Luca DR

12 – Another magic user (2/2)

Perhaps it was magic. Perhaps it was knowing that with his skills, with his defensive treasure, with his abilities, Albert had nothing to fear from the strangers in the room. Perhaps it was due to what other-Albert hinted at in who knows which video, it was not important, about how having a strong sense of self was like being lost in a mirage. Albert didn’t know. But what he knew was that most of his fears were unfounded. Most of his ideas about the club being a dangerous place, be...

12 – Another magic user (1/2)

[Skill proficiency increased.]

• [Perception IV] -> [Perception V]
• Albert’s notes: can perceive Entropy. Currently UNUSABLE as it results in critical failure of brain’s capacity to understand, inducing a state of altered awareness that can only be interrupted by the skill’s termination due to lack of mana to sustain it.

[Quest: Entropic soup complete.]

“Time is an illusion,” T...

11 – Gathering storm (2/2)

Saturday afternoon. Lunch almost saw Albert eating alone at home, for surely that would have been his fate had he not called his friends over. He had a good time with them, he always did. Marc was teasing Colin about Aubrey, and how Colin might go about trying to seduce her tonight at the club. They were heedless of the fact that mentioning the club only made Albert restless. He had shared with them his irrational fear of the place, but as was the case with all irrational fears it was not rea...

11 – Gathering storm (1/2)

The Quadrangle. A mostly quadrilateral structure built in the middle of a desertic zone, a few hundred kilometers away from Temalas. Its actual location was [REDACTED], for obvious reasons. Inside, the Quadrangle was a sprawl of buildings and different areas. It was similar to how the Pentagon would look like if it was actually a square, and had been passed through a randomizer that shuffled its architectural style, its wings and the functions of the single rooms. What’s more was that there...

10 – Plasticity training (2/2)

Eventually, after some tries and using his phone to take notes, Albert came to the conclusion that there was no logic behind how the glyphs were placed on the circles. He managed to translate them with ease, and it turned out that the outer circle was made of symbols that represented animals while the inner was numbers, but there was no correlation between the numbers and the meaning. Furthermore, the circles could be rotated independently without any indication that a particular configuratio...

10 – Plasticity training (1/2)

The tiny second hand of Albert’s metal watch, a metal circle with barely lines in place of the usual numbers to tell the time, inched closer and closer to twelve. The other hand was striking eleven. It was a morning without classes, but the relief that should have come with the knowledge that Albert was free to play with magic all morning didn’t come. It was the 20th of September, Saturday, the day of the club. There were ways to postpone the fatidic moment, namely one: the gem.

Yet...

09 - Entropy Matters

Friday, September 19th, 2PM.

There was a purple gem to investigate, and a whole morning of missed classes that needed studying. Of course, he could go to college now and attend the afternoon classes but, without knowing what they did in the morning it was kind of a waste of time. Time that was better spent studying the gem, postponing the studying of the college courses to sometime in the future. There was a whole weekend to get back to speed after all, which meant that he didn’t need...

08 – Miracle healer

There was one man Samantha could call her superior. Only one, and she was in his room.

“I need more defense budget.” She stated, towering over his hunched figure.

But as he raised his head from the documents, his face was stern. “Again with this whole Holy War, Sam? The other BSA departments will not be happy. How much more of our citizens’ tax money do you want to spend on your fancy witch hunt? You have your team, you have your division. What you don’t have is results....

07 – Rage fueled battle

The hospital loomed over Albert’s thoughts like an inescapable doom. And yet here he was, stuck in traffic in this hellhole of a city, all because of whatever the military were doing both at the bridge and at the bay. They paralyzed all roads with just two cutoffs, and the whole things was a telltale sign of a larger problem that was not his to fix. Still, it was good to hyperfixate on something, because the alternative was imagining all the scenarios where his gramps was dying and he could...

06 – Room with monsters

Why did Albert ever think that making a magical ball of fire appear in an enclosed space was going to be a good idea?

Albert quickly put out the rapidly spreading flames that were threatening to consume his bedsheets and hid the evidence in his closet, opening the windows to let the smell of burning disappear. The cold evening air was enough to clear his thoughts and calm his pounding heart. More than the scare, more than the thought of how he was going to deal with the burnt sheets, mo...

05 – Beyond superstition

The BSA-operated satellite hovering in a geostationary orbit above Temalas City was like an all-seeing panopticon, its lenses particularly crafted in a way that allowed them to spot Events before they could fully form. The technology was classified, but it came as no surprise to anyone who knew what the satellite did that there was magic involved. Its tireless glass eye spied and observed the surface of the earth every hour of every day, ready and watchful. Always. When the surge of energy, h...

04 – Three types of magic

Albert had come to think, in a catastrophically erroneous manner, that whatever magic he acquired via a skill video was completely instinctive and could be used on a whim. This was not, however, the case and the problem reared its ugly head right when he was in a pinch and needed magic the most. It happened during his return trip home, following a night out with his friends. He avoided touching upon the matter of magic with them, for now, at least until he had enough to show them to prove tha...

03 – The egg

“This looks just like the other ones.”

Samantha Cromwell towered above her colleagues on her high heels, worn with the casual ease one would wear sneakers when going around town. At the worksite, she looked completely at home, her unusual wardrobe choices not bothering her in the slightest. Something that could not be said about the other military men who had been brought to secure the bridge after the event. They were all trained personnel, and each and every one of them was famili...

02 - Flexing muscles

There was a race of sentient stone, inhabiting a separate plane of existence from our own. They were the Lithoids, and among them a faction was the most powerful of them all: the Pilgrims. Their only purpose was to eliminate blasphemous presences from anywhere they could reach. Organics, among all, were their worst enemies.

***

Albert struggled to keep himself awake through yet another day of classes. It was not that he didn’t like studying per se, but compared to magic it certa...

01 - Skill video

Nobody knows when the Bureau was founded. Nobody knows how far it extends. But when the first Egg was found, a team was swiftly sent to investigate. Faster than it should have been possible, even with the fastest planes.

And then they were gone, before anyone could ask questions. It was the first of the Tier One events, the first wave of what would soon become a global disaster.

[New quest]

• Quest: feel the flow of mana in the world. 2023-05-10 16:27:12 +0000 UTC View Post