Experiment and Application

::: section "Enervate absorbs. Energy, matter, even itself. It absorbs heat, force, sound, and it doesn't reflect them back like matter does. It's like if you poured water onto a towel --- some of the water is absorbed, but some is always dripping back out. That's matter. Enervate is more like if you had a tight bowl, you pour water in and it stays there, it doesn't leak out." "Until the bowl fills up," Awelah notes. "Yeah. When enervate fills up... it's like how water turns into steam when it's hot. Only enervate turns into... The kind of enervate you're used to, that you cast out with your projection, is called umbra. Umbra, when it absorbs too much, starts to turn into aura." "Okay," she says. "What's this for?" "It's um, sorry this is kind of beside the point. The thing I'm trying to explain is, enervate is physical. It has physical properties and interactions. We can describe it like a thing, rather than a magical force." "Ooliri," Awelah starts, "what I'm trying to understand is what this all has to do with the barrel of water that's hanging from our tree." The barrel rocks slightly, strung up beneath the lowest and thickest tree-branch. The water splashed on its side and running down in rivulets hints at its contents. The rope goes up, loops around the branch once, and then falls back down. Opposite the barrel hangs a big log, large enough for a mantis to perch on. Underweighting the barrel by far, the log has to be suspended in place by another rope, which attaches to a boulder Ooliri must have pushed a long ways over for just this purpose. "This is my idea. It's... a scale." Awelah looks between the barrel and the boy. "Water has a known density, and our waterskins have a known volume. By filling up the barrel with creekwater from the waterskin, I know the total volume, and from that, the total mass. So with that side of the equation settled, I can put something --- or someone --- on the log, and adjust the barrel until the two are balanced. That way, we can measure how much we weigh." "And then..." "Enervate has mass. So if you cast a spell while on the scale, your weight would change." Awelah stares, waiting for elaboration but getting none. "Why do we need to weigh ourselves?" Then she tries to guess. "To track muscle growth? But that doesn't really involve enervate." "No, think about it. If we have measurements, we can test things. I wanted to see how much enervate we have, how much we use with our spells. Maybe see what happens if we use more or less... And then... I guess it's not really that useful, is it? I just thought I could... do something." Awelah watches him as he fumbles through his words. But the look she's giving him isn't one of rejection. Even still, her expression is neutral, evaluating. "You want to figure out how our spells work? Experiment with them?" "Yes! If... if you want, that is." "I want," Awelah pauses to consider her words, "to make my own spell. Makuja did it, and she's not better than me. If I --- if we do this measurement thing, will you..." "Help you with that?" Awelah scowls. "I just want to know if this scale thing is going to be useful to my goal. Or if it's a waste of time." Ooliri flinches back from that, but says, "Well, to modify a spell you'd have to know how it works, right? And we can figure out how it works." "Fine." Awelah takes off her cloak, hanging it off another tree limb. It sags. Then she's kicking off sandals and, after climbing up, spinning on the log to face Ooliri. Her side of the scale starts to sink down, and Ooliri leans over to pick up the weights --- gray-shelled, unripened fruit that he had poked holes into. The meat was dug out and water poured in to make the weight precise. Each one weighed about five hundred grams, and he'd already poured twenty kilos of water and sand into the barrel. Ooliri had guessed close to Awelah's weight; he only added a few partly hollowed fruit to the barrel to even the scale. They float on top of the water. "Now, uh, can you cast it?" "Hard to focus on this swing," she says with a frown. She spins around so that her hands aren't visible to Ooliri, and runs through the tarsigns. Now, finally seeing her cast outside the heat of battle, he can glimpse what ⸢Umbral Body Projection⸥ really looks like. Pale violet chitin darkens like there's little bits of smoke curling off her, and then a cloud of the stuff is flowing out. At first, it's not like the familiar shadow form --- instead it's translucent, just a darkening of the air. Her tarsi are still moving, coming together and then parting slightly, and a black mass is forming within them. Her hands open, and the orb-like mass flies forth into the dark cloud while the nymph is rocked back by the force. Inside the cloud, the orb starts to unravel and expand, flooding the smoke, like resin poured into a mold. This all happens in the space of a breath. Darkening to void-like impenetrability, the silhouette becomes clearly Awelah's. The shadow-Awelah backs off while its creator is still rocking back and forth on the log. Even as it swings and rotates, the rope is now pulled upward --- as expected, she has become lighter. Ooliri rushes to pluck up two fruit out from the barrel, their contents spilling a little due to his hurry. He picks up a third, and that's enough to start to reverse Awelah's upward trajectory, and she slides back down. Putting on a half-weight brings it close enough to balanced. "That's... huh." Ooliri is glancing between the contents of the barrel and the projection. "It's what?" "It's hollow, I think. It'd have to be." "What?" "Well, it depends on your volume, and there's no tub around here... Unless I approximate it? Uh, could you step off the log for a moment?" The log slides upward with a jerk, greatly unbalanced, until it's stopped by the rope suspending it to the ground. On the ground, Ooliri is lining himself up beside Awelah, matching her posture, and then bringing a tarsus flat from the top of his head to where it intersects with Awelah's height. "You're about... fourteen centimeters taller than me? And..." He looks to her side, and seeming too embarrassed to touch, just guesses. "Probably twenty centimeters wide..." He has a notebook in one hand, and starts to scratch with a charcoal pencil. "So if we model you as a tube..." "I'm not a tube." He looks up. "Otherwise I'd have to measure each of your legs, and everywhere your width changes, so..." "Fine, say I'm a tube. What's the point of this?" "I'm trying to figure out what your volume is. I don't know what the usual volume for a mantis of a certain height is." "Didn't you say something about the water's volume? How'd you figure that out?" Ooliri's palps bend back, scrunching up in confusion. "Huh? I already knew the volume, it was the mass I didn't know, and I figured it out because the density is just one... And mantids are mostly water! So they'd have a similar density. I'm being stupid. You're right, thanks Awelah." "You're... welcome?" "So anyway, you only got about twelve hundred grams lighter from casting that spell, yet you weigh twenty thousand or so. And that little bit of enervate is all that makes up the thing. If it's spread out throughout the whole volume --- well, umbra isn't usually that diffuse, not when it's as stable as your projection clearly is. I don't know if that density would make it more translucent, or maybe make it evaporate to aura." Ooliri stops himself, waving a raptorial in front of him. "So well, the alternative is that it's like, a shell." "You're saying it's a balloon." "Well..." Awelah scowls. "That sounds stupid. I'm not blowing balloons." Ooliri shrugs, which doesn't ease her expression. He asks, "Well, what does it look like when it attacks?" Awelah points at her projection, and it moves. It swipes a raptorial at a tall fern, and the stalk snaps from the force of the blow. "How does that work," he says, the words an expression of confusion more than a question. "It clearly can't have that much mass behind the blow, so..." "Maybe it has more mass than you think it does." "Where would it come from, though? It has to come from somewhere." "Dunno," she says. "Does it matter? How does where it comes from help?" "I don't think we need to propose mystery mass. I think we already have the answer, actually." Ooliri steps over to the fern, and then makes the tarsigns, and then: ⸢Bane blast!⸥ "Ha! I did it? I didn't think I'd do it the first time." "That's the answer?" "Bane blast creates force, so your projection could be doing something similar when it hits things. But... if you push on something, it pushes back, and if the projection is so light, why doesn't it go flying when it hits something?" Ooliri looks the projection up and down, and sees it standing on the ground. Standing. "You can make it float, can't you? Could you do that?" Awelah points at it again. The gray nymph is peering at her tarsus when she does it this time, and swears she sees a little bit of darkness flowing out. "Can it attack while in the air? Try making it hit the tree." The pale nymph frowns as if she doesn't like being told, but the projection floats over to the tree and punches it. The shadow goes flying backward. "I guess it... sticks to the ground? Hm. How do you control it, anyway?" "I just... it comes naturally." "Like the signs. Is it a sign that you're making?" "I imagine what I want it to do, and then I point and then... it does it." Now Ooliri is frowning. "Vespers don't care about your thoughts." "What?" "One of the things they taught us in the academy. The vespertine arts aren't magical. No technique works because you want it to, or changes based on what you intend. Endowments are tools, and techniques are a logical application of those tools." "Then I suppose I'm different." "Maybe you're doing something different each time, without realizing it?" "I did what you asked. How do I make the technique st