MindMattersMind MattersEspérance lets Hamzah go, then wanders unobtrusively back to Huttner's cabin to check on him again. By the time Espérance returns to Huttner's cabin, he rises from his meditative position, and inclines his head toward her. "My pardons on being uncommunicative, earlier, Espérance. I was preparing myself for our session in getting your wards prepared and activated. I have just completed my meditations and now am ready to teach you and prepare you at your convenience." "Is that why you've returned?" he asks. "That, and I wanted to make sure you were all right," says Espérance. "I've also been doing what I can to find out more about the mysterious Doctor Altair. Are we going to need absolute solitude for this? The midshipman Christoffer might come looking for me at some point." "I am fine. I merely wished to organize my mind. You have my apologies if I unduly concerned you for my well being. To answer your question, however, privacy is preferred for workings of this type." Huttner replies. "However, it is not strictly mandatory. This is not a complicated working that has a danger of going sour if it is interrupted. I would be more concerned if the mysterious Doctor Altair came to interrupt us than a ship officer." "So would I," says Espérance. "I take it he hasn't tried anything against you yet? That was one of the main things that concerned me." "No, he has not moved against me as yet." Huttner says. "He may be afraid, and he may be biding his time." "How about this." he continues. "Let us take it in small steps and stages, so that when the midshipman comes looking for you, and to tell you more about the Doctor if I mark my guess, less work is lost." "Would this allay your concerns?" Huttner says. "That sounds like an excellent plan," says Espérance. "As you guessed, I am trying to gather information about the Doctor, in a somewhat roundabout fashion." "Gathering information on a possible opponent is a wise strategy, in Gateway or on the field of battle." Huttner says. "Especially with this sailing trip across the wide seas threatening to make a conflict between us and him inevitable." "Any conflict will be of his instigation," Espérance says with a tight smile, "but I intend to be ready for it." "Of course. It is dangerous to underestimate someone of your bloodline." Huttner says. "Come, Espérance" he adds. He walks to the door, looks outside, and then closes it. "We will sit on the floor here together, crosslegged and hands clasped, and begin the process of building your wards." "On guard, Hugo," Espérance instructs the dog, indicating the cabin door. Then she seats herself crosslegged on the floor opposite Huttner, as he indicated, and clasps hands with him. Hugo trots to the door and sits at it smartly, watchful, vigilant, and attentive. In the meantime, as Espérance grasps hands with Huttner, her attentions go elsewhere. The cabin room dissolves from her ocular attentions to a gray formless that is more indicative of dreams. There is no visual stimuli, nothing to see. There are no smells and she can no longer feel the deck of the ship beneath her. There is no taste on her tongue. The sensation -- or rather, the lack of sensation -- is unsettling, but Espérance controls her alarm. "Good. Our minds are linked." Espérance hears the voice of Huttner, showing her sense of hearing, or something, is still active. "Let's build your defenses. Metaphor and simile are important to the construction of a good defense, one that will work within your mind. What I want you to do is to envision a protective and defensive structure or item. What you envision matters in the sense that the structure should mean defense and protection to you. This visualization will give some definition to the fine details of your defense, but I am more concerned about getting you a defense rather than trying to force a particular type on you." "I can show you mine first, if you prefer." Huttner adds. "Or you can begin and I can help you build it once I begin to see the lines of your structure. Your choice." Espérance's reply is not verbal, but expressed in the very action Huttner has suggested. Within the void of their shared consciousness, a perimeter forms, sprouts, intertwines in a virtual Celtic knotwork of sinewy, barbed stems -- a thorn hedge as deadly as the one that warded Sleeping Beauty. "Good, good." comes Huttner's voice as the thorn hedge begins to sprout. Espérance feels a burst of energy, striving her to increase her rate of growth, as well as a trellis, a scaffold onto which the hedge can grow and run. A riot of green stems with deadly thorns soon is a demarcation across the landscape. It's the only thing to see, and it runs in a curving path, defining a large circle around the "center" where Espérance feels herself. Finally, the circle is complete and the ward stops growing into place. "Wood paradigm." Huttner says approvingly. "Elemental walls are a pretty standard choice. Wood is an unusual choice, I will admit, but it does provide a nasty surprise for a would be attacker. I assume you made the thorns poisonous?" "They don't need to be," Espérance replies. At a nudge from her mind, each thorn instantaneously doubles in length; any presence already entangled in the hedge would obviously be pierced in a hundred places. "Any more than I would envenom my sword." "I see." There is a pleased tone in Huttner's voice. He continues. Now, commit this to memory, make it yours. This is your protection. This is what will save your mind from harm." Huttner says. "And then we'll drop out of this and we'll try a dry run." Espérance concentrates, rooting the thorn hedge in her memory. "Any questions?" "Would an intruder 'see' this?" Espérance wants to know. "Or would different people perceive it differently?" An amused chuckles comes from the unseen Huttner. "You can spend decades learning the minutae of mental combat. Much like the use of the weapons of which you are expert." Huttner replies. "A conflict where an attacker is attempting to force themselves upon your mind would start with your own mindscape. With this wall of thorns. If the fight progressed long enough, the attacker would attempt to undermine your paradigm and turn it into something less effective and more amenable to being bypassed or destroyed." "Your response would be to resist this of course." he adds. "And change the paradigm in ways that favor you. These changes in perception reflect the conflict between attacker and defender. The stronger and more skillful your mind, the more successful you will be." "Sounds a bit like those ballads where there's a fight between two shapeshifters," comments Espérance, "and they keep trying to find a shape that'll get the better of their opponent's." "I begin to see why Lady Dara chose this shadow to foster you within." the voice of Huttner comes. "There are parallels between Shaping Combat and these ballads of which you are familiar. Gaining the better shape, here, means that you can better use your mental strength, Espérance, to defeat your opponent, whether on offense or defense. This is why your initial defense, such as you have here, needs to be well in mind and strong." "And thus this entire exercise." "Understood," says Espérance. "So I'm now in en garde position... shall we try a little sparring?" "Yes." comes the voice of Huttner. "I had originally intended to go from a standing start, but it may be more illustrative to start from here and you can see what an attack might look like..." And then Huttner goes silent and Espérance sees and hears nothing for about a minute, at least from her perspective. Finally, this lull is broken by the appearance of a strange looking figure on the "horizon" approaching the hedge that she has placed around her mind. As the figure resolves, Espérance sees that the figure looks somewhat, above the waist, like her traveling companion. From the waist, below, however, his body blends into that of something very arachnid in nature, complete with eight legs and a bloated spider's body. This strangely formed version of Huttner calmly clatters across the formless plain toward Espérance's thorny wall.A bandoleer of small glass vials is draped across his torso, and one of those vials is held in his right hand, as if being prepared to throw. Espérance concentrates, and the thorn hedge rapidly throws out runners along the top edge that weave themselves into a dome. The spider-man form of Huttner stops as Espérance rearranges her defenses, the hedge now completely surrounding the central core of her mind in a much more defensive pose. It occurs to Espérance that her maneuver is much like a defensive stance or style in swordplay. It trades the ability to go on the offense with an added and improved defense and protective value. Huttner finally starts his advance again once Espérance's defenses have been put in place, stopping an indeterminate distance from where the dome of thorny wood stands in defense. The glass vial in his hand is suddenly thrown, launched through the air at Espérance's wall. It strikes the wall, at a point where it has grown thanks to her defensive posture. The "contents" release themselves as glass strikes wood and thorn, something caustic, and designed to eat away at her defenses like acid. From what she feels, it will be a slow process for the acid to eat a hole in her thorny wall, which is probably why the huttner spider-man attacker starts to ready another volley. The hedge begins to burgeon with fresh growth at the spot where the vial hit. At the same time Espérance concentrates on a couple of more subtle, less visible alterations. Huttner stops his approach, watching Espérance's attempts at repairing the damage he caused with his volley. Cautiously, he begins a circuit of the dome of Espérance's protection. His hands start pulling off vials and throwing them, in rapid fashion, at random points in the wall. ...only to find that they are now bouncing off the suddenly springier thorn dome, some of them rebounding back at him. His strategy seems to be to try and overwhelm Espérance's defenses with a barrage of attacks. None of the attacks are particularly strong, but he seems to be trying to get Espérance to exhaust herself repairing and responding to all of them. Espérance does recognize that the repair of defenses from any one attack is only mildly fatiguing, but to try and repair more than one at once will rapidly become progressively harder and taxing. The rebounding does work, although it does take energy. Huttner is surprised by the first couple of rebounds and is winged by one of them. The subsequent shots are dodged. He stops throwing after a fourth vial thrown at her defenses goes awry. While she can't keep this up forever, Espérance does not feel too taxed as yet. She decides to go on the offensive. The hidden underground runners she's been sending out for the past few moments sprout beneath Huttner's avatar, attempting to entangle him in thorny brambles. Huttner's avatar is caught about three quarters through his circuit, just after he has stopped lobbing missiles and is likely trying a different sort of spar. The attack catches him mildly off guard, tripping him first and snaring two of the eight legs outright. With this physical contact between her branches and his avatar, Espérance can feel that the meeting of the minds is stronger and more personal. To Espérance, this is much like using one's strength in a clash of steel, the strength of the two combatants leveraged against each other. Espérance begins with a strong advantage thanks to going on the offensive. The entanglement catches a third and then a fourth leg before Huttner starts responding. The first thing Espérance notices is the subtle color change in his avatar, adding hues of dark red to the jet black hue of the spider portion of his body. Once this is accomplished, the entangling branches that hold his legs start to feel warmer and warmer. Rapidly. Huttner appears to be using his strength to try and burn the extension of the attack on him via the entanglement that Espérance is using. In retaliation, Espérance draws a cooling dew from her mental earth through her hedge's roots, which the entangling brambles begin to exude somewhat in the manner of a sundew plant. The fight switches to a microcosm of the larger conflict, as the sundew sent through the roots and xylem of the plant faces off against the scorching heat, and incipient fire that Huttner threatens to scorch, burn and destroy the entanglement and beyond. The battle is joined, and once again, the conflict between the sundew and the fire is a test of pure strength rather than strategy. Espérance feels the pressure of strength flow back and forth between her and her opponent for tense moments. It's clear to her that Huttner's raw mental strength is likely stronger than her own, and if this contest continued solely in this vein, he might overwhelm her, given time. But, then, in the spirit of sparring rather than raw combat, Huttner's tactics are turned in a different direction. The bottom body of the spider still puts out the dangerous heat, but at a lower level, and now also exudes something like an oil or grease. Huttner's tactics seem immediately clear--this seems to be an attempt to slip the bonds of the brambles that bind him, rather than burning through them and into Espérance. Espérance's response is something very like a disengage -- but with a twist. The brambly roots unwind themselves from Huttner's avatar and withdraw into the ground ... while the ground itself becomes perfectly flat and smooth. Very smooth. Slippery, in fact. Huttner tries to skitter away from the brambles of the wall. Clearly, he did not expect Espérance's change in the local condition. The slippery, frictionless surface that now surrounds the dome of Thorns proves to be slippery enough to send Huttner sliding away on his arachnid belly, out of control. It takes him a few moments to respond, coming to his feet with something like the suckers of a squid. A smile on his face suddenly changes to something like alarm. And then the mental plane breaks, like a soap bubble, and with a brief disorientation on Espérance's part. Her awareness is back in the cabin. Huttner is looking toward the door, which is ajar. At the door are Pridus, the first mate, and Hamzah. Hugo looks alert and regards both men with a more-than-canine intelligence. "You must help us.Quickly." Pridus says, with a look of alarm on his face. "The both of you. Something has happened to the Captain, the Doctor...and someone else." Espérance comes to her feet and reaches for her sword in one smooth motion. "Someone else? Who?" she asks, simultaneously buckling on the weapon and heading for the door. "A ship encountered us in the middle of the open ocean." Pridus explains as the two of them lead Espérance, Huttner (and Hugo) out of the room and toward the foredeck. You can see it moored off of the port bow. A glance over the edge shows a small vessel, a sloop, really, with two figures, a man and a woman on it. Both watch the larger vessel expectantly. "It's Cazaril!" Huttner shouts, joyfully. He stops, urging Espérance to continue onward toward the mystery of the cabin as he stops and waves toward the smaller ship. Espérance gives the occupants of the sloop a brief, startled glance, then continues to follow Pridus and Hamzah. Huttner being reunited with his superior is probably good news, and at least it isn't the Jesbys. But all may not be as it seems... Pridus and Hamzah stop at the entrance to the wardroom where Espérance has taken meals and meetings with the Captain and officers. The door is open and Pridus opens it... Before Espérance can, Hugo enters first, moving into the room and slowly regarding the scene. He gives off a soft growl as he sees Doctor Altair, against the wall nearest the door. He is unconscious, and is bleeding from the nose. Slumped over the table near the far end of the room is the Captain. He does not appear to be injured, but his body language is like that of a puppet whose strings have been cut. There is the pungent smell of something long and thin smoldering on the floor. Near this thing is a stranger, a woman with silver hair. She seems to be rousing from unconsciousness... Backlinks |
