on to demonstrate a technique more advanced than others you've mastered so far. Failure is expected, and the wards should prevent any injury to others from a miscast spell. But will the sparks of your magic just sputter out and die? Or will you inadvertently mispronounce, misform, misshape, or miscalculate in a way that brings chaos to you and your lab partner?

(You could also manage to succeed in casting the spell, but that isn't very fun.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Yes please, and thank you." She nodded at Yuki as he affirmed that yes, he had used the Western form in his introduction. Isabel did try to do her best to be polite, after all. She moved her things over to his table carefully, pushing in the chair at the one she'd just vacated, and then sat down again.

"I really don't know, I was just exploring a bit, first. And trying to find the store where the wand's supposed to be. I suppose I'm not in a hurry to go home, but I would like to get there eventually. Just with a little adventure under my belt beforehand, you know?"

She can't help but grin and shrug at him, then. Isabel well knows she's not a very typical teenager, but she's not really apologetic about it. She is what she is.

Once she sat down Yuki followed suit. And he did listen to what Isabel was saying about adventure. Sure he could understand, because maybe she didn't have important things to go back to, or maybe she was just the adventurous type.

"It might be considered an adventure just to be in a different world, away from everyone and everything you know." And while Yuki himself was now free of the Sohma cage he'd been wanting to get away from forever, the family wasn't the reason that he wanted to go home.

So that prompted his next question. "Were you able to find out anything about the wand's location?"

Mostly, she was just the adventurous type, so he'd hit that particular nail on the head. At Yuki's next words, she nodded. It was an adventure!

"And no one knows me, either, which is kind of nice." At least on Earth, being an heiress wasn't always all it was cracked up to be. Isabel really wasn't the spoiled socialite people thought she was.

But when he asked her about the wand, she shook her head. "Not more than it's supposed to be somewhere in a shop in the merchant district. So that's why I came out here to look for it." If she found it, though, she'd bring it to the attention of those who wanted to hurry home. Even if she didn't feel like she wanted to.

Her words about no one knowing who she was had Yuki look up at her and stare for a moment. But then he realized staring was rude and so he immediately looked elsewhere. He hadn't quite thought of being in this place as somewhere no one knew him. And if no one knew him here, that was freedom. And that was something he'd always wanted and hadn't been able to achieve back home. But he still wanted to go back.

When Isabel stated what she knew of the wand, it was pretty much what he'd already known so there was nothing new there, but his thoughts were about finding the wand. But then he smiled slightly.

"Then that means we'll just have to find it."

Edited 2019-04-01 05:57 (UTC)

"It'd be easier if we had more details, but I guess we'll just have to comb the place...You were writing. Have you got any ideas as to where to start?"

It was a good guess more than anything else, but Yuki seemed the studious sort. To Isabel, that was no bad thing. She herself was a bit more analytically minded than either of her parents--but it also meant that no one who knew her parents really expected that of her. And really, she liked it that way.

"Maybe we should start by looking at shops that seem really esoteric. Like if it has a stuffed alligator hanging in the window." Like really old-style apothecaries, back on Earth. It was a thought, even if it didn't exactly pan out.

In answer, Yuki pulled out his notebook and flipped to the pages he'd been working on before having Isabel sit with him. But he shook his head.

"I really don't have much written down other than the different rumors. I even asked the lady in the shop but she didn't have any information either." This was said with a movement of his silver head towards the entrance.

But as he listened to Isabel, he couldn't help but picture something that would probably be hiding in Saki Hanajima's closet. "It probably would be a stuffed alligator, one that was previously alive."

Test Drive #3

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