Dark Jack Member

 _Interesting,_ Gerald thought with a cautious smile, starting to feel a hint of confidence himself as his faith in their ability to outmaneuver this cunning serpent before them, if not by wit then at least due to the Grand Master's freedom being so greatly imposed. _With the seal of Hazzergash's prison having decayed enough to allow him to not only exert his influence outside of the crystal, but for his spirit to actually be able to escape, I wouldn't have thought that the Grand Master - a much more powerful demon than any of his generals - would still be so completely sealed that he could not even keep his subjects in line. I wonder why that is? One would think that the Grand Master's seal would be broken the fastest of the six, with him being the strongest... unless the seal is actually stronger? But how could it be? I doubt the Nomad would have held back his Spirit-given powers when sealing the generals, so where did he get the additional power to make the Grand Master's prison even greater?_ That was a question for another time, though, and one that he could not hope to receive an answer to unless the Grand Master or the Nomad himself told him. At least this meant that even if the generals of the Infernal Empire were breaking free of their ages-old bindings, at least their dreaded emperor was still securely sealed away for the time being... as long as no-one went about activating more of these sigil stones. "Once he has made the deal," Gerald muttered to Jillian when she was done talking, while the Grand Master now cocked his head left and stared at them intensely, "he knows that he probably can't make it again. We would have to be unusually stupid or arrogant if we went to stop this demon without telling anyone what we'd learned, and the more people are in possession of a piece of knowledge, the more its value degrades. He wants to be sure that he profits, even if we fail." "That's pretty close to the mark, yes," the fiend confirmed, surprising the necromancer only a little by being able to hear him despite the lowered volume of his voice. "And I will concede that if you succeeded, that would be a profit to me in and by itself, but as I said before: you won't succeed. Which is also why I am hesitant to consider your suggestion, Jillian. Firstly I would point out that the information you seek probably consists of three parts, actually: the identity of the demon, its location and the means by which it spreads the Withering. Even if you had the two first parts of the information, what did you think you would do with it? Destroy the demon? We're immortal; we cannot be destroyed, even if you had the power to defeat it. Secondly, if I were to reveal just the identity of the demon, chances are that you, at least, would no longer be interested in the rest of the information. Gerald would be relentless, of course, since ending the plague is his only hope of salvation, but he doesn't have much to offer." The Grand Master snapped his fingers, holding up his right hand with the index-finger extended as though he had had a good idea, and when he spoke his voice was cheery and enthusiastic. "I have an idea! An offer you two surely cannot afford to turn down. I will give you the information in return for you accepting a bet with me. The terms will be as follows: if the Withering is successfully ended within two weeks of me giving you the information, it will be free. I will ask nothing in return and set no further parameters to determine your winning-conditions in the bet. You can end the Withering by any means you see fit, or even have someone else do it for you, and I will be satisfied. So will you, since 'nothing' is exactly what you were offering. Sounds good, yes? If you fail to end the Withering within two weeks, however, you lose. If this happens, Jillian, I want your soul. I have no interest in Gerald's, though; your soul is worthless unless you actually win the bet, so there would be no point in taking it. Instead I want your staff. A soul and a remarkable artifact would be suitable recompense for the information I would be giving you, I think. Oh, and naturally I will want the staff even if the Withering claims you both before your deadline. I will want nothing else in that case, though, since it will mean that the culprit behind the Withering at least knows that I sent someone to foil its scheme. So, how is that? All the information you wanted, _potentially_ for free? Very generous, I'm sure you'll agree."

I did intend to make at least one more post before the actual timeskip, yes, and my idea was that Aemoten's group would just arrive and take care of their own immediate business for the time being, and - since people seem to prefer that idea - postpone the meeting of that and I'on's group until the next morning. There are some things that Aemoten's group will have to deal with, though (like the poor rune mage that has been standing by the gate all day waiting for them), before they can retire for the day and get some well-deserved rest. EDIT: And Rhaevnn posted just before me. Concerning the treatment of Seclyrian sniffers, that usually depends on the circumstances of the sniffer's recruitment; a sniffer that was forcibly made one because its affinity for magic was discovered and not willingly surrendered would indeed be treated more akin to a prisoner than an ally, whereas someone who voluntarily submitted to being made a sniffer would be treated more like a comrade. If one isn't immediately aware of how one came to be a sniffer, however, Seclyrians are more likely than not to simply ignore one such and treat them as little more than part of the furnishing. Sniffers are also usually accompanied by a small group of soldiers in Seclyr, yes (actual soldiers, too, not just guardsmen) who act as the muscle once the sniffer detects a magical anomaly nearby. Sniffers are usually used in special anti-magic patrols and are deployed one per each of these squads, and they practically never get an opportunity to meet one another except when they are off-duty.

Truly? Could it really be possible? Single line breaks? I'm so happy! (Even if the method by which they are made is still somewhat awkward, but I suppose it's not worse than the // I'm used to from university-work.) I have no problems with your character either, Veridis; I'll add it to the list in the OP shortly. But to reiterate Shien's question, how do you intend to introduce Kaedan to the group, and is it still your intention to have him join up with Aemoten's group (the one in Zerul)? EDIT: _facepalm_ Except I can't edit posts made before this new system, so I can't change the OP. Yay... I swear there was one more thing I was supposed to comment on... Oh right; then I guess I'm next in the collab. I'll get a post together when I can.

Well, I have been waiting under the assumption that you were the next in line to post, and I have a strong suspicion that Shien expects the next post in the collab to be yours, as well (well, it'd be either you or me, since Shien was last). If nothing new comes up, I think it's about time that the collab reached completion and Aemoten's group _finally_ arrived at Zerul City.

> Hmm... I see. A somewhat passionate and stubborn person with a(n usually) good self-control would be a match? The part about good self-control is a central part of pretty much any elemental magic, at least if one desire's mastery of it rather than simply the ability to use it. While I think Aemoten could potentially have some difficulty achieving compatibility between his personality and the feeling that feeds water magic, I think he's actually taken a good few steps in the right direction by being capable of separating himself as a person from himself as a warrior. Being able to suppress emotion is even more important to an elementalist than to be able to conjure it; most of the magical accidents that happen, happen because fledging elementalists got too riled up about something or another. To a person with natural affinity for magic, cases of strong emotions of the kind that feeds their native element can cause the magic to manifest on its own. > (What about earth?) Earth magic feeds off confidence, determination and psychological anguish, and must be controlled with the force of a relentless will. Lightning magic relies on excitement and urgency and is guided by the sincere wishes of its wielder, and the two last of the "primal" elements of magic, light and darkness, are associated with despair and pleasure and hope and agony respectively (no, I did not switch hope and despair), but are both controlled by a very focused, "hands on" application of willpower. > To the bit about the dangerousness of bombs and their components: Right, that's why I asked about making them, that way Gregory could just brew a couple up before he heads out to battle or before going out on the road. Now that I think about it, if he's a skilled fire elementalist, could he just create a bomb with that? If so, that seems the best path to take. No muss, no fuss. "Create a bomb with that"? Eh, as Shien said elemental magic requires constant focus to maintain; using it to infuse something with magic isn't entirely possible in that sense. All kinds of elemental magic are capable of causing explosions in one way or another, though, so if you're going down that road I figure he might just as well use his fire magic to cause an explosion on the spot rather than storing the explosion in something before detonating it. Edit: Right, it seems you actually meant to ask about the last thing I mentioned. Yes, one could do that.

> I wonder now how accurate I was when I assigned the elemental affinity of water to Aemoten and earth to Etakar. Water magic usually relies on either sense of serenity or rage, actually, and ice magic specifically comes from feelings of dislike and general enmity. Its control must be soft and gentle, so that one steers its course rather than try to force it to bend to one's will. > ...Reasons? "Chaos" might be a bit of a misnomer, though - wildcard is a more apt descriptor. Oigortrõqk doesn't really want the world to be in a perpetual state of chaos and mayhem (I'd go as far as to say that they'd find it undesirable) ... more so, they simply do whatever currently seems the most interesting - I will say, though, that if I were to bring an iteration of them in, they would be massively downpowered. (As another note, we don't have stability (Legereraon) and change (Allandragian), either. Might need to elaborate what those exactly are, too.) Yeah, reasons; let's leave it at that. Although the way you describe it, I'd think that it might be more fitting to call it a trickster deity or something like that. Once again, "chaos" is specifically the only domain I can't allow deities to have. Any others are basically all right.

> Yeah, he was an elementalist back then. Okay, cool; I didn't mean to imply certainty that he _wasn't_ an elementalist back then, simply that I did not recall him being so. But really, there has been a lot of characters in The Prophecy over the years, and since I don't have Shien's ridiculously keen memory I can't remember every detail about all of them. I do believe you if you say such was the case, and since we are lucky enough to have Shien and she supports the claim, all the better. No problem there. > From Jack's description, I kind of got the impression that while it is possible to learn to use secondary element(s), it would be almost impossible to use those two together - so he'd be able to temporarily switch to using wind, but not really use wind and fire together? Correct; while a person using the aforementioned technique to convert energy from one attunement to another would have two kinds of energy-attunement at the same time for as long as this converted energy remained, manifesting both at the same time through elemental magic would indeed be borderline impossible. Elemental magic is instinctual and relies heavily on the mage's will and emotions, to which different elements react differently, so manifesting two elements at once would require that one was able to quite literally split one's very self in two and have each half control a separate element, due to the very method of deployment and control differing so greatly between them. So it would be one element at a time, but grant a capability to more-or-less switch between them. (Just because it occurred to me that it might be relevant to mention: fire magic commonly relies on its wielders passion and enthusiasm to manifest and draw power from, and must be coaxed into obedience lest it run wild; air magic is associated with feelings of joy and/or fear, and must be strictly leashed by the wielder's will and dominated to prevent it from reclaiming its freedom.) > But yeah ... I believe Jack said you cannot produce liquid fire without dedicated magic back then. ((Edit: I also imagine keeping vials of liquid fire on your person for longer durations would be dangerous as all hell, even more so for a physical fighter. Just imagine if he fell or took an impact to the wrong region...)) Strictly speaking I suppose liquid fire _could_ be made without the immediate assistance of a magus, as long as those of the ingredients that need to be so were magically altered in advance. It would mean that one had to find a magic-wielder every time one needed to restock on the ingredients, though... and that one carried around some twenty pounds of delicate and fragile alchemical equipment. And yes, carrying liquid fire around like that would indeed be rather dangerous, especially for extended periods of time; not only would an impact potentially crack the glass and cause it to explode while still on the wielder's person, but atmospheric air might seep past the seal over time (especially one made on the move and with less-than-perfect-quality apparatus) causing it to turn extremely volatile to the point of it detonating at a slight jostle. (It also occurs to me that one would have to acquire new containers with air-tight seals for every new batch one had to make... which are anything but cheap. In fact none of the ingredients would be so, and the apparatus would be very expensive as well. Eh, it's possible, but the more I think about it, the more unlikely it seems.) Flashdust, that's what I called it! I knew you'd remember, Shien. And yeah, over time I've reconsidered many things about the potential future Reniam, the absence or disuse of gunpowder being one of them. But in current time and age gunpowder isn't used in the immediately relevant regions of the world, so flashdust is the only real alternative. As for future Reniam: that will have to wait for the future. As I mentioned even back then, depending on how events play out in this time, there may not even _be_ a future Reniam. > ((Is it a terrible idea to bring in a wildcard chaos deity? I am still tempted to.)) Eeeeeeeeeeeh... Please don't. Really. I was somewhat supporting of the idea when it was just a deity, but "chaos" is literally the _one_ domain that I can't allow a deity to have. For... reasons.

> Yeah, he's the same character who's lost his other axe, and we can pretend he never had that armor. That I cannot do; if there's one thing that I value in this roleplay, it's maintaining a consistency between what has happened, what happens and what will happen. Actions, once performed, have consequences that echo through history and affect the future in small or big ways, and something that has existed at one point can't simply be removed from history. Even if it no longer exists and has somehow been eradicated from existence, it was there. I also don't remember whether old Gregory was an elementalist? Although I guess he could have been, even if it wasn't technically part of his description at the time, and just not used it. And yes, it is technically possible to invoke different kinds of elemental magic - any different kinds, really - but it's far from as easy or instinctive as invoking elemental magic native to one's natural affinity. It requires one to to have studied and memorized the _feeling_ of energy attuned to that other element, and then consciously force part of one's own energy to mimick that feeling. The conversion of element is temporary - over just several minutes any amount of converted energy will revert to its natural attunement unless one focused on preventing this the entire time - and the energy will lose some of its potency in the process, similar to when the very same thing happens in arcane or black magic. Plus, it will feel just plain unnatural and weird for a person to use elemental magic that isn't "their own". But yes, it is possible. The short answer to the last question would be "yes", although the likelihood of Gregory having such would depend on your definintion of "bomb". If you mean the kind where you light a fuse that triggers an explosion when it reaches its base, those are very rare and currently the penin jealously keeps them to themselves, along with several other inventions and the resource that makes them special... the name of which annoyingly eludes me. It's pretty much something that replaces the yet-undiscovered gunpowder but is much rarer and more potent, and is dust coming from processed liquid fire. Which brings me to the second interpretation of the word "bomb": something that is thrown and explodes on impact. This is a lot more accessible than the penin's bombs, although the production of and trade with them is still rather restricted and mostly illegal. These would be various containers filled with the aforementioned liquid fire, which is an alchemical compound that is extremely volatile and prone to explode with tremendous force when its container is broken. It's basically a more powerful version of nitroglycerin, except liquid fire will only explode when exposed to the atmosphere, making it marginally safer. > I had a very regular set of paladin/cleric/warpriest skills in mind for my character's divine abilities: Kaedan is a rookie right now when it comes to divine powers, so his only real spells at the moment are divine mass for his hammer (which takes a lot of focus for him to cast) and other short prayers to boost his morale. Outside of combat, he can currently use divine powers to heal minor wounds. Later on, he'd learn to use these same abilities in combat, and to greater effect. The divine section in the compendium said something about being able to boost the regeneration of the paladin or the paladin's allies, so that's what I had in mind. Very later still, he'd learn protective prayers that would boost his defences against certain elements or sorceries. A prayer to shield him from fire, for example. These wouldn't make him immune to the target element, but they'd make him sturdier and help him fill the role I had in mind. If I need to add any more spells to his arsenal, I'll consult with you guys first. Uh... alright, firstly Favored Ones in The Prophecy don't cast spells; they ask for something from their deity, which they, if their request is sincere and the deity is willing to give it, they receive. It doesn't require keen memory or great control or any such thing, just that one has faith in one's deity and believes in what it stands for, just as it doesn't drain the Favored One. Secondly, the way Favored Ones work in The Prophecy is that either you serve your deity as a priest, which isn't suited for frontline combat, or as a paladin, which is the protectors of the faith and those who hunts its enemies. Each is a very different kind of service to the deity, and the Favored powers bestowed upon them are specific to the service, not shared between them. The divine blessing of weapons is an ability specific to a paladin of Deliph, and the regeneration is an ability specific to the service of cleric of Deliph, which is a "promoted" priest. One cannot serve Deliph as both, so one cannot have both abilities. And the protective blessings aren't even something that Deliph offers at all, to anyone. The abilities a Favored One of a certain type and depth of service (usually priest, cleric, high priest, paladin and knight-paladin) are all specified in the description of the deities in the Compendium; with only a few exceptions, these are the only powers those deities offer to their Favored Ones. They are abilities that cost nothing to invoke once obtained and can usually be used with ease, but are inferior to magics that are fueled by the caster's own energy in their lack of variety. I'm sorry, but this is the way things work in this universe. > I can also put my character's origins near the border of the desert of desperation you mentioned. Any hot place will do, actually. Is all of this good? Which side of the border? Not that it matters particularly, although depending on how far south you have in mind - and if it has to be somewhere the desert is actually _hot_, I'd imagine it had to be at least as far south as Golerin - being on the Drylands-side of the border would probably result in the occasional clashing with prospective Catolohne legionnaires undergoing their trail of survival there. Even farther south, as far as the southern Catolohne provinces, there probably wouldn't be a problem there, but the desert that far south would be _extremely_ hot, as would the Drylands, although those at least have frequent rains (the further south you go in the Drylands the more frequently it rains, but the faster the water evaporates again, facilitating the same scarcity of water and vegetation).

Oh right, Kaedan. Hmm... I'm somewhat confused as to just what Favored powers are implied that he actually has. Judging by his equipment I'd say that he fell in the category of paladins (priests and the higher ranks of these don't have weapons unless such are specifically required to invoke their Favored powers), but paladins in the service of Deliph only initially have the power to bless weapons with a divine edge or divine mass... and knight-paladins - which are very high ranked within the faith - gain more of a passively active ability to empower their allies and demoralize their enemies. The description of Kaedan's Favored power might need to be a bit more specific. Deserts, though... Golerin is not a desert-nation, no, and even the Drylands technically still have a slightly higher rate of precipitation than evaporation and grows fields of short, tough grass and some other scattered vegetation. Although the easternmost part of the Drylands are very desert-like (the further east you get in the Drylands, the drier it gets), the only true desert nearby and in that direction would the the Desert of Desperation. Technically there's a closer one in the opposite direction, in the northern parts of northern Wegam Fermos highlands, but that's cold desert... with ice instead of sand (although once again technically, the northern Desert of Desperation would also be classified as cold desert, since nearly all the precipitation there - even during summer - is snow or hail). Gregory Maede... wasn't that the name of the character you used the first time around? And the equipment and description is either the same or very similar... you just changed his background? Will you indeed be reassuming the role of your old character? (The formatting of these posts is starting to really annoy me; why can't I be allowed to make single line breaks? Grr...)

I just have the default Windows firewall, really. Other than that I have the Microsoft Security Essentials, but I have _every single_ automated function on that turned off and only use it for periodic (and manually initiated) scans. I think our router has a built-in firewall, too, but that shouldn't interfere (generally firewalls seem to me to be more in the way than they're useful, and all those antivirus programs that insist on doing things themselves slow down my computer too much, so I don't have much).