(OOC) Memory 0, Skill 0

[simple_not_boring]

The first thing Davian remembers is a blast of some kind of energy catching him in the side. He feels himself spinning, tumbling, and it's like something reached into his skull and started squeezing hard. He screams in pain and terror as he finds himself tumbling through...somewhere else.

He's in something that his mind interprets as a furious river of grey smoke and nothingness. The currents are fierce and threaten to tear him apart mentally and physically. Everything about where he used to be is gone; he feels pulled in a thousand directions at once and at the same time unable to go anywhere, and he knows that if he doesn't escape he'll cease to exist.

Instinctively, he calms his mind, running through every mental exercise he's ever learned (and there are a lot). Somehow he understands that Essence can't exist where he is, but something else does -- it flows through him, cold and dark, and as it does the mental pressure eases. The river seems to calm, slowing around him, and he takes a moment (?) to compose himself.

It hurts to look at the river of void around him, but he tries anyway and notices something -- a lighter patch, or a gap in the currents. He doesn't have a physical body, but with a little trial and error he finds that he can will himself to it. As he stares into it, he finds himself elsewhere.



EFFECTS/WHAT HE LEARNED:

* BASICALLY NOTHING. The memory cuts off before he orients himself; as far as he knows, Aather is where he finds himself after the void.
* No idea where he was or what he was doing. Or who he was.
* He does get a few concepts from the disciplines he used -- he understands that Essence is magic/life energy, that despite these exercises he never learned how to do it, and that somehow he's drawing on something else. Mostly, though, what he gets is that the void sucks.



Davian is an Augur, capable of manipulating a force called kan. Kan primarily allows him to manipulate abstract things -- thoughts, time, his own shape, and the force which most people think of as magic, Essence. Essence is effectively life energy, and can act on the physical world, but only on the physical world -- it can't do anything esoteric. In theory, using kan to manipulate Essence is much more precise and powerful than manipulating it naturally, but that level of ability is a separate skill.

This skill allows Davian to draw energy from his environment with kan and convert it to Essence. Without it, he'd die almost immediately since his body doesn't generate Essence on its own. Almost anything energetic can be drained -- light, fire, electricity, magic, the life force of other living things -- and most of the time the drain is almost totally unnoticeable. He'll also be able to detect sources of Essence, but with this skill he'll have to actually see them and it'll be hard to tell the difference between, say, a bonfire and a human being with Essence senses alone.

Davian can also accelerate the drain, targeting a source and drawing some or all of the Essence it contains at once. This puts out fires, dispels magic and quickly kills living things; this manifests as rapid aging, and he can kill a man or a tree in seconds in canon. Once he has a larger-than-normal charge of Essence, he can unleash it as a blast of white light and kinetic force; if he doesn't use it quickly, though, it starts to dissipate. He can probably hold a charge for a few minutes before it starts to decay in Aather. He can also use the excess Essence to refresh himself, substituting for sleep or rejuvenating himself slightly -- though actually healing is, again, a different skill. All this gives him is the most basic and least subtle use of brute-force Essence.

The use of kan is very subtle, and most people can't detect it, even if they're skilled mages. I'm going to say it's likewise difficult to detect what Davian is doing and how he's doing it, although super skilled detectors can probably note the former more easily. Actually using Essence is a different thing -- it's very obvious and very showy.

In Aather, kan use will generally be limited to the standard powercap pattern with a fatigue cost. Dealing lifedrain damage will be about a medium spell, and using the resulting energy will have its own fatigue cost, depending on how much he throws at once. His rejuvenation abilities won't be able to offset the limiter, obviously.