Breakfast is nominally available from 07:45.

Unlike at Cordelia's mansion the choices are far simpler.
There is fresh milk, coffee (its not the 'Arabica' variety you're all familiar with...), Tea (Breakfast or Green). No fruit Juice.
The remainder of the menu constist of a selection from fresh bread (wholemeal/grannery equivalent), butter, cheese (chedder type, white crumbly type, edam type) either made from cow's or sheep's milk, oat meal porridge, cold meats ( chicken, venison, ham, mutton), cured fish, and/or eggs (hard boiled or scrambled by default - you can request poached or fried but they will have to be cooked to order and will take 15 minutes to order/prepare/arrive).
Honey and a selection of jams (strawberry, raspberry, blackcurrent, blackberry and apple) are also available.
For those that want it there is also a 'thick tomatoe sauce'.. you need to use a spoon to spoon it out of the pottery kilner type jar it is in. Note also that the kilner jar fits into a larger bulbous pottery pot, which provides a cold water jacket which keeps the jar cold.

Madison will arrive in the dining room at 07:50, Isla at 07:53, and Gabriel at 07:59.

Breakfast time comes and Cormac is ready and punctual. Remembering that he is to meet with Isla after breakfast he puts the spell rack into a pocket and makes his way to the dining room. He greets any of his cousins he sees along the way and upon arrival. Despite the early morning hour he is fully awake and ready to start the day. He hopes for some instruction on how to regain use of his sorcerous powers throughout shadow and the opportunity to practice his mental pattern walking more.

Musing on how his most recent attempt went the night before he arrives and takes his place.

"Good morning everyone. Slept well I hope."

Rhiannon arrived at breakfast right at 8:00. The resident cousins and Cormac were already there. She made sure to say her Good Mornings before fixing a plate of eggs, bread with jam, and some meat. She had spent a few hours studying the night before and some more in the morning before breakfast. It was all she could do until her cousins caught up to her on the pattern summoning. Not that studying the trump material wasn't important. It was her favorite subject. But she had come so far with the other skill and it felt weird to just stop cold. Hopefully the rest of them would make good use of the time there to advance in that as they had intended. Then, as that last thought finished, she had another idea.

"Madison, Gabriel, Isla" She looked at each of them in turn. "Ive been practicing my pattern manifestation, or mindwalk, and I've got it down to about ten minutes. Cordelia told me that to profress with using the pattern sight I need others who can already do it. With no offense to my classmates, might I ask one of you to assist me with the next steps?"
This message was last edited by the player at 02:21, Sat 29 Apr 2023.

Cassandra enters the room at just gone 8 am nodding briefly to the others she quickly fills her plate with a selection of the food being offered and of course a nice cup of tea.

"I think you're misinterpreting what she said."
"Most likely she said something along the lines of, to make the next step and be able to understand what it is that the Pattern reveals when you use it to examine your surroundings in that manner, is that you need to work with your classmates."
"The reasoning behind this, is that you're all going to need to make the same step, and by all taking the step at once, given that you're going to have to make comparisons between each others auras, is it would be easier to compare notes and therefore work out what the visible differences in Aura's mean."
"Did Cordelia provide you with any hints as to what you may find when you examine each others Aura's in relation to what you may or may not know in relation to each of them?"

"I have to say that actually I did. All this mental exercise is far more taxing that I could ever have thought possible."

In reply to Madison (msg # 5):



"She said basically the same thing you did. That looking at a bunch of auras at once would give me things to compare and contrast. And maybe using my knowledge of everyone can help me identify things about them like if they are powered by Pattern or Logrus, or magic. Or if they are shapeshifters. And that working in a group would let us compare notes, so to speak. And she did mention that these differences would appear as colors."

Rhiannon glanced around the table at each of them. "From my room I was able to see the power of the the Abyss and the Prism. Proximity, or lack of it rather, probably prevented me from seeing much else. But on that, and at the risk of being pushy, why could I not just observe everyone right here. I fully understand that I won't get the benefit of the novel insights of my fellow beginners."

"Primarily etiquette. Summoning the Pattern in the proximity of another Pattern or Logrus user will automatically alert them to its use. If they weren't already aware as to why you may be doing so, then they may think the worst and act accordingly."
"That aside, to be able to determine what you're looking at you need to know what you're looking at, which is a bit of a catch 22. Given you've confirmed that Cordelia has indicated what your compatriots abilities are, you should start with them, as by processes of comparison and elimination you will be able to work out which band in the aura represents which heritage or ability. The one power you won't be able to get from them is the band which represents a Logrus user, which you would be able to get from reading our aura's, except of course without knowing what the other bands represent, you wouldn't know which band represented the Logrus. There is also an additional complication, in that the more powerful the user of a power the greater the masking ability it has on other areas in the aura, which would provide an unnecessary complication at this point. You already have one advantage, in that you've already experimented enough to know that the Abyss looks like. You won't find another signature the same as the Prisms, it's unlike anything else you'll come across."

It felt a bit ironic to Cormac that Madison would mention 'unnecessary complications'. He rather felt they were taking a rush course of something that any typical Amberite, if there even was such a thing as typical in this family, would have been studying since childhood till they were ready to walk the Pattern. By virtue of their rather unusual origins they seemed to be doing things in reverse order.

Perhaps it was a necessity given the circumstances. If Amber were easily accessible then they could go there and take their time, more or less, to learn all of this without expos, a possible war and Gods only know what else going on in the wings. It was a daunting challenge to be sure but he felt they were up to it. With perhaps a few more unnecessary complications thrown in to make it interesting.

"So, to cut to the chase I suppose the rest of us need to pick up the pace so we can catch up to our over achiever here," he said with a nod and playful smile towards Rhiannon. "That is part of why we came here after all. To find a bit more time to work on our mental pattern walking. Maybe by the time we leave here the rest of us will have caught up a little."

He didn't begrudge his cousin her success. Far from it in fact. He was happy for her. Often enough he had been far ahead of his human peers in college and felt trapped because he had to sit through lessons he had already learned while he waited on them to catch up. Maybe it was only fitting for him to see it from the other side for awhile.

"Hang on a minute. I think I've missed something here. What exactly is it you're discussing and would somebody care to explain it to me in words of one syllable?"

Rhiannon raised her hand. "Please. Allow me to try. If I muck it up, then please correct me."

"So, Kenneth, I'll try to use short words for you. We've all been trying to summon the pattern. I believe we've all also managed some success, even if it takes hours. Once you manage to manifest the pattern in less that thirty minutes, the next step is to use it like a kind of looking glass. You can look through the center and see power signatures, those kinds of things. I used it to spot the prism and the Abyss. What we're discussing now is using that ability to see people's auras. It seems auras have colors that show their powers and where they come from. I imagine auras can show more than that and that this power can show other things as well. But that's just me guessing."
This message was last edited by the player at 04:10, Thu 04 May 2023.

"Well, yes. Ideally we would all read each others."



"That's why I thought it would be a good idea to read your auras. I could relate what I'm seeing and you how to interpret it. Not to get pushy, but doesn't that make more sense than us looking at each other and guessing?"

"Okay, lets say you read my aura. I have mixed Choasite and Amber heritage, which makes me a shapeshifter amongst other things. I have both Pattern and Logrus abilities so I have 5 bands in my Aura, but my Logrus is dominant so would mask the other elements in my Aura, making it far more difficult for you to read. Assuming you could read my aura through the mask you would have 5 markers but no idea which one represented which element."

"Now all bar 2 of you are mixed human and Amberite heritage, with Pattern ability. Two don't have additional abilities, and 2 do although you won't be able to detect that yet. So leaving aside the 2 of you with mixed Choasite and Amberite Heritage, you will all have 4 bands in your auras or 3 in four cases, corresponding to Human, Amberite, Pattern, and the other power. If you know what powers your compatriots have you can work out which are the bands corresponding to their particular powers. "

"The two of your compatriots with mixed Chaosite and Amberite heritage, allow you to work out which is the band corresponding to human, and which are the bands corresponding to Chaosite and Shapeshifting, although you won't know which is which, in the same way you won't exactly know which are the Amberite and Pattern bands as you all have these."

"You can work this out in the same way you have done with the Abyss, although the Carnelian and Amber Patterns do appear differently in an aura. You could also work out which was the band corresponding to human simply by reading the aura of any human, except the complication of doing so here means that somebody who may appear human isn't human, they could just be a Chaosite in human form."

"There is also the additional factor that each individuals specific perception of a given marker is subtly different, so whilst an Amberite marker may appear as a sort of peach colour to me, it could appear as turquoise colour to you."

Edited to fix a logic flaw on my part
This message was last edited by the player at 08:24, Fri 05 May 2023.

Having finished her food Cassandra stands up "Alright, I wish you all a good day, I'm off to practice, so I will see you all later."

---
Making it back to her room at 9:55 she settles herself on the bed. With one last deep breath, she begins. With a sigh, she opened her eyes, and slowly she began stretching her slightly numb limbs, it was about 12:25. Cassandra considers the low-level fatigue tugging at her. She doesn't feel tired enough to warrant a nap however a break between this run and the next was needed. That and it would be lunch soon. 'Hmmm, I don't often meditate but perhaps that will help relax me until lunch'

In reply to Madison (msg # 14):



Most of what Madison said still made no sense to Rhiannon. There was no way to justify that a bunch of amateurs knowing nothing would be able to understand what they were seeing better than if they had help from people with a lot more experience. Many things might work differently in different shadows, but logic wasn't one of them. That last bit, however was knew information. If the appearance of auras was a unique experience for each individual viewer, then the elder cousins' knowledge might be less helpful. But by the same logic, the unique perspectives of her less experienced cousins would be of equally limited value. It still made no sense to her, but they seemed dead set on making her and the others do it themselves.

So much for there being an urgency.

Resigned to the idea that she would have to wait for her classmates to progress on the aura sight, Rhiannon just decided to commit her time to studying the volumes of trump lessons. She had plenty to keep herself busy.

"Okay, fine. I'll wait for the others. In the meantime I have other studies. However i do have one last question before I go. You said that using the aura sight is detectable and could provoke an aggressive response. Aura sight is such a benign power. Why would anyone take such offense to it that they would get aggressive?"