[@Grade]

"And don't you forget it, dahling." ember intoned as if it were simply a matter of fact, before sitting back down (a bit roughly, with a plop) on the footlocker.

On the one hand, it had felt rather nice to "blow the cobwebs out", but on the other... He felt his headache coming back on, and felt dizzy.

There were very real, and important reasons why he relied on the use of a focus.  For starters, it actually restricted the flow to something more... sensible... and on the other, it afforded much needed fine control. A good deal of the effort he expended when using magic was not so much in getting the magic, but in getting it to BEHAVE. He was altogether too familiar with the 'cheekiness' and 'ironic disposition' magic tended to get when lots of it got thrown down, haphazardly.  He would not be at all surprised if this particular spot on the beach had "anomalies" for a few days.  If not right away in fact.

He looked at 'Henri', and felt a momentary pang of sympathy.  If he preferred to stay tethered to a beat up wreck that just got a molten magic enema, his body--wherever it was-- must truly be in a bad way.  He vaguely recalled the man had mentioned cryogenesis. Perhaps he was just so damned old, that he had considered this as a means of cheating death-- who knows.  Regardless, that floppy broken arm was just sad.

"Well-- Let's see about that arm then-- " he sighed, reaching back down and reclaiming the wand from its resting place on the sand near his feet. "It just wouldn't do to leave you in something so tatty..."


He started with a gentle probe-- thin streamers of invisible magical force, delicately threaded through and over the surface of the damaged shell 'Henri' was controlling, looking for signs as to its construction, raw material composition, and any obvious signs of otherwise hidden damage.

It appeared to be a somewhat unusual composition-- clearly highly refined materials-- technically a "ceramic", but not like what you would find from your average potter; the materials were not naturally found in such a precise ratio. It was clearly a custom job.  As for the magic-- it twisted this way and that at the attempt to scry it. Usually this meant that it had been warded against prying eyes, or at least formulated in such a way as to discourage duplication. Some of the more expensive magical apparatus one could buy had such clever tricks woven into them for such purposes, but this went above and beyond mere frustration in mind. 

"Well...." mused ember with a frown. "It might take some doing-- I can try to collect the raw materials but..."


"You can't fix the enchantments, I know." 

"Oh, I COULD if I truly cared to invest the time to unravel the fuckery you've got going on in there-- but I'm not sure I want to for a charity case dahling."