Notes and notebooks [open]

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ERich sat on a bench beside the Praetorian gate. He had finally been able to acquire redwood, it was something hard to do since the trees only grew in one place. But now he had a huge chunk of it sitting in the bottom of his trunk in the barracks. He had been doing some reasearch to replace the staff that leaned against him. The staff had been faithful. He remembered the day he carved it. He was seven and it had lasted him so long. It seemed almost a shame to let such a wonderful piece of work go. But the side was cracked, not visibly but Erich could see it when he cast spells. He also needed something that was more combat effective. Swinging a seven foot stick around was not rather effective against monsters and enemies. If they did get close enough he had a sword. But he'd rather people not get too close. He had to keep them at bay. A rod was more effective to carry into battle. He remembered having to choose the wood for his first staff. Anders had a wide selection of wood and whichever reacted the best to him was what he would use. Redwood was his first  choice as it was more conductive to his spells. His second was oak. Erich was glad that his brother's apothecary shop was able to get the reagents that he needed to make the rod. It would be about three and a half feet, something he could strap to his back. But also, he wanted to make sure that the rod would last longer this time.

Erich flipped through the pages of the well worn book that he had in his hands. It was a book on rods and staves. He flipped through and made notes in his notebook. He would have to try this ironwood imbuement spell out on something before he tried it on his rod. A rod that was as tough as iron? That could be more than helpful. It would make it much more sturdy and strong, a lot less likely to break and crack. but he would have to try it out first. He didn't want to put in all the work for making a rod and then messing it up with a spell he couldn't preform in the first place. He had his own equation figured out that helped him greatly with transfiguration spells. But the spells themselves never were preformed on people. He didn't much like them, but he could do basic spells that were in the primer book. This particular spell wasn't, but it didn't seem that hard. "about this much weight and about three and a half feet long...." Erich muttered to himself as he made calculations in his notebook. He looked over his math for a brief moment, it looked as if everything was correct. Maybe he'd try this out on a spear first. Ehh, well, that was stupid. maybe it wasn't so bad? Well he'd try it out after sword training later tonight.

Nostalgically, Erich flipped through the notebook. HE really didn't know what to do if he lost his notebook. Not that it would make him weak. The spells, the formulas, the observations, all of the notes went into another, much larger notebook. It was well worn, flipped through and there were so many notes and corrections in the margins, but written in German. Most of the people around here couldn't do much reading in the German language, so he was grateful for it. He had learned both English and French in Primary School in Austria. He closed his eyes as he thought about the Austrian summers. The smell of the grass, the wind blowing through the trees like a restless sailor at sea, and the Edelweiss. He'd have to obtain some for his rod spell later. He always used it for his earth component. His air component was a tail feather from Arden. There were still some other components he had to obtain as well. No one would even think about how much went into making a rod. Or a staff. But if he was able to do what he was doing well, this would last him for a majority of his life. He just couldn't mess up with it. He wondered if he would ever be able to return home to his beloved Austria. He still had about three years left before he could think about even going home. 

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A small groan escaped the dark haired girls throat as she stepped out into the sun light. Gods how she hated the sun. It was the only time she could find the praetors in their office though. It was stupid. The stupidest thing ever. She had already asked Mercury about any news on Josh, so why did she come to bother them? She didn't know. The thought wouldn't leave her mind until she did though. The sun was seriously blinding her though, she was too much a nocturnal creature. Josh could always stay up with her. Stupid thief only slept a few hours anyway. She was eating, Edmund made sure of that when Mercury wasn't bothering her to eat more. She couldn't hurt Arthur anyway. Not eating would have hurt him, and he hadn't done anything wrong. He didn't deserve a mother like her at all.

She had added some of the weight she lost at Orthys back on. That was good at least. She didn't count the actual weight, because baby, but instead the percentage or whatever. She had Kyle check it for her when she first found out she was pregnant. She needed to be healthy for Arthur. To at least bring him into the world and give him a chance. Even if it was a terrible chance, considering how the world was. She hoped Mercury really would do what he could for his grandson. She knew exactly where she'd be if not for Art. She had been there before. Hardly eating. Never sleeping. Always training, working, planning, keeping her mind off of her problems as well as any other Roman around.

Though the annoyingly blinding light of the stupid sun, she could see someone on a bench. A bench she almost ran into, screeching to a halt with the rocks and debris on the steps scratching under her shoes. She tottered a bit, the extra weight in front didn't help at all for sudden stops. At least she didn't run into the guy, scribble book and all. Scribbles that looked vaguely like her own, but in another language. She could still recognize the tell tale signs of magic plotting though. She never exactly paid any attention to her relatives. At all. Even Trivia, though she had a tendency to show up and bother her and Edmund at her own convenience. She helped with her teleportation circle though. Having that stomach calming rune added in was a major help, because that was not fun.

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Erich found that sometimes looking at a problem from another angle. He tilted his head and ran his fingers through his hair. A hand then ran over his chin. It was stubbly and he was going to need a shave. He was tired, maybe if he closed the notebook and just sat there for a moment, briefly closing his eyes. It was his happy place of sorts, somewhere where he could find his own inner peace. He had a chaotic nature, so at times, he felt as if he had to retreat to his own place, his inner sanctum. They were mostly memories. They centered him. It was his passion for power, his love of knowledge, that was what powered his spells. While greed, lust and anger made good for powering spells, it was unstable emotions. They could easily run out of hand and turn on their caster. A good wizard (how he hated that term but it was one of the better ones out there) knew how to use emotions to properly fuel a spell. Conviction was something important to a spell caster.

But his thoughts were interrupted by one Rhiannon Warlow. Or Rhiannon Rogers. Whatever. Not that he didn't care about his sister, he just didn't have much to do with her these days. Or ever if he wanted to be completely honest about it. He glanced upwards at her from his seated position on the bench. He really didn't know what to make of her. She was pregnant, married, and a traitor. He had always been torn between her. did he believe that she deserved to die a traitor's death as a roman? yes. Did he, as her brother, believe that his sister and his soon to be niece or nephew deserve to die? No. But could he really call her family? They were related by blood but past their shared mother, they really didn't have much in common. The had spoken maybe a few words between each other at best. He frowned for a moment. Had they actually spoken before? Maybe? He wasn't quite sure. Erich had a fairly decent memory, it wasn't perfect or anything of the sort, but he was really having a hard time trying to remember. He just couldn't put his finger on it. He tilted his head at her with a smirk and a raised eyebrow. Gods was she some kind of special stupid. But it sometimes seemed like everyone in his family had a bit of a stupidity streak.

"Rhiannon, isn't it a bit early for you to be out and lurking in the shadows?" Erich said with a smirk on his face. It was quite amusing. He did have a bit of fun getting people riled up. He grumbled to himself as he sat up, flipping through some of his notebook written in german. He sighed to himself as he again looked at his calculations. Still it looked horrible and like something was wrong. "Unglück!" He muttered with a roll of his eyes as he shut the notebook in his hand and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Damned calculations."

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It rubbed her the wrong way. That smug smirk. Not that she wasn't already worn down and in a terrible mood as it was. Who wouldn't be in such a mood when the person you loved was probably captured and being tortured for the past month. She had the time down to minutes for how long Josh had been gone. She'd been counting since he was first kidnapped. Did you still call it kidnapping when it was an adult? Abduction made it sound like aliens took him. No. It was humans. Perhaps she had the right idea, going with Saturn. She shook the though. Shook the vicious laughter at the back of her mind, telling her she had a chance. That if she hadn't over looked Ed and Nick's insubordination, if she hadn't given them notice, if she hadn't tricked the monsters into attacking each other. There was a lot of sabotage really. It was kind of amazing, but Saturn didn't like to spend time with the riff raff she guessed. Would putting Saturn in charge be really worth it?

She hated humans sometimes, a lot of the time. Almost all the time now, like when she was betrayed as a child. She was acting like one now wasn't she? Her fingers leafed through her hair, longer now than when she had chopped it off in Orthys. It was a few inches long now, and getting in her face a lot. Again, like when she had started growing her hair out as a child. Everything seemed to have reset itself. Except no one else saw it that way. She was a traitor, and deserved to die. She could have. She would have tried to make sure of it. Except Josh wouldn't have lasted. Maybe? She shook the thought, the taunting voice telling her Josh would have been fine. Better even, without her. No matter, she had a child. Would have a child, and he needed her. Maybe. “Gods damn it, shut up.” she snarled at the voice in her head. Except, she did it aloud. She hadn't realized, not at first. Slowly though, she realized. “Not....you. Sorry.” she looked away from him. “It'd be great if I were in shadows. I hate the sun.”

She hoped he'd glaze over the topic, her outburst. “Wait, go back. Was that an iron wood spell? I can't read it....but the....the...” she waved her hand at the now closed book “Layout.”

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Erich had seen his fair share of strange things in his life. After all he was a son of Trivia and a demi-god. Monsters, gods, all of those things belonged in story books and fairy tales. But then again, he was a kid who could do magic. No he wasn't your typical fairy godfather or anything of that sort, but he could create a fireball that was amazing enough to be considered for fireworks. Come on, he could do magic for crying out loud. His mother was a goddess. As he thought in previous times before, he firmly believed that this stuff should belong in books and not in life. One of these days he might write a book about all of the stuff that he had come across at his time at camp. Incredible monsters and fantastical creatures, they were all amazing but at the same time it was scary. What he thought was the worst part was that he was constantly having to defend himself against things that he only ever had seen in stories before. But he had come to grips with it after he had come to camp with Lord Mercury. This was the world he lived in and this was his life. He had to make the best of it if he wanted to live long.

There were times when he was rather grateful that he didn't much hang out with his siblings. There were times when he regretted not being with them. But Rhiannon was his younger sister, no matter how crazy she was. He wasn't going to lie, he was worried about her. Mostly for Josh's sake. Josh was his buddy after all and he worried about his well-being. That meant worrying about his sister. And his worry didn't abate when she openly snarled an obscenity at him. Was it at him? He was taken aback slightly and looked around, maybe there was something lurking in the shadows or the bushes lining the roads. Had she been summoning demons again? Maybe that was it. Not that he was for summoning things from the abyss, but sweet jesus in a tin can. She didn't have to yell at him just because they had a difference in opinion. Well that was, well.... odd. He watched her carefully as she apologized to him about the whole growling incident. She just didn't look well. She didn't look like a decrepit homeless bum, but she didn't look well either.

Rhiannon brushed the outburst under the rug. He shrugged it off as well. There was always going to be more strange things about people that he would never quite figure out. But she had noticed the layout of the spell he had been trying to do. Maybe she could help him out with it. "Yeah Ironwood enchantment. I suck at enchantments. But when I make this new rod, I want it to be stronger. I can't have it cracking in battle like my staff did." He said with a shrug of his shoulders. He flipped open the notebook in his hands and turned it so she could read what he was doing. Well at least check the equation. His mom did say she was good at enchantments right? No maybe not but a new perspective might allow him some insight that he hadn't seen before. A new perspective was always welcome, even since he had been stuck on a particular problem with his spell-work for almost a week or so. Even his brother in the apothecary shop where he was getting most of his materials from couldn't quite figure out why his enchantment LOOKED wrong. But then again, his brother in the apothecary shop was more inclined towards potions and reagents than he was actual spells.

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Nope, it made more sense upside down. While it was right side up she tried to make sense of the words in another language. She'd heard Josh speak in nearly all of them. She tried to shake the though. Josh. Her mind would go into terrible area's thinking about him. The idea that Gunnar, was that what he was called? Psh, shadow man. He hadn't been trying his best, she could tell. Stone would always stop him, hold back whatever else he had in mind to cause pain but not death. The human body was surprisingly resilient she supposed. So the though of Stone not holding someone back was terrifying. What kind of pain would they put Josh though. This was why she'd want to kill him by her hand before. So he wouldn't have to be in pain at the hands of another. It made her angry, sick, vengeful. It stirred a rage inside of her she never felt before, but she couldn't do anything about it. She tried to not think about it. To not think about him, but they grew up in this camp, and every inch of this ground held some kind of memory.

She wrinkled her brows at the formula. “I don't use rods or staffs, and I have tried making enchantments perminate, gods know the library needs to be sound proofed, but I haven’t completed a permanent one. Have you looked through the west wing in the college library? That's where I put a lot of my dad's books. Though the untranslated ones might still be in the foreign language section.” When Rhiannon entered the legion she brought more than a truck load of books with her from her fathers collection. They'd been rotting in her family home before, unused and uncared for. So she brought them here, and luckily the library was well versed in keeping destructive little demigods from burning or blowing up their books. Even water logging, the books were well protected. She wondered if they would make a copy of every book that came through the city. It's be amazing to have a copy of every book in existence, but that would put a lot of the builders to work adding more and more to the building. Was it even made to hold more than two stories? Probably not.

“What is this? Why is this here?” she questioned what looked like extra bulk on what was already a complex equation “And it'd probably do well as a circle, or triangle. Strong in building structure, physical and spells.” It was funny how many things work both normally and for spells. Rhiannon was a bigger fan of creating large spell circles, full of runes and the like. She enjoyed her spontaneous spells as well, but planning spells ahead of time was great. “It's......missing something....” she said staring at it, trying to figure it out. Stone, metal, and wood where the main focus elements. Something like this might require giving up something to make his weapon better. It was hard to tell sometimes when you were making a spell.

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Erich loved the library. It was one of his more favorite places in the whole world. So many books, so much to read, so many things to learn. The smell of book, the sound of people scratching pencil or pen to paper, it was heaven to him. Oh he could spend hours in the library. Though he wondered if they had a few banned books on the shelves or if he would have to procure them. But all literature was worth reading. Or at least that's how he felt. He also didn't quite understand why Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were on the banned reading list in America. For people who loved their freedom and being able to do as they pleased, they sure did like to put a good bit of restrictions on people. There were some that he expected were on the list for language, or at least that was his particular speculation on Tom Sawyer. Otherwise it was just a book about a boy in the time when the author wrote it. He had a list of the banned books, he had read a few but he wanted to complete the list. He always had lists. Lists of what to do of things he could do. Things he needed. things he wanted, all sorts of lists. Yes Green eggs and Ham was on the banned book list too. For some odd reason people thought it portrayed Marxism. Harry potter was on the list too because some people felt as if it was a threat to Christianity. There were some things that people should just realize are books. Erich would bet his spell books that most of the people hadn't even ever picked up a book. Erich once was told by someone that books were a product of a person's imagination, that those that didn't read or didn't like to read had no imagination therefor the books never had a single word on them.

"How many books did your dad have?" Erich asked curiously. The smug smirk was gone from his face and was replaced by a look of genuine curiosity. "I haven't been in the west wing yet. But I'm slowly making my way over there." He made a mental note to go there later. He might have had to speed up his reading plan and go ahead and check out what sort of books were over there. "But if you ever figure out a silencing spell for the library, you could get paid a lot of money for that." Erich said with a nod of his head. Oh he knew just as well how loud some of the people could be. Specifically some of the younger children who had just found the library. But Rhiannon had gone from totally uncool in his mind to at least half way decent. She was still slightly on his shit list, but he wasn't going to make many assumptions till he knew all the facts. That's why he kept a journal of observations and notes.

Then Rhiannon asked him something about his equation. "oh that? Its to compensate for the over influx of power. You know energy is neither created nor destroyed but sometimes there's too much energy and the vessel can be destroyed. This is the fail safe to compensate for it." He tapped his chin as he flipped through the page to the spell circle he was going to use. "The rod will be used to connect the two halves of the circle that way it's at the flux of power." He said as he again tapped his chin with the eraser side of his pencil. "All of the elements are accounted for.... I just can't figure out what's missing."

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She arched her eye brows then wrinkled them a bit trying to actually remember the number of books her dad had. It was enough they had to build another wing onto the library just to house them all, not that Rhiannon minded any, her father would have been happy to know anyone used them. That people could share in his enthusiasm, and could protect the books. Her dad was a geek. She wasn't afraid to admit it in the slightest, she liked geeky-ness. Josh had it a lot too, his humor and his love of languages. He was a geek. Mercury was a Geek. Everyone was probably a geek about something, otherwise you were just a boring person. She enjoyed books, and magic, and movies a lot. Other people sometimes thought it was a bit too much, but oh well. She wasn't a music geek though, she couldn't remember a musician or a song title to save her life. Though she did remember all the lyrics to her favorite songs.

The smug smile disappeared from his face, replaced by a look of curiosity. Perhaps that transition was exactly what made her start talking to Josh. He used to have that annoying cocky smile. She made that fade from him. Made him loose some of himself, it was her fault he was captured after all. Perhaps she should have just killed him. He'd go to Elysium, or perhaps spend his death with his dad hanging out and goofing off. “Well they had to add the West Wing in to fit my dad's collection, probably over a hundred thousand. It's nice to see all of them are on shelves now though. I could probably look up the exact number. You should. I think they're organized by language, since....my dad never cared about what language it was in. If he couldn't translate it he knew someone who could. Granted there are also his notes on books, which he published. I guess a hundred or so are really just that. My dad's translation notes. Those are on the turn tables though. Also plenty of books on languages, which they already had a section for but it's much better now. They're kinda beside each other now, Magic and Languages. Various other books too, math, science, animals, Steven King, Harry Potter, Dresden Files, Narnia, random game guides for games he never played.” She wrinkled her eyebrows trying to think “It was a lot of things really. He just liked books. Knowledge.”

Rhiannon certainly knew how that was, noisy people. “I've got a temporary one I write on paper runes. But you need four, and you have to put it exactly North, exactly South, East, West. No noise in or out for about an hour before it dies.” That was probably the first spell she had gotten to use Runes with, and it worked amazingly well. Perfect for her, if only it lasted a bit longer. “Probably be great for putting a screaming baby in time out though....” She put her hand on her stomach, which was finally looking like she was pregnant. Though it looked probably only a few months instead of end term like she was. The baby was due somewhere around her birthday, and she was pretty sure some god would decide labor would be a great birthday present. Well as long as he was healthy she supposed. The thought he'd be punished for her wasn't far from her thoughts. By the gods, by the people around them. Someone had tried to hit her stomach before, when she went for some light exercise at the Arena. She stopped going there.

“Ahh, that. Yeah, but there is a way to break that rule, supposedly. I think it's got repercussions though.” Rhiannon never really learned about any laws of magic, not specifically. She learned some of the things the hard way about it, and science. It was interesting that science and magic actually went together really well. Or not. Science originated from alchemy, which was considered a branch of magic at one point. “I just learned to control how much I put in, never tried a back up. It's not always fun. Torn tendons from a strength spell...” she shook her head. Not fun. “Right, and you'll be the spirit slash energy component right? Energy, container, elements needed, conductor... material deconstruction and reconstruction. Energy distribution, quantity, quality, what will be expended in the process and what will be stored.....”