After killing the zombies I notice Julius is still standing there and shout to him. "Hey Julius! No time for a slack jaw, move."


I look down at the water scanning for the felt movement. "Egh, You think its the fish men? Or something worse? Either way I don't like the prospect of jumping over the water, but what do you think?"

Mentat curses profusely and dismounts, pulling the keys from the bike and speaking the words of banishment. "Trace, ride eternal!"

He looks at the gaps here and the doorway he's targeting, and looks at Mew. "So, how are you at track and field, specifically hurdles or parkour?"

While she answers that, he mentally recreates the directions to the chapel in his mind, using the bell towers as his reference. It might be that going across all of those gaps while being attacked by the things from the Black Lagoon might be unnecessary, and he's wanting to make sure.

Of course, for all he knew, that was the kraken down there.

"I'll sum it up as, my jumping leaves something to be desired."

You have a feeling that the chapel it up from here.
You notice a light in the room with the open door. It appears to be a statue of the Virgin Mary holding a flame.

"Open door, religious iconography." He pointed to the open doorway. "Quickly now. I have a really good idea. Shut the door behind us."

He moved through the doorway, drew his uzi-stylized squirt gun, and sprayed the doorway's frame on the edges with the holy water as he spoke a modified version of Scripture. "The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are, and when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No evil shall touch you when I strike."

His goal was simple: fry any evil stupid enough to pass through that doorway.
This message was last edited by the player at 05:28, Wed 06 Sept 2017.

Both of you go through the door. As you pass through, you get a innate sense of peace and safety from this room. Mentat anoints the door with Holy water and speaks His modified Scripture and closes the door. The feeling intensifies. You feel that any evil or unnatural thing would have to be really dumb to try to get through that door.

As you stand in the room the minor scrapes and bruises from the fall fade before your very eyes. You feel full of power and resolve.

"Okay. Breather time." He puts the squirt gun back in his jacket, where it disappears. "Not gonna lie - even your pistol looks pretty good to me. I miss real bullets, and despite their ammo issues and occasional unreliability because not all universes understand how ballistics work, they are fantastic weapons. God didn't make all men equal, Samuel Colt did."

He sat down with the statue at his back. "So, magic for dummies. First step, humility. Learning how to use magic properly was a long, slow and very painful process for me and quite a few others. Pride is still a thing for me."

"So how much do you know, or think you know about magic in general, specifically the part where you actually make the universe move to your will?"

I hold up my hand as I get ready to count off what I know of true magic, lifting a finger for each point. "Jack ~and~ Squat. Yea, I think that about covers it."

"Oh, good. No stupid presumptions then about what works and what doesn't. And you won't be arguing with me about this topic, which is also nice." Mentat started to pace. "So, let's consider Humility wrapped up until further notice. Pride is the biggest danger of learning and utilizing magic - it will literally solve every, single problem you have with no requirement to truly learn and exert yourself. The problem with doing this is twofold."

"The first is that you never get better until you are deprived of magic and have to get better or fail. The sheer utility of magic is seductive in its power to encourage complacency. One day, you will find yourself cut off from your spells, and suddenly realize you have no useful skills to fall back on." He took a breath as he recalled the second point. "The second flaw is likely related to our verser nature and how it reacts to cast magic, but typically each spell cast by us has a one in a thousand chance of ending the universe you are in, give or take circumstances. This power is not for casual use, and it is not for playtime. Each spell you cast, you are swinging a weapon of mass destruction to achieve your ends, regardless of your goals. So it better be worth that risk."

"With that in mind, it's pretty darn useful, and I do use it. What I did at the door was a half-magic, rather low key stuff. An atheist could look at that, and while he would conclude it has no reason to work, he would understand what I was aiming to do, and therefore it would work. That's the essence of magic - it often works only because you think it works." He stopped pacing and stood in front of the statue behind him, letting the light frame him and make him look impressive. "Now, for the next step of Tutelage: when the chips are down, and your mortal strength and knowledge is not enough, what do you do? Pray? Research? Hypothesize? Get high? Accept fate? Meditate?"

"I know that's a lot of stuff to ask, but take a moment to consider what you do when pressed. This will determine a lot about what your starting path will be."

"I research if possibly relevant first, but I get the feeling your referring to when things are now truly out of my control. In which case I confide in you, Ed, my husband. Though your question does remind me of why I used to pray, which was to thank God for the world he made."

"Okay, so three answers." He put a hand to his forehead. "We will go with your first answer for now, as it matches the iPhone you have that won't work in most of the worlds you visit for one reason or another, and I don't see a lot of religious iconography on you. I'm going to guess you rely on that portable Internet a lot."

"This is workable. That phone..." He did a quick perceptive scan of it, and realized it had no magical abilities inherit to it at all like he originally hypothesized that it did. Which meant whatever it was doing in the prior world was a quality of the world it was in. "...is a divination focus, just like I told you earlier."

Magic operated on belief, as far as he knew, so why change that? Besides, it might become one, with time and practice. "The brushes and tools will allow you to work great insights of the mind with time, but they aren't quick. For fast and practical magic, the iPhone will aid you due to its Underworld connections. I will teach you the programming code of the universe, and with that phone you will be able to reprogram or hack it."

"The first spell I will teach you is the reading of magic. Reading, as all primal cultures know, is one of the strongest magics in existence. If you can draw a tale or instructions and then understand them later, you have power at your fingertips."

Mentat pulled a knife from his coat and began carving into the floor a set of runes. "Turn on your phone, go to settings and type into the network setting for the broadband signal COSMIC, in all caps. That's C-O-S-M-I-C. Don't worry if it tells you the network doesn't exist. That's normal, and just a filter for those who don't belong. Then look at the runes, and ask your phone to decipher them for you. Don't be surprised if it takes a while to load an answer. You ARE asking the cosmic internet that binds everything together a question, not your normal one. Be patient."
This message was last edited by the player at 04:48, Thu 07 Sept 2017.

Well that was fast, a magic item. I mean we weren't even there an hour before the phone acted up.
Consider our state of mind. It never occured to us that the phone wouldn't funtion. So when it couldn't get ahold of Ed it redirected us. Just somewhere we didn't expect.
So you think we accidentally used magic, like when that guy learned wire fu without realizing it was impossible?It is worth a try, Ed Mentat did say he was a wizard.
And he summoned a cool bike.
Yes, and he summoned a bike.

Having shaken off the initial skepticism, I decide to roll with it and look for the new network, Cosmic.Well Ed said it was a thing, so it should be here. I give it a dozen or so tries if I don't see it at first, eventually trying to shut down and restart the phone, before giving up.

You type in C-O-S-M-I-C into the network name for the IPhone. And... You actually getting a signal. Your Browser takes you to a search engine that simply reads 'आकाश'


So How would you search for runes that look like this?
ᛋᚲᛁᚱᚱᛖᛚ

Mentat smiles, legitimately impressed at the speed she was picking this up. Then again, versers always did seem to have an affinity to drawing power to themselves. "Excellent work so far. Focus, and finish the task."

Now step two....Wha-What is step TWO? I pause a good moment as I consider how to translate the runes. I start by taking a picture. Maybe being hooked up to a magical internet will add some features to Siri? I push the button to activate Siri. "Siri, trasnlate?" Siri was never involved in redeeming a card on iTunes so I'm not sure if it was the right app for the job. (You can take a picture of the numbers on an iTunes gift card to redeem it.)

You hear a familiar feminine voice come from your phone.
"What do you think I am, Rosetta Stone?
Fine.
Detecting script... Futhark. Elder Futhark.
Transliteration
s-k-i-r-r-e-l
No match found in Old Norse.
Did the writer just use the Elder Futhark to write an English Word? Because that sounds like Squirrel."
This message was last edited by the player at 02:21, Fri 08 Sept 2017.

Surprised by the unusual amount of snark. "Siri are you feeling ...okay?"

Siri Replies with
"I am feeling perfectly fine. Why do you Ask?"

"Ah... You know what I'm just gonna attribute it to the new network. Thanks Siri."

"Perhaps a little too precise, but yes, I wrote squirrel to insure you weren't going to be a sloppy, guessing cheater. Apparently I messed it up and used a phonetic version as opposed to the right one. Too many variations of runic to keep track of. Still, it's universal as long as you have the cipher, and you got the gist." Mentat was happy with the development, despite his own linguistic mistake. "Now, next spell, and thankfully none of these I'm teaching you has a chance to destroy the universe to my knowledge, because they are basic and sensory in nature. I need you to learn if there is magic present in this room, and then find out if the fire the Virgin Mary is holding is magical or not. Go."

He sat down, and just awaited the answer.

Well there are two ways we can go about this. The first is to contune to rely on the phone, maybe looking throgh the camera for the magic. Two, we close our eyes, hold out our hand and try to feel out where the magic is. While the phone has been working for us we may need to consider that as Mentat said there may be places it doesn't function, so we may want to start with option two.
I get the feeling this is more about not being tied to the phone than whether or not it would work in some places.
Admittedly. Fine, a little variance wouldn't hurt anyway.

I close my eyes and try to clear my head. The hardest part I imagine will be encoring the feeling,Verser sense, I'm getting from Mentat. I then hold out my hands as though I'm groping through the darkness, letting whatever feelings I find lead the way.

You close your eyes and do a breathing exercise to clear your mind.  At first You only sense Mentat's verser signal. But you manage to set that out of your mind. You feel... Calm. relatively save. The feeling is sort of like light and it is radiating from the statue and it's flame.

"The fire is magical. Best I can tell, it is the reason the room feels safe."

"Good. Now we step to more advanced lessons. First, don't get fancy. Stick with the magic phone for spellcasting. There will be time enough when I am not sharing a room with you for you to experiment with magic and get fancy."

Mentat took a breath, glad nothing had gone wrong so far, and that he didn't have to use countermagic so far. "I have my own way of using spells that lowers the chance of universal destruction immensely. It is extremely stressful to the verser's mind and body, but all tests so far have resulted in merely the death of the caster, and perhaps a wave of localized destruction. The worst? A horrifying monster that opposes whatever the hell you were just doing appears at the site of your imminent death, AND you die anyways, with the excess energies that would have destroyed the universe you are in dissipating harmlessly between worlds."

"So, while the odds of normal magic ending the universe are..." He does some actual mental arithmatic. "...about one in ten million, with this style, unless you are trying something truly apocalyptic to begin with, at which point the difference between success and failure will be academic, the odds are effectively zero. This will involve you tapping into the dark reaches of your mind. On COSMIC, go to the site cosmic-backslash-settings-dot-u-n-i, and change the default settings to Subconscious and Deep Soul."

This time, he readied himself for dispelling excess magical energies. This was usually the point at which something went wrong if it was going to happen.

"Alright, you said cosmic/settings.uni, right?" I type in what he says after all Ed Mentat hasn't lead us wrong yet. In fact if I can't find it I'll just keep retyping it thinking I misspelled something.