Freelance Heroics (Firesign Book 2)
Page 42
9 Food and drink can be summoned, but will be tasteless and dissipate as soon as they’re swallowed. Living creatures can be summoned as well, but because magick cannot affect the mind, they will be brain-dead and unable to move.
10 Illusions can fool the sense of touch using alteration, but it’s usually confined to rough actions such as striking or punching, since force magick cannot duplicate more delicate sensations.
11 Only the announcer and Mazik so far. They were hoping it would catch on.
12 While illusions could use protection and alteration to appear solid when struck by a sword or a spell, they can’t mimic the feeling of sweat, clothing, or flesh. Mazik could figure out which one was which, provided that he touched them with his bare hands.
13 Also known as brass knuckles or knuckledusters, Houkian fists were a favored weapon of anyone who had ever been to Houk ever.
14 While it’s impossible to summon a living creature with arcane magick, divine magick is under no such restriction. Raedren could almost hear Mazik complaining about it from here.
15 Charge crystals are specialized focus crystals that can store concentrated mana for a limited amount of time. This allows casters to temporarily increase their effective mana pool and release more mana at one time than they normally could. Mana contained in a charge crystal must be consciously held onto or it will dissipate, and it cannot be absorbed back into the caster’s mana pool. Charge crystals are both heinously expensive and difficult to use.
16 While casters travel by cart, horse, or boat like everyone else, over land many opt to simply run. Through a combination of enhancement, rejuvenation, and alteration, a skilled caster can rival the speed of top-class manaless sprinters—and maintain it for hours at a time. The same distance would take twice as long to cover on horseback, and six times as long in a cart.
17 On the surface, orck prismatic blades looked like primitive, blocky stone swords—which they were, though they have unique properties that make them more lethal than their human analogs. Made from a glossy black stone exclusive to the Badlands, they’re crafted as one might expect, by chipping away at a large piece of stone. But thanks to a magick unique to orcks, the stone could be shaped almost like metal, resulting in a weapon with the balance, symmetry, and durability of steel, the cutting edge of obsidian, and the striking power of a stout club—not to mention a weapon that cannot be studied for long, since orck prismatic blades weaken and deteriorate when not in the presence of an orck. Orcks that stole human weapons were generally considered less dangerous than those with prismatic blades.
18 Orcks weren’t big on secondary sex characteristics, nor did they pay much attention to each other’s sex until it came time to make more orcks. The main noticeable difference was that the females were larger, stronger, and faster than the males, though the males made up for it with sheer throat-tightening aggression.
19 Uard was an elve. Like halvelin, elves were no different from regular humans, because they were regular humans. They weren’t wiser, didn’t live longer, and weren’t inherently more magickal, though that didn’t stop some from perpetuating those myths. They were just normal humans with more earring real estate.
20 Orck exiles are members of the orck upper class who, having kept their intelligence into adulthood, decide to live among humanity rather than become warlords. Though mistrusted by most humans, they’re the source of much of humanity’s knowledge about orcks, including customs, culture, technology, and most importantly, troop dispositions.
21 Aegis has a twenty-six-hour day. Aegisians have two extra hours in the day, and it’s still not enough time. There’s a lesson in that.