Alisa only really notices the lewd glances sent her way, and stretches to better show off her bust for a moment as she eyes the sleek body of one of the onlookers. She grins, but then gives her head a shake as she reminds herself that Gab will be back as quickly as he can.
Settling back, she plucks at the mentioned shirt. "I'm not sure any clothes would've really helped against those slime thingys... unless you wrapped yourself up like a mummy..." She snickers at the mental image. "I wonder... is it possible to summon them...? One would make a fun bedmate... especially with a partner..."
"hmm for some reason that sounds like the safest way to keep you occupied...just wrap you up and leave you on the floor or something. so what did the puddle of goo give you a hard time?"
(Shadowcat's trying to be mean? Well! Now to interpret it as sex talk!)
Alisa looks surprised. "What? Just wrapped up? No toys, nobody playing with me while I'm tied up? That sounds bo-ring. Now, if you added a slime thingy... hee, twitching and tickling whenever it found an opening in the cloth and oozed its way inside..."
She flops back, lying flat on the ground and wriggling slightly to find a more comfortable spot. A silent whisper, and the grass seems to shift with Alisa, bending away from her body instead of being crushed under it. The minor magic seems to steady her somewhat, and her next response is a bit more serious.
"Hard? Well... not by itself... FUN, certainly. If there had been just us, we'd have kept going until one of us got too tired to continue... but with Gab and Geralt both there, they took care of it first... and if there had been more demons instead, THAT would've been trouble..."
"But no, not really a hard time. An interesting time - I haven't gotten laid like that since Sean showed me this spell you could use on some vines and, well..." She blushes and falls silent.
*gives a rolls of her eyes listening to Alissa going on about it all crossing her arms over her chest she glanced around a bit at the Fey for a bit before looking back to Alissa* "Geralt and Gab seem to think this place is safe for now...what about you? our capture the things that were said..the number of ambushes about town...maybe i'm just paranoid but i think something bad may be coming and soon..sorry kinda a buzzkill..so who is this sean?"
Alisa looks around the encampment before answering, gathering her thoughts. "I think it's safe for now, too. It's true I'd feel safer if there were some good solid walls around us... but maybe that explosion as we were escaping was something going wrong for the demons. I can't imagine that they'd blow up their own prison if they could choose not to."
She looks up at the sky, a blush darkening her cheeks. "Sean was a student at the Collegium... a year ahead of me, so he'd taken some more advanced classes. I dated him for a while, and he helped me with some of my studies. But... then he went to study at another academy for a season, and we drifted apart."
"sounds like a simple bit of life..i dont put much stock in nice pretty relationships...i have done well enough with my life alone...i didnt get to be known for being so dangerous cause i worked well with others....anyways how much time did you spend studying magic? some stuff is kinda..coming to me lately..things that seem right up my alley but new tricks so to speak."
"Mmm... three years... or so... I got kinda... distracted... as time went on."
Alisa sits back up and starts digging into her pack, ending up with a couple of battered books. One has "Carolinian, Alisa" written carefully on its spine, while the other seems to be all swirls and flourishes from a distance. Putting the personal book back, she starts flipping through the other.
"Well... um... people practicing often get stronger, able to handle more complicated magics... and sometimes stress brings out latent powers..."
She stops running her finger over her chosen page, and looks over at Shadowcat. "I think I've found the right page... what did you want to know?"
"well i didnt have anything specific in mind per say was jsut kinda curious about maybe what to expect..as may be obvious magic isnt quite my specialty"
"Well... lemme see..." Alisa starts fingering through her textbook again.
"Magic, as we most often view it, can be divided into two categories:
Wizardry, or 'true' magic, which involves the careful manipulation of external forces to achieve a supernatural result.
Sorcery, or 'spirit' magic, which draws upon the power of the soul to accomplish feats beyond mundane means.
"A wizard makes use of skill to change the natural progression of local energy fields. For example, drawing heat energy out of his surroundings and focussing it out of his palms, thereby creating a burst of flames. A sufficiently adaptive wizard is therefore capable of creating a wide variety of effects with his magic, although the power of such spells is frequently limited by the ambient magical levels. A desert is scarcely likely to provide the necessary power for a rain spell, after all.
"Spirit-wielders, by contrast, draw their energy not from others but from themselves. As they are, quite literally, expending themselves to power their magics, such tend to be more primitive, instinctual effects than a wizard's spells. However, where a wizard's potency is limited by what he can forcibly draw, a spirit-wielder can, under extreme duress, channel the near-entirety of their soul into their abilities. With this capability, a spirit-wielder's magic tends to be more limited in variety, but frequently more potent than a matching wizardly spell."
Alisa flips forwards several pages, then begins reading again.
"While a wizard will naturally seek to better understand his manipulations, and spend much time in study and experimentation to improve his spells, the fact that all but the weakest magics require the wizard to utilize a portion of his own energy to 'prime the pump', as it were, causes many wizards to use the practice methodologies of spirit-wielders to further increase their ability to cast. Meditation, proper diet, exercise, and rapid-fire casting practice all assist in this goal."
Finishing the passage, she looks up at Shadowcat. "Does that help?"
(Can you tell that I tried to write it from a mage's viewpoint? )
*shadowcat woul become curious as Alissa read from the book and move to sit next to her looking along in the book as she read. To better understand what one could do was to make more skillful use of it and so Shadowcat wanted to know what she had gained access to* "well it is an interesting bit of information thats for certain. I surely have never practiced magic and so i guess that means i have a form of spirit magic then?"
As with Alisa, the grass seems to move so that it's not being crushed under Shadowcat, and Alisa moves the book over so that Shadowcat can read along. "Well, yes, that's what it sounds like." She flips forwards a page.
"As previously noted, a spirit-wielder's use of power is at least partly instinctual. A developing telekinetic might try to pick up an object, to find it leaping into his hand seemingly of its own accord. A blade-wielder might start by generating a burning glow around his fists, and then as he grows in strength and confidence, manifest his trademark energy sword - but he will still swing it as though it has heft, despite its immaterial nature.
"The greatest challenge to a spirit-wielder is their partly-instinctive use of their powers. Unlike a wizard, the spirit-wielder must take care not to overexert themselves in any one usage, lest they exhaust themselves. Experienced spirit-wielders will have greater energy reserves, due to practice and training, but will naturally seek to limit their powers to what seems appropriate for the task at hand."
She lifts her gaze from the book. "I'm not sure how much more help this textbook will be - it's for wizard-types, after all."
The looks sent their way by the Fey in the camp gradually dropped off over the next few minutes, as Shadowcat and Alisa begin talking about the way their two distinct powers worked. As Shadowcat replies to Alisas explanation recited from her school textbook, neither notice that Geralt is making his way through the Fey crowd toward them, returning form whatever he'd set out to do. When they did notice him, however, about the first thing they noticed was the sour look on his face. Before either of them could say anything, he began speaking, his words clipped; "The Fey have got some food for the both of you waiting in the grove. You'd best go get it before it spoils." And, as he finishes, he points toward the stand of trees in the middle of the encampment.
Geralt only says; "Don't worry about it. I'm sure you'll find out about it at some point anyway;" As he waves his hand. He then immediately turns and starts heading toward the stand of trees he'd indicated a moment ago, apparently intent on getting some food for himself. After a second he stops, and turns to say; "Oh, yes, Gab knows where you'll be, so you don't have to worry about him looking for you. This place isn't big enough for you to be that hard to find, standing out as you do."
Putting her textbook away, Alisa blinks at Geralt's last comment. Sure, everybody was Fey, except for the three of them, but they didn't stand out that badly...
"Okay, then..." She shrugs to herself, letting the subject of Geralt's odd mood change drop, and hoists up her rattling backpack.
Then she heads towards the grove, eager to fill her growling belly.
*just gives a shrug of shoulders and rolls her eyes before heading along to aquire some food as well ready to feast on some actual food rather then a building desire to just go ravenous on the next bit of warm meat she kill*
Geralt gives an emotionless grunt over his shoulder as he starts heading toward the small forest, and the two women trail after him. Alisa and Shadowcat notice that now that they are moving, the Fey seem to have re-acquired their earlier interest in the trio. Both of them catch a great many stares and double takes, in about the same mix as before, but this time the two notice just how odd some of the Fey creatures are. The gruffs and the High Fey are the most human of the creatures they see, but the massive trolls seem to take as much of an interest in them as anyone else, as do a small group of the tiny, diminutive dumogi, which looked like nothing more than balls of blue-black flesh with tiny stick-like arms and legs. Oddest of all were the yellow-skinned kobolds, about three feet tall and only vaguely human in their facial features, and the spiders, easily the size of a large dog and covered in thick white fur. As they passed a group of the creatures, they all began chittering excitedly amongst themselves, and seemed as if they would have approached them had a particularly large gruff wielding a warhammer not begun shooing them away.
It takes them less than a minute to get through the Fey camp to the grove, and both Alisa and Shadowcat are amazed to find that, as soon as they pass through the wall of trees, the previously quiet sounds of the encampment become completely silent. It was almost as though this grove was a place from an entirely different world.
Several of the High Fey, some wearing golden or bronze armor, while others were barely dressed at all, stood around the edge of the clearing, conversing with one another. If any of them noticed the two women enter, they didn't deign to do so much as look in their direction. In the center of the clearing was a stone table, and a various selection of fruits and vegetables sat upon it on plates of clear crystal. Geralt was already there, and had an empty plate in his hands as he pushed portions of various things onto it, his bearing suggesting that he was just as grumpy as before. Off to the side slightly were two more empty silver plates, and since no one else seemed to be interested in taking them, they must be meant for them.
)