To Nereus
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TennyoCeres84
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To Nereus
When Meris left Dalarath, how proficient was she at using Black Speech? What could she do?
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IamLEAM1983
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As Nereus
"Honestly, we never considered the creative aspects of the idiom. I didn't want to let her risk losing her sanity in the process of trying to hold atoms into place with her words and her willpower alone. I taught her how to confuse other Void Weavers using quick and dirty logical puzzles, essentially barked koans centered on some of the Others' self-contradictory edicts. Not everyone in my people is honestly able to think their way past tricks that both respect and violate Thermodynamics, for instance, and it would take a fairly contemporary Squid to piece together the missing parts of an incomplete chant designed to create fullerenes or carbon mono-filaments.
We quickly realized she'd be better off with quick offenses and quick defenses. Daze the Squid with your sudden burst of vocal Chaos, and use those few seconds to close the gap and gain the upper hand in physical combat. The shorter the uses, the more her mind is likely to learn to bend along her uses of the Black Speech, instead of breaking. The trick, honestly, is for her to focus on the end result and not focus too much on the how of it all. Some of the theorems she's had to memorize are fairly dastardly traps of circular logic, so trying to understand them on top of memorizing them would have been inadvisable. We started phonetically, to make sure she'd have no clear and present understanding of what she'd be screaming, and then presented her with a summary of what she'd been saying - a more or less sanitized version of that particular puzzle.
All the while, Lucian and I checked for signs of enthrallment or enfeeblement: dilated pupils, bloodshot eyes, slurred speech or lessened cognition or coherence. I'd say we did good, seeing as the worst I ever managed to cause her was a few hours' worth of floating spots in her field of view. Her learning a decent repertoire of verbal cheap tricks - a bit like tossing dirt in the eyes of an opponent - was more than enough for us.
To be fair, I did witness her deeper potential. Once we'll have truly won, I'll be the first to try and initiate her to the more complex art of matter manipulation. The Others gone, creating things verbally should only as hard as the average imagination would allow it to be. The elements that defy or pervert reality were always known to be approachable through more exotic and less direct ways that have the merit of simply bending the rules, rather than breaking them.
Think about it this way: the loyalists would turn a sphere inside out by altering the world around that sphere to the breaking point. The White Brotherhood knows that if the sphere is made out of a material that can pass through itself, all you have to do is crease some segments of it and twist the rest. There's no need to destroy anything to change what is perceptible - all it takes is a different perspective."
We quickly realized she'd be better off with quick offenses and quick defenses. Daze the Squid with your sudden burst of vocal Chaos, and use those few seconds to close the gap and gain the upper hand in physical combat. The shorter the uses, the more her mind is likely to learn to bend along her uses of the Black Speech, instead of breaking. The trick, honestly, is for her to focus on the end result and not focus too much on the how of it all. Some of the theorems she's had to memorize are fairly dastardly traps of circular logic, so trying to understand them on top of memorizing them would have been inadvisable. We started phonetically, to make sure she'd have no clear and present understanding of what she'd be screaming, and then presented her with a summary of what she'd been saying - a more or less sanitized version of that particular puzzle.
All the while, Lucian and I checked for signs of enthrallment or enfeeblement: dilated pupils, bloodshot eyes, slurred speech or lessened cognition or coherence. I'd say we did good, seeing as the worst I ever managed to cause her was a few hours' worth of floating spots in her field of view. Her learning a decent repertoire of verbal cheap tricks - a bit like tossing dirt in the eyes of an opponent - was more than enough for us.
To be fair, I did witness her deeper potential. Once we'll have truly won, I'll be the first to try and initiate her to the more complex art of matter manipulation. The Others gone, creating things verbally should only as hard as the average imagination would allow it to be. The elements that defy or pervert reality were always known to be approachable through more exotic and less direct ways that have the merit of simply bending the rules, rather than breaking them.
Think about it this way: the loyalists would turn a sphere inside out by altering the world around that sphere to the breaking point. The White Brotherhood knows that if the sphere is made out of a material that can pass through itself, all you have to do is crease some segments of it and twist the rest. There's no need to destroy anything to change what is perceptible - all it takes is a different perspective."