>>5779705“Henzler, I don’t know if YOU walk around with your second sight ‘on’ all the time like some crazy person, but MOST of us turn it off from time to time,” you’d joked.
“Not ALL the time,” she said defensively, with a pout and downcast eyes that implied you’d accidentally struck closer to truth than intended. “But that’s not what’s happening. <Faerie Fire> isn’t Elementalism, like <Fireball> or <Lightning Bolt>. It’s not <Illusion> either, like <Dazzle> or <Mage’s Torch>. It’s not matter being released, or energy. Its ‘light’… It’s something else.”
“Soul-stuff, I guess,” you’d hazarded, Elven soul-stuff, passed down from the True Fey.”.
“But ‘elf’ is a material condition of biology, of the body,” Henzler had pressed. “The soul… I mean, the soul of an elf and of a man are the same, fundamentally, aren’t they? And what IS ‘soul-stuff’, spirit, REALLY? Isn’t it just life-force—mystical energy, mana, what we ALL cast with?”
“How should I know?” you’d protested, backing away as she drew uncomfortably close to you in her enthusiasm. “Look, when do we get to the part where I learn from YOU? I’m not YOUR tutor, you know!”
(Or her experimental animal, for that matter…)
“R-right,” she’d said, shuffling back and averting her eyes, rummaging in her bag for her notes on…
>Elemental Principles[Even with your subtle flame, it’s an embarrassing thing for a wizard to not be able to cast <Fireball>, isn’t it?]
>Curses & Cures[Soul-stuff and life-force can be infected and afflicted just as the body can, but <Restoration> of such afflictions isn’t something you’d ever had the knack for…]
>Divination & Farsight[This was generally considered an elven art, ironically, but not one you’d ever studied at either Tower, and the ability to construct and set a remote <Arcane Eye> was a useful tool…]
>Global Magical Studies[Speaking of weird and unique ‘soul-stuff’, you were still struggling with Easterling history and calligraphy, while HENZLER was reading their scrolls at such a high level of fluency as to form a <Jade Aura>…]
>Write-in[I’ll veto if I can’t justify it to myself within the setting, but I'll let you know why.]
[Regardless of your pick, I'll roll Arcana. DC is 10 to gain a rank in the field, but 15 to learn the spell; this is further modified by similarity or dissimilarity to your existing aptitudes, but I'll let you fine folsk puzzle out how.]
