leviathan counter

[9:34 PM] Leafia_Barrett: I just had a stupid thought
[9:35 PM] Leafia_Barrett: how quickly would Sol be able to pick up on casting a dryadic spell if she was basically handed its instructions
[9:35 PM] Leafia_Barrett: specifically a razor-sharp bolt of water
[9:36 PM] Kiri: an afternoon, followed by a week of fiddling, followed by a 10 minute rant about 'how the fuck do you people live like this'
[9:36 PM] Kiri: she casts for results and not for precision
[9:36 PM] Leafia_Barrett: mmh. longer than I was hoping.
[9:36 PM] Kiri: like she would 'get' it very quick, and then spend a long time looking for shortcuts
[9:37 PM] Kiri: and when it turns out there aren't any because it's a much more exact science her reaction is basically 'thanks! i hate it'
[9:37 PM] Leafia_Barrett: you know how the thing with the Leviathan was "as long as the Siren lives, no mortal weapon or spell can pierce my hide"
[9:37 PM] Kiri: yeah, that whole thing
[9:37 PM] Leafia_Barrett: guess what is a non-mortal source of ether.
[9:37 PM] Leafia_Barrett: the planet.
[9:38 PM] Kiri: I mean the whole idea was, at the time, stealing his water spear move, as a reminder
[9:38 PM] Leafia_Barrett: the joke here being that as direct creations of Gaia, the Leviathan and Siren don't cast etheric magic, they cast dryadic magic
[9:38 PM] Kiri: she nearly gets tagged by that, feels the way that magic moved and is like 'oh my god I get it'
[9:39 PM] Kiri: yeah though I understand what you mean
[9:42 PM] Leafia_Barrett: also, the shortcut would probably be to cast a dryadic spell that takes siphons from the leyline and doesn't actually use it, then cheat and manipulate it with etheric techniques instead
[9:42 PM] Leafia_Barrett: or something to that effect
[9:48 PM] Leafia_Barrett: kinda like the idea that the resulting water spear Sol throws out actually has almost zero force behind it, because learning to cast a new class of magic mid-combat is Difficult And Awkward
[9:48 PM] Kiri: I mean the real cheat is 'all magics is the same'
[9:48 PM] Leafia_Barrett: and Levi doesn't even register it until Sol is like "hey dude check your fin, we won"
[9:48 PM] Kiri: something I imagine Sol picks up on faintly after this incident
[9:48 PM] Leafia_Barrett: because the spell pierced enough
[9:49 PM] Kiri: She was able to recreate magic of dryadic origin on impulse alone using the same strategies and ideas as always
[9:49 PM] Kiri: just... 'from a different angle', is how she'd put it
[9:50 PM] Leafia_Barrett: the challenge wasn't to defeat her or harm her in any significant manner, it was specifically "draw blood"
[9:50 PM] Leafia_Barrett: no amount specified
[9:50 PM] Leafia_Barrett: and Sol just poked Levi with what amounts to a magical thumbtack
[9:50 PM] Kiri: I imagine she winds up thinking 'oh I can emulate dryadic magic real well' up until like
[9:50 PM] Kiri: either the pillars or post-Omnicide when she realizes 'all magics is the same'
[9:53 PM] Leafia_Barrett: magic is magic is magic, the only requirement is that you get the ether and do the thing with it
[9:53 PM] Kiri: I'm just imagining Sol ranting at Celia where it's just like
[9:54 PM] Leafia_Barrett: the reason the dryadic spell had worked is because the leylines are made of pure element, while mortal ether is mostly just a chaotic swirl of all of them
[9:54 PM] Leafia_Barrett: Sol could have done it with her own mana, but she'd have to have distilled everything down to the exact elements needed
[9:54 PM] Kiri: "I genuinely don't know how you and your kind fucking live, why would you ever jump through so many hoops to cast a spell"
"Y-... You realize we work with a very delicate art, right?"
"So's fucking building demolition, that's not as mind-numbing as this is to do, you know"
"You're literally taking the weave of the world and sewing it back into place the way you--"
"Yeah and I didn't become a wizard to fuckin' knit"
[9:58 PM] Leafia_Barrett: this also explains why the Siren uses a rather limited repertoire of spells (ice shell, ice blast, water spear, enchanted song being basically it) - she's doing the same thing dryads do, she's just really good at doing it fast because she can manipulate huge amounts of ether effortlessly (kind of a perk of the demigod enchantment Gaia used on her)
[9:58 PM] Leafia_Barrett: it's a prewritten series of programming steps
[9:59 PM] Leafia_Barrett: she's just running the program
[9:59 PM] Kiri: she draws on a template basically, yeah
[9:59 PM] Leafia_Barrett: so there's very little room for easy experimentation
[10:00 PM] Kiri: she can actually tug at the stardust leylines directly instead of grabbing at whatever she'll actually be able to touch and manually reshaping it into the exact combination and proportions you'd need, and all this mess
[10:00 PM] Leafia_Barrett: she technically does have access to etheric magic too, but
[10:01 PM] Leafia_Barrett: when she was a normal mortal, she lacked the mental capacity to use it (anglerfish), and when she was altered into the Siren, she had no reason to use it
[10:02 PM] Leafia_Barrett: I'm still sticking to the idea that Levi & Siren were literally just a fish that happened to be there when Gaia needed something to guard and maintain the newly-placed seal
[10:03 PM] Leafia_Barrett: she just went "you'll do" and started morphing it because it was quicker than building an organism from scratch
[10:03 PM] Leafia_Barrett: and the matter was slightly time-sensitive
[10:03 PM] Kiri: mmm
[10:04 PM] Leafia_Barrett: it also fits Gaia's modus operandi of "fuck it, just tape it together, it'll work I swear"
[10:06 PM] Leafia_Barrett: because I do want that to be an unironic running theme with Gaia - she's impulsive and impatient, and would rather brute-force a solution quickly and clumsily than spend the time to make it elegant, which inevitably leads to some glitches
[10:07 PM] Leafia_Barrett: or unexpected oversights, such as "whoops, Abyssion's prison also makes him nigh invincible, and we have to remove the enchantment and unleash the guy at full force to actually bring him down"
[10:08 PM] Leafia_Barrett: Gaia didn't bother thinking ahead to "one day we will probably need to come back and handle this guy properly", she just locked him in a box and said "problem solved"
[10:10 PM] Leafia_Barrett: "also the guardians' powers were tied to the box too, but it shouldn't matter since the box isn't going anywhere"
[10:11 PM] Leafia_Barrett: I am in full-blown "sleep-deprived rambler" mode, can you tell
[10:11 PM] Leafia_Barrett: I should probably go bed, but I wanted to get those thoughts on paper now so I didn't forget them