illusion and invis

As I exhaled, I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling my power rise easily to the surface. It expanded through the air, weaving into it in a way that was hard to describe, and then took hold. It was something thin, fragile as a spider’s web, but I could only hope it was enough for this.

I stood up from my chair, sliding into invisibility even as I left a copy of myself behind that I looked over critically, judging my work. It was surprisingly hard to make an illusion, at least the way I did so. The cost wasn’t much of an issue any more, but it was an image in my mind given form. Imagine a person—not the idea of a person or their name, but everything about them; their eyes, their face, their whole body, all at once. Imagine holding every aspect of a person in your head at the same time and keeping it that way while trying to do something else, never letting it slip. It wasn’t easy. I was kind of surprised it was even possible, but I suppose I had my new skill to thank for that.

Delusory (Passive) LV1 EXP: 7.27%
An ability born not from an understanding of lies but of truths. In grasping the nature of the world hidden behind the veil of perception, one has gained the power to manipulate that veil and craft illusions around oneself, transforming thoughts into light and light into ephemeral form. The energy required and difficult increases with the breadth of the illusion and decreases with skill level.

I’d only practiced with it lightly—enough to make sure that the illusions themselves had some kind physical presence. I wasn’t certain if the mention of them being light given form was literal or metaphorical, but I’d confirmed that they’d appear in a mirrors reflection and that a scroll could take a picture of them. I could even make noise with them, with some additional effort, though it was a lot easier to just use Levant for that. Even so, while they had about as much solidity and mass as light, it wasn’t hard to think of uses for being able to make people see things, first and foremost being making them not see things.

Well, in truth, invisibility was proving to be a tricky son of a bitch for the same reason as illusions—you couldn’t just imagine there being nothing or you’d be a blank space; you had to make people see what would be on the other side of you, from every angle. Dust in the air, the reflection of and blockage of light, all of it had to be accounted for. I was still working on that, too. But for a bunch of tiny cameras in a dark room, it should be fine.