Discovery and Transformation (OOC note as well)

Beyond Dominia: The Role Playing Mill: Discovery and Transformation (OOC note as well)

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By /\/\ist Phantom on Tuesday, January 09, 2001 - 01:53 am:

-= January 11, 795 TR =-

/\/\ist Phantom had just finished setting the last stones in place for the Tower of Mist's ceiling a few hours ago. He had been resting and letting his mana sources replenish a little bit and his form stabilize again. Once he finished whatever business that big, planeswalker-esque person wanted him to do, he'd have to start getting some furniture and stuff to fill the Tower. It would probably take him a couple of years to gather all the books he would need to fill the bookcases he was going to put in there. And it would probably take him decades upon decades to learn as much as his old master Dimetrios had known and to attain the same mastery of magic that Dimetrios had once possessed. Thinking about that, following in his master's footsteps, filled him with sorrow as he remembered his master's death over a year and a half ago. If Dimetrios had tried to escape rather than saving him, a lowly apprentice, then his master would still be alive now. And master Trokaire.... /\/\ist shook off his grief and tried to focus on the present again. They were dead now. He couldn't help them now, but the least he could do is try to continue their work and follow in their footsteps.

/\/\ist turned towards the pit beside him and shook off the last of his regret and focused on what he was doing now. He walked down into the pit and down the short tunnel to the entrance of the buried library. He walked down the main hall to the main study where most of the ancient library's books and other materials were. He stepped up to the pedastal with the giant book upon it and went through the process of initiating his telekinesis spell. With the spell up, he telekinetically opened the book and flipped through the first few pages. Then he came to a page that looked like it had some kind of list upon it. 'Probably the index or table of contents or something,' he thought. 'Now, how do I go about deciphering this text?' he pondered. He had learned a 'Universal Language' spell when he was with the crazy old man that would allow him to understand spoken words of any language, except the language of magic.... He would have to modify the spell somehow to decipher this written text, if it was at all possible. Still.....his master Dimetrios had said that one sufficiently skilled could rework and reshape the magical energies of a spell to alter it into a new spell of similar power and effect, it was just a matter of knowing what parts of the spell to modify and how much. Unfortunately, /\/\ist wasn't intimately familiar with the nuances of mana manipulation like his master had been, and had only gleamed the slightest hint at how to do it from observing his master and listening to archmage's lectures on magical theorums and formulae and whatnot. He had a long way to go to become a sage like his master. But he had to give it a try.

/\/\ist Phantom cancelled his telekinesis spell and began to concentrate on his language spell, while looking at the large book before him. He let his sight drift into the ether where he could see the magical aura of the book. He called up the Universal Language spell in his mind and drew upon the mana from the nearby ocean and the sky above. He focused on the spell and channeled the proper mana into it, then held the complete spell before him. He struggled to contain the extra mana for a few more minutes and to delay the spell from activating. He channeled a little more mana into the spell and then began to mentally poke and tug at parts of the spell's energy, altering its shape slightly and hoping that he was manipulating the right parts and not going too far. The mana began to burn through his mind, trying to return to whence it came, but he shoved it back into the spell and pressed it against the book, then released it. As he did so, he let his sight drift back into the normal spectrum and watched the spell take effect. His wraithen form flickered and dimmed slightly from the strain, then stabilized again. A ripple of blue-white energy spread across the pages the book was opened to, and the air about the book seemed to blur and fluctuate as if exposed to a great heat. Then, a cascade of sparkles and flashes, and the air returned to normal. Upon the pages, floating just above the runic text, were words and letters and numbers of glowing blue light in the common language. /\/\ist Phantom all but fell to his knees with weakness, his form flickering again and then stabilizing, and he silently gave thanks to master Dimetrios and to the gods.

When he recovered from the strain and got back up, he re-instated his telekinesis spell and began to read the words upon the book. There must have been a dozen pages of spells alone listed in the table of contents, along with another two pages of other miscellaneous things contained within the great book. As he flipped through the pages, one of the entries caught his eye: a shape-changing spell. And there were nearly a dozen similar spells listed after it. But what really caught his eye was one of the last few shape-changing spells listed: a wraithform spell. He referenced the page it was on and flipped through the massive tome to the correct page. Although the bottom half of the page was covered in odd runes that the modified Universal Language spell apparently couldn't decipher, the upper half of the page was deciphered and described the spell and the required components, gestures, and other nuances of the spell. There were small illustrations of the neccesary hand gestures along the side of the page, and a small footnote at the bottom, below the runic incantation, and deciphered. /\/\ist Phantom was stunned. It described the basics of reversing the spell and making a wraithen creature corporeal again, assuming the creature was ever corporeal to begin with. 'This might be able to make me human again.......' /\/\ist thought in awe. It was several long moments before he recovered and began to read the text upon the page and then skimmed through the other pages around it. It appeared that the scribe who wrote these entries had included details for reversing most of the spells in the tome. It must've taken centuries to learn this much about magic, and decades more to compile all of that into this one, large, universal book on magic. 'It must've been one heck of a large coalition of magi that compiled and wrote this thing,' /\/\ist Phantom thought with awe again. And it had to have been awfully difficult to gather that many magi in one place and get them to work together...

/\/\ist spent the rest of the day and much of the night studying the tome and reading the passages in it before and after the spell listings. When the next day dawned, he realized that in the span of one day, he had read but a tiny fraction of the non-spell passages in the book and that it would probably take a year to read them all, and probably a couple more years to read all of the spell entries. The writing in the book was amazingly small and yet very clear. /\/\ist had spent a few hours studying the runic text and comparing it to the magical translations, slowly getting a feel for the ancient langauge and gaining a slight understanding of its alphabet and composition. But then his Universal Language spell wore off and the glowing blue letters faded away, leaving only the old, runic text upon the pages.
/\/\ist rested for a few hours afterward to let his form stabilize from the effort of using his telekinesis spell.

Then he made another effort at casting and reshaping his Universal Language spell, only more so this time as he tried to decipher the magical text within the book so that he could learn and recite the incantations there. It took him five tries to do it, twice failing miserably and twice nearly matching his previous success, and then finally succeeding. He quickly cast his telekinesis spell and flipped to the page with the incantation for the wraithform spell. Then he gathered together the components he had managed to scrounge up and began to recite the incantation, using what knowledge he had gleaned from the footnote about reversing the effect to modify the spell into an anti-wraithform spell.

It took him many hours and many failed attempts before he had finally figured out through trial and error the exact requirements for reversing the effect, and eventually performed the correct ritual and manipulated the spell correctly to get the desired effect. There was an explosion of light and a loud humming sound, and /\/\ist's world began to blur and grow dark. The flashing and sparkling and humming died down as /\/\ist Phantom collapsed to the floor, enshrouded in a white haze.

********************

Hours later, he awoke to the uncomfortable feeling of the rough, cold, stone floor underneath him. He opened his eyes and slowly stood up, trying to shake the blurryness of his vision and the dizzyness. When he finally recovered, he looked about, wondering what had happened. He felt something odd covering him, and he felt the cold air from outside nipping at his hands and face and chilling him. 'How odd,' he thought as he began to glance down towards the large tome. As he did so, he noticed the faint reflection of something blue upon dusty stone floor and he spun around, expecting to find some creature behind him. But he saw nothing, nothing but a swift streak of blue swinging to the right near the ground. He looked down then as the realization hit him and he saw where the blue reflection had come from. He was wearing his old apprentice wizard's robes, the ones he had worn before his death and resurrection. He lifted his hands up and glanced at them, seeing the pale flesh upon them and gasping. He was human again! He was no longer a wraith!

******************

A few hours later, /\/\ist had closed the tome and left the ruined old library, using his telekinesis spell to move the old metal doors closed. He had spent some time reading a few of the spell descriptions and studying them, trying to understand them well enough to cast without the book. But it would be at least a few more days before he could begin to understand the runic text of the magical language that the incantations were written in, and it would be even longer before he could learn to cast the spells with normal magic rather than the old component-, gesture-, and incantation-needing magicks that the spells were scribed in. He had also thought about many things since returning to his old human form, like how unfitting a name or title '/\/\ist Phantom' was now. He decided to drop that name now that he was his old, original self again, and to take up his old birthname and family name. Arkhandus of house Archeon.

(OOC: From now on I'll be using Arkhandus as the character name for Mist Phantom. It's the name he went by on his homeplane before dying, getting resurrected as a ghost-like being, and getting deposited on Phaema. :) Though I'll still use Mist Phantom as my screen name or whatever for all of my OOC posts and stuff. I've also decided to stop using the odd characters that I put in Mist Phantom's, Shard's, and Necronis' names, because, well, I just had too. It gets kinda annoying always having to type them out and I know nobody else ever uses them anymore. So I figure I ought to stop bothering with them as well. Though the names do still look better with the funky characters. :) Oh, but the demi-god-type-being
/\/\yste will still have the funky characters in his name, for the short time left that I will be using him in my stories and posts. End OOC.)

formerly:
~ /\/\ist Phantom ~
§hard, Sword Mage
Aphiron, Novice Warrior
Traug, Troll Mage
/\/ecronis, Lord of Undead

now:
Arkhandus, Blue Mage
Shard, Sword Mage
Aphiron, Novice Warrior
Traug, Troll Mage
Necronis, Lord of Undead


By Jerreck on Tuesday, January 09, 2001 - 01:10 pm:

Congratulations, Mist! Must feel great to have a body again. :) Nice work!

/Jerreck


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