>>5389609“And how is the new limb, Throat-sssinger?” you ask him one day, during his meditations with you, when the limb seems all but complete.
Karz pauses in his signature musical stylings, and hesitatingly holds his gauntlet-like metal hand aloft. A few of the inner mechanisms are not yet fully-encased, so that you can see the piston-tendons of this false-limb—really more of a cast over the existing, mostly-intact arm-and-hand, you suppose—shift in response to a flex of his muscles. His fake fingers close and clench, forming a fist as swiftly and nearly as naturally as his flesh-and-blood ones.
“That’s all they do,” he admits. “No picking up an instrument for me…”
He looks a little perturbed for a moment, and so you ask: “The Engineer’sss work iss… Unsssatisfactory, then?”
“Wh-no! No! Noelle’s work is excellent.”
“Noelle, isss it? On a firssst name basssiss?” you tease, eliciting a scarlet blush from your bard.
“It’s just…” he pauses. “It’s only, somatic components are important to magic, right? How am I meant to learn and cast more complex spells like… Like this?”
Hm. Well, that IS something to consider. You suppose you’d do better to avoid losing any limbs until the field of medical prosthesis advances a little further! But how to assuage the Throat-singer’s concerns?
>He needn’t worry—he knows all the magic you planned to teach him, anyway>You’re actually left-handed yourself—you can teach him one of your spells, as you cats it [which one?]>Encourage him to focus upon the path of the bard—they cast with music, rather than through gestures and key-words, and he’s already well-suited to such>Instruct the Throat-singer and Engineer to continue meeting until she can improve the prosthesis to the extent that it allows one to cast>Write-in 