Quoted By:
The salt you put down to prevent the Strangeness from spreading did its job admirably. You can see with your Strange-Staining scarification glyph that whatever Strangeness passed out of the seabird on its death has been confined to the spaces where the squirming and struggling of the bird brushed aside the protective layer. But now that you want to Remediate those small patches, all of the salt around them presents a serious issue. You could accidentally bridge the spell into the surrounding salt – in fact, there is enough salt present that the spell might actually be able to arc out of the little pile of salt that you are targeting with the Remediation cast and into the rest of it, all at once. Or it could split, with one cast running in the pile with another simultaneously running in the remains of the bed. If either of those things were to happen … it would be worse than attempting to hammer cast the entire thing all in one sitting.
For a start, with bridging, arcing or splitting is just that, accidental. You have no idea if or when it is going to happen, so obviously, you are not going to be able to prepare yourself, to focus down on the spell. In the best-case scenario, you would be on the backfoot. In the worse-case scenario, you would be knocked on your ass. When it comes to throttling up or down magical reactions, seconds matter. Of course, that is assuming that you would be able to throttle the reaction at all. If you were targeting the pile, and the cast managed to get into the surrounding salt, you might completely lose control of it. And when a spell becomes sustainable outside of the control of the caster – that is a recipe for danger, disaster, and destruction, even with a relatively benign spell, like Salt-Remediation.
Now, there is a simple way to avoid all of these problems – remove the damned salt. But of course, there are issues with that as well. With so much salt present, and such relatively small stains to look at, you are not really able to judge just how much Strangeness passed out of the Glyphed Gull and into the cobblestones below. This is the perennial issue caused by the death of magical or Strange beings. Not only do you have to contend with the ‘fresh’ Strangeness that they are carrying, once the being dies, you also have to deal with a portion of all of the Strangeness that has dissipated into them over the course of their entire life. At this moment, the bird is not too Strange, which could suggest that very little Strangeness had dissipated into the bird during its life, and so even less would be released upon its demise … but considering that you were running a Mitigation spell at the time the Gull expired, you cannot be sure. It is possible, that at the moment of death, the Strangeness that should have been released on the bird was instead directed to a more amenable spot – in this case, the bits of cobblestones that were no longer protected by the bed of salt that you had put down.
