The day after the wedding, Figaro Finch (no relation) came into the house for a meeting. He did this every once in a while, mostly to see what wheels he could grease. He didn’t seem terribly happy with his assignment, especially in comparison to Jorge. So far as I could tell, he’d prided himself as […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 140: Commingling
One of the first orders of business, once I got back, was following Bethel’s soul line. I’d been mildly derelict in not doing it earlier, as it was the traditional unlock for Loyalty 10, but I’d had too many plates spinning at once, and in my defense, I hadn’t thought that Bethel would get one, […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 139: Piece of Mind
The knock on my door was a timid one. “Come in!” I called. I was surprised to see Valencia step through. She looked trepidatious, with her hair (white, dyed brown) covering her face some. Her eyes were crimson red, rather than the purple they took on when she put her lenses in. She wasn’t the […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 138: Stats for Nerds II
PHY 8 7 POW 21 Unarmed Combat 21 One-handed Weapons 21 Two-handed Weapons 21 Improvised Weapons 7 SPD 21 Thrown Weapons 21 Dual Wield 0 Stealth 0 Bows 7 END 21 Rifles 20 Parry 20 Dodge 21 Athletics MEN 11 10 CUN 27 Engineering 11 Shields 10 Unarmored 13 Medium Armor 10 KNO […]
Appendix II: On the Nature of Standing
It is now widely know that fame and infamy correlate to extraordinary abilities, but this knowledge was not always so firm and entrenched, especially among uncivilized people. The Djamila believed that their fadi were granted their powers through spirits. When someone started to become stronger or faster, they would say that a spirit had inhabited […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 137: Darili Irid
There were three thousand miles between the Athenaeum of Barriers and Darili Irid. Using a teleportation key for a single dwarf was out of the question. The typical cost for traveling between touchstones in major cities was ten thousand obols, but that assumed that you had four other people who would be splitting the cost, […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 136: Krinrael
“So,” I said as I came into Grak’s room. “I’m giving out hugs today.” Grak stared at me, looking me over. “Why?” he asked. “I thought that you would like one,” I said, switching over to Groglir. “When I left you were upset that Magor wasn’t coming. I can be your krinrael instead.” “Your command […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 135: Holding
We had a debriefing in what Bethel called ‘the conference room’. Even before she had gained the ability to fold space, she liked to go big, making rooms with ceilings that stretched up dozens of feet and more space than was needed for the people and furniture. With the ability to make rooms as large […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 134: Safe Mode
WARNING: CUSTOM LOGIC PROCESS HAS EXCEEDED 90% MEMORY USAGE THRESHOLD. WARNING: CUSTOM LOGIC PROCESS HAS EXCEEDED 95% MEMORY USAGE THRESHOLD. WARNING: CUSTOM LOGIC PROCESS HAS EXCEEDED 99% MEMORY USAGE THRESHOLD. WARNING: CUSTOM LOGIC PROCESS HAS EXCEEDED 512 CONSECUTIVE FUNCTION CALLS. ESTIMATED TIME TO EXIT LOGIC PROCESS WITHOUT INTERVENTION = 5.8 * 10^53 PT. ESTIMATED TIME […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 133: The Critical Path
I was almost out the door by the time the afterglow started fading and I came to my senses. I’d been acting on half-formed ideas and baked-in instinct, not actually thinking about what I was doing. Without any thought applied to the matter, I would have left Raven’s home with sword in hand and commenced […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 132: Uskine Nervedah
It took me a long time to get as many editions of Amaryllis’ books as I did, not just the focused meditation to get their information, and the work I needed to correlate that information to the schema and map it to a physical location within the Library, but actually trekking through miles of corridors […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 131: A Cypress Waits
Skill increased: Library Magic lvl 30! New Virtue: Bookish Instinct! Bookish Instinct: Through focused meditation, you can learn the qualities of the book you’re looking for, so long as it exists within the library, and so long as the quality is part of the current schema. The more qualities of the book you know, the […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 130: The Abject Despair of an Uncaring World
I made it to the soft cap of lvl 20 before the end of the day, at which point I had an instinctive feel for the books and their place within the schema. I would still need the catalog that the librarians were in the middle of constructing, and probably a map (also under construction), […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 129: Schemata
It wasn’t Raven who came back, but Xorbus, the goblin. I had gotten my Library Magic up to level 8 while I was waiting, but stopped as soon as I saw someone’s torchlight joining my own. “Getting anywhere?” asked Xorbus with a toothy smile. “Some,” I said. “I was expecting Raven.” “Bah,” said Xorbus with […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 128: An Open Book
By ‘married’, Bethel apparently meant ‘I am going to irrevocably swallow him and our essential natures will merge’. There were a few equivalents across Aerb, species that would merge with each other and lose individual identity as part of pair-bonding, or who would take on parts of each other as part of the process, but […]