>>6117380There is no peer reviewed evidence that writing wards on paper and then stitching that paper to your uniform wards off the Wrack.
But there also is not any evidence it doesn't make things better, and sometimes out here you have to take your double negatives and your totems and hope. If prayer beads and icon statues and little symbols on necklaces is good for everyone else perhaps your curious new suit of paper will be good for you too. If nothing else it makes you feel better. That's worth a world of good out here.
The Company Ward Specialists are already hard at work in the field. They had to carve a path through the wrack and ward it, to allow the road to be used again. Beats taking the long way around the collapsing fort. They had to make sure there was no odd improbable animals crawling from the fissures in the earth. They had to check the while thing over for signs of fireglass. "Properly" crystalised potential, the fireglass is to the wrack as gold is to lead. If - IF - this monstrous cascade somehow caused fireglass to sprout in minable chunks it may not assuage those who suffered and die but it would certainly make the Company at large happy, given the enormous wealth it would imply. That would be a staggering amount of good fortune. And so, tired, yawning, fatigued and blinking to keep the sand out of their red-rimmed eyes, the Specialists are hard at work.
They give Icarus and his rather curious getup the side-eye. Though one of them also grabs his notebook, sketches out a protective ward and rips the page to attach to his pocket. Hey, if works . . .
. . . So far no one's found any sudden windfalls of enormous wealth that would pull this calamity from terrible to merely monstrous. What they have found is that the Wrack is . . breaking? It's oddly brittle. Usually, the hardened chunks of potential and the cracks in creation are resilient to blow and bullet. But this stuff has a tendency to crack apart with pressure. Some of it is still resilient, of course. Yet the vast majority is improperly formed, which some careful work with a magnifying glass has revealed. Odds are that this field will slowly be worn down by wind and weather and then subsumed back into the Wastes over time.
That's made everyone feel a lot better. Bad enough it sprouted here at all. Far worse if it was sign that the Deep Wastes were reaching *out* towards the coast, the slow ending of all life on the entire continent beneath an unstoppable glacial tide of crystal. No. For now, the world is asserting its mundanity and this field is shimmering apart.
Which all in all leaves a few interesting possibilities though the Specialists aren't entirely sure how to go about it. They've already sent word off to the Company, but until the proper tools get here they're left with their best creative impulses.
And thing is: Wrack Crystal is -sharp- stuff. It's brittle, yes, but these flakes. With /some/ care, they can be pulled from the structures. . .
