[DungeonMeshi]Shielding & Shedding I
Jun. 16th, 2024 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plotdogPart one - shielding
Marcille was so absorbed in her newly borrowed scrolls that she didn't realize the room had been dead silent for a while. She wondered if Falin had left. But she was still there, sitting on the windowsill, and came up with the bare hint of a smile when Marcille met her eyes.
"You finished the cookies?" She asked.
Falin nodded.
"How do you like them?"
Falin hesitated. Just before desperation hit Marcille, she said slowly. "I like the texture... Moist. Contrasts to the crunchy chocolate inside—which is good!" Hurrily, she supplemented, "The bitter taste balances out the sugar powder on the outside!"
Marcille sighed. "I knew I shouldn't use ready-made choc bits. Just wait and let me make another batch after I learn how to melt chocolate without burning it..." She got out of the chair.
"You mean now?" Falin scratched her nose and then belly, "I'm not sure I can take any more..."
"But I must come up with perfect cookies to bribe the bishop!" Marcille cried, "Only two days left, and I still can't make anything presentable, or anything I'd like to have for myself. Myself!"
It was true. She knew Falin was tasting for her out of goodwill, and maybe with strong control over her palate reactions. A normal person, or a picky person, like the bishop, would just frown upon the plate of ungodly waste of dough.
"Oh, Marcille..." Falin walked over quickly to lend her a shoulder to lean on. "It's not that bad, and..." She stroked Marcille's hair and tucked the loose strands into the hairband. "You can always buy from a boutique shop, right?"
"I wish it was that simple." Her voice was muffled on Falin's shoulder. The little schoolgirl had grown up so tall before she realized. "Old clown can tell."
The old clown held power over half potions of the continent, and Marcille was desperate to land her a job after her untimely departure from the school. If only they waited a bit longer for the diploma... If not for Falin's stupid brother...
Marcille shivered as an idea flashed through her mind. "You brother," She held Falin's shoulders to look her in the eyes. "Go grab him!"
"What's about brother Laois?"
Clouted her own hand with the fist, Marcille blamed herself for not coming up with the idea sooner. "He can eat, right? And," she closed her eyes halfway. "Isn't he still owing me for... for stealing you away? This can be his repayment."
Although hate to admit it, making him eat those cookies can be a nice punishment.
"Well..." Fallin began to stammer out a reply, but fell silent and looked another way to avoid Marcille's stare. "He's in a bad shape, though."
"What happened?" That's strange, for Falin had come back from the dungeon alive and well, with their task completed. Not missing an arm or anything.
"I...it's a... I don't know how to put this right, but..." Falin took a deep breath. "He just got dumped."
Marcille raised her eyebrow, "Yeah..." She waited, but Falin wasn't putting in more details. "How is this relevant?"
Falin said sheepishly, "He was taking it so bad that he can't leave the room."
That's even stranger. In the brief interaction Marcille had made with the tall-man, she didn't realize he was the sentimental kind. Or the vulnerable kind. She saw a well-attired tall-man without a blemish or worry on his face and assumed he didn't feel things. Is this yet another prejudiced speculation she had made over other species?
She didn't want to become that kind of elf.
"Oh, I didn't realize." Marcille couldn't find a word.
"That's alright. It might be a good thing for him. Really. She was very cruel to him in the end."
"Who is she?" Although she didn't want to pry, Marcille asked.
"The mage in our team." Falin saw the drastic change on her face and chuckled. "I know, right?"
"Your brother didn't look like the kind who would mess around in his own team."
"Yes, most unfortunately... But here he is, breaking his heart." Falin sighed. "He's very sensitive, actually..."
Again, Marcille had a difficult moment to relate the word to the tall blond guy from her memory. Her face must betray her thought, for Falin was looking at her with an amused expression.
"You don't buy it, am I right?"
"I don't buy it." No longer able to keep it in, Marcille yelled, "But he is just... a guy, you know? And didn't you say something about him in the army?"
"He got bullied a lot in the army."
"Bullied for what? Being 6 feet tall, or from a wealthy family?"
Falin scratched her chin again, nervously. "I... I didn't think so. He just didn't get along with them and had trouble blending in their circle. Even now, I could hear him twisting around at night having bad dreams, and half of them were about the army. Or alerted at certain words, which I learned later were the terrible names they called him then."
"Hum," Marcille considered. "Has he always be like this?"
"Like...?"
"It sounds to me that your brother is very bad at confronting people. Easily exploited. Remember that time he got stabbed when he was delivering consideration money to your former member?"
Falin nodded quickly. "He always said that was a good friend and a trustworthy ally!"
"How long has he been like this?"
"Been like... what?"
Marcille counted as she spread out her fingers, "For one, blind? He's like what, forty? For all I know, it's about age for a tall-man to mature. He should be able to tell if someone has ill intentions towards him, let alone how obvious they are!"
"Twenty-four." Falin corrected helpfully.
Marcille ignored her, "And two, allowing other people to harm him. Look at him! He got all the advantages, and he didn't know how to use them. I'm not saying that he should be the bully, but at least it shouldn't be too difficult to protect himself from harm, right? It's unbecoming."
"I know, it's just how brother is like. He would protect anyone in the team, but not himself." Falin sighed.
Marcille didn't buy her overestimation of her brother's morality. It could simply be from stupidity.
Falin continued, "And I don't think trusting people is a bad quality." And before Marcille could interrupt, she went on, "Brother Laois did nothing wrong for trusting people, for having a bad time in the army, for falling in love with the wrong people, for escaping from an ununderstanding village... He was hurt, and blame shouldn't be on him!"
There was something sparkling in her eyes. And when she was like this, Marcille could not fight back. Why did she spell it out, anyway? Did she have to be the bad person to point out the obvious?
"I understand, but the world around him isn't going to change magically. Most people just change themselves... Wait."
Marcille paused.
Falin ducked her head, looking at her and waiting.
"Yes, the world isn't going to change magically, so what if," Marcille spoke quickly, too afraid to get lost in her strands of thoughts, "we change your brother magically?"
"No!" Falin yelped, "What are you sugg..."
"No hear me out," Marcille put a hand on Falin's mouth to keep her out of the way, "No, we're not changing him, nor the world. What if we just change things between them, like..." She ran off to grab the ink and scroll from the desk. Falin followed her closely.
"Look, we all know the basics of senses. Something projecting its manas from afar, and people are on the receiving end of the projection. Receive it with eyes, then it's a sight. Receive it when ears, and it's a sound. Some people like you and me have magic senses, and we can tell the flows of magic in the air." She turned back, and Falin was staring at her, unblinking, focused in a slightly creepy way.
Marcille continued, "Although had been argued on its credibility, some believe 'feelings', 'emotions', or in a broader sense, 'intentions' are also a result of mana projection. But unlike sounds or images, it's harder to capture. It's possible that 'intentions' run on a higher plane, a bit like magic. Funny, right? All the sayings about love is like magic. And I've got proof, for I have measured it."
"Measure? I don't understand...?"
Marcille burst out laughing. "Yes, I did it! It was in one of my post-graduate projects, and although I didn't get a distinction grade as expected," she coughed, "The board didn't see the potential in my research, but they can't deny the statistics in my report... Look." She began to scribble on the parchment. "Shame that I can't bring all the papers across the sea, but it's all in my brain." She poked her temple with the feather end of the quill.
Falin tilted her head in curiosity when looking at the illustrations before them. "Is this a windowpane?"
Marcille nodded, not without reservation, "Yes, I...borrowed it from the restroom."
"That's alright."
"And then I found a reagent that is specially liquified from smoky quartz. Smoky quartz has a stabilizing quality, and that makes it suitable for making vials for soul-containing purposes. After liquidation, these qualities are even more concentrated. Not a soul, or a shred of mana could travel past the material. Do you get that?"
Falin nodded. "I suppose I do. Were you testing its ability to shield emotions?"
"That's just the first section in the research proposal. The board could never be happy with a yes/no conclusion. With reconfiguration spells, I tuned the liquid to wrap itself tightly on the window. Yes, it's still in a liquid form, because then I punctured small holes on the foil, like this," She began to draw dots on the paper, "they had to be lined up evenly, and adjustable, so I could tell what is the shortest distance between holes for the mana to penerate through."
Falin's eyes lightened up, "But... how can you isolate the 'feeling' mana from sounds and sights, and how can you determine it does come through?"
Marcille rubbed her temple, "Well I didn't isolate it, actually... But I did manage to keep the quantity of mana stable." She's a little embarrassed. "I punched a gnome girl in the face and recorded her yelling with a music box. She was mean to me at the time, by the way. All for the research purpose."
"All for the research, for sure," Falin repeated, not without teasing.
"Anyway, I put the record on one side of the glass, blindfolded myself, used an ear protector, and stood on the other side of the glass, while I tuned the quartz foil until I felt I hint of annoyance. And shame."
"Could they come from the experiment itself?"
"Oh, come on!" Marcille glared at Falin, who had the nerve to giggle at her review of a very sophisticated, thorough experiment. "I also recorded different emotions, like laughter, sorrow, disgust, fear... in the end, I got the same emotions as I recorded. All of them. But guess what?" She smiled, as if she just won an argument, "their 'gaps' are different!"
"The gaps between the holes for them to pass through?"
"Yes! Mild emotions, like sorrow and gentle pleasure, require smaller gaps, while anger and scare require larger. Isn't that amazing?"
Falin bit her own fingers while she was taking in the facts. "That sounds about right... But did you take samples from different people? Could the result vary between different research objects with different mana strengths?"
"I thought about it, so I did manage to isolate three groups of records solely contributed by three people." She counted, "Well, myself, the cleaning lady from our dorm, and there's a guy from the class, who took interest in the subject."
Falin tilted her head. "Is that so?"
"Well, at first I thought so, but..." She waved it off, "That's not important, and he's not important, either. As it turned out, our different mana strength did cause a variation in length between the gaps. But in general, it's still the same: milder emotions, smaller gaps; sharper emotions, larger gaps. And the gaps are actually proportional to our manas. I'm the strongest, and my sharp emotions will need the largest gap to come through. The cleaning lady is a half-foot, and had the weakest mana, so basically some of her feelings couldn't even come through, because I simply couldn't drill the holes any closer. As it for the guy..." Marcille sighed.
"And the guy?"
"Now think about it, it was the bad decision to invite him over that had ruined it." She rubbed her temple and sat down on the chair. "His readings were strange. A gnome with a mana level between an elf and a half-foot, but with the emotion gaps that were so far away that almost didn't even fit in the panel. Later, I found another gnome for the same experiment and got the data that was in the middle, which aligned with my hypothesis. But I was honest enough to submit all the results and provided another theory for future research, that the guy wasn't genuine when he was at the experiment. Fake his actual emotions and so on. And yes, none of the board bought it."
"I think I understand you now," Falin hummed happily, "How you plan to help Brother with it!"
"Wha...right," Marcille almost forgot about the business with Falin's brother in the heat of the speech, "about helping your brother. What have you got?"
Falin bowed down and fetched the quill from Marcille's hand. She drew a tiny person on the paper with a smiley face. "So this is my brother, and this," She drew a dotted line around the figure, "Is an emotion shield."
"Emotion shield?" Marcille got a little anxious. "But we can't just make a quartz bubble around him. Can we?"
"Not quartz, no. But look, haven't we learned a few combat skills to block the opponents' spells?"
"Yes, but the spells are concentrated and rapid while the em... Oh, I got your point." Marcille, too, eyes widened at the surprise of epiphany. "They are from the same source! Just on different speeds and planes!"
"Yes, yes, look at it." Falin drew a thick arrow towards the dotted bubble, "This is a Thunderbolt, fast and fierce, and to hold a countering shield will drain a great resource from the cores of mages."
"And the emotion is much, much weaker than a Thunderbolt." Marcille hurried to the cabinet to fetch an ink pen. She came back and drew a thinner line beside Falin's. "And it only requires bare minimal mana to keep it up."
"Actually, Marcille, I think it will be better if you draw it like this," Falin drew a thin, wavy line with an arrow end to the bubble, "This resembles a milder emotion——slow and gentle, like happiness, which requires smaller gaps to go through. And for stronger feelings, like anger, desperation, or as you speculated, affection in false pretense, will be like this," she drew another line with precipitous waves that were almost vertical. "Hit the threshold."
"And blocked out." Marcille finished her thought.
"Yes."
"Yes."
They both went silent for a while.
"So do we..." After a long, awkward silence, Marcille stuttered. "Do we... Can we perform this on your brother?"
Falin smiled, "I mean, it's a good idea, but not without proper test runs. And his permission."
Marcille squeezed out a smile, "...Sure, lesson 101 for the clinical magic, right?"
Falin stood up, "I think I need to talk to him about it first, or you might waste your time."
"NO. No... Let me do a test run real quick. Or he might be disappointed... if this doesn't work at all."
"Oh, dear Marcille..." Falin sighed, "Don't you need to work on those cookies?"
"Cookies?" Marcille was taken back, and then she laughed. "Who cares about an altar job when I can bring the research on the field? And oh, Falin, buy me the cookies from the boutique shop when you're on your way back anyway."
Falin was confused. "So you still want the job...?"
"No," Marcille clenched her fists in excitement. "Just to make sure the joy from delicious food was measured correctly."
NOTES:
THAT TIME MARCILLE INVENTED INCEL SPELL
I wasn't afraid of writing her as a nerd. I was afraid I wasn't writing her nerdy enough.
btw I was about to write something like the Death of King Arthur, full of love & betrayal and wheeeee i got stuck on a trail of thought and here we go, marcille and falin having cookies and brainstorming incel curses
Marcille was so absorbed in her newly borrowed scrolls that she didn't realize the room had been dead silent for a while. She wondered if Falin had left. But she was still there, sitting on the windowsill, and came up with the bare hint of a smile when Marcille met her eyes.
"You finished the cookies?" She asked.
Falin nodded.
"How do you like them?"
Falin hesitated. Just before desperation hit Marcille, she said slowly. "I like the texture... Moist. Contrasts to the crunchy chocolate inside—which is good!" Hurrily, she supplemented, "The bitter taste balances out the sugar powder on the outside!"
Marcille sighed. "I knew I shouldn't use ready-made choc bits. Just wait and let me make another batch after I learn how to melt chocolate without burning it..." She got out of the chair.
"You mean now?" Falin scratched her nose and then belly, "I'm not sure I can take any more..."
"But I must come up with perfect cookies to bribe the bishop!" Marcille cried, "Only two days left, and I still can't make anything presentable, or anything I'd like to have for myself. Myself!"
It was true. She knew Falin was tasting for her out of goodwill, and maybe with strong control over her palate reactions. A normal person, or a picky person, like the bishop, would just frown upon the plate of ungodly waste of dough.
"Oh, Marcille..." Falin walked over quickly to lend her a shoulder to lean on. "It's not that bad, and..." She stroked Marcille's hair and tucked the loose strands into the hairband. "You can always buy from a boutique shop, right?"
"I wish it was that simple." Her voice was muffled on Falin's shoulder. The little schoolgirl had grown up so tall before she realized. "Old clown can tell."
The old clown held power over half potions of the continent, and Marcille was desperate to land her a job after her untimely departure from the school. If only they waited a bit longer for the diploma... If not for Falin's stupid brother...
Marcille shivered as an idea flashed through her mind. "You brother," She held Falin's shoulders to look her in the eyes. "Go grab him!"
"What's about brother Laois?"
Clouted her own hand with the fist, Marcille blamed herself for not coming up with the idea sooner. "He can eat, right? And," she closed her eyes halfway. "Isn't he still owing me for... for stealing you away? This can be his repayment."
Although hate to admit it, making him eat those cookies can be a nice punishment.
"Well..." Fallin began to stammer out a reply, but fell silent and looked another way to avoid Marcille's stare. "He's in a bad shape, though."
"What happened?" That's strange, for Falin had come back from the dungeon alive and well, with their task completed. Not missing an arm or anything.
"I...it's a... I don't know how to put this right, but..." Falin took a deep breath. "He just got dumped."
Marcille raised her eyebrow, "Yeah..." She waited, but Falin wasn't putting in more details. "How is this relevant?"
Falin said sheepishly, "He was taking it so bad that he can't leave the room."
That's even stranger. In the brief interaction Marcille had made with the tall-man, she didn't realize he was the sentimental kind. Or the vulnerable kind. She saw a well-attired tall-man without a blemish or worry on his face and assumed he didn't feel things. Is this yet another prejudiced speculation she had made over other species?
She didn't want to become that kind of elf.
"Oh, I didn't realize." Marcille couldn't find a word.
"That's alright. It might be a good thing for him. Really. She was very cruel to him in the end."
"Who is she?" Although she didn't want to pry, Marcille asked.
"The mage in our team." Falin saw the drastic change on her face and chuckled. "I know, right?"
"Your brother didn't look like the kind who would mess around in his own team."
"Yes, most unfortunately... But here he is, breaking his heart." Falin sighed. "He's very sensitive, actually..."
Again, Marcille had a difficult moment to relate the word to the tall blond guy from her memory. Her face must betray her thought, for Falin was looking at her with an amused expression.
"You don't buy it, am I right?"
"I don't buy it." No longer able to keep it in, Marcille yelled, "But he is just... a guy, you know? And didn't you say something about him in the army?"
"He got bullied a lot in the army."
"Bullied for what? Being 6 feet tall, or from a wealthy family?"
Falin scratched her chin again, nervously. "I... I didn't think so. He just didn't get along with them and had trouble blending in their circle. Even now, I could hear him twisting around at night having bad dreams, and half of them were about the army. Or alerted at certain words, which I learned later were the terrible names they called him then."
"Hum," Marcille considered. "Has he always be like this?"
"Like...?"
"It sounds to me that your brother is very bad at confronting people. Easily exploited. Remember that time he got stabbed when he was delivering consideration money to your former member?"
Falin nodded quickly. "He always said that was a good friend and a trustworthy ally!"
"How long has he been like this?"
"Been like... what?"
Marcille counted as she spread out her fingers, "For one, blind? He's like what, forty? For all I know, it's about age for a tall-man to mature. He should be able to tell if someone has ill intentions towards him, let alone how obvious they are!"
"Twenty-four." Falin corrected helpfully.
Marcille ignored her, "And two, allowing other people to harm him. Look at him! He got all the advantages, and he didn't know how to use them. I'm not saying that he should be the bully, but at least it shouldn't be too difficult to protect himself from harm, right? It's unbecoming."
"I know, it's just how brother is like. He would protect anyone in the team, but not himself." Falin sighed.
Marcille didn't buy her overestimation of her brother's morality. It could simply be from stupidity.
Falin continued, "And I don't think trusting people is a bad quality." And before Marcille could interrupt, she went on, "Brother Laois did nothing wrong for trusting people, for having a bad time in the army, for falling in love with the wrong people, for escaping from an ununderstanding village... He was hurt, and blame shouldn't be on him!"
There was something sparkling in her eyes. And when she was like this, Marcille could not fight back. Why did she spell it out, anyway? Did she have to be the bad person to point out the obvious?
"I understand, but the world around him isn't going to change magically. Most people just change themselves... Wait."
Marcille paused.
Falin ducked her head, looking at her and waiting.
"Yes, the world isn't going to change magically, so what if," Marcille spoke quickly, too afraid to get lost in her strands of thoughts, "we change your brother magically?"
"No!" Falin yelped, "What are you sugg..."
"No hear me out," Marcille put a hand on Falin's mouth to keep her out of the way, "No, we're not changing him, nor the world. What if we just change things between them, like..." She ran off to grab the ink and scroll from the desk. Falin followed her closely.
"Look, we all know the basics of senses. Something projecting its manas from afar, and people are on the receiving end of the projection. Receive it with eyes, then it's a sight. Receive it when ears, and it's a sound. Some people like you and me have magic senses, and we can tell the flows of magic in the air." She turned back, and Falin was staring at her, unblinking, focused in a slightly creepy way.
Marcille continued, "Although had been argued on its credibility, some believe 'feelings', 'emotions', or in a broader sense, 'intentions' are also a result of mana projection. But unlike sounds or images, it's harder to capture. It's possible that 'intentions' run on a higher plane, a bit like magic. Funny, right? All the sayings about love is like magic. And I've got proof, for I have measured it."
"Measure? I don't understand...?"
Marcille burst out laughing. "Yes, I did it! It was in one of my post-graduate projects, and although I didn't get a distinction grade as expected," she coughed, "The board didn't see the potential in my research, but they can't deny the statistics in my report... Look." She began to scribble on the parchment. "Shame that I can't bring all the papers across the sea, but it's all in my brain." She poked her temple with the feather end of the quill.
Falin tilted her head in curiosity when looking at the illustrations before them. "Is this a windowpane?"
Marcille nodded, not without reservation, "Yes, I...borrowed it from the restroom."
"That's alright."
"And then I found a reagent that is specially liquified from smoky quartz. Smoky quartz has a stabilizing quality, and that makes it suitable for making vials for soul-containing purposes. After liquidation, these qualities are even more concentrated. Not a soul, or a shred of mana could travel past the material. Do you get that?"
Falin nodded. "I suppose I do. Were you testing its ability to shield emotions?"
"That's just the first section in the research proposal. The board could never be happy with a yes/no conclusion. With reconfiguration spells, I tuned the liquid to wrap itself tightly on the window. Yes, it's still in a liquid form, because then I punctured small holes on the foil, like this," She began to draw dots on the paper, "they had to be lined up evenly, and adjustable, so I could tell what is the shortest distance between holes for the mana to penerate through."
Falin's eyes lightened up, "But... how can you isolate the 'feeling' mana from sounds and sights, and how can you determine it does come through?"
Marcille rubbed her temple, "Well I didn't isolate it, actually... But I did manage to keep the quantity of mana stable." She's a little embarrassed. "I punched a gnome girl in the face and recorded her yelling with a music box. She was mean to me at the time, by the way. All for the research purpose."
"All for the research, for sure," Falin repeated, not without teasing.
"Anyway, I put the record on one side of the glass, blindfolded myself, used an ear protector, and stood on the other side of the glass, while I tuned the quartz foil until I felt I hint of annoyance. And shame."
"Could they come from the experiment itself?"
"Oh, come on!" Marcille glared at Falin, who had the nerve to giggle at her review of a very sophisticated, thorough experiment. "I also recorded different emotions, like laughter, sorrow, disgust, fear... in the end, I got the same emotions as I recorded. All of them. But guess what?" She smiled, as if she just won an argument, "their 'gaps' are different!"
"The gaps between the holes for them to pass through?"
"Yes! Mild emotions, like sorrow and gentle pleasure, require smaller gaps, while anger and scare require larger. Isn't that amazing?"
Falin bit her own fingers while she was taking in the facts. "That sounds about right... But did you take samples from different people? Could the result vary between different research objects with different mana strengths?"
"I thought about it, so I did manage to isolate three groups of records solely contributed by three people." She counted, "Well, myself, the cleaning lady from our dorm, and there's a guy from the class, who took interest in the subject."
Falin tilted her head. "Is that so?"
"Well, at first I thought so, but..." She waved it off, "That's not important, and he's not important, either. As it turned out, our different mana strength did cause a variation in length between the gaps. But in general, it's still the same: milder emotions, smaller gaps; sharper emotions, larger gaps. And the gaps are actually proportional to our manas. I'm the strongest, and my sharp emotions will need the largest gap to come through. The cleaning lady is a half-foot, and had the weakest mana, so basically some of her feelings couldn't even come through, because I simply couldn't drill the holes any closer. As it for the guy..." Marcille sighed.
"And the guy?"
"Now think about it, it was the bad decision to invite him over that had ruined it." She rubbed her temple and sat down on the chair. "His readings were strange. A gnome with a mana level between an elf and a half-foot, but with the emotion gaps that were so far away that almost didn't even fit in the panel. Later, I found another gnome for the same experiment and got the data that was in the middle, which aligned with my hypothesis. But I was honest enough to submit all the results and provided another theory for future research, that the guy wasn't genuine when he was at the experiment. Fake his actual emotions and so on. And yes, none of the board bought it."
"I think I understand you now," Falin hummed happily, "How you plan to help Brother with it!"
"Wha...right," Marcille almost forgot about the business with Falin's brother in the heat of the speech, "about helping your brother. What have you got?"
Falin bowed down and fetched the quill from Marcille's hand. She drew a tiny person on the paper with a smiley face. "So this is my brother, and this," She drew a dotted line around the figure, "Is an emotion shield."
"Emotion shield?" Marcille got a little anxious. "But we can't just make a quartz bubble around him. Can we?"
"Not quartz, no. But look, haven't we learned a few combat skills to block the opponents' spells?"
"Yes, but the spells are concentrated and rapid while the em... Oh, I got your point." Marcille, too, eyes widened at the surprise of epiphany. "They are from the same source! Just on different speeds and planes!"
"Yes, yes, look at it." Falin drew a thick arrow towards the dotted bubble, "This is a Thunderbolt, fast and fierce, and to hold a countering shield will drain a great resource from the cores of mages."
"And the emotion is much, much weaker than a Thunderbolt." Marcille hurried to the cabinet to fetch an ink pen. She came back and drew a thinner line beside Falin's. "And it only requires bare minimal mana to keep it up."
"Actually, Marcille, I think it will be better if you draw it like this," Falin drew a thin, wavy line with an arrow end to the bubble, "This resembles a milder emotion——slow and gentle, like happiness, which requires smaller gaps to go through. And for stronger feelings, like anger, desperation, or as you speculated, affection in false pretense, will be like this," she drew another line with precipitous waves that were almost vertical. "Hit the threshold."
"And blocked out." Marcille finished her thought.
"Yes."
"Yes."
They both went silent for a while.
"So do we..." After a long, awkward silence, Marcille stuttered. "Do we... Can we perform this on your brother?"
Falin smiled, "I mean, it's a good idea, but not without proper test runs. And his permission."
Marcille squeezed out a smile, "...Sure, lesson 101 for the clinical magic, right?"
Falin stood up, "I think I need to talk to him about it first, or you might waste your time."
"NO. No... Let me do a test run real quick. Or he might be disappointed... if this doesn't work at all."
"Oh, dear Marcille..." Falin sighed, "Don't you need to work on those cookies?"
"Cookies?" Marcille was taken back, and then she laughed. "Who cares about an altar job when I can bring the research on the field? And oh, Falin, buy me the cookies from the boutique shop when you're on your way back anyway."
Falin was confused. "So you still want the job...?"
"No," Marcille clenched her fists in excitement. "Just to make sure the joy from delicious food was measured correctly."
NOTES:
THAT TIME MARCILLE INVENTED INCEL SPELL
I wasn't afraid of writing her as a nerd. I was afraid I wasn't writing her nerdy enough.
btw I was about to write something like the Death of King Arthur, full of love & betrayal and wheeeee i got stuck on a trail of thought and here we go, marcille and falin having cookies and brainstorming incel curses
