Fantasy RPG Forum - Standing Trials

A few breaks before Balthazar was expected to leave for Port Diabolo with a few of his settlers to gather supplies and workers who could help them build lasting homes to combat the wind, the mage and his guards set out to the perimeter of the settlement to see if there was anything that they could do buy the settlement a little more time. He'd arranged for the ship that dropped them off to come by and pick them up again. It took a little persuading but the captain felt good to help the people of Faldrass with a few extra trips back and forth. Well he was happy to do it when Balthazar promised he could ensure good winds and moderately calm waters for the journey when the mage was on the ship.

"So why wasn't this a problem before?" Balthazar asked Balder and Silk as they walked along the perimeter of the settlement, which at this point was little more than a rough collection of tents. Balthazar's first impulse when the wind knocked the first tent off the ground was to anchor them further into the earth with defiance so he'd gone around the settlement and done just that, driving every anchor further into the ground to ensure the wind did not rip them free again. It was a simple but surprisingly effective counter to the wind but it would not do anything to deal with the cold. They'd have to figure that out later.

"Apparently the trees that were here created a barrier to stop the wind from blowing things around." Balder reported as the trio slowed to a stop and Balthazar looked around at where the trees had once been. The ash clouds from Faldrass erupting had destroyed a lot, stripping the trees of life and coating them in ash but there were still placed where wood protruded from the ground, just nowhere where the trees seemed to have survived. Balthazar put a hand around one of the dead trees and used his transmutation spark to assess the wood with identity. It was weak, brittle, and useless for building but wood had many uses.

"Would it be difficult to create our own?" Balthazar asked as he twisted his hand and snapped withering branch he was holding off the tree. He held it out to Silk. "The wood is dead but it might burn well and keep settlers warm. Have a few come and collect wood from here while we figure out the barrier." Balthazar instructed Silk who nodded and walked off towards the settlement to get a few hands to help out. Fire would help with the cold but it, like the sand, was not a permanent solution. The wood they had access to here couldn't be used to build so Balthazar felt better about the decision to go to Almund. He didn't want to pillage the trees at the Serenity Garden. He wasn't sure why but he wanted to leave it as undisturbed as possible while building his settlement at the base of it.

Balder's brow furrowed a little and he crossed his arms as he thought about the good they'd brought over. He'd kept the best track of everything but even he was just a man. Balthazar had an unfailing memory but he did not know how much they needed to achieve tasks. "We don't have the supplies to start on houses and start on a barrier. You'd have to pick one now and get supplies for the other at Port Diabolo." Balder assessed. Balthazar looked to his left, then to his right, and then back towards the settlement.

"We have the earth beneath our feet. What more do we need?" Balthazar asked as he began to reach out to the elements to figure out a few details. He needed to stop the wind so he needed to figure out where the wind was going. "I can raise some pillars of stone from the earth, maybe a low wall if it works better. Do you know how to build something to stop the wind?"

"Not quite but I can get the settler who told me about it. It was... Bran I think." Balder said. Balder, Balthazar, Bran. That wasn't confusing in the slightest.

"Get him for me."

Bran turned out to be a very informed man but he didn't seem informed about a lot of things. He knew how the wind worked and he knew why the trees managed to stop the wind. He tried to explain it to Balthazar but the words he used were somewhat confusing to the alchemist. For all his familiarity and bond with the element, Balthazar could not control it all the time if he was not there. He felt the wind sweeping over the settlement and knew the direction it came from, which Bran implied would be important, but Bran also explained that it would not matter. "The trees worked because they directed wind up and over the land while allowing a little to pass through it too. It didn't stop the wind as much as it weakened it." Bran explained, "A wall- Balder said you wanted to put up a wall- wouldn't do the same thing. It would just push the wind up and probably fall over."

"How can you be sure?" Balthazar asked, his arms crossed while he looked over the land me meant to work with. By now Silk had returned with a handful of settlers who were breaking off and cutting away as much of the dead wood as they could while Balthazar planned how to best his second kin element.

"I'm sure, trust me, I planted these barriers for farmers on Beacon to make money while I was displaced. You'll need to put up something like a bush or more trees." Bran explained confidently from beside Balthazar.

"But it'll take too long to grow those." Balthazar deduced while he watched his settlers working.

"Can't you just... I don't know... magic them to grow faster? Everyone says you can do incredible things with your magic." Bran asked a little more nervously than he'd provided his input.

"No, I don't have any... wait... WAIT!" Balthazar's voice jumped to a scream, "Everyone stop! Take the wood we have and go start a little fire on the beach to get warm. I have another idea!" The settlers seemed shaken by Balthazar's sudden change of heart but none as much as Silk who walked over to get an answer.

"What's going on?" She asked with a little irritation in her voice.

"I'm going to put up something to block the wind, I need everyone but Bran to clear the area." Balthazar explained without giving Silk any real information. She smirked, noticing how he'd dodged the question and nodded before turning and calling for the settlers to follow her back to the tents. Balthazar turned to Bran. "What if it wasn't a wall? What if I made pillars where the trees were? Would it be enough to stop the wind?"

"It might. The stone won't be exactly like the trees though, no leaves, no foliage like a bush would provide. Still it's better than nothing."

Well... they'd find out if that was true.

Balthazar as no stranger to reshaping landscapes. When he was younger and far less experienced in the art of communicating with the elements, he had created a slide on a cliffside in the crags. Granted the rocks in the crags were brittle and weak already. The ground he stood on now was made of stronger earth and would take more to convince to move into the shapes he wanted it to move into. He wondered if he could apply ether directly to shape the ground like he did with objects in transmutation but he didn't test it because it was a more constructive process to work with the elements rather than to force them. With defiance, he had to ask and coax the earth to obey. He could force it, but he'd know it was not comfortable with it. With transmutation he just shaped things and hoped it held for the best. Well... he didn't hope. He could use identity to figure out the structural weaknesses and start over.

"So what shape should I go for?" Balthazar asked Bran as he walked along the little path he meant to convert into a wind break- or at least the best one he could create at the moment. They were at the east side of the large sort of isthmus connecting to the peninsula of the Serenity Garden and Bran had spent the last thirty bits with Balthazar placing little crosses in the dirt where he thought it would be most effective for Balthazar to conjure a stone pillar. Balthazar had the raw talent but not the brains to create windbreaks so he was fairly at the disposal of Bran who, if wrong in his estimates, would have wasted the mage's whole mid-trial.

"Well... honestly you'd probably be better off just creating pillars where I put the marks. Make them sturdy though, we'll build onto them." Balthazar nodded to him in agreement and set about doing exactly what he'd been asked to do. He could reach as far as two hundred feet with his magic and yet he walked to every mark in the dirt and create the pillar for it one by one. Each pillar rose slowly from the earth, spinning upwards in a circular motion like a screw coming out of a wall until they reached Balthazar's height and stopped. It took about a full bit to draw each pillar from the ground and Bran had set them all ten feet apart along the eastern coast of the settlement. By the time the foundation for the eastern windbreak had been set, Balthazar felt a little tingling in his fingers but no great numbness. He'd done far worse and was capable of far more and manipulating one element at its source.

"So, what now? This isn't doing anything." Balthazar expressed as he returned to Bran from the location of the last eastern pillar. He could still feel the wind, his kin, pushing directly through to the settlement. Well, less directly now but still pretty directly. The wind bent around the stone pillars but it hardly bent enough to keep the settlers from having their tents knocked into the sky- though that had become far less common after Balthazar drove the anchors for all the tents deeper with Defiance.

"Well if we had one, I'd tell you to throw up a net between the pillars. A net should do roughly what some trees and bushes would have done. It'll let wind pass through and-"

"I remember what trees do." Balthazar said, crossing his arms in thought. "We don't have a net. We could take down a tent and poke holes in the fabric then stretch it out over the pillars but that'll leave three settlers without somewhere to stay."

"And, again, it isn't an option just to magically conjure one?" Bran seemed hopeful as he asked this time. Balthazar gave him a strange look and then looked towards the long row of pillars.

"In theory, I could conjure a net made of stone but it would probably crumble. I don't know how to have that many holes in it while also maintaining the integrity of the rock itself." Balthazar explained as he tried to visualize what a rock net would look like. He couldn't. Instead he thought further back, much further back, to when he'd been a farmer. Did he make windbreaks? No, there hadn't been a lot of wind and he was used more of the labor like digging and harvesting. "So, short of a net, what is our next best option?"

Bran considered the question for a full bit in silence while he looked over the pillars, then out at the water, then licked his finger and held it up to the air, then looked back at the pillars again. "More pillars, I suppose, just put a little distance between them so wind gets through and it should alleviate some pressure buildup." Balthazar didn't know what that meant but he'd got the first part loud and clear, more pillars. So that was what he spent his time making. Bran had him put each pillar about a foot apart and Balthazar conjured another... probably thirty stone pillars to create a wall with more gaps in it than he'd ever seen. Standing there at the windbreak once it was done, Balthazar felt like he'd wasted all his time. He felt the wind as strongly as ever before and he felt it slipping through the pillars to continue on towards the settlement but he decided and Bran told him, there was not much more that could be done.

It was only when they returned to the tents and Balthazar went around checking to make sure they were all still decently anchored down that he realized the wind whipping in the settlement had indeed weakened. It was good, it was a start, and it would buy him time to go get what they needed from Almund.