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

"That... is a heart....?" she asked, her eyes now locked on it like it was the only thing in the universe that mattered. And there was so much... longing... in the word heart when she said it.

"Kinda? It keeps my heart from dying at least," replied Tony. "Keeps tiny shards of metal from digging into it, and tearing it open like melted cheese."

"That... can save a heart...?" she whispered, awed. Then her shoulder slumped a little. "But... not replace it."

"It's powerful though," replied Tony. "17.5 Gigajoules of pure badassium. Enough to power life for twenty years. To me, this is basically a heart to me."

She looked up at him, her voice quiet and sounding like everything might depend upon his answer. "You... made this? You... can make hearts?"

She had always presumed that a heart looked more like Kingdom Hearts....

"In a way, yeah, yeah I can kid. Just depends on how you use it." said Tony.

"Could...." she rested a hand on her chest and looked down. She knew what Axel had said... but... if she had a heart she'd know it, right? Maybe the others did. But she was a failure of an experiment, not even a real Nobody. But maybe...

"Could you build a heart... for someone who never had one?" she sked, softly.

"Maybe. A heart's a tricky thing. I can maintain one through science, but building a real heart? Well, that's a science that I'm still working out the bugs on." replied Tony. "For me though, what defines a heart, is what's inside you, the feelings you get when you feel like you need to protect someone."

"It's that tight ball of emotions within that really truly makes you whole."

She closed her eyes and nodded, her hands falling to her sides. "Then someone like me without emotions and without a heart... will never be whole." She had already known that, so she should be okay with hearing that now. Right?

"I dunno kid... you're doing a pretty good job being sad and disappointed right now," said Tony. Tossing her the device, he said, "If that's not a sign of having a heart, being disappointed at something? That's an emotion. One that every kid experiences when they're told they can't have something. Here. Have a heart. It's not much, I can get by on my own. Call it a early Christmas present kid."

He grinned. "I can get along just fine on this weird magic heart of mine. Why can't you have a mechanical one? A heart's a heart, but you've already got one. You just proved it to yourself."

She caught it on reflex, holding it like it was precious, but she looked up at him confused. She shook her head. "The emotions Nobodies think we feel.... they're just shadows of memories, aren't they?" Well, Axel had said that the whole not having a heart thing was something of a lie, but she had a hard time believing it. And even if that were true for the others... she was different. She was even further from human than they were.

Her fingers curled around it, a million questions in her head. But she thought they should establish one thing first. "I'm not... I'm not a person. And I'm not a kid. I'm a year old already." More or less. Three hundred something days back home, then about two months here. Roxas would know the exact number.

She rubbed a finger carefully across the heart she now held, trying to figure out which of the many questions about how she was supposed to use a heart she should ask first, when another question came out before the others. "And... what... is a christmas present?"

Was that like the icing on the cake?

Test Drive #3

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