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Post by Noa on Aug 22, 2020 18:15:42 GMT -6
“Rhys,” Aster said. “Could you do anything about this?”
{Me?} Rhys seemed surprised to find himself thus addressed, and looked around at the plot again. {Why? What do you want me to do?}
“Help me clear it, ideally,” Aster said, trying not to let sarcasm sneak into his voice. He wasn’t dealing with Avander right now, where that kind of banter was par for the course. Rhys meant almost everything earnestly, as far as Aster could tell, and Aster didn’t want to spit in the face of that. “You can… make things grow. Can you also make them wither?”
{... No, I don’t think so,} Rhys said. But there was a bit of hesitation there, and he looked as though he was thinking. Fluttering up to one of the sturdier remaining fence posts, he took a perch on it and considered the garden, as if evaluating it for something.
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Post by Noa on Aug 22, 2020 18:15:57 GMT -6
{I can… I can try to see what I can do,} he said at length.
“Sure, go for it,” Aster said. “Just make sure you don’t call up more brambles.” He was honestly more curious than hopeful. If Rhys felt like he might be able to do something more, whatever form it took, the result was sure to be at least a little interesting, right?
{Okay, here goes then,} Rhys said, and closed his eyes. He seemed to concentrate a bit better when he did that. What he was concentrating on, and what he was going for, remained to be seen, but Aster couldn’t help the sense of anticipation building as he waited.
At first, nothing happened. But Aster expected that; he was asking Rhys to do something he hadn’t done before, after all. But after a while, and with Rhys beginning to look increasingly constipated, Aster turned to the so called garden, and saw that something had changed.
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Post by Noa on Aug 22, 2020 18:16:07 GMT -6
It wasn’t, of course, that the plants had all withered to nothing. He couldn’t possibly be so fortuitous, and honestly, Rhys’s abilities were centered around restoration rather than destruction, so it probably didn’t make sense for him to have that sort of power. But the brambles had, for lack of a better word, blossomed - at least in Aster’s immediate vicinity.
“Huh,” Aster said.
{What? What is it? Did something good happen?} At once, Rhys’s eyes snapped open. Aster half expected the blossoms to wither then and there, but the ones that had bloomed stayed where they were. No more of them emerged, so the spell or effect or whatnot had clearly ended, but there were signs enough for Rhys to see what it was that he had wrought.
“You did this,” Aster said, plucking a flower and showing it to the Felusine, who inspected it with great interest.
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Post by Noa on Aug 22, 2020 18:16:39 GMT -6
Aster held the flower closer, and Rhys took an experimental sniff. He brightened immediately. {It’s a nice scent! We should take some home. It would liven up the place.}
“Why not?” Aster said with a shrug. “It’ll be the only thing we have to show for today, but… The Hara will like it.” He sniffed the flower himself, and while his reaction wasn’t as animated as Rhys’s, he conceded that it did, in fact, smell nice.
“I don’t think you should do any more for today though,” Aster said, looking out at the brambles. “You didn’t make them get bigger, but I don’t know if this makes ‘em stronger… And I don’t think they need any more help.”
{Sorry… I can’t really cut them either,} Rhys said, sounding genuinely apologetic. {I think I’d hurt myself if I tried to chew on them.}
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Post by Jack on Aug 22, 2020 19:14:51 GMT -6
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Post by Noa on Aug 22, 2020 22:10:36 GMT -6
Rhys jumped down from the fence post into the little area that Aster had cleared, and picked at one of the long thorns with a claw, very gingerly.
“Yeah, looks that way, huh? I’ll just do what I can for today, and… figure out something about the rest some other time.” Aster scratched his head, looking around him at the state of the plot of land that he was working with. He’d have to do something about this… And next time he would bring a creature with him who could help out with it more. If not Summer, then maybe Grunty or Avander. The former would be good at carrying a large load, and at flattening things - if only the brambles weren’t so sharp. The latter… Well, Aster had sort of gotten into the habit of throwing Avander at a lot of his problems to see if that would work.
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Post by Noa on Aug 22, 2020 22:10:50 GMT -6
Between the two of them they would be able to manage something, surely.
Regardless, they weren’t going to get much done today with just Aster on his own, and Rhys was probably going to get bored of watching Aster whack away at vines. “Let’s just go home for now,” Aster said.
{Are you sure?} said Rhys.
“I’ll take you back here when it’s not so overgrown,” Aster promised. Rhys seemed satisfied with that, so together they set off for somewhere nicer to take a walk through.
The next time they were there together, the plot of land had been roughly cleared. Aster had done a lot of the cutting, and Grunty had done a lot of the hauling. As it turned out, wind magic had been good for cutting through the brambles from a distance, though it had taken Aster a few tries to get the proper control…
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Post by Noa on Aug 22, 2020 22:11:07 GMT -6
And he couldn’t do it indefinitely, since he only had a certain amount of wind magic on tap each day.
But long story short, they now had actual dirt to work with. With Grunty’s help, they had even managed to till the soil somewhat, so that it wasn’t so packed down.
Aster had brought Rhys here for a couple of reasons. One of which was some training, funnily enough.
“So that thing you did the other day with the flowers,” Aster said. “You think you can do it again?”
{The flowers? I… I guess so. Why not?} Rhys took a moment to recall it. It had been some time, and he had only done it the once, after all. But he didn’t seem fazed by the idea, so that much was good, at least. If he was confident, then Aster wasn’t about to undermine that for him.
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Post by Noa on Aug 22, 2020 22:11:24 GMT -6
“Give it a go, then. Make something bloom here.” He tapped a little plot of dirt that had been tilled. For them to be able to use this as a skill, Rhys had to be able to control it, and he had to be able to do it on demand. That was the extent of Aster’s goal with this training.
Rhys looked at the plot that Aster had indicated. It really wasn’t very big, just the size for a flower bed. And then he closed his eyes, and Aster waited. This time Aster knew to watch the plot of land to see what was happening, and knew what to expect, so he wasn’t altogether surprised when a flower sprouted from the ground… And then another… and then a third.
By the time Rhys was finished, there was a cluster of flowers growing more or less from the plot Aster had indicated.
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Post by Noa on Aug 22, 2020 22:11:49 GMT -6
Some spilled out from its confines, but Aster wasn’t going to quibble about Rhys coloring outside the lines a little, so to speak. This was already pretty good for what was technically a first try, since the first time Rhys had done it, they hadn’t actually been trying to achieve the specific result.
Aster said as much. “Not bad. You managed to do it again.”
{I remember the feeling from last time, a little. It’s easier than vines, actually.} Rhys sounded only a little tired, which was also a good sign. Given a little rest, he would be ready to try again soon, hopefully. But Aster had no intention of pushing him very hard, and for the moment they admired the flowers together.
After Rhys had had more of a break, Aster asked him to try again on a different plot. “Go ahead. Make it bloom,” Aster prompted.
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Post by Noa on Aug 22, 2020 22:11:59 GMT -6
Again, Rhys concentrated on the plot, and flowers slowly began to unfurl from the dirt after a while. This time it happened a bit more quickly than the last, and there were more flowers. They didn’t all look the same, but they all had something of that relaxing fragrance about them.
They took another short break, and then Aster took Rhys to a tree growing just outside their plot, independent of any of the gardens assigned to a particular owner. “Try this one,” he said. “Make it bloom.” He was curious to see whether Rhys could do it, since he had made the brambles blossom before, when he hadn’t been particularly aiming for anything. So theoretically any existing plant could bloom too, right, if he just reached out to it the same way?
Rhys was certainly game to try. He didn’t hesitate or question anything, but closed his eyes and concentrated again.
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Post by Noa on Aug 22, 2020 22:12:15 GMT -6
It took a little longer, but slowly flowers began to bloom on the tree too, several popping up at once. These were, of course, the flowers that would naturally have bloomed from this kind of tree, just forced into being out of season. {They’re beautiful,} Rhys said appreciatively when he opened his eyes again.
“They’re not too bad,” Aster agreed. He had never really been the type to appreciate flowers, but it wasn’t unpleasant to look at. And the scent really was sort of relaxing, in a way he could appreciate more than the aesthetics of it.
They kept up this practice a few more times that day, and then several days after that, to get Rhys used to doing it, and to learn the limitations of what he could do. More flowers took more time, but eventually he could make things bloom in a wide swathe all around them, as well as in a concentrated area.
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Post by Noa on Aug 22, 2020 22:12:54 GMT -6
Established plants were more difficult at first, but eventually he got the hang of them.
It was learning to do all this with his eyes open that was the challenging part. Aster thought it would be nice, both so he didn’t have to close off one of his senses to do this, and also so he could see it happening as he did it. Rhys liked the flowers a good deal more than Aster did, and Aster thought he would have liked to see them in the process of blooming, rather than only when they were done.
It took a lot of practice for them to get over that hurdle. It was harder, as it turned out, for Rhys to visualize things with his eyes open. But Aster talked him through it, trying this tactic when that didn’t work, until finally Rhys was able to do it the once.
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Post by Noa on Aug 22, 2020 22:13:31 GMT -6
Things got easier from there, once he knew it was possible. It still took some practice before he could do it consistently, but it wasn’t like he was learning the skill from scratch.
Eventually they got to a place where Rhys was comfortable doing it on cue, and Aster was comfortable with his progression… By which point the garden was a veritable riot of flowers, some of them even growing out of the disintegrated and defunct fencing.
… In the end, it was almost as overgrown as when it had started. Most of the flowers were not, fortunately, as troublesome to remove as the brambles, but Aster didn’t know if he wanted this to be the look and function of his garden, so… Removing them was going to have to happen at some point.
{Don’t worry,} Rhys reassured him. {I won’t be sad. I can always make them bloom again somewhere else if I wanted.}
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Post by Noa on Aug 22, 2020 22:13:55 GMT -6
Aster’s first instinct was to claim he hadn’t been thinking that, but he thought on it a bit and decided that he was in fact glad that Rhys didn’t actually mind. “That’s good then,” Aster said. “I’ll… have Grunty in here to help me plow this place again tomorrow.” The Gug wasn’t likely to be happy about that, but at least he wasn’t clever or interested enough to question why they were doing the same thing again, and in the same place, so soon after the last time they had done it. Avander would have, but then Aster didn’t think Avander was quite equal to the task of pulling a plow in the first place. His dignity as a former drake probably wouldn’t have allowed it.
That was a problem for another time though. For now, it was fine to just appreciate the flowers.
25 (exit)
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