strangetrip | Winter's Crest Snow Day [GP]

The Inn was decorated in, if possible, an even more outlandish style than usual. Garlands of evergreens and bright berries competed with gold angels and cheerful small grinning creatures with pointed ears and shoes. A large fir tree had appeared seemingly from nowhere and was now draped with lights and hung with colored glass balls. At the top perched a figure in white robes with wings.

It was, Percy mused, probably for whatever the local holiday was, but it was also close enough to Winter's Crest decorations for him to feel a bit homesick for Whitestone. After all, it was only a year ago that he'd been able to celebrate Winter's Crest in his home city for the first time in years.

Something was still missing - or rather, many things were missing but one thing that he could solve for. Winter's Crest called for snow, and better snow in abundance. To solve for that last problem, he turned to a gnome of exceptional talent. While he didn't know how Sarenrae's power worked, he did have complete faith in her cleric. And thus, together, they concocted a plan: to turn the weather to a more appropriate clime.

The morning of December 20th dawned as it often did in this place - heavy with clouds that would burn off before noon. The clouds were important. They would make the spell casting easier, and Pike knew that she needed all the help she could get. Weather magic was not her forte. Like all clerics with powers as advanced as hers, she knew the right spell but when you had a druid around, there hadn't been much need for her to use it.

Dressed in a warm coat and a big floppy, knit cap, she sat on the ground with her legs crossed. Holding her holy symbol in both hands, she concentrated on the sky. As the Celestial incantation took root, golden rays of light encircled her and rose into the air. With each heartbeat, she could feel Sarenrae's power drawing warmth from the clouds above and into her body.

It took ten minutes to cast the spell and another twenty minutes for it to take effect. The spell would fade if she didn't maintain concentration all day, but it was a small price to pay.

And that's how, before the sun had completely finished rising, it was snowing on the Madonna Inn.

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The carousel illusion could only continue as long as she concentrated upon it, and she would have to renew her veil soon as well. But this she could do easily enough. As she had done with Liz, she placed her two hands together, murmured a few arcane syllables, and when she spread them apart, a rainbow shimmered between them.

It was enough that in her wonder, the girl relaxed and her smile widened. "That's beautiful."

"An illusion only, but a pretty one," Lillith agreed and moved her hands toward Corbie. "Pass your hand through it once, and then a second time more slowly." If she did as Lillith bid, the first time her hand would pass through as it were nothing. The second, Lillith would bend it to stretch with and color her hand.

When her hand passed through the first time it made complete sense to Corbie. This was, after all, not so very different from what her witchlights did. They were light and color with no physical substance. But when the color took to her hand when she pulled it back through...

The girl's eyes went huge as she watched the colors shimmer over her skin.

"My illusions, I can shape them as I wish, or cause them to move. So small an illusion as the rainbow requires only a cantrip. Is this a thing you know?"

Kashaw had explained that the magic here was not like theirs, so Lillith did not assume that because she was a wizard she would know cantrips.

"That's like a spell you don't gotta think about or put much into, right?" Corbie summoned a handful of her witchlights, which was a kind of cantrip as far as she understood. Felix had called it a shortcut.

"A small magical effect, yes. One that does not require a proper spell." She glanced at the small lights in Corbie's hand. "That looks like a cantrip we call Dancing Lights. Can you separate them, arrange them in patterns?"

Without speaking a word, Corbie set the little lights floating and dancing into a couple of different patterns. Then she pulled something from Felix and summoned more lights, setting them around her head like a flower crown and making her deep blue eyes into a bright and vivid violet.

She grinned.

"Lovely!" Lillith watched the little lights and the beautiful blue of Corbie's eyes for a short time. "We have a cantrip very like that, called dancing lights. I do not have this one myself, but I do have others. Shall we continue?"

Corbie nodded vigorously, setting her whole mop of curly hair bouncing. "Yes, please."

Inspired by bouncing curls, Lillith spoke a conjuration. In mid-air appeared a hand, spectral in seeming, but pretty blue and violet in color. Lillith directed it to smooth down curls of sunlit gold.

Corbie stopped and watched that incorporeal hand that nonetheless she definitely felt on her hair. "I don't got anything like this. Regina's been teaching me to move things with my magic, though."

"It is similar. The Mage Hand is a visualization for telekinesis." It was somewhat more than that, but it was a good beginning for explaining it. "When you move things, how do you do it?"

"Um. I think about an extension of my hands, I guess," Corbie admitted after she thought about that for a second. "I just don't see it."

"Yes. Is very much like that, only I make a hand because it is specialty, yes? To make appear what is not there. Other wizards, they may do as you do, but for me, for cantrip, is simpler to manifest hand," Lillith told her. She was only marginally aware that when she spoke of magic at length, her true accent began to emerge.

Corbie frowned at that as she turned the idea over in her mind. "I guess it never occurred to me to make a spell visible if it's not... y'know, specifically for seeing. If that makes any sense. I dunno if it does. I think it does."

"It does," Lillith assured her. At least, to Lillith it did. "But I wonder. Must you make a different spell to move all different things? To smooth hair, lift a coat, tap a shoulder?"

Corbie's frown deepened. "Um... I don't think so? But I haven't been at it long, so it feels like I'm remaking it every time anyway."

"I suppose..." Lillith tapped her finger to her lips thoughtfully. "It is a focusing device. You might try it to see if the movement comes easier that way."

"I'll try it later," Corbie promised. When her magic had immediately visible results, well. If she didn't have time to think about it, she got kind of shy of doing new things in public.

"Always, I am learning new magic," Lillith said, seeing in Corbie something of her self before Bellenore, Nethspira and Nephitiri had shown themselves to be the horrid creatures that they were. "We might study or practice together, yes?"

Corbie perked at that. The Inn would never been school, but then given the disappointment school had turned out to be in some cases, she could probably live with that. "Please?"

"Yes, then. We shall." Of course she would have to explain who and what she was to Corbie at some point, but she could teach her about her world first. And then it would not be so much a shock, she hoped.

"I am in Paris Violets. Room 210. Please come find me any time."

"Absolutely," Corbie agreed at once.

Had this really been so hard? After all, just asking was how she'd gotten Felix to teach her.

... That gave her an idea.

Winter's Crest Snow Day [GP]

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