Dragon spells turn into plots
Apr. 6th, 2015 12:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethOkay, so, I have poked the systems until I'm pretty sure I know what a Dragon can do. Seek, Purify, Shape, Create, Jet, Breath. And then Shapeshift.
So now I want a set of plots built around that. Problems, up to seven of them, where those spells are the solutions. And I want a gradual reveal, not least because I'm going to wrap a romance plot around it and have a gradual increase in intimacy. So, like, admitting you did in fact do magic is a significant stage in a relationship. ... in a really generally applicable way... :eyeroll:
So we've got a Wind dragon, Phil http://flightrising.com/main.php?p=lair&id=127188&tab=dragon&did=11734041
(Isn't he awesome?)
He'll be learning spells from the Air college.
Seek is really very useless at first glance. Seek Air? Oh look, there's some. And there. And also there. Wow it's like we're surrounded. So, unless you stick them under water or underground in they're stuffed for air, it isn't terribly helpful as a directional tool. (Okay, I'm planning to stick them underwater, but it's not the most subtle use of this spell.)
But, in the details, it is actually more use: it's analyse air, if you're careful and fiddle about with it. You can seek particular elements. A specific gas or combination of gases, with known sources excluded if mentioned in advance. So if SHIELD is seeking a gas based weapon? Phil's their go to guy. He's also the first to notice if they're being gassed. And if some rooms are safer, or some caves breathable still, he can find that out.
Seek Air costs 1 energy to cast, and with an energy reserve of 12, Phil can in theory get 12 pieces of information about the local air before he starts to wear himself out physically. But the better you know a spell, the less energy it takes to cast. Skill 15 means -1 to the cost, and at that skill he can also cast it with a single word or with a single gesture, while moving. Since he's known it since early childhood, there's every reason to believe he knows it that well. That means he can treat it pretty much like another sense, one he has to concentrate to use.
... crit failing in an RPG leads to random and unexpected side effects up to and including demons. Using a spell so routinely would kind of increase the possibility of rolling two 18s in a row, at which point demons. But I do not wish to write about demons, or indeed most of the crit fail possibilities. Accidentally hurting yourself by doing a spell really wrong might add some drama, and making it sort of go zzzt and make a stink instead of working could be amusing, but mostly I'm not going to be rolling and he's not going to be failing. Actually rebuilding all of this as the kind of Advantages that don't risk the crit table is entirely possible, just darn fiddly. So I shall be basically ignoring it, I think, because plot is not RPG game balance.
If Phil can sense things about air that others can't - and really I think expanding these Seek spells to Sense spells and putting in stuff like wind speed isn't stretching it much for storytelling purposes - he's going to get a reputation as an observant guy. Possibly weirdly observant. But nobody is going to jump from there to magic, let alone dragons. Actually there's no point people would think dragons before, you know, actually looking like a dragon. If there's mages that are not dragons, him doing magic is going to pass as a different kind of weird.
But then there's Purify. That makes breathable air where there was none, and that's going to be very useful. Again, it's a one point spell, so if he's known it a long time (he has) and practiced a lot (oh yes), he can cast it for free with a single word or gesture. Gas attacks are basically only going to bother him for the single second it takes him to notice them... if and only if he's willing to be that noticeable with his magic.
Oh, and it clears a one yard radius to a distance of 12 feet off the floor. Each person would pretty much need their own casting, unless they were bunched up super close, and he'd have to start with himself or risk losing the ability because coughing etc. And then if there's air flow he'd need to keep on clearing it, and that could get tedious, plus make his little gesture that much more noticeable. Plus the rulebook points out that it's only safe to clear nonlethals one yard at a time, because wisps and eddies will move between cleared and uncleared spaces even in a still room. To up the radius he just needs to pour in more energy, but now it'll cost him.
However, it costs him a point per yard radius (what, it gets easier the more area you cover? Logic!), so with an Energy Reserve of 12, he's going to have no noticeable problem with anything up to a bus length away from him. Well, not noticeable cast once. If he needs to clear a larger area, he can spend fatigue (also 12) and eventually collapse from the effort, or he can do himself actual injury and burn hit points. If he's an average strength guy then he's only got 10 of those, but as a SHIELD agent he probably works out, and again, we can call that 12. Once hit points are all gone, he's risking unconsciousness, definitely reeling, but not actually dying. Probably. Helpless, but not having to roll death checks yet. But that's not the big limitation: every point of HP he burns is him injuring himself and pouring it into the magic, and it hurts. This would be a great dramatic way to power the initial dragon transformation even without an Energy Reserve, but, big drawback, pain is distracting. Skill is at -1 for each point of HP put into the spell. If he starts out with skill 15 then he could burn 5HP and still have a 50/50 chance of success. He'll have to both speak and gesture though. Stretch things an extra yard with another 1HP and he's down to skill 9, he has to make a song and dance of it (gestures, foot movements, and louder words), and his chance of success is down to about 1/3. This is some high risk stuff. If he tries to stretch the range all the way out to the edge of his hit points? He's got to roll a 3 to make it work. Does he, in universe, know that? Is he figuring out the range and numbers in his head? Or does he just have to estimate, maybe overstretch himself, and fail for the first time in ages?
Well, what's more dramatic?
Also, realism: nobody around here has their character sheets or can figure out their penalties. He knows he's good, he's good enough he can do everything he wants to, it very rarely fails (one time in twenty at skill 15, one in fifty at 16+), and it usually doesn't tire him at all, but what's his real limits? Situations that test them are going to be pretty rare. So he'll be guessing.
All that math applies to any area effect spell. 12 yards from Energy Reserve, another 12 from fatigue, and up to 12 of HP that will make him fail. That's up to 37 yards of area effected, the first yard being free at skill 15, or more likely an effective range of around 30 yards, HP being too sketchy after that on the risk/reward side.
So how do you set up a situation where he needs to clear 30 yards radius of air in one second?
*starts googling sports field sizes*
That kind of thing gets flashy though. Push himself and he'll have to draw attention to himself to get it done at all. Try it little and often and he'll be building up a pattern.
Basically once the effects are external, they're notable, and he has to add up how important his Secret is. Given the general state of the Marvel universe about the 'gifted' or 'mutants' or apparently 'inhumans', it's pretty much a danger of death level secret. Therefore he's only going to use it when there's danger of death.
Really, gas masks are so much simpler.
But where the story lives is of course when he has to weigh his own life against saving someone else. Which, he's a hero, he's not going to take long to weigh that up, he'll go around saving people. But he will want to do so as discretely as dragonly possible.
Purify Air is also good in a sealed room. Like, hermetically sealed, no air is getting in. Every casting makes that 1 yard radius 12ft tall amount of air good to breathe, and it will last 45 minutes for one person at rest. Since that 1 yard is free for Phil, he just needs to cast his spell once every 45 minutes, and he's golden until he needs to sleep.
... after 16 hours awake he loses one fatigue point, and then another every 4 hours after that. The magic alone wouldn't require him to stay awake, just to set an alarm for as close to 45 minutes as he dares. If he overshoots he'll just die in his sleep, which could be considered a problem, but if he wakes up every half hour and waves his finger and goes back to sleep he'll have fresh air all night.
If he's already been awake a long time and gets thrown into a situation that needs magic, he'll already be short on fatigue. For most mages that means they're screwed, but Energy Reserve is this shiny shiny bundle of extras. I have totally made the dragons super munchie, by giving them that Energy Reserve. But if they don't have it they can't shapeshift. So. Fatigue just means he's going to pass out eventually, same like anyone else, and can't power his spells with it to make them bigger.
If he's not the only person in that sealed room? They're going to want him to make it bigger. ... although actually their use of radius rather than area means he is going to want to make it bigger too, since it'll be cheaper and last longer, but that only works on the amount of air they actually have available. If they're in a small room (like 6ft across by 12ft tall or something that adds up the same) he's just going to have to Purify it that much more often.
If he's sharing a small room with someone and tells them he needs waking up every half hour or they're going to die, then he really needs them to trust him. I mean, him having a working watch or phone alarm would clearly fix that, but if he needs to impress upon someone the absolute need for them staying awake on watch and waking him regularly, that takes trust. Because he's probably going to have to explain why. If he can handle it himself, the air stays fresh, they'll just assume the room isn't as sealed as they feared; but if he needs help to make the deadline then he'll have to explain he's actually actively doing something.
One person, 45 minutes. Two people, 20 minutes, with a margin. 3 castings an hour for as long as he can stay awake, or interrupt his low quality sleep often enough to recast.
That's if he's only going to Purify the air. If he actually has to Create the air, say because they're trapped underwater and it keeps bubbling away? Oh, that's more fun.
For a start, he would need to cast it at the speed of the plot. The amount of air created is 45 cubic ft per second for five seconds, lasting 1 minute per person per cubic foot so about 225 minutes for one person, but if it's bubbling away you don't necessarily get those minutes. We can use it up as fast as we want to.
He has known Seek since kindergarten, Purify since childhood, and Shape since youth, but Create is the next one up and by human-adulthood he's more interested in his SHIELD skills. He's put less time in it, knows it to a lower skill. Casting it will cost him. 1 point per casting, sure, but still, cost.
FP return at 1 point per ten minutes rest. If they're under water and having to tread water, they are not resting. If he can float, arguably he's at rest, but then Clint has to hold them both up. Good try but more fun to have him increasingly exhausted. So, he needs to cast more often than once in ten minutes, and his energy reserve and fatigue will gradually erode.
And if he's casting into a sealed container he can't increase the radius to lower the cost without increasing the pressure, which probably just makes it leak faster. Create comes from a single point and bubbles, but what it's bubbling into could become a problem. They could create a breathable pocket in anything vaguely airproof, but maybe there's just not containment, just a steady stream of bubbles. Maybe it's bubbling out as fast as it bubbles in. ... that would actually cast 12*5 seconds worth of breathable air before it starts fatiguing him, and I think knocking him out in two minutes is unlikely to facilitate the plot. So they need a lid of some sort, just a leaky one. If they're trapped underwater by something they first tried to break their way out of, then they even made the leaks. They could try to get out again, but if they fail they just make it harder to keep the air in. If they sit tight, their air lasts as long as Coulson can stay conscious.
Also, at skill 14, he's going to fail one time out of ten. That isn't a big deal if he's got any energy left to try again, but it's going to wear him out faster, and he's going to be more annoyed at himself for the screw up.
Since I'm screwing with them there isn't much point doing the maths, but this is one time having pulled an all nighter to get to the mission is going to cost him. And one time he's going to risk the pain from using HP to cast. If he's already used fatigue just staying awake then he's out a number of castings, if he's been awake long enough to get stupid from it (somewhere around the second bedtime he's not asleep) then he'll be suffering penalties and fail to cast more often and still have to just try again, and if he fails for longer than they've got air then hey, dead. Also, it's probably hard to sleep while floating underwater trying to keep your face in an air pocket. So then he's going to burn himself up to power the spells, and every time he does that he's casting at a penalty so he'll fail more often, and if he fails he has to hurt himself again immediately to keep the air flowing.
This is going to be visible, prelonged, heroic sacrifice stuff. Whoever he is trapped down there with is going to see he's doing this, and that it is hurting him. And then eventually he'll be on the verge of passing out, but he'll try casting that one more time because Clint needs however much air Coulson could get for him, and then Clint is stuck trying to get them both out. ... if he can in fact tear a hole big enough to exit from then they'll feel pretty stupid about the effort? Okay, so, they have a leak because they tried to get out of the highest point in wherever they're trapped, but someone can go diving and try and find or make an exit lower down. Not speeding the leak, but still having an unknowable length of time before they succeed. And they'd be using air faster, though the leak is probably the major factor there.
I'm imagining the heartfelt conversations in the air bubble. Heartfelt and brief, if Clint keeps diving for the exit, and then has to support Coulson somehow while he's unconscious.
But then I think about buddy breathing, ala Due South, and Coulson could totally do that too, bubbles that float away if Clint doesn't breath them directly. That's back to the two minutes before he passes out problem though.
They don't have to save themselves, they just have to try their hardest to save each other. SHIELD can be their last minute save. Or catch them half way up after Clint finally batters their shelter/trap apart. They're not alone.
So then Phil is in hospital recovering from a kind of damage SHIELD knows nowt about and can do nothing for. And the only cure is rest. Proper, total rest. No range time, no nothing.
classic hurt/comfort territory, no more needs saying.
[at this point I realized I’d typed near 3K words of math and plot bunnies into my browser and paused to go type in Word instead. That means it saves when I tell it to and locally, instead of automatically and to the cloud, so I don’t know which way is actually better, but, habit.]
Oooh, plot bunny: at some point I need Phil to be captured because he’s a dragon. For this, someone needs to know his Secret, and have an effective plan to capture him, as well as a way of misleading SHIELD long enough to do what they have planned. I’m thinking inside job? HYDRA would be into Dragons, I’m sure. So Phil has been trying to keep the secret even from most of SHIELD, with Fury’s blessing I’m sure since a secret ace up your sleeve is so much more fun, but then he has to do something flash to save Barton and then I sat down to write this because at some point Barton wants teaching, maybe after his ears get hurt and he’s off duty until he heals up and gets used to the new and imperfect hearing aids again. Phil doesn’t reckon he’ll be able to use the spells. Not a Force sensitive, no midichlorians, says Clint, and then they can have an argue about Star Wars and be cute.
BUT, Clint wants to learn it anyway. He can’t hear the words properly so they start with the gestures, and obviously to an ASL user they’re a sign language. Which is news to Phil, to him they’re a set of seven rote learned signs, each taking about a second… so I want to know how many words you can sign or say in a second, since these spells take a second to do. Google says two or three words per second? He’s probably just saying the spell name in Draconic then… and he might know enough Draconic to know that. But it is news to him he’s also doing the same in sign, the gestures didn’t mean distinct words to him. And the ‘dance’ that goes with them, he’s pretty much stopped doing those since he was a kid, he hasn’t thought about them much in years. Teaching would deepen his understanding of his own arts. The movements, they’re all about feeling the element you’re moving with and through. So to feel air you’d become aware of your breath, how you pattern it into sound, and not just with your voice, how you move yourself through it. Once you get good at it you can do it with less conscious thought, but to learn them takes concentration. Skill 9 and below doubles the time to cast, so you could say more words? Or just say them s l o w l y and clearly. Enunciate! Phil would have to slow right down to let a beginner even try it. It would feel odd, because he was taught by his father, so it feels like a family thing he’s letting Clint in on. And it can’t be late enough in the story to be ‘so they can teach the baby’ if I want this to be how people at SHIELD notice Phil. … it would be more cute that way though, and not involve screwing up Phil’s life. But if Phil is teaching Clint then it makes sense that they’re kidnapped together, which was a point I was… hazy on before.
To kidnap a mage, you want them unconscious. And preferably exhausted. Because any drug that takes more than a second to apply, they can neutralize (if they have Purify Water or Purify Air, depending on form of delivery) (though technically Neutralize Poison is an unrelated spell, it is a healing spell for after the poison is in the body) (and Purify Food is a food college one, so, there are ways and ways). If Phil has gained a reputation with gas weapons, you can bait the trap, test him, and exhaust him, all at once.
Also you don’t need a 36 yard radius of free floating deadly gas that needs clearing all at once if you have two cases of deadly gas in bottles that are about to be broken, 60 or so yards apart, and with appropriate Dire Consequences. Phil can purify the air nearest himself, even if it’s in a bottle. … I know the examples are like ‘room full of smoke’, and it would have to be in gas form in a bottle, but I’m the boss of this story. There is poison gas, he can sense it, and there’s more than one source of it. There are people who will be hurt in both/all locations. If he casts successfully, nobody gets dead, he gets the whole screaming agony thing and probably passes out but doesn’t die, and everyone is … kind of sort of happy ish? If he does not cast, or casts only the size of spell he knows he’s capable of, someone dies. Possibly including him. He can cast a small area that starts far away from him, but “If you cannot touch any part of the affected area, apply a skill penalty equal to your distance in yards from the nearest edge of the area.” That means he’ll have the energy to try again, but if he’s more than… skill 15 minus 6 has only a 1/3 chance of success, if he’s more than 6 yards away he’s not skilled enough to do it. He could cast a Purify that big without cutting into his fatigue, though. He could cast it really, really big, for the same skill penalty. And it would take him two seconds, in which time he could run like 10 yards anyway. Or a bit more with training. Either way, if there’s things either at his location and 30 yards away or just 60 yards apart when he can stand in the middle, he could take his chances casting, but he couldn’t reach them to defuse a bomb or whatever.
… there could also just be one big room full of poison. That’s a lot more straightforward. But if someone sets up a ‘choose or perish’ and he just chooses to save everyone? Doable.
If they’re in an underground base that turns out to be full of poison gas bombs on a timer? He won’t have time to stop them, he’ll have to Purify them all. Then maybe the explosion brings down the roof, so SHIELD have every reason to believe they’ve been blown up, but secretly they’re just trapped and being whisked away for observation.
At which point the existing plot puts them in a sealed room together. Which could be another test, if it’s sealed thoroughly enough. And why together? Because if he grows dragon sized he’ll squish his friend. So probably the earlier test would try and get him to get his wings out? They want to know if they’ve got a dragon or a mage, after all. So: Great big room, very tall roof, very much bomb, breakable containers below that will gas the city if he doesn’t do something about it. Clint trying to climb up to the bombs before they go? Er, then he gets crunchy before the captured together phase. Not so good.
Some things I’ll figure out if I actually write the thing. There’s a set of parameters where you can exhaust Phil and capture him. Capturing Barton ought to be hard though. Oh, daft me, that’s the reason the gas shouldn’t be in bottles, Barton is already down but more than 6 yards away, Phil exhausts himself to clear the air for Clint, then gets hit with more gas. It doesn’t have to be deadly or have boom stuff involved, that way. Or it could be deadly with prolonged exposure, so Phil can’t run closer. Tweaks are easier than really large areas.
So I’ve got plot moments out of Seek, Purify and Create.
Shape, Air Jet and the Breath attack I’m probably basing on Concussion all have similar effects, just on a different scale. They move air around, starting with a gentle breeze, and ending up with something that does damage to hearing, stuns you, and can actually do crushing damage. Shape Air needs the most noticeable ritual and is hardest to aim, being a broad stream starting from a specified point. Jet attacks fire out of your fingers and you can study up on Innate Attack skill to get good at aiming them. Breath attacks use the same skill, but come out of your mouth just by saying the words. Shape Air could push you around, Air Jet will shove you into walls and can go hard enough to knock you out, but if you piss off a dragon enough to get the Breath attack then you are going to get crunched, lose hit points, sustain potentially fatal damage, even before worrying about where it shoves you.
Shape Air is most fun as a sort of trickster spell. You can in fact be subtle with it. You get penalties on it for distance, so it can start maybe 4 yards (12 feet) away and Phil still have a 50/50 chance of it working. If it starts on him it’ll work 9/10. Cost depends on wind speed, and Phil could afford an instant of gale force a yard across, but that’s a bit of a blunt instrument. More fun to make it bang doors or windows, blow out candles (if they chase the kind of villains that use candles or other flame based lighting), or just be that annoying cold breeze that makes someone think the door has opened.
… the flame based lighting thing makes me think of Kronos’ base in CaH/Rev6:8. Even after he clears out, that’s a perfectly good secret base, with submarine parking. And probable gas fired flaming torches. Someone should totally use that.
… also, gas fires? There’s nothing in the Air college that lets you create specific gasses or combinations of gasses, even though you can Seek them. There’s no poison gas cloud even. It’s sad. Plenty of Lightning attacks are in the Air college, no ways to make an instant flammable cloud. Gee, I wonder why… Er, so, breathable air probably means an ordinary mixture like Earth atmosphere, and Purify can turn absolutely any gas into that, which would on occasion mean transmuting or destroying elements. Magic does things differently. It’s not just shuffling the good bits around, unless the good bits are subatomic particles. But if you can make a complex gas mixture like ‘breathable air’ then surely you should be able to make pure oxygen? Ah, they would call that ‘Essential Air’. That’s a different spell. So there’s specific spells for specific gases? Good to know.
Means Phil can’t just blow people up with gas. Only puff them around with concentrated air blasts. Sometimes, very concentrated indeed.
Air Jet and Concussion are definitely combat spells, and they’re going to get noticed. I guess you could pretend your airbending was your own super awesome martial arts knocking people back, but not at the point it makes a thunderclap. Also, the thunderclap is going to mess up anyone without ear protectors, within 10 yards. That’s pretty much everyone in the warehouse then. And it makes a great angsty excuse to mess up Clint’s hearing some more, and leave him bored and with Coulson owing him one. See teaching him magic-sign, above. And probably learning ASL off him, because couples learning to communicate better are of the good.
I don’t know what plots specifically would need Air Jet and only Air Jet. It makes a thin but forceful stream of air come out your hand. I mean, you could shove someone from 2 to 6 yards away, but why would you need to do that when you could shoot them? Knockback is much less likely to be lethal, in theory, might not even do damage if they don’t hit a wall, and can knock people into each other in handy breaky domino effects. But if you try it on catwalks then someone is going splat. As with any combat spell it would of course be useful when you don’t got a gun, but the limited range is … well, inside a building with thin walls, possibly even more useful than guns? There’s walls to slam them into but no bullet penetration to worry about.
Breath attacks are for when the other guy has you tied up and feels the need to gloat. Black Widow’s way of dealing with that is of course both cool and available to trained SHIELD agents in plausible general, but being able to just open your mouth and BOOM them is pretty damn cool.
He’d also need a pretty damn important reason to do it. Like, imminent death. Because again, using this shit in public is danger of death, because nobody is going to mistake this for anything other than honest to goodness super powers.
The situation that goes with the dragon transformation is obvious, and broadly why I timed Tony falling off Avenger’s Tower. 20 seconds and no other flyers around? Phil’s got to find his wings, whatever the personal consequences.
So that’s the plots that go with the spell arsenal.
Cool.
Now to just put them in order and write them.
So now I want a set of plots built around that. Problems, up to seven of them, where those spells are the solutions. And I want a gradual reveal, not least because I'm going to wrap a romance plot around it and have a gradual increase in intimacy. So, like, admitting you did in fact do magic is a significant stage in a relationship. ... in a really generally applicable way... :eyeroll:
So we've got a Wind dragon, Phil http://flightrising.com/main.php?p=lair&id=127188&tab=dragon&did=11734041
(Isn't he awesome?)
He'll be learning spells from the Air college.
Seek is really very useless at first glance. Seek Air? Oh look, there's some. And there. And also there. Wow it's like we're surrounded. So, unless you stick them under water or underground in they're stuffed for air, it isn't terribly helpful as a directional tool. (Okay, I'm planning to stick them underwater, but it's not the most subtle use of this spell.)
But, in the details, it is actually more use: it's analyse air, if you're careful and fiddle about with it. You can seek particular elements. A specific gas or combination of gases, with known sources excluded if mentioned in advance. So if SHIELD is seeking a gas based weapon? Phil's their go to guy. He's also the first to notice if they're being gassed. And if some rooms are safer, or some caves breathable still, he can find that out.
Seek Air costs 1 energy to cast, and with an energy reserve of 12, Phil can in theory get 12 pieces of information about the local air before he starts to wear himself out physically. But the better you know a spell, the less energy it takes to cast. Skill 15 means -1 to the cost, and at that skill he can also cast it with a single word or with a single gesture, while moving. Since he's known it since early childhood, there's every reason to believe he knows it that well. That means he can treat it pretty much like another sense, one he has to concentrate to use.
... crit failing in an RPG leads to random and unexpected side effects up to and including demons. Using a spell so routinely would kind of increase the possibility of rolling two 18s in a row, at which point demons. But I do not wish to write about demons, or indeed most of the crit fail possibilities. Accidentally hurting yourself by doing a spell really wrong might add some drama, and making it sort of go zzzt and make a stink instead of working could be amusing, but mostly I'm not going to be rolling and he's not going to be failing. Actually rebuilding all of this as the kind of Advantages that don't risk the crit table is entirely possible, just darn fiddly. So I shall be basically ignoring it, I think, because plot is not RPG game balance.
If Phil can sense things about air that others can't - and really I think expanding these Seek spells to Sense spells and putting in stuff like wind speed isn't stretching it much for storytelling purposes - he's going to get a reputation as an observant guy. Possibly weirdly observant. But nobody is going to jump from there to magic, let alone dragons. Actually there's no point people would think dragons before, you know, actually looking like a dragon. If there's mages that are not dragons, him doing magic is going to pass as a different kind of weird.
But then there's Purify. That makes breathable air where there was none, and that's going to be very useful. Again, it's a one point spell, so if he's known it a long time (he has) and practiced a lot (oh yes), he can cast it for free with a single word or gesture. Gas attacks are basically only going to bother him for the single second it takes him to notice them... if and only if he's willing to be that noticeable with his magic.
Oh, and it clears a one yard radius to a distance of 12 feet off the floor. Each person would pretty much need their own casting, unless they were bunched up super close, and he'd have to start with himself or risk losing the ability because coughing etc. And then if there's air flow he'd need to keep on clearing it, and that could get tedious, plus make his little gesture that much more noticeable. Plus the rulebook points out that it's only safe to clear nonlethals one yard at a time, because wisps and eddies will move between cleared and uncleared spaces even in a still room. To up the radius he just needs to pour in more energy, but now it'll cost him.
However, it costs him a point per yard radius (what, it gets easier the more area you cover? Logic!), so with an Energy Reserve of 12, he's going to have no noticeable problem with anything up to a bus length away from him. Well, not noticeable cast once. If he needs to clear a larger area, he can spend fatigue (also 12) and eventually collapse from the effort, or he can do himself actual injury and burn hit points. If he's an average strength guy then he's only got 10 of those, but as a SHIELD agent he probably works out, and again, we can call that 12. Once hit points are all gone, he's risking unconsciousness, definitely reeling, but not actually dying. Probably. Helpless, but not having to roll death checks yet. But that's not the big limitation: every point of HP he burns is him injuring himself and pouring it into the magic, and it hurts. This would be a great dramatic way to power the initial dragon transformation even without an Energy Reserve, but, big drawback, pain is distracting. Skill is at -1 for each point of HP put into the spell. If he starts out with skill 15 then he could burn 5HP and still have a 50/50 chance of success. He'll have to both speak and gesture though. Stretch things an extra yard with another 1HP and he's down to skill 9, he has to make a song and dance of it (gestures, foot movements, and louder words), and his chance of success is down to about 1/3. This is some high risk stuff. If he tries to stretch the range all the way out to the edge of his hit points? He's got to roll a 3 to make it work. Does he, in universe, know that? Is he figuring out the range and numbers in his head? Or does he just have to estimate, maybe overstretch himself, and fail for the first time in ages?
Well, what's more dramatic?
Also, realism: nobody around here has their character sheets or can figure out their penalties. He knows he's good, he's good enough he can do everything he wants to, it very rarely fails (one time in twenty at skill 15, one in fifty at 16+), and it usually doesn't tire him at all, but what's his real limits? Situations that test them are going to be pretty rare. So he'll be guessing.
All that math applies to any area effect spell. 12 yards from Energy Reserve, another 12 from fatigue, and up to 12 of HP that will make him fail. That's up to 37 yards of area effected, the first yard being free at skill 15, or more likely an effective range of around 30 yards, HP being too sketchy after that on the risk/reward side.
So how do you set up a situation where he needs to clear 30 yards radius of air in one second?
*starts googling sports field sizes*
That kind of thing gets flashy though. Push himself and he'll have to draw attention to himself to get it done at all. Try it little and often and he'll be building up a pattern.
Basically once the effects are external, they're notable, and he has to add up how important his Secret is. Given the general state of the Marvel universe about the 'gifted' or 'mutants' or apparently 'inhumans', it's pretty much a danger of death level secret. Therefore he's only going to use it when there's danger of death.
Really, gas masks are so much simpler.
But where the story lives is of course when he has to weigh his own life against saving someone else. Which, he's a hero, he's not going to take long to weigh that up, he'll go around saving people. But he will want to do so as discretely as dragonly possible.
Purify Air is also good in a sealed room. Like, hermetically sealed, no air is getting in. Every casting makes that 1 yard radius 12ft tall amount of air good to breathe, and it will last 45 minutes for one person at rest. Since that 1 yard is free for Phil, he just needs to cast his spell once every 45 minutes, and he's golden until he needs to sleep.
... after 16 hours awake he loses one fatigue point, and then another every 4 hours after that. The magic alone wouldn't require him to stay awake, just to set an alarm for as close to 45 minutes as he dares. If he overshoots he'll just die in his sleep, which could be considered a problem, but if he wakes up every half hour and waves his finger and goes back to sleep he'll have fresh air all night.
If he's already been awake a long time and gets thrown into a situation that needs magic, he'll already be short on fatigue. For most mages that means they're screwed, but Energy Reserve is this shiny shiny bundle of extras. I have totally made the dragons super munchie, by giving them that Energy Reserve. But if they don't have it they can't shapeshift. So. Fatigue just means he's going to pass out eventually, same like anyone else, and can't power his spells with it to make them bigger.
If he's not the only person in that sealed room? They're going to want him to make it bigger. ... although actually their use of radius rather than area means he is going to want to make it bigger too, since it'll be cheaper and last longer, but that only works on the amount of air they actually have available. If they're in a small room (like 6ft across by 12ft tall or something that adds up the same) he's just going to have to Purify it that much more often.
If he's sharing a small room with someone and tells them he needs waking up every half hour or they're going to die, then he really needs them to trust him. I mean, him having a working watch or phone alarm would clearly fix that, but if he needs to impress upon someone the absolute need for them staying awake on watch and waking him regularly, that takes trust. Because he's probably going to have to explain why. If he can handle it himself, the air stays fresh, they'll just assume the room isn't as sealed as they feared; but if he needs help to make the deadline then he'll have to explain he's actually actively doing something.
One person, 45 minutes. Two people, 20 minutes, with a margin. 3 castings an hour for as long as he can stay awake, or interrupt his low quality sleep often enough to recast.
That's if he's only going to Purify the air. If he actually has to Create the air, say because they're trapped underwater and it keeps bubbling away? Oh, that's more fun.
For a start, he would need to cast it at the speed of the plot. The amount of air created is 45 cubic ft per second for five seconds, lasting 1 minute per person per cubic foot so about 225 minutes for one person, but if it's bubbling away you don't necessarily get those minutes. We can use it up as fast as we want to.
He has known Seek since kindergarten, Purify since childhood, and Shape since youth, but Create is the next one up and by human-adulthood he's more interested in his SHIELD skills. He's put less time in it, knows it to a lower skill. Casting it will cost him. 1 point per casting, sure, but still, cost.
FP return at 1 point per ten minutes rest. If they're under water and having to tread water, they are not resting. If he can float, arguably he's at rest, but then Clint has to hold them both up. Good try but more fun to have him increasingly exhausted. So, he needs to cast more often than once in ten minutes, and his energy reserve and fatigue will gradually erode.
And if he's casting into a sealed container he can't increase the radius to lower the cost without increasing the pressure, which probably just makes it leak faster. Create comes from a single point and bubbles, but what it's bubbling into could become a problem. They could create a breathable pocket in anything vaguely airproof, but maybe there's just not containment, just a steady stream of bubbles. Maybe it's bubbling out as fast as it bubbles in. ... that would actually cast 12*5 seconds worth of breathable air before it starts fatiguing him, and I think knocking him out in two minutes is unlikely to facilitate the plot. So they need a lid of some sort, just a leaky one. If they're trapped underwater by something they first tried to break their way out of, then they even made the leaks. They could try to get out again, but if they fail they just make it harder to keep the air in. If they sit tight, their air lasts as long as Coulson can stay conscious.
Also, at skill 14, he's going to fail one time out of ten. That isn't a big deal if he's got any energy left to try again, but it's going to wear him out faster, and he's going to be more annoyed at himself for the screw up.
Since I'm screwing with them there isn't much point doing the maths, but this is one time having pulled an all nighter to get to the mission is going to cost him. And one time he's going to risk the pain from using HP to cast. If he's already used fatigue just staying awake then he's out a number of castings, if he's been awake long enough to get stupid from it (somewhere around the second bedtime he's not asleep) then he'll be suffering penalties and fail to cast more often and still have to just try again, and if he fails for longer than they've got air then hey, dead. Also, it's probably hard to sleep while floating underwater trying to keep your face in an air pocket. So then he's going to burn himself up to power the spells, and every time he does that he's casting at a penalty so he'll fail more often, and if he fails he has to hurt himself again immediately to keep the air flowing.
This is going to be visible, prelonged, heroic sacrifice stuff. Whoever he is trapped down there with is going to see he's doing this, and that it is hurting him. And then eventually he'll be on the verge of passing out, but he'll try casting that one more time because Clint needs however much air Coulson could get for him, and then Clint is stuck trying to get them both out. ... if he can in fact tear a hole big enough to exit from then they'll feel pretty stupid about the effort? Okay, so, they have a leak because they tried to get out of the highest point in wherever they're trapped, but someone can go diving and try and find or make an exit lower down. Not speeding the leak, but still having an unknowable length of time before they succeed. And they'd be using air faster, though the leak is probably the major factor there.
I'm imagining the heartfelt conversations in the air bubble. Heartfelt and brief, if Clint keeps diving for the exit, and then has to support Coulson somehow while he's unconscious.
But then I think about buddy breathing, ala Due South, and Coulson could totally do that too, bubbles that float away if Clint doesn't breath them directly. That's back to the two minutes before he passes out problem though.
They don't have to save themselves, they just have to try their hardest to save each other. SHIELD can be their last minute save. Or catch them half way up after Clint finally batters their shelter/trap apart. They're not alone.
So then Phil is in hospital recovering from a kind of damage SHIELD knows nowt about and can do nothing for. And the only cure is rest. Proper, total rest. No range time, no nothing.
classic hurt/comfort territory, no more needs saying.
[at this point I realized I’d typed near 3K words of math and plot bunnies into my browser and paused to go type in Word instead. That means it saves when I tell it to and locally, instead of automatically and to the cloud, so I don’t know which way is actually better, but, habit.]
Oooh, plot bunny: at some point I need Phil to be captured because he’s a dragon. For this, someone needs to know his Secret, and have an effective plan to capture him, as well as a way of misleading SHIELD long enough to do what they have planned. I’m thinking inside job? HYDRA would be into Dragons, I’m sure. So Phil has been trying to keep the secret even from most of SHIELD, with Fury’s blessing I’m sure since a secret ace up your sleeve is so much more fun, but then he has to do something flash to save Barton and then I sat down to write this because at some point Barton wants teaching, maybe after his ears get hurt and he’s off duty until he heals up and gets used to the new and imperfect hearing aids again. Phil doesn’t reckon he’ll be able to use the spells. Not a Force sensitive, no midichlorians, says Clint, and then they can have an argue about Star Wars and be cute.
BUT, Clint wants to learn it anyway. He can’t hear the words properly so they start with the gestures, and obviously to an ASL user they’re a sign language. Which is news to Phil, to him they’re a set of seven rote learned signs, each taking about a second… so I want to know how many words you can sign or say in a second, since these spells take a second to do. Google says two or three words per second? He’s probably just saying the spell name in Draconic then… and he might know enough Draconic to know that. But it is news to him he’s also doing the same in sign, the gestures didn’t mean distinct words to him. And the ‘dance’ that goes with them, he’s pretty much stopped doing those since he was a kid, he hasn’t thought about them much in years. Teaching would deepen his understanding of his own arts. The movements, they’re all about feeling the element you’re moving with and through. So to feel air you’d become aware of your breath, how you pattern it into sound, and not just with your voice, how you move yourself through it. Once you get good at it you can do it with less conscious thought, but to learn them takes concentration. Skill 9 and below doubles the time to cast, so you could say more words? Or just say them s l o w l y and clearly. Enunciate! Phil would have to slow right down to let a beginner even try it. It would feel odd, because he was taught by his father, so it feels like a family thing he’s letting Clint in on. And it can’t be late enough in the story to be ‘so they can teach the baby’ if I want this to be how people at SHIELD notice Phil. … it would be more cute that way though, and not involve screwing up Phil’s life. But if Phil is teaching Clint then it makes sense that they’re kidnapped together, which was a point I was… hazy on before.
To kidnap a mage, you want them unconscious. And preferably exhausted. Because any drug that takes more than a second to apply, they can neutralize (if they have Purify Water or Purify Air, depending on form of delivery) (though technically Neutralize Poison is an unrelated spell, it is a healing spell for after the poison is in the body) (and Purify Food is a food college one, so, there are ways and ways). If Phil has gained a reputation with gas weapons, you can bait the trap, test him, and exhaust him, all at once.
Also you don’t need a 36 yard radius of free floating deadly gas that needs clearing all at once if you have two cases of deadly gas in bottles that are about to be broken, 60 or so yards apart, and with appropriate Dire Consequences. Phil can purify the air nearest himself, even if it’s in a bottle. … I know the examples are like ‘room full of smoke’, and it would have to be in gas form in a bottle, but I’m the boss of this story. There is poison gas, he can sense it, and there’s more than one source of it. There are people who will be hurt in both/all locations. If he casts successfully, nobody gets dead, he gets the whole screaming agony thing and probably passes out but doesn’t die, and everyone is … kind of sort of happy ish? If he does not cast, or casts only the size of spell he knows he’s capable of, someone dies. Possibly including him. He can cast a small area that starts far away from him, but “If you cannot touch any part of the affected area, apply a skill penalty equal to your distance in yards from the nearest edge of the area.” That means he’ll have the energy to try again, but if he’s more than… skill 15 minus 6 has only a 1/3 chance of success, if he’s more than 6 yards away he’s not skilled enough to do it. He could cast a Purify that big without cutting into his fatigue, though. He could cast it really, really big, for the same skill penalty. And it would take him two seconds, in which time he could run like 10 yards anyway. Or a bit more with training. Either way, if there’s things either at his location and 30 yards away or just 60 yards apart when he can stand in the middle, he could take his chances casting, but he couldn’t reach them to defuse a bomb or whatever.
… there could also just be one big room full of poison. That’s a lot more straightforward. But if someone sets up a ‘choose or perish’ and he just chooses to save everyone? Doable.
If they’re in an underground base that turns out to be full of poison gas bombs on a timer? He won’t have time to stop them, he’ll have to Purify them all. Then maybe the explosion brings down the roof, so SHIELD have every reason to believe they’ve been blown up, but secretly they’re just trapped and being whisked away for observation.
At which point the existing plot puts them in a sealed room together. Which could be another test, if it’s sealed thoroughly enough. And why together? Because if he grows dragon sized he’ll squish his friend. So probably the earlier test would try and get him to get his wings out? They want to know if they’ve got a dragon or a mage, after all. So: Great big room, very tall roof, very much bomb, breakable containers below that will gas the city if he doesn’t do something about it. Clint trying to climb up to the bombs before they go? Er, then he gets crunchy before the captured together phase. Not so good.
Some things I’ll figure out if I actually write the thing. There’s a set of parameters where you can exhaust Phil and capture him. Capturing Barton ought to be hard though. Oh, daft me, that’s the reason the gas shouldn’t be in bottles, Barton is already down but more than 6 yards away, Phil exhausts himself to clear the air for Clint, then gets hit with more gas. It doesn’t have to be deadly or have boom stuff involved, that way. Or it could be deadly with prolonged exposure, so Phil can’t run closer. Tweaks are easier than really large areas.
So I’ve got plot moments out of Seek, Purify and Create.
Shape, Air Jet and the Breath attack I’m probably basing on Concussion all have similar effects, just on a different scale. They move air around, starting with a gentle breeze, and ending up with something that does damage to hearing, stuns you, and can actually do crushing damage. Shape Air needs the most noticeable ritual and is hardest to aim, being a broad stream starting from a specified point. Jet attacks fire out of your fingers and you can study up on Innate Attack skill to get good at aiming them. Breath attacks use the same skill, but come out of your mouth just by saying the words. Shape Air could push you around, Air Jet will shove you into walls and can go hard enough to knock you out, but if you piss off a dragon enough to get the Breath attack then you are going to get crunched, lose hit points, sustain potentially fatal damage, even before worrying about where it shoves you.
Shape Air is most fun as a sort of trickster spell. You can in fact be subtle with it. You get penalties on it for distance, so it can start maybe 4 yards (12 feet) away and Phil still have a 50/50 chance of it working. If it starts on him it’ll work 9/10. Cost depends on wind speed, and Phil could afford an instant of gale force a yard across, but that’s a bit of a blunt instrument. More fun to make it bang doors or windows, blow out candles (if they chase the kind of villains that use candles or other flame based lighting), or just be that annoying cold breeze that makes someone think the door has opened.
… the flame based lighting thing makes me think of Kronos’ base in CaH/Rev6:8. Even after he clears out, that’s a perfectly good secret base, with submarine parking. And probable gas fired flaming torches. Someone should totally use that.
… also, gas fires? There’s nothing in the Air college that lets you create specific gasses or combinations of gasses, even though you can Seek them. There’s no poison gas cloud even. It’s sad. Plenty of Lightning attacks are in the Air college, no ways to make an instant flammable cloud. Gee, I wonder why… Er, so, breathable air probably means an ordinary mixture like Earth atmosphere, and Purify can turn absolutely any gas into that, which would on occasion mean transmuting or destroying elements. Magic does things differently. It’s not just shuffling the good bits around, unless the good bits are subatomic particles. But if you can make a complex gas mixture like ‘breathable air’ then surely you should be able to make pure oxygen? Ah, they would call that ‘Essential Air’. That’s a different spell. So there’s specific spells for specific gases? Good to know.
Means Phil can’t just blow people up with gas. Only puff them around with concentrated air blasts. Sometimes, very concentrated indeed.
Air Jet and Concussion are definitely combat spells, and they’re going to get noticed. I guess you could pretend your airbending was your own super awesome martial arts knocking people back, but not at the point it makes a thunderclap. Also, the thunderclap is going to mess up anyone without ear protectors, within 10 yards. That’s pretty much everyone in the warehouse then. And it makes a great angsty excuse to mess up Clint’s hearing some more, and leave him bored and with Coulson owing him one. See teaching him magic-sign, above. And probably learning ASL off him, because couples learning to communicate better are of the good.
I don’t know what plots specifically would need Air Jet and only Air Jet. It makes a thin but forceful stream of air come out your hand. I mean, you could shove someone from 2 to 6 yards away, but why would you need to do that when you could shoot them? Knockback is much less likely to be lethal, in theory, might not even do damage if they don’t hit a wall, and can knock people into each other in handy breaky domino effects. But if you try it on catwalks then someone is going splat. As with any combat spell it would of course be useful when you don’t got a gun, but the limited range is … well, inside a building with thin walls, possibly even more useful than guns? There’s walls to slam them into but no bullet penetration to worry about.
Breath attacks are for when the other guy has you tied up and feels the need to gloat. Black Widow’s way of dealing with that is of course both cool and available to trained SHIELD agents in plausible general, but being able to just open your mouth and BOOM them is pretty damn cool.
He’d also need a pretty damn important reason to do it. Like, imminent death. Because again, using this shit in public is danger of death, because nobody is going to mistake this for anything other than honest to goodness super powers.
The situation that goes with the dragon transformation is obvious, and broadly why I timed Tony falling off Avenger’s Tower. 20 seconds and no other flyers around? Phil’s got to find his wings, whatever the personal consequences.
So that’s the plots that go with the spell arsenal.
Cool.
Now to just put them in order and write them.