Chapter 6: Snapping To It

on April 18, 2011 in Volume 2: Sophomore Effort
Timeline: , , , , , ,

In Which Mackenzie Charges Forward

My schedule for Monday was really pretty light. In my first semester at MU, I’d tried to balance my schedule to begin with, but subsequent shuffling had left me with a long break in the afternoon that I’d come to enjoy and even count on. As I left spellbinding, I found myself really appreciating the placement of my gap this year. It was still only ten in the morning and I had nothing before my local hazards class at two.

This meant that every time I came out of my spellbinding lab, I could easily spend an hour or two working on what I’d learned before and after lunch if I needed to, or wanted to. Okay, there would be some days I’d need to give up some of that copious free time for my assignments for my other classes, or to practice stuff for Callahan’s class… but the five-credit impact on my GPA of the fighting class and Amaranth’s first task notwithstanding, spellbinding was really going to be the centerpiece of my schedule.

Instead of heading back to Gilcrease immediately, I found an empty lab room that had suitably rune-reinforced targets for destructive evocations in order to get a jump start for Wednesday. I expected it to be empty on the first day of classes, but there were about a half dozen kids in there messing around. It was kind of surprising to me that my brain instantly coded them as “kids”. It had to do with the way they all were startled when I walked in and assumed various shades of we-weren’t-doing-anything. The fading sparks and smell of smoke in the room argued otherwise, but then, that was what the room was for.

Ah, freshmen… or sophomores who still hadn’t quite shed the freshman mindset. The college experience often lacked clear signposts for what was within limits. The lab had a paper sign taped up outside that clearly stated when it was open and free for student use, but it lacked an adult authority standing there and saying, “Yes, this means you. You can come in and use this room. You don’t have to check with anyone. You don’t need to be told by your teacher to come here. You don’t have to show a pass.”

I wasn’t going to look down my nose at or laugh at anyone who was still all furtive and cautious about using the resources that were set aside for them. I’d pretty much been the same way all the way up through the end of my freshman year. If I hadn’t been kicking around a much less densely populated campus with none of my friends there all summer, I probably would have still been in the same boat.

I ignored them and got down to my work, and eventually they went back to their kind of sloppy magical missile-slinging.

When broken down to its components, the spell we’d done in class was nothing but a series of elemental invocations, and I was good at that. My infernal heritage gave me an affinity for pulling fire out from where it lurked inside other elemental matter. That had given me an insight on dealing with the other elements, and things like light or sound that behaved in a pseudoelemental fashion.

It only took a little thought and a few tries for me to make a tiny little thunderclap without using a spell formula. It was just a matter of working out the discrete steps that went into it and writing it out in my workbook.

Step one was to invoke air. That was both easy and hard. Air was all around me. Compared to something like the earth in a brick wall or the unexpressed fire in a candle wick, it was reasonably pure, as elemental manifestations in the physical world went. But air was also nebulous and hard to get a “hold” on. The real trick in invoking air was to pick out a particular bit of it and isolate it.

Step two was to impel it into motion… basically, call forth the elemental air from the extant material air in a particular direction. To push air away from one’s body, an invoker had to be able to “pull” it from an external point. That was a little trickier. Trickier still was making it snap. I didn’t want a breeze or even a gust, I wanted a clap… air bursting through air. It was like the difference between a wave and a slap. I could do it, but it took a few tries and then the spell didn’t travel very far. Well, the stock version hadn’t had much range to it, either.

Things like this were why formal spells were useful, even if they lacked versatility. I could invoke elements in any way I could imagine all day long, but if I wanted to do something complicated it really helped to have a formula to follow. When I found the trick to making the air snap, I jotted down a rough draft of it in the symbolic language of spells and then followed that. It was pretty satisfying to make the air crack like a whip.

I had a feeling it would be a useful trick in its own right, if I found myself in a tight spot… painful and distracting, but not terribly dangerous. I wasn’t planning on finding myself in situations where I would need to be able to deliver a painful smack from across a small room, but after my experiences of the previous year I decided it would be good to be a little more prepared.

I took one of my empty wands and managed to layer five charges of what I was thinking of as the whip-crack spell into it. I used up two of the charges testing it… one to make sure it had worked, and then another one after adding an accuracy enhancement that was sustained by the stored charges. That last flourish would mean that I’d have to periodically recharge the wand even if I never used it, but I really wasn’t much of a natural battlemage. There was little point in having a self-defense spell that I couldn’t hit with.

A little bit after I started producing the crack, I became conscious of the sensation of eyes on me. I don’t know what triggered it… possibly it was the awareness that the room had gone quiet even though I hadn’t heard anyone leaving. I didn’t look over… my newfound semi-confidence did not extend to enjoying being the center of strangers’ attention, and looking over would probably invite conversation.

I realized that while they were zapping and blasting sparks and flames at the rune-lined bullseyes, I was just shooting puffs of air. Before I managed to produce the snap, it must have looked like I was doing approximately nothing. My brain wanted to wonder what they thought I was up to, but I didn’t let it. It didn’t matter what they thought, I told myself. I didn’t even know if they thought anything bad. It wasn’t like they were audibly snickering or anything.

I started focusing all my attention on the center of the bullseye when I wasn’t looking at my notebook, even though my spell was stopping well short of it. Having something to focus on let me narrow my world to just me and my task. It was how I’d dealt with the torment of classmates in high school. I wasn’t exactly being tormented at that moment, of course, but I really had hoped to find a room that was either empty or containing other people who were equally focused on their own tasks.

Even with the audible snap, I was still doing only half of the spell… the stock one had ended with a spark or flash. I could make a flash of light or fire easily enough, and I could string that together with the little mini thunderclap, but that hadn’t been what we were doing. The snap was supposed to end in a spark… sort of the reverse of a lightning bolt splitting the air to unleash thunder. That was the really tricky part.

It took me the better part of half an hour of trying to realize that I wasn’t going to unlock the secret all by myself right then and there, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that I’d identified where the real problem was. I had another day to work on it before the class met again, and even if I made no further progress I would go in armed with this insight into the problem. The less time it took me to unravel the basic spell, the more time I would have to work on making it my own.

And of course, if I knew where I needed help I wouldn’t lose much time if I had to ask Acantha for assistance. I found that I liked her. It was pretty obvious she wasn’t used to leading a class… it wasn’t so much that her massive verbal outflow style of speaking would have been any better one-on-one, but I imagined it came from inexperience with addressing her instructions to a large group. She had done much better when dealing with individual students.

I especially liked her grading system, and the fact that she’d articulated how it would work for the day… an average grade for efficiently duplicating the spell, higher grades for improving on it. I wondered what would count as an improvement. Things like longer range, a louder snap, and a bigger or brighter spark were obvious improvements. Obviously they would count towards a higher grade, but I had a suspicion that going for less obvious choices might count for more.

But what would qualify? Would something cosmetic, like adding color or other visual highlights, be considered an “improvement”? I didn’t know much about fashion, but the way Acantha dressed and the fact that she colored her hair made me think she was probably pretty conscious of things like personal style. Would putting something like a personal stamp on the spell count as an improvement?

To play it safe I figured I should probably try for at least two technical improvements in order to secure my grade and then throw in a flourish to try to earn teacher-impressing-points.

If I wanted any chance of reaching that goal during the hour of allotted class time, that would mean trying to crack the secret of the spell before Wednesday’s class. That wasn’t a big deal. I’d had a somewhat rocky transition from the point where I was able to get most of my classwork done in class to spending as much or more of my own time on it, but at least this was for something related to my major.

Making cheap offensive spells and charging up wands with them was the least of what I wanted to be able to do as an enchanter. These were such easy and basic techniques and they had been around for so long that the catacombs and caves of the world were basically littered with discarded wands, staves, and rods with a handful of charges for some random spell in them.

But it was real enchantment, and I’d be doing it.

Acantha had talked about parallel sequences… that meant that by the end of the semester, I’d be able to load my blank staff up with one instance each of a bunch of spells and dump a ton of energy into it as charges I could expend without burning off any of the spells. I realized as I thought about it that even if I couldn’t get a permanent size-changing spell on it, I would be able to put shrinking and expanding spells in it and just recharge it from time to time.

I realized I couldn’t do parallel charges yet, but there didn’t seem to be any reason I couldn’t load up a few instances of size changing in each direction. I’d only be able to trigger them off in sequence, but that was no problem… I knew what order I’d want to use the spells in: shrink, grow, shrink, grow. I decided to let my energy levels regenerate a little over lunch and then I’d go try it out. It might actually impress Callah… Coach Callahan… if when I showed up at her class at the end of the day, I could demonstrate that I was actually carrying my weapon with me at all times.

This wasn’t the sort of modern stuff I wanted to do with my life, but it was an important first step and… well, I had to admit that part of me found the wizardly trappings pretty cool. I would never put on a robe and hat like Ian’s dad or the more traditionalist professors.

When we all met for lunch in the old dining hall… somehow nothing more than the plan to check out the Arch’s dining facilities for dinner had transformed this one into “the old dining hall” in my mind… everyone was excited about their morning classes. I was, too, but where Amaranth’s excitement made her talkative, I just kept thinking about the possibilities… the possible applications for what I’d learned, the possibilities for what I would learn.

Ian was quiet, but it was obvious he felt relieved. Not necessarily happy… it seemed he wouldn’t know the results of his audition until some time later, but at this point it was over. He’d made it through it. The world hadn’t ended. He hadn’t been laughed out of the room. His lute hadn’t caught fire or turned into a fish, and neither had his audience or himself. I don’t know that he’d actually worried about those things, but whatever worst-case scenario he’d envisioned had not come to pass.

Dee was also quiet, but she seemed to be content. Something about her seemed softer than it had the year before. Maybe I was better at reading her facial expressions, or maybe she’d grown more expressive. She was definitely covering up less, at least when she was indoors. Her cowl was hanging down her back and she was wearing her cloak up off her shoulders. The voluminous priestess robes underneath didn’t exactly show off skin, but the fact that she was showing off the robes made her seem a lot more open to the world.

Steff was sketching in her notebook. Seeing this made me happy, because she was an incredible artist… but her full-blooded elven teachers had made her really self-conscious about her artistic endeavors, so I didn’t want to call attention to it.

Also there was a good chance that whatever she was drawing wasn’t something anyone else would want to see while we were eating. She was an incredible artist, but her tastes tended to run dark… and red.

Strangely, after Amaranth, the most sociable one at the table was Two. She seemed to pick up her friend Hazel’s outgoing attitude for a period of time after they hung out. She also made friends easily, or else people easily befriended her… she kept saying hello to what I assumed were classmates and former classmates who went past. She also greeted at least one former floormate of ours.

“Hello, Belinda!” she said as the half-ogre stopped at the edge of the seating area, an almost empty tray held in her massive hands.

“Hey!” she said, suddenly smiling a big tusky smile and striding towards us. “Do you all mind if I join you?” She sat down without waiting for an answer, but from the way she was talking a mile a minute it seemed like it was more absentminded nerves than presumption. “I saw you this morning but I was already sitting with the Skirmish guys and I’m on my own right now, and I saw you all and I thought, you know, it’s kind of how last year started, all of us Harlowe peeps eating together… not that you’re in Harlowe, anymore. That was a crazy year, wasn’t it? We really kind of got off to the wrong foot, I mean on the wrong foot. Or to a bad start.”

“Hello, Belinda,” Amaranth said. “Sure, feel free. We’re all friends here.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Oh, and it’s Bel. I’m going by Bel now. I mean, I think I am. It’s something I’m trying.”

“Okay, Bel,” Amaranth said. She squeezed my hand under the table.

“Hey,” I said, hoping I was smiling. I felt like I was smiling, but the half-ogre made me nervous. She’d done a complete one-eighty around the time of Leda’s death, but first impressions can be a powerful thing, especially when they’re pressed in with seven feet of craggy muscle.

She was one of the people I’d shared a table with a few times in the first few days of the previous fall semester and then never again. She’d landed a position as captain of a squad in the school’s Skirmish team on the strength of being a half-ogre, with emphasis on “strength”. I guess she’d seen the presence of a supernaturally strong half-demon as an unacceptable challenge to her position… the fact that I had no interest in recreational or real fighting hadn’t mollified her at all. It had only made my existence in proximity to her all the more insulting somehow.

To say it charitably: she hadn’t exactly dealt with her insecurity well… but who could say they handled everything with perfect grace in their first year at college? I sure couldn’t. She’d managed to get over herself.

She was also long over any need to prove herself the biggest and baddest one on the block. She’d toyed with dropping out of Skirmish, but it seemed she had come to realize that despite being only the second or third strongest person in the Harlowe girls’ freshman floor, she was a better fighter than Puddy or I were… and while there was a limit to what she could do about her strength while staying within Skirmish rules, nothing stopped her from becoming the best fighter she could be.

“How are things on the hex?” Amaranth asked her, referring to the six-sided field where the Skirmish matches were fought.

“Pretty good,” Belinda… Bel… said. “I think we’re going to have a great year, especially with Rocky as co-captain of the squad. We’ve been working on strategies over the summer. We’ve also been working with the other squad captains more. You know last year they mostly tried to use us as a sort of secret weapon, but that only really works once. This year we’re really working more as an actual part of the army.”

“I thought you really pulled things together nicely at the end of the season, last year,” Amaranth said. “Granted I wasn’t watching the whole battle from the healer’s tent, but I picked up on the highlights.”

“We’ll do better this year. We’ve lost our air support and our skeleton herder, but they weren’t exactly team players to begin with, you know?”

Steff had given no sign that she was paying attention, but I heard her let out a derisive snort. If Bel heard it, she didn’t react.

Ian joined in the conversation as it continued along the same lines, and I zoned out more. Even if I was taking five hours of melee class, mock combat still wasn’t my thing.

After lunch I hurried back to Gilcrease and up to my room so I could see what I could do with my staff. I still couldn’t reliably shrink it down to a handy pocket size for very long, which was my eventual goal… but halving it was no problem, and going a little further wasn’t that hard. I settled on a length of about two feet, which was short enough that I could have it hanging off a belt loop like my paddle, and also long enough that I could possibly use it as a weapon if I had to.

I’d played around with changing its size enough that it only took me fifteen minutes to write up a workable shrinking spell. It was no different than enhancing the attribute of an item… in this case, the attributes were its dimensions and I was “enhancing” them negatively. I couldn’t have effected such a drastic alteration for long with anything else, but my staff was made to be enchanted. It was, in fact, enchanted to be enchanted.

The spell to restore it to full size was even easier, because it just had to undo the shrinking spell… and that was where I hit the first hitch in my plan. I’d been thinking of it like a toggle, because I’d always be switching back and forth. But the shrinking spell was a temporary alteration. It could last a good long time given the staff’s base enchantment, but it would wear off eventually and every time it did wear off on its own I’d be stuck wasting a charge of the reversal spell before I could shrink it again.

It was possible I could have contrived a shrink spell that would sustain itself like the seal, but that would be getting really complex. It would be weirdly recursive… the charged spell would be sustaining itself before it was cast, and when it discharged it would have to become self-sustaining, too. I couldn’t begin to wrap my mind around that.

So in the end I decided to do it halfway: I stacked five copies of the shrinking spell as charges in the staff. When I needed it big, it was no big deal to just peel them off. In fact, I realized that when I got to the point where I was ready to do the spells in parallel it would make more sense to have a shrinking spell and a general purpose enhancement-dispeller… then I could use the same stored spell to cancel the shrinking one or to strip away an opponent’s buffing effect.

All the work I’d done during my break felt kind of clumsy and had probably taken me much longer than it should have, compared to what I hoped to be capable of after a little bit more training. I imagined I’d find myself redoing all of it more than once as I learned better ways of doing things.

The funny thing was, I didn’t mind that one bit. Considering that my remaining two classes for the day were both things that had nothing to do with my major and that I was being required to take, it felt good to be able to put my lessons to a hands-on use already.


Soon: Mackenzie’s in a delving class? One taught by a semi-familiar face?? Declarative sentences end with question marks??? Come back Wednesday and find out why!


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49 Responses to “Chapter 6: Snapping To It”

  1. Luciano from Denmark says:

    Am i truly the first? And after reading it even?

    Current score: 0
  2. zeel says:

    I do love learning about magic.

    What would happen if the spell wore off while the staff is in a small place? would it break, or punch holes through things? and what if it expands while she is walking, wont she trip?
    also:
    Mackenzie’s in a delving class?

    what?

    (first!)

    Current score: 1
    • Rin says:

      WARNING: Do not look too closely at end of staff while in shrunken form.

      Current score: 2
      • Lee says:

        See, now someone must get poked in the eye with the expanding staff. It’s too funny not to happen. If we ever need an excuse for Mack to visit the healing center…

        Current score: 0
    • drudge says:

      Mackenzie, trip? That would be an unusual experience to watch!

      Current score: 0
    • Durragh says:

      ok, don’t tell me i’m the only pervert that wondered if this counted as a magical weapon and and the possible applications of the enlargment…..

      Current score: 1
    • Lythar says:

      I would hope that the staff would do something like the thing in D&D where if the staff’s expansion doesn’t have enough strength to break free of the enclosing space, it would just fill the space and stop. That said, highly doubt it would work that way. Especially knowing Mack.

      Current score: 0
  3. Angnor says:

    Errors, I think…
    “I was still only ten in the morning”
    It was still…

    ‘…them as “kids”. but it had…’
    I think the period should be a comma, or capitalize ‘but’?

    “…I jotted it down a rough draft of it in the symbolic language of spells and then followed that.”
    Probably no ‘it’ at the beginning, or ‘in a rough draft in the symbolic…’.

    Loved the chapter and all the spellcrafting. Interesting to see a changed Belinda, and looking forward to more as always.

    [OK, anyone want to share the secret of italics here? This looks horribly clunky…]

    Current score: 0
  4. 3023ogilvyd says:

    Typo report:
    “She’d toyed with dropping out of Skirmish, but it seemed she had come –tor– realize…”

    ToMU 2 feels very different from how Volume 1 was, but perhaps that’s just my perception of it. It’s more… mature, in a way. It feels almost like it’s a first-person open-ended novel instead of something that, at times felt like a fictional blog. While both have their advantages, stylistically, you can feel the momentum of the story, feel that there are things that are happening, and are happening around the story. Was that planned, or just a happy coincidence?

    Current score: 0
  5. Angnor says:

    More possible errors…
    Edit: Beaten to the punch. 🙂

    Current score: 0
  6. yann says:

    “tried to use as as a sort of secret weapon” – use us as.

    Current score: 0
  7. Burnsidhe says:

    “Local Hazards” is the delving class, I’m sure. I expect it will mostly (mostly!) deal with local threats of both the ecology and the city around MU. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a “field trip” of some kind much later in the semester.

    Current score: 1
  8. bramble says:

    Anyone else think that Bel is adorable in this chapter? Sounds like she’s doing well, too.

    Current score: 1
    • Abeo says:

      Extremely adorable. Two level adorable.

      Current score: 0
  9. Null Set says:

    Typo: “You know last year they mostly tried to use as as a sort of secret weapon”

    as as -> us as

    Current score: 0
    • Burnsidhe says:

      It could also be “.. use me as a sort…” There could also be a mixed viewpoint in that paragraph. Remember, people do not speak grammatically correctly all the time.

      Current score: 0
  10. Hatamoto says:

    I gotta admit, I get a geekalicious thrill seeing the logic behind the magic in this universe.

    Current score: 0
  11. Jennifer says:

    …My resolution to stop reading the construction posts (so that the new chapter is a complete surprise) just got a bit more difficult.

    Curse my weakness for unnamed “familiar faces.”

    Current score: 0
    • Brenda says:

      I tend to go in and read just the beginning of it – the first two screenfuls, so to speak – and leave the rest as a surprise. It’s a good compromise!

      Current score: 0
  12. Oni says:

    ““We’ll do better this year. We’ve lost our air support and our skeleton herder, but they weren’t exactly team players to begin with, you know?””

    So I think I might just be being forgetful, but whatever *did* happen to the Harpy and the Necromancer? I kinda like those two.

    Current score: 0
  13. Kallio says:

    Mackenzie?
    Delving?
    This is going to be awesome.

    Current score: 0
  14. Rachel says:

    @Oni- Pretty sure Bel just means they graduated. Were they seniors?

    Current score: 0
    • drudge says:

      Jimmy never liked skirmish to begin with. He was basically forced to do it as punishment for unlawful soul sucking. Scylla strikes me as just going along with whatever Jimmy does, so she probably left when he decided not to come back.

      Current score: 0
      • Phexar says:

        Yeah, and Steff’s derisive snort’s no surprise considering her and Jimmy know each other through their shared interest in necromancy (and have a mutual dislike, it seems). He never did seem like a team player alright. =P

        Current score: 0
        • fka_luddite says:

          My recollection is that Jimmy and Steff were together in the soul-sucking offense. When they were subjected to different punishments Jimmy felt Steff had gotten off easy.

          Current score: 0
          • drudge says:

            No, Jimmy was the soul sucker. Steff was brought in for fucking a zombie.

            Current score: 1
    • Chris says:

      In the last year Jimmy the necromancer was in his fourth year (https://www.talesofmu.com/story/other/opening-skirmishes), although he still had to finish four year of classes (https://www.talesofmu.com/story/other/scylla-and-charred-burgers). Maybe he is doing his masters now? Are graduate students allowed in the skirmish team?

      Current score: 0
      • Oni says:

        OK, that’s what I thought I wasn’t remembering; I wasn’t sure what year he’d been in, but I was pretty sure that’s what had happened.

        Current score: 0
  15. Lunaroki says:

    Typo Report?

    Okay, not even sure this counts as a typo but…

    well, I had to admit that part of me found the wizardly trappings pretty cool. I would never put on a robe and hat like Ian’s dad or the more traditionalist professors.

    This really sounds like there’s some form of “though” missing in the latter sentence, like maybe “even though” or “although” bridging the two sentences together or just a simple “though” at the end of the sentence.

    Current score: 0
    • Miss Lynx says:

      Yes, that one caught my eye too.

      Also, in the bit about Steff drawing, the phrase “incredible artist” gets used twice in fairly quick succession, sounding a bit repetitive. Phrasing one of them differently would make it flow better.

      Otherwise, though, very much enjoying all the magic theory, and seeing how people have changed since last year. Though I’m also eager to see what the new year will offer in terms of actual plot…

      Current score: 0
  16. Vee says:

    Yeah, Mackenzie, I BET you’re “really appreciating the placement of your gap this year”.

    I’m sorry for the juvenile joke, guys, but I couldn’t resist.

    Current score: 1
    • Rey d'Tutto says:

      She has more fun filling that gap, I’m thinkin’.

      Current score: 0
  17. Kaila says:

    Ah, the nerdness.

    <3

    Current score: 0
  18. The Dark Master says:

    Yes, this sort of preparation for spell casting, even if it isn’t very strong or powerful yet is exactly what I would want to do. Mackenzie’s self-deprivation of cheap attack spells aside, I still think it would be awesome to be walking around with a few tricks up your sleeve.

    Current score: 0
  19. The Dark Master says:

    Next, I can definitely empathise with Mackenzie about dealing with crap in elementary and high-school. The need to be able to understand that what others say about you isn’t always true and the ability to ignore what some people say to you was a necessary skill for me.

    I also can understand what it’s like if someone you’ve once deemed an enemy tries to make friends with you… it’s very hard to let go and just trust them, doubly so if you feel they’ve betrayed you.

    Current score: 0
  20. Cadnawes says:

    You know, I actually think it is much easier to become the friend of someone with whom you got off on the wrong foot than it is to reconcile with a friend who should have known better, but wronged you anyway.

    I have an obvious physical disability and was the last to know I’m bi, so in high school, one more person being a jerk to me barely even registered. A girl I thought seemed like an interesting person said something mystifying but unkind to me in the halls, causing me to be momentarily disappointed in my estimation of her character, and then to forget all about it in the general cloud of people being assholes. (people didn’t even usually stop at words, so really, her actions could have been worse).

    A whole year later, she came up to me and apologized. She’d actually snarked at me because she heard I wronged a friend of hers, which she had soon learned was untrue. A lot of what she had believed about several people turned out to not be the case. Her unkindness had really bothered her this whole time. This was an unprecidented event and blew my mind. It actually didn’t take me long to become very good friends with her. You have to respect somebody who can admit their own misdoing to a veritable stranger.

    The parallels aren’t perfect, but I can’t help but be reminded of that event. I just think Bel’s shown herself to have some real integrity.

    Current score: 0
  21. Amy Amethyst says:

    Can’t you just see what would happen if Mack removed the shrinking spell from her staff while aiming the end of the staff at an opponent?

    Current score: 0
    • cnic says:

      That depends where she is pointing the other end. Mack is smart but sometimes she doesn’t think of the consequences until too late. I could easily see her do a double take down.

      Current score: 1
  22. roma says:

    random question: have you studied formal and/or philosophical logic?

    Current score: 0
    • A little bit. I had a 100 level philosophy class, and my math class (which the instructor sourly introduced us to on the first day by saying, “Welcome to math for fine arts majors.” focused on Boolean operations and logic.

      If you have random questions like this, I really strongly suggest you use my Formspring account… that’s what it’s for, and I sometimes go for weeks or months without reading the comments on this site.

      Current score: 0
  23. Author_Unknown says:

    “Granted I wasn’t watching the whole battle from the healer’s tent, but I picked up on the highlights.”

    wasn’t should be was? Or she wasn’t watching the whole fight, she was in the healer’s tent, (can she see the fight from the healer’s tent?), something seems a bit unclear.

    Current score: 0
    • drudge says:

      I assume she can’t see it, but injured players give her highlights of how it came to be that way for them.

      Current score: 0
  24. Readaholic says:

    Om nom nom.

    Current score: 0
  25. Zathras IX says:

    When her energy
    Runs low, does Mackenzie sit
    And rest for a spell?

    Current score: 3
  26. TheTurnipKing says:

    It seems like using an enchantment dispeller on an item that is enchanted to be enchanted wouldn’t be a good idea.

    Current score: 0
  27. Lori says:

    What happened to the ‘ook’-ing? Are we no longer Munkeys?

    Current score: 0
  28. Oh man, I’d forgotten the whole subplot with Bel and Rocky and the skirmish team… that was good stuff. I’d love to hear more about them.

    The more I think about it, the more I’m sure I’d rather just get random side stories from all over the MUniverse than any particular specific set of characters every time. I hope we’ll continue to get glimpses of the rest of the campus in line with the main stories.

    Current score: 0
  29. Sher says:

    I really like the fresh focus on the story rather than Mack’s on going relationships, not that I like that, but not when it interferes with the greater plot. Seeing Mack flourish is a wonderful experince.

    Current score: 0