Quoted By:
The body of the bird starts to curl up as the reaction winds down. On the underbelly of the Gull, the feathers that remained to the bird in life are lost in death. Wet with blood and some unknown frothy discharge, they clump together and are shaken off, by the tremors and convulsions that are still being caused by the Mitigation. As the corpse is gradually denuded, you can see that the Glyphs on the belly did not escape unscathed. The scars of the Scarification Glyphs have opened up, which is where the blood and the … you suppose you could call it puss, but the consistency is all wrong. Well, whatever the Hell it is, it quite clearly came out of the Glyphs. It is messy, to be sure, but it is not too bad. Scarification Glyphs are fairly resilient to damage, so long as they are just surface cuts and scrapes. Apparently, it is not too uncommon for a new Scarification Glyph to open up again the first few times its spell is initialized.
What actually has you worried is the new blisters and bruising around the Glyphs – those indicate that there has been some disruption in the dermis, perhaps even the subdermis, which is where a Scarification Glyph is decidedly <span class="mu-i">not</span> resilient to damage. You are about to start swearing under your breath, when you can feel the legs of the bird start to give away in your hand, and you make the split-second decision to grab on to the Gull with your off-hand, to make sure that the cast does not end prematurely. In most cases, doing this is dangerous, for several reasons. First, adding a second focal or point of contact this late in the cast might cause the spell to shift, split or even just to generally react in unexpected and unstable ways. Second, if the new point of contact is not shielded, then there is a risk of kickback at contact or backwashing afterwards. But worse than that is the chance that the cast unexpectedly bridges over from the intended target – in this case, the Gull – and into the caster.
In this particular case though, none of those are on the table. The spell has nearly played itself out, so the odds that the cast splits or even shifts is low, really low – and if it did, you should be able to rein it in. And your off-hand is already shielded well enough with the salt that you have been holding at the ready. Even with the unexpected aggression of this particular cast, it is still nowhere near powerful enough that you actually had to be concerned about the spell arcing out of the bird and into an unintended target.
This belief in yourself is vindicated, when about two minutes later the cast peters out without further incident. The Glyphed Gull is real mess, but at least the corpse is still in one piece – minus what is <span class="mu-i">hopefully</span> just superficial damage to the Glyphs … oh, and the legs, which feel as if they are going to fall to pieces the moment you try to release them. Honestly, as the point of contact on the target of a Mitigation cast, they got off pretty easily.
