xinoehp512

I imagined a type of Ritual magic that could 'bind' natural creatures, limiting their power.

I think that the Natural form of magic fits better with yin, personally.

Sign me up as xinoehp513, someone who may or may not be an impersonator. You never know.

You know, I always considered the ASL to be primarily Ritual-based, because of the Natural/Ritual dichotomy. That doesn't fit in well with your idea, though...

I think that we should avoid tying Innate magic too closely to Ritual magic. It's supposed to be a balance between Ritual and Natural, but the way we have it set up is heavily Ritual-biased. Maybe, if we do a gender division with Innates, one gender could be more Ritual-focused (i.e. seeing symbols and spiritweb) and the other could be more Natural focused (i.e. seeing the flow of magic).

The woman looked at Csilen. "Do you believe in reincarnation?"

The woman was silent. "Do you feel like you've failed your men, Csilen?"

There were five elims in a game with 18 players?

The woman looked at him and sighed. "Why did you commit suicide, Csilen?"

She shrugged. "Death. What else?"

The woman raised her eyebrows. "Really? Why do you suppose they followed you all this way, then?"

Behind him stood a group of men. Csilen's men. One waved.

Ruplestiltskin swallowed and reached forwards to tap the strange lady on the leg. All of a sudden, he felt something vast. Something awful. He yelped and fell back. "What is that curse?" he gasped.

The woman raised her eyebrows. "I suppose you could call this an afterlife. But to be honest, it's not supposed to be more that a stopping point on the way to the real afterlife. "As for me? I am called many things. But today, right now, I am your savior."

Enolc sank to his knees, overwhelmed. So much killing. So much. He'd sworn not to assist violence in any way, and yet. Here it was, happening on his ship. And he couldn't do anything to stop it. He didn't have enough... Or did he? With a start, he realized that his Investiture had been recharged by the storm. How had he not thought of that earlier? He put his hand to the floor and concentrated. With a flash, the ship cloned. Everyone on board- except for the invaders- cloned with it. He rolled to the floor, drained. In his mind, he felt the other ship release, vanishing with all of the clones it still had on board. He smiled.

Tom nodded. “Where were we… Ah, yes. The group had finally gotten back together. “It was then that we asked the essential question; what are we going to do? We were all in agreement that something needed to change; none of us had wanted eternal life in the first place, especially not the way we had received it.. It was also obvious that we needed to get the Key, because no other object could lift or modify the spell placed on our souls. “But what would we do with the key? Samika and Ralvon thought we should just unlock ourselves and let ourselves pass away naturally, even suggesting finding a way to destroy the Key entirely. Nialliv and Aurora disagreed, and thought that we should use the Key to form a society where those who did well in life were rewarded with rebirth if they so desired. “None of them thought that the Key could do any more than it had done. Why should it? We had followed all the instructions that had been given to us. There hadn’t been anything that explicitly said that it prevented you from dying, after all. “But you and I thought differently. In our opinion, the Key hadn’t worked the way we had expected it to not because it had been designed that way, but because something important had been removed from it. If we could find that important piece and restore it, we could make ourselves truly immortal, immune to aging and death. “Each idea had drawbacks; Samika’s and Ralvon’s idea was drastic, Nialliv and Aurora’s idea strayed into moral-grey-area territory, and mine and your idea might not even be possible. We argued about it for a long time, but in the end, we decided that we should find the Key before we made any decisions. “It was fairly easy to get the Key, far easier than even we expected. The land around it had changed, but not much, and all the traps and challenges inside were the same. We had bypassed them before without knowing what they were; with the experience we had gained from that time, along with the additional help that we had picked up, it was a cakewalk. Before we knew it, we had reached the central chamber, gotten the Key, and escaped. “If any of us had hoped that the journey would somehow change the others minds, we were disappointed. Before we had even escaped the vault, the argument started back up again. Having the Key made no difference; in fact, it probably made the argument worse. At one point, Samika almost sent herself to the Beyond. If it hadn’t been for you, I doubt we would have made it all out alive. “But you were able to keep Samika from committing suicide and calm everyone else down. You were able to convince the others to at least give me a chance to prove my belief. You were able to remind us all of why we had been seeking after the Key in the first place. And most importantly, you were able to awaken the sense of unity as a team that we had felt in our first lives.” He paused, and let out a sigh. “We would need that unity in the years to come.”

The liquid tasted slightly bitter, but had a sweet aftertaste It filled AJ with a calming and soothing warmth, bringing peace and reassurance to his mind. Tom sat in silence for a moment. "Shall I continue?" he asked.

"You're dead." The woman's lips turned up slightly. "That's typically what happens when you shoot yourself in the head." @I think I am here.

Tom was silent for a moment. Then he stood up and walked over the wheel of vials he had been at earlier. He came back with another one of the red vials. He sat down and held it out to AJ. @Shard of Thought @beantheboy12 ~~~~~~ Meanwhile... A woman stood contemplating the landscape. It was a barren and lifeless place, where she stood. Strange, in some ways. But in others, not strange at all. Behind her, the shape of a man suddenly appeared. She turned to face him. She raised an eyebrow, but her face remained expressionless. "Hello, Csilen." she said.

I had 2 Electrum and a Cadmium last night. For the sake of speeding up discussion, Ark.

Reylf shot up through the air. That stuff at the tavern had taken way longer then he expected it to. He needed to get to the Alleyharbor, fast. Luckily for him, he was the fastest thing he knew of. He accelerated across the city, feeling the Alleystorm sweep over him.

As the Investiture flooded the ship, it surged forwards. Enolc stumbled, almost losing his balance. He smiled. Voyager wasn't taking any risks with her passengers, was she? "No thanks," he called through the rain. "I think we should be good for now, at least."

Tom continued."It might have been the end of us. Indeed, in the hours leading up to my death, I was sure that it would be the end. The key hadn't done anything to us, I assumed; it had been fake all along, or was missing some essential component."Luckily for me, I was wrong. The key had locked down our souls, like the legends had said it would; none of us passed into the Beyond, as we would have otherwise. But floating around as a Cognitive shadow is hardly a desirable fate, and the designers of the Key had taken this into account. A strange mechanism allowed for those who lost their physical form after being Keyed to 'reset' the soul, in a limited sense, and be reborn into the world."And so it was with us. We lost our memories, of course, so for the next twelve years we lived whatever life we had been born into. We had been scattered around the globe; with one notable exception, none of us even knew each other."Our memories were still there, however, and waiting to return to us. On occasion, they would infiltrate our minds while we slept, leaving us dreams that seemed even more vivid than reality. I myself awoke many times feeling the sense that there was something that I had forgotten, something that was important. But I was never able to recall what it was."As we got older and older, the dreams began to come more and more often. They began to strike during the day, too, albeit in shorter moments. But I remembered these no better than the dreams, and they left me no more than a sensation of loss every time one faded from my memory again.“But they kept coming. And they got longer. On occasion, I would be writing something down when one struck me; when that happened, I could write down a word or two before the memory completely disappeared from my mind.“I was naturally very curious as to what these strange episodes meant. Even so, I think it would have probably taken me another year or two before I decided to actually take the next step and figure out what these visions meant if it hadn’t been for my sister Liliana. She figured out on her own that there was something strange going on, and once she had discovered what it was, she made it her personal mission to find out what significance they had.“It wasn’t long after we had begun putting effort into studying this when you found us. By this point, you’d managed to get your memories back fully, along with those of Aurora, Nialliv and Samika. You helped me, too – and Ralvon, when we finally found him. The group had finally gotten back together.”He took another drink of his water. It was thirsty work, telling a tale. ---- Back at the docks, living breadmunks began to drag away the bodies of those who had fallen to the constables. One of them scurried over to Csilen and begun to nuzzle his cheek.

Rumplestiltskin finished. The air crackled. He sighed. "That should keep us safe for now." He took a look at the man. Silvery light crackled across his hand. Involuntarily, he shivered. Powerful magic. But's what's the price? There had to be one. All magic had a price. That shield spell he had just cast would have likely taken one of his gold coins from his pocket, kept there for that exact purpose. That (or other golden items) was the most commonly used method, but there were other, darker ways.

Rumplestiltskin started muttering something under his breath. The air began to crackle with power...