Vitaly S Alexius

Scientific Sorcery : 69 The Teamwork Archetype

“No,” I said. “I don’t trust you.”

“Trust,” Mooni tapped her beak. “Trust can be bought and sold, traded and earned. Trust can be won. Trust like friendship, like any relationship archetype, is transactional. What do you want to know? What do you wish me to tell you for the acquisition of your trust?”

I raised the crystal snowflake to the orb.

“Do you know what this is?”

“Tap the orb with it,” she said.

I did.

The Corvix’s yellow...

Scientific Sorcery : 68 Corvus Analytica

I swallowed nervously.

“Thought so,” Moonalia’s eyes suddenly filled with sparks of tears. “I did tell that dummy not to chase after a stupid dream of a rugged barbarian, to just buy her own champion in Iridium from a respectable Drallus shop. Blargh."

“Why do you think that she’s…” I began.

“I don’t see any of her things,” Moonalia said. “I designed that orb myself, you know. It casts a small, but quite potent Identify pulse upon contact. I am only g...

Scientific Sorcery : 67 Sunbeam

“WHAT?!” I felt like I'd been punched in the gut. "No? What do you mean, no? There has to be a way!"

Stormy just stared at me, offering no further explanation, no elaboration, no solution to the pressing issue at hand.

"Why?" I snarled, losing patience with the kitten. "Why does Teya have to decay away? What was the point of stealing the artifact from that blasted swamp that nearly melted my face off?!"

The kitten tilted her head at me then slowly mewed a single word: "S...

Scientific Sorcery : 66 Aquatic Refuge

We arrived at the North Sea delta of river Glinka just as the sun began to dip below the horizon, painting the sky in hues of orange and purple. The makeshift boat, crafted from hexacite-infused wood, had served us well on our journey down the river. But as we approached the vast expanse of the sea, my heart sank.

In the distance, I could make out the silhouette of our barge, beached on the shore. A lone figure moved methodically across its deck, systematically tearing it apart, searchi...

Scientific Sorcery : 65 The Saviour of Humanity

-=[Chrizantia Malekai]=-

I hung suspended in the void above an ocean of violet stars - the myriads of human souls I had folded into my vast body woven from roots and bogwater. All of them waited to be unfolded back into existence when the time was right… when the world would be filled with far less wrongness, hunger and misery. 

My gaze swept over the hearts of my seven heroes, my heart sinking as I took stock of my losses.

Three of them had somehow been brou...

Scientific Sorcery : 64 Hydrological Hazards

Stormy led me through the treacherous bog with an uncanny sense of direction. 

Her meows and gestures, though sometimes cryptic, guided me past hidden traps, barely visible ghostly webs and dangerous plants. We navigated the dead and rotting forest until we reached a putrid swamp that seemed to pulse with malevolence. Silver, suffocating, sulfur-smelling fog blanketed the air.

Following Stormy's insistent meows, I pushed a rotting tree into the muck and used it as a makeshift...

Scientific Sorcery : 63 Hidden Storm

-=[Stormy]=-

“Intercept the flying sick!” I loudly meowed an order to the river dog just seconds before the sky-flying cat-servant sent his pointy blood-stick flying our way.

Ta-Mya's doggery paw swung up just in time as the stick flew, intercepting the pointy end right before it took off MyOan's head. I ducked just in case, as the stick pierced the big dog paw, going halfway through it and hissing apart when a spray of river dog’s blood interfered with its ...

Scientific Sorcery : 62 Attempted Diplomacy

Teya turned her head my way, clearly unsure how to respond to Ingvar's unexpected praise and invitation. I decided to take control of the situation before it spiraled any further. Perhaps there was no need to murder this hero as he didn’t seem to be fully in on the Gygr’s dark plot as Bobliss had been.

"Jarl Ingvar," I said, "I believe there's been a misunderstanding. We are not your enemies, nor have we stolen anything. The stone you seek, the Galdrasteinn, is not a possession to b...

Scientific Sorcery : 61 The Jarl of Horngard

The last rays of the sun vanished behind thick clouds, plunging Svalbard into an eerie twilight. Silver tendrils of fog began creeping across the land, slithering between the dismantled ruins. Stormy growled from her perch on my shoulder, her fur bristling.

"I know, girl," I murmured, rushing up to the barge via the wooden steps. “It’s time to go.”

I cast a final glance at the smithy and the remains of Svalbard, a pang of sorrow twisting in my chest. 

There was st...

Scientific Sorcery : 60 The Stillwalker

The following days and nights flew by crafting Teya's new form - a massive, dog-like body that stood as tall as a Jotun. The frame was made of sturdy wood, covered in thick leather to make it watertight. I fitted it with another large seat to house her human form, ensuring she could maintain control over this new body. Basically, all Teya had to do was climb onto the dog’s back and strap herself in and then she turned from a mere armored human into a canine tank.

As I worked, I couldn...

Scientific Sorcery : 59 Canine Huntress

As Teya collected a bucket of Chronacist crystals for me, I set up my microscope to examine them more closely.

The crystals were fascinating - according to what Galateya revealed, they seemed to have been produced by blood magic, but unlike Cali's blood-magic artifacts, there were no negative trails or corrupting influences visible within them.

I peered through the lens, adjusting the focus to get a better look at the crystal structure. It was intricate, almost fractal in nature, ...

Scientific Sorcery : 58 The Deconstruction of Svalbard

I carefully bagged the remaining shard of Glinka's megalith shard and carried it into Svalbard's ruins.

As I carefully handled the stone covered in fish and wave-shaped hand-carved runes, I felt a faint tingle of magic, like spikes of electrical current dancing across my skin.

"Alright, Teya," I said, addressing the river spirit through Stormy as I placed her megalith next to the smithy. "To start off, I’ll need your help to unearth everything of value in Svalbard. Everything. D...

Scientific Sorcery : 57 Across One Hundred Thousand Years

I stared at Stormy's paws, still resting on both 'Yes' and 'No' in response to my question about whether I was alive.

"Well, well," I muttered, "looks like I'm Schrödinger's witch. Both dead and alive until someone opens the box... or in this case, rips out my heart and eats it."

The joke fell flat, even to my own ears. The implications of my discovery were too profound, too unsettling.

I turned my attention back to the microscopic crystals I had extracted from my blood. T...

Scientific Sorcery : 56 Animated to Existence

“Teya,” I repeated, watching as the river spirit’s Avatar rearranged itself ever so slightly, a resemblance of a smile. It looked like tears formed on her face made from a thousand minute waves folding into each other.

Stormy tapped the word ‘yes’.

I wondered why the river spirit was crying. Was she afraid of death or was she simply lamenting something that I could not comprehend? 

“Nice to meet you, Teya,” I said.

Then, I waved a hand at the flesh-...

Scientific Sorcery 55 : Karpathy Galateya

"Long, long ago, we were masters of all. The land, the sea, even the endless sky," my grandfather spoke, his voice gravelly with age, "and our people lived on a world called Werth.”

I sat on the lush carpet of furs, warm and content as the fire crackled before us. Grandfather's wrinkled face was animated in the flickering light as he spun his tale, the same one he'd told me a few times before.

“But then came the Voidstorms,” Grandfather continued. “They devoured the sun an...

Scientific Sorcery 54 : My Feline Secretary

Hypothesis: 

Nature Spirits can’t see or hear male witches unless the witch spills his blood in the water to make a deal. Nature Spirits can however see and hear Champions, Sorceresses and kittens.

I extracted the chewed-up remnant of Glinka's megalith from my liquified circle using a rope and my own strength, placing it carefully on the ground. The river spirit hovered above the remnant of her column with a somewhat frustrated body-expression, her ...

Scientific Sorcery : 53 Feline Intervention

There was something wrong with my head.

The hexagrammic, fractal tattoo on the Jarl’s chest pulsated with radiant, ever-folding darkness not allowing me to think straight. I had something… something that could help me stop this monster. What was it? I couldn’t recall.

I watched as a tiny, black kitten rushed across the icy landscape and stopped in front of me, pawing at the black threads dancing through the air, slicing them apart with her little paws.

<...

Scientific Sorcery 52 : The Immovable Man

“What?” Cali hissed back to me. “How is he still alive… Why didn’t the Word unmake him? Explode him again, Ioan! Before he finds out where we are…”

“Clever, clever,” Jarl Bobliss shook his head, his voice calm but somehow carrying itself across all of Svalbard as if every inflection of his tongue made the air itself vibrate. “But not as clever as I. Those were good men that died. You will pay for that, witch.”

He began to advance toward us, walking slowly as ...

Scientific Sorcery 51 : Blightcoal

I expected the fairly basic black gunpowder barrel to explode and to maybe expand the cavern a bit while making a whole bunch of noise to impress Cali with, but the resulting detonation went way above what would have happened back on Earth, behaving almost like dynamite.

Seeing Cali’s utterly shocked face made it all the more worth it, assuring that she would not take me to the curious corvids.

Gunpowder definitely made a hefty argument against being disassembled. ...

Scientific Sorcery 50 : Pyrolysis

=[Callista Liesl]=-

I watched nervously as Ioan continued to chop down trees, his movements methodical and purposeful. 

Why was the Emissary of Heaven chopping down trees? 

Maybe he was judging what it was like to be a woodcutter? Maybe his judgement of everyone and everything on Thornwild would be slow and meticulous, take centuries if not millennia. After all–if we Sorceresses enjoyed unnaturally long lives then the Celestia...