fandomtownies | The Infinite Consortium, Thursday Afternoon

Irene had been meaning to poke in here anyway -- one did not post a sign about a selection of fine cloaks without her at least noticing -- but now that she knew the proprietress, she had all the more reason to swing by.

"Hello?" she called as she ducked in, drawing the greeting out in a light sing-song.

It was a testament to Irene's power of transformation that Liliana clearly didn't recognize her when she first stepped into the store. Her return "Hello," was much more sedate until her brain removed the singsong from the voice, at which point her eyes widened and she had to laugh.

"Irene!" she said, standing up, surprise still evident in her voice, even with the amusement. "Welcome. I'm sorry, darling, it took me a moment to recognize you without the wig. Red is quite clearly one of your colors."

"I also look nice in blonde," Irene confided with a quick grin and a light pat to her updo as she stepped a bit more into the shop to look around. "Hello, Liliana! Figured I'd take you up on the invitation to visit -- and, furthermore, sate my curiosity a bit about this place."

A bit, anyway. Irene's curiosity was, after all, definitely insatiable, so any answers she got now would likely just breed further questions for another day.

People without questions were dreadful bores. Imagine not wanting to learn more about the world. Impossible. And she had no doubt the other woman knew when to stop asking questions, thus avoiding becoming a bore by going too far that other way as well - as well as a sneaking suspicion that none of the questions Irene would ask would be boring anyway.

"I'm thrilled you've come to see me," she said, coming around the counter, purple gown whispering in the way only expensive silk could. "I've been at a loss for occupation all day. Do come in and let me show you about. Half the people on the island are terrified of the very concept of artifacts, it's exciting to speak to someone with an open mind."

You know who was primed to hear silk's whisper? Right here, and Irene's gaze flicked immediately to Liliana's gown with interest (and approval.) Given the cooler temperatures, she was wearing her new Burberry coat out today, freshly dry-cleaned to dismiss any marks left on it by any brave forays into...say, a blacksmith's forge.

"I'll trust you to tell me when I should only look and not touch," Irene commented lightly, lifting a brow playfully. "That's the golden rule from what I've gathered, when it comes to these sorts of things, right? It's always the careless ones who go and get themselves cursed by something they should have respected, or their faces melted off or what have you."

Looking -- observing, making mental notes, obsessing, et cetera -- was usually safe enough, though.

Irene's approving glance for her gown was met by Liliana's admiring glance for her coat, which turned into an amused smile and a nod of acknowledgement. They were women of wealth and taste and it was always nice to be recognized as such.

"I most certainly will, but you'll find those are rare, at least for artifacts from my part of the Multiverse," Liliana said, leading Irene further into the stacks. "Most of ours require mana to function correctly, and I believe you said you're not magic. There are others that will work if you equip them, but those are usually arms and armor. Speaking of, what can I show you first? Jewelry? Gemstones? Weapons? What kinds of things excite your fancy, darling?"

"Oooh, let's start with jewelry." An easy decision, considering Irene was generally pretty set for weapons and a source thereof, but she could always stand to ogle some sparkly things. "I'm a simple woman of simple pleasures, at times. And what, my dear, is mana?"

It had been some...decades since Irene had seen the inside of a bible, but she was fairly sure that word meant something different in this context than the way she'd heard it used before.

Edited 2023-11-02 22:30 (UTC)

"Mana is the power that fuels spells," Liliana explained, bringing her over to the shelf where jewelry gleamed. "Five colors - and also colorless - that well up from different environment types. Each type of magic is good for different things, but even the things they do in common are flavored differently. Healing an injury with white mana, for example, is more about reminding the body what it was, how it was meant to work. Healing an injury with black mana, however, is often more leeching the health and vitality from someone else. But no matter what, you need that mana to cast it, which we - primarily - get from soaking up the mana that the land provides."

As she spoke, she moved some of the jewelry forward for Irene to peruse. A jeweled torque, another jeweled amulet, just a whole bunch of rings, a few amulets and necklaces, though she considered one and then pushed it back away with a shake of her head. "Probably better not to touch that one," she said.

There were more to be looked through, but she thought this was a nice start.

Irene's wide-eyed gaze flicked over the assortment, and don't think that that discarded amulet didn't rather keep her attention for a second longer than it probably should have.

But the Aladdin's ring was where she decided to start, gingerly reaching out to pluck up the ring to examine it. "And it's an inherent thing, your magic?" she inquired, glancing up from the ring to Liliana. "I know of worlds where anyone can cast, if they're determined enough and have the training. This is all beautiful, by the way."

Irene wasn't, like, jealous she'd never been offered an opportunity to go to magic school or whatever thanks to coming from an ostensibly un-magical world, don't worry. She would have been great at it, just saying, but she wasn't jealous or anything.

Okay, but she would have been. Because magic required discipline, focus, and will, and anybody who said that those were qualities Irene Adler didn't have in spades was a fool.

"Yes, exactly," Liliana said with a nod. "Both the ability to use magic and the far rarer ability to Planeswalk. There may be planes where magic is the result of study, but not any that I've yet been to."

She smiles at Irene's choice and added, "That ring is meant to harm your enemies. It requires a significant amount of mana, but it does a significant amount of damage to a single creature in return."

"That seems to be a commonality amongst magicians I've met -- if that's the term," Irene commented, shooting a slightly apologetic look to Liliana in case 'magician' was somehow an offense in her universe. "The balance. Something big from you, or your power source, if you want to really muck up someone's day. My friend Margo's magic comes from an equal output of pain, I believe."

She studied the ring a bit further before setting it down and instead leaning in to carefully examine the Mox Sapphire. "Do you anticipate having to do much of that here? I understand last week was a bit of a -- crash course, but it's usually quite quiet."

"Magic user, mage, and wizard are traditional terms," Liliana said, but she didn't seem particularly fussed over 'magician,' either. "Margo was explaining to me that her magic was based on...math? Equations? And also pain. For my magic, the what isn't particularly important, compared to the scope. Whether I wanted to cause a great deal of harm or heal a large number of people, a large mana output would still be necessary. Whereas if I simply wanted to hurt you a little - or heal you slightly - much less mana would be used. Since coming here, I've learned about a number of magic systems that seem to have a...moral component, almost?"

Seemed real weird to her but okay.

"Whereas for me, all magic is neutral. Mana doesn't care how you use it, simply how much."

Nodding to the sapphire she added, "That is a mana generator. Once every so often, you can tap into it and get a small amount of blue mana, just enough to cast a tiny spell. So if you had, oh, eight of these, I'd guess, and used them all at once, you'd have enough magic to use the ring once."

As she spoke, her eye caught the plain gold band she'd brought forward and she frowned. Something about that just didn't sit right. She reached for it and tucked it into her pocket, pulling forward a jet medallion to replace it. "Same with this," she said, "only it gives black mana, which is my primary mana type. As for your question..." She hummed. "I suppose the easiest answer is that I always anticipate it, even if I don't precisely think it's likely. I do not trust easily or well, and certainly not in something so fragile as peace."

"You, my new friend, are wise," Irene told her, curiously watching that gold (wedding?) band get tucked away in favor of the medallion. "I've lived here for -- oh, about three years now, with a pause to break it up, and while it's usually peaceful here...it's still always better to be prepared, I agree."

Which was why Irene was generally pretty well-armed when she wandered out (though, ever since a werewolf had once told her he could smell gunpowder on her, she'd defaulted to syringes and her switchblade kept in her handbag.) Just because something almost never happened, and just because the island hosted a plethora of superheroes and magic users who could generally destroy anything that rolled through -- again, no one here was jealous -- it did not do to rest on one's laurels.

That was just when a murder carnival or something would turn up, wouldn't it?

"What does blue mana do?" She had a fairly good guess, if Liliana and her black magic dealt primarily with death, decay, and corruption, but she was prepared to be wrong!

Liliana crooked a smile at Irene. "Experience begets," she agreed wryly. "Though I'll admit, this past...whatever you want to call it...didn't seem particularly dangerous, simply...unsettling. And annoying. I've heard about a house, but are there other, more dangerous things that happen?"

While most of her defense did come from her magic, Liliana had two knives on her person almost always and had taught herself how to break fingers if she had to. She wasn't particularly gifted with either of the latter options, but she knew better than to simply reply on mana.

"Blue mana is primarily about control," she explained, watching Irene with a slight smile as she thought this might appeal to the other woman greatly. "Control, cleverness, knowledge, logic, thought. If I were to summon a zombie to fight, a clever blue mage might twist the spell to send it away again. If a red mage were to send a lightning bolt, a blue mage would simply counterspell it and watch it fizzle. Blue mana is from water and islands, so it's mutable and changeable, one step ahead, thinking of possible combinations and plans within plans."

Irene scarcely knew about the house herself, anyway, aside from hearsay and radio, but she had been through a few more dangerous things herself, firsthand. (Though, truly, nothing that dangerous for years, which tempted her to get comfortable.)

"Blue," she noted, "sounds like it's still my color, in this case." Which might have been obvious to some ~~players~~, but was still an interesting, delightful discovery for Irene. "Cerebral magic appeals to me much more than...bombast. Do you find that it tracks to personalities?" And was it a chicken or egg situation? Did the magic make the mage, or did the mage find themselves adhering to the tone of their mana?

"As far as things more dangerous," she added, "in my experience, the worst we had was a carnival that possessed about half the town." And then they'd solved it with hugs! "But I honestly almost prefer that to some of the less obviously deadly things that come through."

~~Next FH meme: What Deck Color Combination Am I?~~

"A bit of both, though mostly the mage choosing the magic," Liliana said. "Almost any magic user can, if necessary, use any color magic. It's just harder and less efficient and doesn't make sense to do. You see--" Here she paused. "How do you feel about getting a hopefully-brief but thorough grounding on magic?" she asked with a small laugh. "Because I can just give you the short answer of 'mages tend to fall into whichever color or combination of colors best suits their innate philosophies, but then constantly using that magic tends to reify those philosophies.' But change is always possible. I started out as a white magic user, when I was a girl."

~~It goes right along with the Sorting Hat thing!~~

"I am always most interested in the thorough answer, Liliana," Irene told her, grinning although she was absolutely sincere. "Did you not like white magic, or did black agree more?"

"Ah ah, be careful," Liliana chided playfully. "I spent over twenty years honing my necromantic crafts, I can become quite the pedant if I don't watch myself and nobody could want that." And then, as if she were trying to stave that possibility off by being a good hostess, she added, "Also, at any time, let me know if you'd like to break for tea. I have an electric kettle and various blends from about the Multiverse if you care to try."

She wasn't quite sure if she saddened Ignis by generally only having a single cup of coffee in the morning and then switching to tea, or delighted him because then he got to claim the rest of the coffee for himself for the day.

"Each color of magic has its own, mmm, philosophy. What it does best and why. Using blue mana to do something impulsive and risky won't work very well. You can make it work with enough brute force, but you'd be very much square-peg-in-a-round-holing it. Every color of mana has two aligning colors - black and blue are aligned, for example - and two opposing colors - red and blue, or black and white, that relate to how well the philosophies of the magics can harmonize. Or perhaps, synergize. And while most people end up falling into magic that synergizes, it's not particularly rare for someone to end up with opposing colors. Though it's less that you sit down and say, 'I shall become a user of blue magic!', as opposed to figuring out what you want to do and going with the mana that supports that.

"Growing up, I was trained as a cleric in a holy order." She crooked a smile at Irene for that little bit of amusing and ironic trivia. "And so I used white magic because white is the best for healing. But I started supplementing my healing knowledge with necromancy - the two are very closely related and only prejudiced fools can't see that - and so I began tapping into black mana as well. I would use white to heal and black for my necromantic practice."

"And are white and black 'aligned,' as you say, or are they as opposite as they sound?" Irene asked, utterly fascinated. This was so different from Margo's magic, though it wasn't terribly different from the way she understood Amaya's Crumbler's energy intake to work. (Which was to say -- Irene barely understood that, but she did try-slash-pretend.) "And I would assume, from what you've said about black magic before, that white healing is more straightforward medical, for lack of a better term, healing, as opposed to how you've described sort of...borrowing life force with your magic."

Look at that spin! Borrowing!

"And, honestly, I'll never say no to a good cuppa, as long as I'm not putting you out," she added, reaching over to lightly touch Liliana's arm if permitted, mostly in a gesture of -- well, hoping to be a good guest, in turn.

Liliana was going to use that at Stark the next time it came up. She'd borrowed, okay?

The touch was not only permitted, but earned a smile, though Irene would likely notice that the necromancer ran cold enough that a slight chill was palpable even through the fabric of her clothing. "Not at all," she assured. "Tea is like the color black, it goes with everything and is rarely ever inappropriate. And feel free to take several things off the shelf with us to keep looking at if you'd like."

Liliana returned to the counter and plugged in a kettle that already had water in it, then pulled out a drawer full of containers of loose-leaf tea, covered in an elegant foreign script. "If you let me know the kinds of things you like, I can make a suggestion," she said. "And please sit--" She turned a hard glare on the two chairs that were positioned on the far side of the counter and strode over, dragging a surprisingly plush and comfortable looking armchair one further back into the store muttering in a sulphurous language, leaving behind a plain wooden chair that matched the one behind the counter.

Don't even worry about it, Irene. It was an Entirely Normal Armchair.

"What had you asked? Ah yes! Black and white are opposed. Black is individualistic and amoral, which clashes with white's lawful righteousness and drive towards community, and its focus on decay and corruption clashes with green's drive for growth and fertility. I used white for the actual healing, and black for things like harm and injury and alchemical poisons and the like. I used their magic for opposing things, which was a point I'd intended to make before and forgot, so thank you darling. Blue mana is very strong here, being an island and all, so if I wanted to, I could tap into it, but every spell that I have ready to cast requires black. I would have a ton of mana and absolutely nothing to do with it, and that would remain true until either I tapped into the black mana that flows here, or I bothered to learn some blue spells to cast instead."

"And where, darling, do you find black mana flowing here?" Irene wondered, snagging up that ornate Foresight Amulet and the Emerald Medallion to carry over with her towards the chairs. (That Entirely Normal chair was getting a look, though, look at that thing. She knew people she'd invite to sit in it in a heartbeat.) "Blue from water, certainly, and it sounds like -- I'd bet green mana is a whole plant thing." Just an educated guess! "And can you produce it yourself, if you needed to? Keep it in a jar for a rainy day?"

Though maybe a rainy day was exactly the sort of gloom that would produce it? Probably not, that sounded like it was still blue.

Edited 2023-11-05 15:12 (UTC)

The whole reason Liliana hadn't packed it back up and returned it was because she could imagine it coming in handy from time to time. And she was very much the kind of woman who appreciated a gun on the mantle in Act One.

"Blue comes from islands and water, exactly right!" Liliana beamed at Irene. "Green from forests, which is also quite abundant here. Black comes from swamps, the landscape of decay and rot, and there are a couple of spots around here that do the trick." Especially near the home she'd claimed for herself, which had been why she'd done that claiming. And Maryland itself was apparently filled with swamps, to her delight. "Plains and grasslands produce white mana and mountains produce red."

It got a little tricky when dealing with purely urban planes, of course, but that was Mana 201 stuff.

"And, yes, to some extent, living creatures produce mana as well, but tapping into that storehouse does damage. One aspect of necromancy involves sacrificing lesser creatures to claim their mana in a pinch."

Honestly, a lot of necromancy involved sacrificing creatures, it was a whole thing.

"It's actually very economical," she added. "You sacrifice a creature, get its mana, and then just bring it back from the dead a few moments later."

"Any kind of creatures?" Irene wondered. Would, say, a squirrel produce enough mana to be worth sacrificing? "Or do they need to be specifically...bats and spiders and things?"

Look. There were aesthetics in play, here.

Irene out here trying to get Liliana on the squirrel mafia hitlist.

"Oh, squirrels are incredibly useful that way," Liliana assured her. "Generations of clever green wizards have made armies out of squirrels and positively destroyed their enemies who weren't expecting how efficient a mob of small creatures can be. But the right black spells and not only can you stop that army in its tracks, but turn them against their previous owner, undead and hungry. Harvesting a squirrel for mana would get you about as much as you'd get from that medallion--" she indicated the emerald that Irene was holding, "though you almost certainly would get black." She paused to consider. "There might be a few spells that would get you green? But most commonly, black."

Better squirrels than to have the whole underground raccoon operation after her! They had already proven to be much more hostile.

"It sounds," Irene ventured, "like black spells, in general, work well when there's an element of...trickery to them?" Which explained quite a bit about its adjacence to blue magic, which seemed to rely even more so on outwitting one's opponent. "And like there are built-in countermeasures -- what good is an entire army of squirrels, after all, if it's only a matter of time and mana before they're rendered useless or worse?"

But by a similar token, she figured there must be some sort of similar mechanic to counter all that decay, right? The universe tended to balance, that way.

It was true that raccoons weren't anywhere near as prevalent in Liliana's Multiverse as squirrels were.

"An interesting thought," Liliana said, considering that. "I think that might be more a function of how I approach magic than a function of black itself, but now it's definitely something I shall have to consider." She gave Irene another smile, the woman's cleverness clearly continuing to propel her up the ladder of Liliana's esteem. "It's interesting comparing the ways that the different types of magic function when they're doing nominally the same thing. If I want to claim a creature someone else is commanding, my best bet is to kill it and raise it from the dead. Blue, on the other hand, would simply steal it, clouding the creature's mind until it believed that it belonged to the blue mage instead. A most frustrating occurrence, let me tell you." She laughed softly. "There are times when fighting a blue wizard feels like playing a game of 'Mistress, May I?' as you wait to see if they'll graciously allow your spells to resolve or if they're going to continue to deny you."

Again, there was totally a universe somewhere with Irene in a blue dress, commanding a bunch of drakes and having just a grand time Reverse-Unoing every mage she met.

"How frustrating," she commiserated, sincere in her sympathy. It was always such a drag to have someone do that sort of thing to you, and she would know. "Though, I suppose, infinitely useful, as far as knowing one's enemies' weaknesses and strengths."

The color coding probably helped a bit, too.

Listen, you repped the colors, all right? Whether it was your sports team or your mana, you repped the colors. Also, Irene deserved drakes, it was a tragedy that she didn't have one already, really.

"Which is why it serves to have a bit of versatility in your repertoire," Liliana admitted, a little reluctantly. "Artifacts, for example, or using several colors of mana. One protection from black enchantment might ruin my plans, but not if I had a few additional tricks up my sleeves."

Like her Planeswalker abilities, but that just got hard to meta.

The Infinite Consortium, Thursday Afternoon

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