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Princess Tells Her Story part 21 (.pdf Version)
by Typhin
Author
4 years ago
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After all the excitement of the last few chapters, it's nice to get something a little more "downtime-y", addressing problems that need to be addressed, like housing and the fact that Tola ran off and closed down the bookstore last time. Naughty Tola, Miss Brown is putting a lot of trust in you for someone she only recently met! And now you're putting yourself in such danger. You're becoming such an unreliable employee!
Remember, kids, Blood Magic is dangerous and do not try it at home. There's no real "safety cutoff" at work, so you may end up burning more vitality than you can spare, and magical healing won't work on you. In electrical engineering terms, it's like having multiple connections to your postive voltage rail to be able to draw more amperage than normal. Even though the blood isn't physically connected, it's spiritually connected, but the power draw is several times faster than normal casting. This can be very damaging, because much like cooking, the "rate of energy transfer" is as important as "the amount of energy transferred". The crystals normally would allow a mage to channel that energy over several days, a portion at a time. In video game terms, it's like the spell costs 2000 MP, but Tola's max MP is only 500. By using blood magic, he was able to "burn" max MP and HP to cast the spell, and only proper rest can recover that.
This chapter is a little above the average length, coming in at 7402 words. With this, the grand total passes the 150k word mark, though Book 2 is only at 47,417 words so far. Because I'm a dork that's easily amused by numbers, the little spreadsheet thing I have that calculates the running total (because I got tired of doing it by hand) now includes a column that ranks each chapter by length, making this #8 (with 19 and 20 being considered separate chapters, ranks #6 and #21 respectively). The average is 7249 words, and the median is 6847.
Fun facts! Did you know Ida Grove, IA is a real place? It has a population of around 2051 people as of the 2020 census, has an area of about 2.20 square miles, and is entirely contained in the 51445 ZIP Code. So tiny! My high school had around 2200 students the year I graduated...
Its motto actually is "The Castle Town", which is something I discovered after I picked it out semi-randomly on Google Maps. (I was looking for a pretty remote town with a lot of forest, out somewhere in rural Midwest, something nice and small so some shenanigans could happen without getting national media involved.) The Community Housing Center is a real place, though I don't know if they actually operate as a shelter with beds and stuff. I made that part up. Also, while 255th Street (the road where Princess got hit by a car) exists, Ida Grove Emergency Veterinary Clinic and Reading Is Magic Bookstore are both made up. The Skate Palace castle and the town marker castle thingie are real, though.
After all the excitement of the last few chapters, it's nice to get something a little more "downtime-y", addressing problems that need to be addressed, like housing and the fact that Tola ran off and closed down the bookstore last time. Naughty Tola, Miss Brown is putting a lot of trust in you for someone she only recently met! And now you're putting yourself in such danger. You're becoming such an unreliable employee!
Remember, kids, Blood Magic is dangerous and do not try it at home. There's no real "safety cutoff" at work, so you may end up burning more vitality than you can spare, and magical healing won't work on you. In electrical engineering terms, it's like having multiple connections to your postive voltage rail to be able to draw more amperage than normal. Even though the blood isn't physically connected, it's spiritually connected, but the power draw is several times faster than normal casting. This can be very damaging, because much like cooking, the "rate of energy transfer" is as important as "the amount of energy transferred". The crystals normally would allow a mage to channel that energy over several days, a portion at a time. In video game terms, it's like the spell costs 2000 MP, but Tola's max MP is only 500. By using blood magic, he was able to "burn" max MP and HP to cast the spell, and only proper rest can recover that.
This chapter is a little above the average length, coming in at 7402 words. With this, the grand total passes the 150k word mark, though Book 2 is only at 47,417 words so far. Because I'm a dork that's easily amused by numbers, the little spreadsheet thing I have that calculates the running total (because I got tired of doing it by hand) now includes a column that ranks each chapter by length, making this #8 (with 19 and 20 being considered separate chapters, ranks #6 and #21 respectively). The average is 7249 words, and the median is 6847.
Fun facts! Did you know Ida Grove, IA is a real place? It has a population of around 2051 people as of the 2020 census, has an area of about 2.20 square miles, and is entirely contained in the 51445 ZIP Code. So tiny! My high school had around 2200 students the year I graduated...
Its motto actually is "The Castle Town", which is something I discovered after I picked it out semi-randomly on Google Maps. (I was looking for a pretty remote town with a lot of forest, out somewhere in rural Midwest, something nice and small so some shenanigans could happen without getting national media involved.) The Community Housing Center is a real place, though I don't know if they actually operate as a shelter with beds and stuff. I made that part up. Also, while 255th Street (the road where Princess got hit by a car) exists, Ida Grove Emergency Veterinary Clinic and Reading Is Magic Bookstore are both made up. The Skate Palace castle and the town marker castle thingie are real, though.
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Western Dragon
120 x 120
131.8 kB
Magic energy was thought to be produced by the soul, and has often been likened to "stamina", "life force", "vital energy", and similar things. A mage that uses a lot of power finds themselves winded and tired, as has been seen a couple of times as Tola gets in fights. Being on Earth doesn't reduce their magic, but does make magic "bleed out" of less efficient spells/items faster, like things drying out faster in low humidity air.
Magic energy is actually channeled from the Chaos Void through the soul, and there's, well, a lot of energy in the Void. The entirety of the Universe, the singularity of energy that exploded and condensed into all the matter that exists, all the stars and planets of all the galaxies, is the energy that was within the "bubble" the Universe sits within, floating among the infinite Void.
If Princess were somehow blocked from accessing that, she would still be okay, but would lose access to her magic-dependant abilities once her reserves ran out. She'd not be able to fly, wounds wouldn't regenerate, and she wouldn't be able to breathe fire. That also means she wouldn't be able to raise her body temperature, making her feel incredibly cold and lethargic, as dragons are cold-blooded but used to keeping themselves heated with magic (which allowed them to have more energy and be more active, which caused them to evolve similar to felines as ambush/hunting predators).
So, no worries, they'll be fine. Even Tola, who just burned a chunk of his own life force there, will recover after a while. (Granted, he'll recover a lot faster than someone who isn't Stormtouched, but it's not like he knows that or has anyone to compare himself to... ^.~ )