He watches her technique, eagle-eyed; they hadn’t actually clarified any specific rules, so the layered spell only makes a faint smile flicker at the corner of his mouth. He appreciates someone thinking outside the box.
Vega plants the magic like mines going off beneath the rock, an explosion beneath it shoving it into motion. When he steps up to the plate for his turn, he still relies on brute-force telekinesis, which is a strain: like trying to dead-lift a boulder.
Is he actually able to move more than he was, two years ago? He likes to imagine so.
Strange is sweating in the sun. They keep working at it. The competition is surprisingly well-balanced, which he wouldn’t have expected from the start: Vega is younger, but he’s newer to local magic. Strange has been immersed in more powerful spellcraft, but it comes so painfully difficult here, a bird struggling to fly with one wing clipped, a hand tied behind his back; and force magic is her specific forté.
By the end of their best-out-of-three, she’s the winner, and he’s sitting exhausted on the very rock they’ve been flinging around. Perhaps a little sour at having been bested by a Youth™, but at the end of the day, the sorcerer doesn’t genuinely mind: failure is a learning state, and there’s also that pleasantly-exhausted buzz of a good workout, his whole body humming with the Fade. He owes her a favour.
no subject
Vega plants the magic like mines going off beneath the rock, an explosion beneath it shoving it into motion. When he steps up to the plate for his turn, he still relies on brute-force telekinesis, which is a strain: like trying to dead-lift a boulder.
Is he actually able to move more than he was, two years ago? He likes to imagine so.
Strange is sweating in the sun. They keep working at it. The competition is surprisingly well-balanced, which he wouldn’t have expected from the start: Vega is younger, but he’s newer to local magic. Strange has been immersed in more powerful spellcraft, but it comes so painfully difficult here, a bird struggling to fly with one wing clipped, a hand tied behind his back; and force magic is her specific forté.
By the end of their best-out-of-three, she’s the winner, and he’s sitting exhausted on the very rock they’ve been flinging around. Perhaps a little sour at having been bested by a Youth™, but at the end of the day, the sorcerer doesn’t genuinely mind: failure is a learning state, and there’s also that pleasantly-exhausted buzz of a good workout, his whole body humming with the Fade. He owes her a favour.
“I need a drink,” he announces.