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a heavy rain falls
WHO: Fox and OPEN
WHEN: Catch-all for July
WHERE: On the Journey to Taravast
WHAT: Tattoos, magic, chatting - whatever your heart desires
WARNINGS: will add if they come up
Fox spends a lot of his time bothering Karsa, trying to learn as much as he can from her despite her tightened guard. The magic here is different, and it's taking a frustratingly long time to parse it, but he's starting to at least be able to grasp the edges of it. She shows him what runes to use for the spell he offered, and that tiny clue is what he clutches as he works into the night.
He has a bad habit of not watching where he's walking, lost in thought as he scribbles in a little notebook that he bought before they left Sa-Hareth. It isn't ideal. It's too small, his thoughts too big - the almost seem to tumble off the pages as he hastily scribbles. But then he also nearly walks off the edge of the narrow stairs... Hopefully someone is around to catch him.
He's more subdued than he was, before the siege, though when he realizes he's being watched he does his best to keep up his usual cheerful demeanor. This had all felt a little like a game, at first. A dangerous game, but still a game. A puzzle for him to figure out how to solve, one in a long line of many. Now, he's not so sure.
Now, he's worried that neither this world or himself will come out the same now that he's in it.
[ ooc: feel free to make your own prompts, or hit me up and ask me to write you one in particular! ]
WHEN: Catch-all for July
WHERE: On the Journey to Taravast
WHAT: Tattoos, magic, chatting - whatever your heart desires
WARNINGS: will add if they come up
Fox spends a lot of his time bothering Karsa, trying to learn as much as he can from her despite her tightened guard. The magic here is different, and it's taking a frustratingly long time to parse it, but he's starting to at least be able to grasp the edges of it. She shows him what runes to use for the spell he offered, and that tiny clue is what he clutches as he works into the night.
He has a bad habit of not watching where he's walking, lost in thought as he scribbles in a little notebook that he bought before they left Sa-Hareth. It isn't ideal. It's too small, his thoughts too big - the almost seem to tumble off the pages as he hastily scribbles. But then he also nearly walks off the edge of the narrow stairs... Hopefully someone is around to catch him.
He's more subdued than he was, before the siege, though when he realizes he's being watched he does his best to keep up his usual cheerful demeanor. This had all felt a little like a game, at first. A dangerous game, but still a game. A puzzle for him to figure out how to solve, one in a long line of many. Now, he's not so sure.
Now, he's worried that neither this world or himself will come out the same now that he's in it.
[ ooc: feel free to make your own prompts, or hit me up and ask me to write you one in particular! ]
no subject
It's enough to distract him from the fact that he nearly just about walked off a cliff. Oops.
He looks over - then down - at his rescuer, and gives a sheepish, apologetic look. "Ah--" He glances down at his notes, where the sudden abrupt action has caused him to draw a streak of ink right across the page. "-- Ah." He looked back up at Five again.
"... Sorry. Yeah. Just trying to get my thoughts sorted out, I guess." He helplessly blew over the pages, drying the smudged ink, feeling and looking embarrassed.
"Um - thanks, though. For you know. Not letting me walk off a cliff."
no subject
"Yeah, well. Don't count on me being there every time." He doesn't plan on spending half of this trip catching people from falling off of cliffs, though with the creatures flying around, he expects it won't be the last one. It's not worth the flack he'd get if he let them get picked off when his ability makes it so easy to grab them first.
There's always a sort of awkwardness around Fox. He can't really tell if it's him, or if it's the agreement he has with Mingyu that perpetuates the feeling. But he doesn't move away as quickly as he might have if he weren't interested in the pages he's holding that he can't quite make out.
"Are you getting anywhere with that?"
no subject
He knows he's the one to blame for every dark turn Mingyu had taken in the years between.
Thankfully Five breaks the awkward silence with the best possible question he could ask.
"Oh! Um - yeah, sort of!" He holds the book so that five can see it, but - that doesn't help. Like all of his notes, Fox has written them in his own personal code - half mixing Korean and English and then inscribing it all in his own symbols to boot.
For someone who was very vocally supportive of teaching everyone magic, he was very careful about who or what could read his work.
"I've been trying to get Karsa to teach me how to thrall. As far as I can tell, I should be able to do it - it doesn't seem to be an inherent power thing - not like you and your sister. It is definitely teachable, she just - um - well she's touchy about it. I think she thinks I'm trying to undermine her work? Or something? So it's slow going. But she did show me--" He flips backward several dozen pages, then shows Five the contents. These runes look nothing like anything else in Fox's book - smudged by charcoal rather than ink. "I showed her the spell I was working on, and she sort of - fixed it. I mean, I was trying to cast on the thralled quartz's, yeah? And it always gets tricky layering one kind of magic over another, especially when the original enchantment was made in a way I haven't figured out yet. But I wanted to be able to piggy back it, so she edited my work with these."
no subject
If nothing else, he solved the mystery of what they've been talking about. Though he still hasn't grasped magic enough that it's clear what that means by 'thralling' and how that relates to the quartz, or if he's even talking about the same thing he started with.
"And if you succeed, what are you trying to use it on?" He hates having to ask such basic questions, but he did offer to teach him before, when he was helping his sister. He's learned what subjects he'll speak openly about.
no subject
"The most useful thralling that we've seen so far is the communication network that they have between quartz. I want to figure out if - well, if I can piggy-back on those enchantments. Or if I can use thralling to trigger magic at further distances. Or if I can use it to boost the power of my own spells. But first and foremost I think it's important for us to be able to talk to each other without anyone listening in." He glances up, then, and back, just to make sure none of the rest of the caravan were in earshot, and then he drops his voice.
"Not that I don't think these people honestly want to help us, but... We're going somewhere where we have to pretend we're working against each other, right? We need secure lines of communication that we know are secure."
no subject
Longwinded turns out to be right, but in this case, he's tolerant because he's interested in what he has to say. Once he gets a better sense of his use of the word, he has to wonder again why Karsa would even choose to point him in the right direction. From what he knows of Fox, that's a slippery slope, and he doesn't doubt he'll keep at it until he figures it out. At least, that's what Five would do in his position. So why does it benefit her to trust them?
He doesn't muse on that very long when Fox lowers his voice. His expression is enough to reveal what he thinks about giving them the benefit of the doubt for wanting to help them, and his eyes narrow further when he reveals why he's interested in a secure line of communication.
"That would be ideal," he says slowly. Of course, that would only be trusting someone else with the same issue. Unless he can understand how the magic works, he'd be accepting what he's told on blind faith. "How close are you to being able to test it?"