Eternity RPC Board
The muscles that held Elke's spine erect went taut as Nevina touched her forehead, due partly to the presumptuous intimacy of the action, and in part due to the reasoning for the poke - the patronizing lecture behind the impurities of her techniques. She felt very much at that moment like a child, brimming with unsullied confidence, who'd blurted out an incorrect answer in front of her class to subsequently be corrected of her mistake. Only, of course, this was much more debasing; this wasn't elementary arithmetic or spelling, and Nevina wasn't a teacher who would soon forget one child's face as waves of successive cohorts took her place. She'd felt that way a lot, today. It would be nice to have the chance for a redo, but she'd never heard of anyone successfully performing a time reversal spell (despite what Daudo from her third level Conjuring class had assured her he'd done once.)
But, on the other hand, Nevina was a certain kind of teacher for the moment, and Elke was here to learn. This sort of honest moment between the two women, one much more experienced and wiser than the other, should be something Elke should expect. It was nothing to be ashamed of when it was exactly what she'd asked for. And perhaps that very realization demonstrated the completion of Lesson One: Elke was not the master, and she would do well to ask for a demonstration before showing off her own technique. The young woman could already foresee the struggle she would face in applying the lesson going forward. It wasn't every day, after all, that the young upstart got to meet her heroine, and the compulsion to prove herself was one that imposed itself rudely into the front parts of her brain all the time.
"I hope I don't assume incorrectly that you would have your own technique for finding the facts in this case?" the younger asked, taking a seat to Nevina's right where a pile of fallen mountain laurel leaves decorated the ground like confetti. She took a moment to adjust her various bags and satchels, rearranging her tools of the trade and ensuring that all was in its proper place. Her filing system for her baubles and trinkets was rather one of ordered disorder. Arranged chaos. No one else would ever be able to find anything in her myriad of bags, but that was okay, because Elke could find them.
And it made her very important treasures all the harder to find and steal, besides.
"I'd like to see it sometime," Elke then confided. She'd located her journal and quill, spread the book over one of her thighs, and was flipping to the page that bore the ink sketch of Egrimm's beryl of which, if she had to admit, she now felt less fond knowing just how mediocre Nevina thought it to be. Had she been talked out of an entire season's work dusting every nook and cranny and mopping up every pool of unidentified liquid at her father's clinic for no reason?
"You big dummy."
Still, in the spirit of accurate documentation of her education, she began immortalizing the new fissure in the stone, coloring in the jagged line on her previous sketch of the stone. When she'd began, there had already been one rather large fissure down the meridian of the talisman (it was only after she'd utilized it the first time and witnessed the formation of a new crack that she realized the original one it had come included with meant that the product was used, and not so gently). All the other cracks in the sketch had been added each time she'd used it for a spell, each one denoted with a letter - a, b, c, and so on in order - with footnotes explaining how each crack had arisen. This newest one corresponded with e, and she indicated in the footnotes the date, location, and cause.
"That is," she added as her fingers twitched back and forth into the shape of the crack, "if you have need of such a spell. I wouldn't want you to waste your, ah... energies on something not needed just to show me how it's done."
But, on the other hand, Nevina was a certain kind of teacher for the moment, and Elke was here to learn. This sort of honest moment between the two women, one much more experienced and wiser than the other, should be something Elke should expect. It was nothing to be ashamed of when it was exactly what she'd asked for. And perhaps that very realization demonstrated the completion of Lesson One: Elke was not the master, and she would do well to ask for a demonstration before showing off her own technique. The young woman could already foresee the struggle she would face in applying the lesson going forward. It wasn't every day, after all, that the young upstart got to meet her heroine, and the compulsion to prove herself was one that imposed itself rudely into the front parts of her brain all the time.
"I hope I don't assume incorrectly that you would have your own technique for finding the facts in this case?" the younger asked, taking a seat to Nevina's right where a pile of fallen mountain laurel leaves decorated the ground like confetti. She took a moment to adjust her various bags and satchels, rearranging her tools of the trade and ensuring that all was in its proper place. Her filing system for her baubles and trinkets was rather one of ordered disorder. Arranged chaos. No one else would ever be able to find anything in her myriad of bags, but that was okay, because Elke could find them.
And it made her very important treasures all the harder to find and steal, besides.
"I'd like to see it sometime," Elke then confided. She'd located her journal and quill, spread the book over one of her thighs, and was flipping to the page that bore the ink sketch of Egrimm's beryl of which, if she had to admit, she now felt less fond knowing just how mediocre Nevina thought it to be. Had she been talked out of an entire season's work dusting every nook and cranny and mopping up every pool of unidentified liquid at her father's clinic for no reason?
"You big dummy."
Still, in the spirit of accurate documentation of her education, she began immortalizing the new fissure in the stone, coloring in the jagged line on her previous sketch of the stone. When she'd began, there had already been one rather large fissure down the meridian of the talisman (it was only after she'd utilized it the first time and witnessed the formation of a new crack that she realized the original one it had come included with meant that the product was used, and not so gently). All the other cracks in the sketch had been added each time she'd used it for a spell, each one denoted with a letter - a, b, c, and so on in order - with footnotes explaining how each crack had arisen. This newest one corresponded with e, and she indicated in the footnotes the date, location, and cause.
"That is," she added as her fingers twitched back and forth into the shape of the crack, "if you have need of such a spell. I wouldn't want you to waste your, ah... energies on something not needed just to show me how it's done."