Luca DR
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11 – Gathering storm (2/2)
🕑 Added 2023-05-11 14:40:13 +0000 UTCSaturday afternoon. Lunch almost saw Albert eating alone at home, for surely that would have been his fate had he not called his friends over. He had a good time with them, he always did. Marc was teasing Colin about Aubrey, and how Colin might go about trying to seduce her tonight at the club. They were heedless of the fact that mentioning the club only made Albert restless. He had shared with them his irrational fear of the place, but as was the case with all irrational fears it was not really appreciated by anyone save for those who had it. His friends couldn’t understand.
There were other things that weighted on his mind, making him distracted. There was a quest he really wanted to get done before tonight, and no matter how his mind told him that he was indeed progressing fast through magic, without anyone to compare to he never felt like he was doing quite enough. Thus, by the time his friends left and half the afternoon was gone, he was exploding with restlessness and immediately jumped onto the bed to initiate the state of faux-meditation that seemed to always help him figure out the magic stuff.
Not before setting an alarm for 8PM sharp, giving him time enough to get dressed and meet his friends for a pre-club pizza. His mother approved of his choice of location to have dinner, as it freed her up to stay with her father at the hospital and have dinner with him. She mentioned that she wanted to have a chat with him and catch up, ask him some things about a problem she had at work.
The quest was the following:
[New quest: Entropic soup.]
- You have undoubtedly realized the advantages associated with mastery of time. From escaping tough situations, to being able to have more time to do the things that matter, being a master of the flow of entropy has obvious advantages. Your creative use of it also gave you insight.
- Quest: Train [Perception] until you become able to perceive entropy gradients.
- Reward: Bullet Time skill video.
And [Bullet Time], if Albert got the reference to a bad sequel of an otherwise decent trilogy that needed no fourth film correctly, was a way to slow down time to a crawl while still being able to move around and interact with objects. A very interesting addition to his current arsenal that already sported one way to manipulate time, adding to it with a skill instead of another item. Using items was, Albert concluded after careful consideration, a liability. There were two mitigating factors: an inventory skill that allowed him to carry items inconspicuously wherever he wanted and however many he wanted, and items that exceeded anything he could do with just skills.
The Hazegem was an item that exceeded any skill he had, even considering the possible [Bullet Time] but, without the inventory skill to cover for the inherent risk of relying on a physical object, he still felt uncomfortable and preferred not to count the gem as part of his core arsenal. An evaluation that his grandfather approved of, during a call they had where Albert explained him this very mode of reasoning. He was still to disclose everything about his magic to the old man, and he made a note to do so as soon as possible when he had time.
So, feeling the flow of entropy. Good thing that he knew what entropy was.
Entropy is a measure of the degree of disorder or randomness in a system, and it tends to increase over time.
That was the textbook definition, the point from where to start devising a way to see it. First he needed to understand it at a fundamental level, at a universal level, then he needed to translate it into something his brain could process, like color or a feeling.
Entropy is closely related to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which dictates the flow of energy from hotter to cooler objects, resulting in an overall increase in disorder within the universe.
That was not enough. How did the universe actually deal with it? How did it show itself in the workings of nature itself? He imagined what the other Albert, the one in the skill videos, would say. It seemed to help.
Try to see it as a fundamental aspect of the universe's nature, expressing the inevitability of change, decay, and the ultimate dissolution of all structure and order. From this perspective, entropy can be seen as a profound reminder of the impermanence and transience of all things, a reminder to appreciate the fleeting beauty of the world while it lasts.
Suddenly there was color, and light, and music and taste and feeling and, and and and—everything. A blinding spectacle of colors, a communion of senses in the most entrancing ways. A synesthesia of meaning. A flow of all things. Then darkness.
Out of mana, and the blaring alarm of the clock screaming that it was almost night outside.
[Skill proficiency increased.]
- [Perception IV] -> [Perception V]
- Albert’s notes: can perceive Entropy. Currently UNUSABLE as it results in critical failure of brain’s capacity to understand, inducing a state of altered awareness that can only be interrupted by the skill’s termination due to lack of mana to sustain it.
[Quest: Entropic soup complete.]
