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An Abandoned Journey

Lore, history and other content by the citizens of Underlight preserved for posterity.
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Arnaya
Dreamer
Posts: 831
Joined: Mon Aug 03, 2015 2:25 am
Character Name(s): Arnaya

An Abandoned Journey

Post by Arnaya »

So, as quite a few people have heard me mention... I've been working on something in little bits during my spare time for quite a while now. The rediscovery of of dreamers could advance their own arts outside of going through teachers. It's something that many of us had been told through the years, including myself several times. That we could do this, but that it was a lot harder and more time consuming than questing for them would be.

This was partly a vanity project, to see what it would take just out of curiosity. And partly because I wanted to make sure that dreamers had options for those occasions when they couldn't find a teacher... or when the available teachers were, well. Unavailable for whatever reason. This would also be a way for a dreamer to develop a greater understanding of their arts. So I thought it would be a neat and useful little addition to the dreamer bag of tricks.

I started off with the basics... trying to practice and refine my faculty with Trap Nightmare (The art I'd decided to work on self-platting). I slowed down my evokes, carefully following how exactly the evokes worked, followed up by slow and careful monitoring of how the evokes affected the target. Then working on refining my control over the art, adjusting how fast or where exactly it first hit the mare. I spent two hours or so at a stretch, a couple of days a week doing this for a bit over a month. Previously, I'd simply drawn up the evoke and tossed it at the mare... a simplistic and brute force approach. But I found that I had a lot more success by targeting the evoke. For Emphants, it seemed that I was more effective with my trapping when I targeted just behind the mares head while I was facing away from me (Base of the skull area), while Bogrom's went easier when I'd target between their shoulder blades. I also found that easing the evokes impact... making it more of a caress, made the trapping go easier.

This drew a bit of interest from various entities, including the eyeballs that we've all come to know so well. Several energy manifestations were included in all of this, and I made several attempts at drawing on them to boost my Trap without success. I kept working on that for about a month, every couple of days spending some time, drawing on energy that I'd stored from the city to manifest brief spurts of enhanced traps a couple of times. Then I tried to get a small group together as a culmination of the effort..trying to empower my trapping ability. This attempt was unsuccessful. So, I spoke to Agonarius who gave me the advice that, especially for higher plats like I was trying to do with my Trap, bringing others into it was going to be a key point.

So, after another week or so of working on my trap, Magnum-425; Rasputin; and Uthanatos gave me a hand in Cenotaph of Dread with a more significant effort at empowering the trap, using an Agoknight as the target. This also was unsuccessful. So, I went back to further refining my skill before making another attempt. This one substantially larger, using Cuero in Nightmare form as the target, and drawing on a larger store of energy from the city as well as energy contributed by the others helping, and a set of other soulmasters contributed trapping power. A total of 8 people were involved in this effort, and there was no result again.

So, I went back to working on refining things a bit more. The city had started to pick up, and I didn't have as much time to work on this. I'd already concluded that treating the arts just like a normal skill wasn't going to work, but apparently it wasn't simply a matter of power either. Nor a combination of the two. There was something else that I was missing, so I wanted to work on it until I figured it out. So, I kept working on in little bits whenever I had spare time... though when the mace and Eldryck Venym came about... I had Very little time to do so.

Things finally settled down, and I began to work on this again. Several students helping me collect tokens that symbolized other Soulmasters trapping ability... or what trap meant to them. This took place over a couple of months. I came to the realization that it was less about power or skill... and more about the emotion and understanding of the effect, rather than the art. I of course worked on developing my skill with the art further, learning how to solo trap agoknights reliably despite not being able to trap a full ago. Finally, I felt like I was ready and decided to give it another try... just with a small group was the plan.

The other night, Aileron; Anasina; Uthanatos; Magnum-425; and I were going to make the attempt in Thresh Caves. Purple Lace, Jade, Frey, and others joined us... and some personal issues arose at the last minute, leading me to call off the attempt at that point for later rescheduling. I took advantage of the extra time to try and gather more tokens, reaching out to elders... when I was informed that my intended course of action would not be allowed, period. And that if I insisted on it, basically the Master's of the city would pay the price by having train self removed as an option. So, at this point in time, I have abandoned the effort and simply gotten a quest for it.
~ Arnaya, Soulmistress
The most important lesson I've learned over this past year, is not to let anyone make you cruel. No matter how badly you want to give the world a taste of it's own bitter medicine, it is never worth losing yourself.
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