[Open] But I Digress

[Umberto Bassington-Smythe]

Gadslough Lecture Hall - Brunnhold
The 9th Day of Yaris, 2719 Afternoon

". . . w

hich taken with the underlying metrical patterns in formal utterances, leads us to the conclusion that the thought-form constructed via the incantation is highly sensitive to both the denotative as well as the connotative senses of the individual lexical elements.” At least there were students this time. A few had filtered in, little groups, pairs, singletons. Most of them seemed only half interested. Several had nodded off and were snoring peacefully in corners of the room. He didn’t think his voice was particularly soothing. Perhaps the finer points of incantation semantics had a side effect of inducing somnolence in some part of the student body? He really should check with Abe on that. She’s the physical in the family. Probably knows all sorts of things about the specific afflictions of the student body. No, don’t be a fool. The industrious snoozers probably were out late last night, engaging in the rituals peculiar to the upper forms. Too much drinking, bad wine, worse singing, carrying on unwise affairs. Loudly. Beneath his window. Now he thought if it, it was a wonder he was awake as well, what with the off-key love songs and the defilement of perfectly innocent hedges. A noisy, sleepless night, yet he was not tired. Not yet. One of the great virtues of being engrossed in one’s work: sleep seemed to be more or less optional.

“Further,” he continued, getting his thoughts back in line with the matter at hand, “since each of the Monite lexemes is fundamentally polysemous - and yes I do hear you giggling in the third row; and no, this does not mean the words enjoy a surfeit of paramours, but rather an surfeit of meanings - fundamentally polysemous, the surface interpretation of any incantation is not always clear, and may indeed be more or less impossible to understand from a purely linguistic perspective. This brings us neatly to the Polysemy Problem. If the possible meanings of an incantation are a function of the combined senses of each lexeme, how then do we arrive at anything like a functioning spell?” He turned to the great green-black slate board behind. It often gave him chills to be standing before these altars of fleeting knowledge. He was feeling it now. His hands should have been sweating. They were not. The chalk may have had something to do with that. With a flick of his wrists he began sketching out a large and complex tree diagram. Very pleasant to see it, familiar, homely.

“Now, the Spencer-Chalmers model of incantations assumes a fundamentally syntactic structure, breaking the utterance down into the familiar syntactic constituents that probably tormented you all in your composition classes.” There might have been a smattering of polite laughter. Or not. He was not sure. He did not care. Syntactic constituents were his old friends, but he’d seen enough of his fellows suffer with them to have developed some degree of sympathy. “This solves a good deal of the ambiguity by proposing that the semantics of the incantation are limited by the allowed grammatical structures of a well-formed utterance. Further work by Chalmers on trace theory also helps resolve the issue of the discontinuities among constituents by introducing the notions of movement and residual markers of this movement.” For quite a while he’d held with Chalmers on this, she was a sound theorist, one of the best, but it always seemed to him that her models were better suited to tackling mortal languages than the semantic mess that was Monite. Something else had to be going on. Still, the Spencer-Chalmers model was considered the orthodox view, and it was a little early in the term to branch out into the exciting work coming out of Thul Amat.

Unless one of the mostly-uninterested onlookers, he couldn’t really think of them as students, as his students; asked a probing question. He had some hope. That was worse that expecting failure. Every rustling sound, every inevitable cough made him think a question would be lobbed at him like a prize tomato. So far, he remained resolutely clean.

He went on, past a summary of transformation syntax, of constituency parsing, of formalisms and some of the paradoxes that each of these engendered. Was he glossing over too much? Probably. A concrete example was needed.

“Returning to polysemy in the semantics of incantations, I would like to draw your attention to the following.” He spoke a few words, time-worn and long-tested held out his hand as though he was cradling a brandy snifter. Then the sensation came. His skin seemed to turn to cold sediment in a deep pool, his veins flowed with the memory of sap, his bones became the memory of rhizomes long buried, of stems rising from the depths and towards the surface and the light. The shape of the ghostly memory took form, and in his hand a lily flower, deep purple like wine, bloomed. Only an illusion, made of light and the memory of a flower he once saw drifting down the narrow canal that ran at the back of the antiques storage warehouse. It was so bright, so perfect, that it had been burned into his memory, the wholeness of all flowers, their paragon. He recalled diving into the canal to follow it. He’d lost his shoes that day. New shoes, but he had caught the flower. Cuttings from it were still growing in the atrium pond of his mother’s house. And now the memory and the words had shaped the thing in his hands. But where did the rest of the sensation come from? He had never seen the plant from which the flower had been torn loose. He had never been a flower. It came unbidden with the words.

“A simple enough illusion, the blossom of a nenuphar. Few words spoken, and it blooms in my hand. If you would all be so good as to repeat my incantation and observe the flowers you create, we will have some very useful data about which we can ask our next questions.”

[Ezre Vks]

Gadslough Hall

Afternoon on the 9th of Yaris, 2719

By the molten heart of Vroh Guar, it was so hot in Anaxas in Yaris! Ezre had lived in the Kingdom for more than a few years and yet the dry season still surprised him every time, oozing the life from his mountain-bred body through his very pores, far more acclimated to the thin air of Hox. Thankfully, this season meant autumn was coming soon and after autumn—winter. He just needed to survive another seventy one days of this temperature-specific torture, confined to the thick, wool layers of Brunnhold's garish green uniform for way too much of his day. If only he could at least dress for bjaras in a Hoxian manner instead of in this stuffy uniform, he'd admittedly be a happier creature.

For now, miserable and sweaty, he could only take consolation in the fact that he wasn't entirely suffering alone and that he was attending a lecture on the semantics and Monite. Having been raised in the company of some of the Six Kingdom's oldest manuscripts and most ancient of compendiums, tucked away in the unassuming temple-filled city of Kzeckas in one of the most isolated corners of known Vita, the linguistics of spellwork was not a passing interest for the Clairvoyant mortuary sciences student who enjoyed the company of history.

Not wanting to sit alone and confident that the Hessean would be just as interested in the possible historical references in the lecture on magical incantation and linguistics, Ezre had managed to drag Lilanee with him between classes, eagerly cajoling her in his own way—subdued enthusiasm was perhaps one of the Hoxian's more endearing abilities—and promising without any hint of shame that should the entire thing prove boring, well, he would certainly make up for it.

They'd found the lecture hall surprisingly sparsely populated (at least it was a surprise to the Hexxos Guide who somewhat assumed such opportunities for extracurricular studies would have appealed to more than just himself), but that gave them an opportunity to find a decent pair of seats near an open window (for the breeze). The dark-haired boy settled in and prepared to take notes, pausing only to let inked fingers undo the first pair of buttons of his uniform coat, needing to free his tattooed neck from it's stuffy confinement in the hopes of a bit of fresh air circulating to keep him from simply suffocating in this horrible heat.

He did not giggle at the potential for innuendo, though that didn't mean he didn't catch on to the implications as Mister Bassington-Smyth (non-Hoxians had such long names sometimes) spoke of polysemous lexemes and the curious repetitions found in much of current spellwork.

Ezre had questions, shifting in his seat and forced to write them down, patiently sorting through his thoughts and waiting for an opportunity—an opportunity that appeared to be far off on the lectural horizon given just how well their visiting lecturer seemed to carry on with his academic observations.

Perhaps too well.

He recognized the names of famous spell-writers and their legacies, though admittedly the Hexxos was also familiar with ancient texts and authorship otherwise lost to the passage of time, dusty tomes long-forgotten in the well-tended stacks of Kzecka libraries and temple crypts. He chose to keep those things to himself, however, eager though he was to share all of their archaeological and magical secrets with the young woman next to him once Winter Break finally arrived.

Ah, winter—

Ezre would have allowed himself a moment of daydreaming about snow-covered mountaintops and hoarfrost and icy breath just to feel cool again, the sweat that trickled down the back of his tattooed neck and clung to the stubble of the freshly shaved sides of his head not enough to at all make him feel more comfortable in an enclosed lecture hall full of young student bodies in the heat of the dry season. Instead, he felt the movement of mona in the air as the man leading the lecture gathered his field, perking the somewhat melting young Hoxian from his misery in curiosity.

Listening to the older galdor's spell, perhaps with more attention than he normally would given that part of the point was to listen to his Monite usage in order to repeat it.

The spell itself was not entirely specific about the type of flower, and while Physical Conversation was not at all his specialty, a basic illusion created by accessing memories and bending the light as a small blend of simple Perceptive and Physical magic wasn't entirely difficult. He wasn't trying to fool anyone into thinking it was real, nor was he adding scent or sensation so much as creating a visual image. Easy enough, he decided, turning slightly in his uncomfortable wooden seat to offer Lilanee the briefest of smiles.

Turning one hand over, palm marked by the thin, pink lines of his other unorthodox magical explorations with sanguimancy, the Hexxos Guide was curious to see the differences in everyone's floral illusions. His airy field drew close, gathering with it monic particles that were denser and different from his Clairvoyant aura, and he spoke the spell as he'd heard it cast, the collective voices raised in the lecture hall from those students still awake and still eager enough to participate choosing this moment to do so.

His flower was definitely not a lily. While he'd become rather familiar with roses as of late, the illusion that slowly and rather poorly blossomed in the scarred underside of his tattooed hand was a small collection of tiny blooms in subtle shades of violet and periwinkle blue—alyssums, an alpine plant that often carpeted the rare grassy stretches nestled in the high altitudes of the Spondola mountains he'd called home.

Ezre waited with a not so subtle eagerness to see the results of Lilanee's spellwork as well as other students around them both. Whatever Mister Bassington-Smyth's point would become was hopefully an interesting one, given he probably had finally achieved the attention of the entire lecture hall.

[Brodie Sutherland]

Gadslough Lecture Hall - Brunnhold

The 9th Day of Yaris, 2719 Afternoon

So-called voluntary lecture halls weren't any less interminably boring than the mandatory ones, it turned out. Wild that the professor-- whatever his name was, some kind of fish came to mind? Bassoon?-- an insufferably stuffy man Brodie dreamed of pushing into a river every time he said something incomprehensible about ... lexicals?-- which was often-- seemed so smug about knowing all these four-syllable words.

If only mona appreciated action over flowery words. Brodie had sat down with a pencil and the fullest intentions to take notes, but that had quickly devolved into scratchy doodles. He'd managed to capture two entire words from the deluge:

"Language" and "patterns." Great. Language had patterns. He may as well be giving the lecture.

Was it possible to be more bored than this? Not to mention that the hall was so hot that it about put him to sleep.

Brodie's mind drifted, just attentive enough to vaguely catch the word "semous." He snickered. The funniest part (besides that it sounded sexual, which was a good part) was that this garbage was supposed to mean something.

Everyone shifted in their seats, putting their pencils down, and Brodie sat up, alarmed. How loud had he snickered? Oh, the professor was manifesting some kind of purple lily from his hand. What a useful spell. Tons of practical applications, that one.

Ah, tick. Everyone else had their hands out and was trying to make flowers, too. Brodie scrambled to sit straight and set his pencil down, took a deep breath, and held his out hand in front of him, scraping his mind for the basic words Professor Bassoon had just said. What did polysemantics have to do with this? Didn't matter, if everyone else could do it, sure as quartz Brodie Sutherland could, too.

Relief was what he felt when the words flowed and a flower unfolded from his open hand, blooming as if from his veins into ... one of the scraggly bright bougainvillea that flanked the front gate of the orphanage. Not even a real flower, these stupid things looked like stage-painted leaves. Brodie's face flushed and he closed his hand, as if he could crush the illusion into his palm.

No one else knew. No one else could know. Yet a bright hot shame burned in his chest.

[Abeline Ixbridge]

Mid-Lecture

Abeline sat in the back, casually observing the students. She had come to support her cousin, but it seemed the addition of a warm body wasn't needed. Not counting the heat, more students were in attendance than she had expected. Perhaps they'd peter off. Regardless, she'd heard this lecture before. Not precisely this lecture, for Bertie never did rehearse, but he'd droned on about the subject often enough she'd grown familiar with the terms. They were like the furniture in his overly-large townhouse; simply a part of visiting with him, and entirely ignorable. This was not to say his work was tedious to behold or utterly useless. A table was useful, but she never thought of it, nor tables generally considered, in great detail.

Dutifully, she produced an illusory flower. She hadn't thought about it, either, and the resulting saffron lily was a sordid blend of cheating off her cousin's magic and her personal grocery list. "Saffron," she muttered to herself. "I knew I forgot something."

She took note of the flowers actual students had made, or attempted to make. Some sort of forget-me-not-looking thing, and one of those red ones. She suspected it was not a gardenia. She added them to her notebook, which was full--not of lecture notes, but lecture attendee notes, which she'd promised to make for her cousin. What with his back to the class and his head in the clouds, he would have little data on how the talk actually went over. This, she could provide. For a price.

Feeling generous, she kicked a student slumbering next to her. "Quick, make a flower illusion!"

[Umberto Bassington-Smythe]

Gadslough Lecture Hall - Brunnhold
The 9th Day of Yaris, 2719 Afternoon

H

e looked out at the wan bouquet that had begun to bloom among the half-populated seats. Pale ghosts of flowers, some brighter than others, several rotten and sickly. The young woman dozing in the back had failed to produce a flower at all. He half-expected a poppy from her. It would have been apposite. Though somnolent casting was an area of theory he was not, at this current moment, prepared to explore.

“Now, most of you have produced a creditable nenuphar. Rather paler than mine, which is to be expected, and not because of any inferiority in your casting but rather due to a quirk of the incantation semantics. Some of you, however, have gone on and produced something rather different, rather brighter.” That too he had expected. It was so nice of the magic to work as intended. He would thank the mona later. And how are you going to do that? Invite them up for tea? Doubtful. He had nothing like enough cups.

Eyes shot back and forth across the faces among the flowers. Most he did not recognize, and of those he did, only the merest fraction could he recall anything like a name. But then, he’d never been good with names. Especially his own. One student, a fellow in the 9th form with great flapping ears and a raffish grin he did recognize and could name. And he had obliged the class by producing a bright and unique blossom. “Now, Mr Parslowe here has produced a rather fine orchid. What manner of orchid is it, Mr Parslowe?”

The young man with the bright purple spotted orchid looked slightly taken aback, shuffled in his seat, but eventually spoke. “It is a variety of cyrtopodium, professor.”

“I see, I see. Thank you Mr Parslowe. And this particular flower, you have some personal association with it? Perhaps your great uncle purchased such a specimen with the last of the family fortune, thus condemning his relatives to a life of penury?” Mr Parslowe sunk back in his chair, shaking his head. The hair was too shaggy and it flopped about in a particularly useless way. Was he trying to hide those ears with it? Possibly. Or perhaps floppy hair was in this year for the poetical set. There was something of the poetic about the eyes of Mr Parslowe. “Then perhaps you once gave such a flower to an unrequited love on a fresh spring morning with your heart full of hope, but fortune and their opinion were against you?”

Parslowe laughed. “No, professor. My elder sister collects orchids, and on one occasion I knocked one over, very like this one, killed it too, and was in a world of trouble for a week. It’s a memorable flower.”

Umberto nodded, smiling. “Thank you again, Mr Parslowe. I will refrain from tormenting you further. However, that kind of association with a flower, a particular flower is of the utmost importance. It shows just how complex even a simple-seeming incantation really is.” He smiled at Parslowe, made a note that he was a good egg, then promptly forgot everything other than Monic semantics. “Now, in Shallow Semantic Parsing, we make the assumption that the incantation carries meaning in a way that is generalized, stable, and repeatable. In short, we can consider that incantations are similar to idioms. Meaningful, but not parsable at the constituent level. For well-worn spells and basic instruction this works very well. It is, however, a lie. A useful lie, yes, but a lie all the same.” This was not a controversial opinion. Nothing like it. Even the originators of the shallow parse theory knew it was merely a useful tool, not a detailed representation of the whole meaning of the incantation. “However, in the effect of the spell we all just performed, we can see that the incantation is being acted upon at something like the constituent level. Otherwise, we would each end up with the same effect. Since we have not, we know there is more happening within the body of the incantation than the shallow parse would seem to indicate. So, where does this additional structure come from?”

He turned the blackboard behind him and took up the chalk. The feel of it in his hand, the smoothness, the powdery coating, even the smell; perfection. This was what he was meant for, to stand in this place, at this infinitely reusable stele, and write new inscriptions, form new incantations, and to make new magic. Or to try. And to fail. And to try again. He squeaked the chalk along, forming the characters of the incantation. They always looked bare and unfinished in chalk. An ephemeral skeleton. So he fleshed it out: diacritics, tone markers, all the features of narrow transcription. It looked like some drunken spider with chalky feet had taken a casual stroll across the utterance.

“We will begin, as we always must, with the verb-complex and its incorporated objects.” With a sudden slash he underlined the verbal complex. It seemed unduly dramatic, it probably was, but he did not care. The joy in the work led to such flourishes. Better to indulge a little here than to bottle it up and let it fester quietly until it became a kind of regret, a pining for things undone and words unsaid. “A surface read will provide us with a crude translation of ‘Make now out of the light, to me, this bloom’ Simple enough. But such a surface translation explains only the broad elements of the effect of the spell, while leaving us more in the dark about the realization than might be desired. Why did I produce this nenuphar, and why did Parslowe here conjure up this exact orchid?” He waited for a moment, scanning the eyes of the students, trying to see if any of them were bored to tears, or if any had raced ahead and arrived at an answer. He could not tell, not yet. “To find the beginning of our answer, we need to consider all the possible meanings of the verb complex, not just the obvious ones.. This form of ‘make’ contains a sense of ‘recall’, and the form ‘bloom’ does not really so much mean ‘flower’ as it means ‘the memory of the flower’. And that latter is itself ambiguous. Does the spell command the mona to create a flower from my memory? Certainly that explains Parslowe’s orchid. It is a flower memory to which he is attached. But the verb might also carry with it the meaning of ‘show me the flower’s memory’. And, at least in my case, and I am tolerably sure in some of yours as well, you feel some strange floral memories of roots and growing things quite unlike anything your fleshy animal body has ever experienced. You experience the ghost of the flower’s memories. And if no flower strikes your memory? Well, then the spell will look for any memory it can find. In this case, the flower I conjured up. My own incantation primed the environment, added meaning and sense that could be drawn upon. And, my own incantational influence cannot entirely explain all the effects we see in this room. There are other, deeper, complexities afoot.”

Some of the students were nodding along, others stared off into the disinterested void. And one, bent double with discomfort, had an expression of disgust and feverish longing at the flower than now sprouted in their hand. This too, he had expected.

[Lilanee Kuleda]

9th Yaris, 2719
BRUNNHOLD | AFTERNOON

Lilanee pushed her glasses further up her nose, dipping her quill and scrawling furiously to capture the Professors words in her own unique style of notes. She didn’t giggle along with the others, instead lifting her periwinkle gaze to glance at the man with interest, the feathered tail of her writing utensil wafting mindlessly over her pursed-in-thought lips.
​​
​​As the tree was drawn, so it was written in her notebook, tsking a little at the immaturity of her classmates. Her mind focused on his words, jotting things that felt relevant, adjusting her glasses again as the older man picked up the spellwork to create the illusion of a flower. She set her quill aside, looking over at the Hoxian as he shot her a small smile, giving him a broad beaming one in return. At first, the red haired Hessean had no desire to attend the lecture, quite certain it wouldn’t at all be aligned with her personal delights. But quite the contrary, the young woman found Professor Bassington-Smythe’s presentation extraordinary fascinating. It was a pleasant surprise to have a mote of practical in their lesson.
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​​Placing down her quill, Lilanee gathered her field, holding her hand upwards and envisioned her floral creation whilst uttering the spellwork. As the shifting of light began to build the illusion, the teenager brought it closer to her face, examining the flat silvery petals, their ends bleeding into a vibrant iridescent magenta. It bloomed, many thin papery petals all clustered around a tawny pollen centre. The Drakemorn, or otherwise known as a Hessean begonia, flowers used in the wreaths for the dead.
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​​Lilanee drew the illusion away from her face, swallowing the small mote of unnecessary anxiety in her throat, glancing over instead at the beautiful small flowers in Ezre’s hand and smiling a little.
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​​Of course he'd decided on something so simple, yet so perfectly representative of himself. She didn't know the flower was Hoxian, but the simplicity and subtly was undoubtedly Ezre.
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​​“Now, most of you have produced a creditable nenuphar. Rather paler than mine…Some of you, however, have gone on and produced something rather different, rather brighter.”
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​​Lilanee blinked, looking around the room at the other students blooms before back to her own. It wasn’t so much pale as it was not quite opaque, her hand visible through it’s structure. If she shifted her hand this way and that, the illusion refracted and caught the metallic tones of the flower. She looked at the professor again. He was calling out one of the boys, enquiring on his orchid. Why had he created it? What was it's connection. As the Parslowe boy laughed through his reasoning, the red head looked at her bloom again.
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​​Why had she created this then?
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​​The man was writing again, drawing her attention back to the board, and her notes. One hand holding her bloom, the other her quill, Lilanee dutifully wrote her notes, transposing the monite as it was displayed on the board.
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​​ “Make now out of the light, to me, this bloom. The ninth form repeated the loose translation under her breath, placing a full stop and looking back at the teacher.
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​​Recall this memory in bloom.
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​​Frowning, Lilanee raised her quill high, inhaling to ask the question before she was even asked.
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​​ “What if there is no memory for our bloom? What if the flower we have created provides no past to associate to? I have a Drakesmorn, and yet I have no funerals I can recall. I mean, I have seen the flower, in books and my mother has told me about them but I haven't been to Hesse since I was an infant. Is there in a sense, Monic influence here? Would the mona build something of meaning to themselves, or is there memory I don’t personally recall that they can draw on?” Looking at her bloom again, Lilanee tilted her quill to gesture at it.
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​​ “Silver and magenta. Of all the colors the Hessean begonia can come in, why this specific combination? It’s rather fascinating actually. Did you know that Drakesmorn is most common in the Barrens? It grows with very little water, and can be found in the most unlikely of places. It’s a hardy bloom, representative of the strength of Hesseans. It’s a great honour to have them laid on your bones.” She looked at Ezre with a brief smile, before turning to the Professor expectantly.

[Ezre Vks]

Gadslough Hall

Afternoon on the 9th of Yaris, 2719

There were many students who produced a replica of what they saw in the Professor's hands, perhaps in hopes of winning the man's approval or the approval of their peers. Their flowers paled in comparison—literally—to the original illusion, but there in Ezre's hand was not something created for the sake of anyone but himself. He glanced over, dark eyes tracing over the shades of blue in miniature nestled in his cupped palm, and he looked toward Lilanee with a bit of excitement, curious to see what she would be holding.

The flower in her hand was like nothing he'd seen before, metallic and bright. He would have asked about it had there not been questions and more instruction, the tickling sensation of upkeep on the illusion he held onto so delicately with the slight curl of tattooed fingers barely felt while he shifted in his seat, just a little, to peer down over the spellwork of other students and finally down to the professor speaking.

The Hoxian knew the Hessean next to him well enough that the Clairvoyant could almost predict her questions, the ripple of thought in the vicinity of her field and the tensing of a body he was so very aware of catching the edge of his attention before her hand raised and her curiosities filled the sticky-hot lecture hall with her voice. He didn't smile, no expression in particular at all on his delicate features, but he tilted his head to look back over the flower—the Drakesmorn, a name he knew from his Funerary Studies and Burial History electives, from his independent studies in the libraries of the Crypts.

"Magenta—I know that color—" The Hexxos Guide whispered with unexpected mischief, the flicker of a smirk teasing at the edges of his tattooed lips. He left the rest up to the young woman's imagination, though the light flex of his field and a gentle shift of brighter colors—the flush of lavender and the briefest shy hint of ochre would give his intimate humor away.

She spoke of never seeing a Drakesmorn in person, of her very faded memories of Hesse, and of burial traditions of her people and for a moment, the Hexxos Guide forgot he was in a classroom full of peers and even a few faculty:

Ezre smiled.

Catching himself, the diminutive blooms in his other hand faltered for a moment and he looked away quickly, back down through various students and their blossoms, murmuring while waiting for a more official answer, "—the mona are known to have long memories, and as a Clairvoyant, I have been told it is possible to reach into latent memories of an individual with particular spell combinations involving Perceptive magic. I do not see this as being far from a possibility, especially if this flower holds particular meaning for you."

[Umberto Bassington-Smythe]

Gadslough Lecture Hall - Brunnhold
The 9th Day of Yaris, 2719 Afternoon

S

uddenly, no, at last, someone other than himself had spoken. Clear, tumbling words, full of interest. A pleasure to hear. At least he was not putting the whole room to sleep. At the jumble of words, the cascade of questions, the corners of him mouth twitched, he tried to force the smile away. He succeeded, in preventing it erupting upon his face, but it had not vanished, damnit. Instead it migrated to his vocal chords. That was probably worse.

“Miss, um, sorry I have no idea what your name it, Miss, um, Drakemorn.” Well, why not, it was about the only thing he had to identifier the young person with the curious flower. Names were fluid things in any event. “You raise an interesting question. Indeed you raise several interesting questions. Can the Mona act upon their own memory? The short answer is yes, and within the field complex of a given individual those actions upon the memory will be strongest. That is partly how the magic is, I supposed colored might be the right word? Yes, colored. Though I personally doubt that the Mona would, of their own independent accord, choose to create a flower via that spell that has no associations with you, with your memory. Indeed, your own words seem to indicate, at least to some degree that there is an association, even if your conscious mind cannot now discover it.” Another student, dark-haired fellow with a bunch of blueish purple flowers spoke up, jumping in and stealing a bit of his own thunder. Ah well, no harm done. The youth and he were thinking along the same lines. “Indeed, and thank you Mr Periwinkle for your observations. I entirely agree with your assessment.” Drakemorn and Periwinkle were clearly people to be watched, to be encouraged. How to do that? Time would likely tell. Or not; they might vanish from his lectures and never be heard from again. It would not be the first time that had happened. “Perhaps, Miss Drakemorn, we may interpret the flower as a reminder? A key by which some half-forgotten event or scene may be recalled to you. I do not know the contents of your mind, so I cannot say for certain, but that is where I would begin my investigations.”

A thought, sudden, perfect. “Homework for you all. Please consider your flowers, and, should it be useful to you note down the nature of your memories, of the nature of the spell as you experienced it. If you cannot understand your flower, then perhaps set it aside for a time, clear the old mind, and go for a stroll. A long, brisk stroll. That may well jog the memory.” He had no right to assign any work, this was just a lecture series, and entirely voluntary. It was a minor miracle that anyone had shown up at all. Well, anyone other than Abe. She’d probably assail him afterward, point out all the flaws in his presentation, and generally chide him for his elliptical speech patterns. It would be nice to experience that again. Old certainties were valuable, anchoring. He could use all the anchoring he could get.

“Now, if we consider the psychology of the caster with reference to the incantation, and thank you Miss Drakemorn and Mr Periwinkle for sending us down this canal .” Well, it was not a canal he had intended to scull down, yet here he was, and one had to strike early while the iron was hot. Enough with tormenting of metaphors. He had incantations to torment. Students too. Much more practical. Still, the whole pattern of the lecture had been driven off-course. Could he correct it, bring it back to the old tack? Possible. “We find that this can be useful in reducing the semantic uncertainty in the interpretation. This, then, is the context element. And magic always occurs in context. Even if you were to cast alone, naked, and suspended in a featureless void, with a mind equally as empty, even that would impose a context upon the incantation."[/color]. For some time he addressed the issue, drawing in Perceptive principles, considering various theories of mind, their possible effects on castor action. "We also have to consider the field-psyche interaction, which is whole matter unto itself. However, I digress, as this most interesting issue of caster context is intended to be the subject of the next lecture in this series. ”

Would anyone attend that lecture? Possibly so, if he was lucky. He did not believe in luck, but he’d take all the help he could get.

“And should any of you wish to discuss this, or indeed any other aspect of this lecture, I shall be at The Ivy Green this evening, and at office hours tomorrow in the afternoon.” He nodded, mostly to himself. Office hours, such a magnificent thing to say, to have. “Now, if we return to the incantation itself, let us consider how we might tackle the problem of reducing the semantic dimensions of the utterance using semantic embeddings. Are you all familiar with the work of Suna Ekwasi regarding naive interpretations of monite n-grams?”

[Pleasance Hedgethorne]

The sweltering temperatures, combined with the stuffiness of the Professor, made for ideal conditions to slumber. Between the heat and his incomprehensible droning, all of the oxygen seemed to slip out of the room. It wasn't long before Pleasance succumbed to the lack of air and fell into a comfortable slumber on her desk.

She dreamt dreams of cotton and feather beds, just skipping over a field of down and chasing after the candied wings of butterflies. The sky was bright and sunny, and she felt surrounded by warmth. It was a pleasant dream, which made the awakening all that much ruder.

Pleasance felt a sharp kick in her shin, "Quick, make a flower illusion!"

She gasped in surprise, sitting upright, and to attention. Either someone had cracked a window to let some air flood into the room or someone had slipped her a drop of laudanum. Whatever it was, Pleasance found herself dreadfully lucid as the Professor continued to siphon the joy and fun from the air with his lengthy and droning speech about seminal parallelograms, or whatever nonsense of which he was speaking.

Right, an illusory flower. That seemed a simple enough cantrip to accomplish with her physical magics. She concentrated, aided in part by the sudden onset of lucidity. The galdor girl lamented the sensation of dreadful, painful, and horrible lucidity as she held her hand out. Palm upright, she concentrated on it, and formed from fiber to fiber, a large flax flower. It was colored an iridescent, bright blue, growing nearly seven inches from her palm. For a moment, she was startled. Pleasance rarely experienced such great success, even from mere cantrips. Yet there they were!

She turned to Abeline, and smiled with no small amount of smug evident on her face, "There, will that do?"

Pleasance turned back toward the front of the room, once more enticed by the promise of learning more, before she started to listen to the professor.

Before long, she was slipping back into sleep, resting her head on her hand until it fell asleep, and her face fell sideways on the desk. Her light snoring filled the immediate area as she tried to make herself comfortable for this session of sleep-study.

Pleasance snickered, half-conscious, as she overheard him speaking to something one of the other students brought up, "Teheh... Canal." She murmured between light snorts.

Soon enough, she was dreaming of dancing on featherbed fields and candy butterflies again.

Rolls

Pleasance manages a pretty impressive-looking blue-flax flower.
SidekickBOTToday at 1:42 AM
@Good Guy: 1d6 = (6) = 6

[Lilanee Kuleda]

9th Yaris, 2719
BRUNNHOLD | AFTERNOON

"Magenta—I know that color—"

Lilanee coughed suddenly, covering the small titter that tried to escape her throat, cheeks reddening whilst she whole-heartedly attempted not to even turn and look at the Hoxian, focusing her entire self very directly on the professor.

She listened with fascination, not at all bothered by the name by flower rather than her own actual name. As Ezre muttered about latent memory, she nodded slowly, looking down at the bloom with renewed interest. Was it as simple as that? Was it just the images from her mothers books, or was it something from her infancy?

Curious.

It would be easy enough to ask her father, were he around. He would understand these things, and no doubt remind Lilanee of some time in her youth when he had introduced her to someone-or-rather who had probably had the Drakemorn. Or something. Mother though, she would just bemoan the uselessness of the exercise.

Homework! Yes!

Lilanee focused on her book, scribbling down the set out task, dutiful even if she wasn’t sure where to begin. She could start with her own resources in the dorm, and then if that was insufficient perhaps a day trip to Vienda would help. That might be nice? She hadn’t been to Vienda for at least a year or more, not since Father had left on his expedition. Maybe Ezre would like to come? They could do that together, make a real day of it. Visit the Museum, or the Zoological Gardens? There was a medical exhibit in Uptown, they could look at the nervous system of a wick or the tibia of a human, something bizarre like that. Ooh! They could visit Ghost Town!

However, I digress, as this most interesting issue of caster context is intended to be the subject of the next lecture in this series.

Chrovesbollox! She’d gotten completely distracted by her daydream of adventure, missing most of what the professor had said. Her blue eyes skimmed over to the Hoxian, hoping he had at least, captured it. They could compare notes later. Her mind returned to the older man’s teachings, nodding again at the mention of the Suna Ekwasi.

Someone was snoring.

Lilanee frowned, turning her gaze over the room, looking for the culprit. A girl, Pleasance. The Hessean knew of her, but didn’t know her. A scrounger of others work, she didn’t seem to think much for herself, and now she was disturbing the lecture that Ezre had invited her to.

Well this was just inappropriate.

“I’m sorry Professor Bassington-Smythe, can we just…Miss Hedgethorne!” She called out across the room, undaunted by the small cast of faces that turned first to seek out the voice, before twisting to seek out the addressee.