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Post by lilywilde on Oct 27, 2016 5:03:13 GMT -6
Lily's shook her head, saying "While I appreciate your guidance, how could that possibly be enough? I don't have a clue what I'm doing. I can barely stitch two pieces of cloth together, let alone, well, this..." she said gesturing to the abused fabric in front of her.
She watched as the red aura flared up in the girl's fingertips, wondering what that signified.
"I mean, I could probably learn in time, and have every intention of doing so, but there's no way that I manage by the time that the Vytal festival begins." She began to fidget with the comfortable fabric in front of her, it's fibers as familiar to her as the forests. She loved the idea of repairing it with her own hands. She ran her finger tips gingerly over every familiar rip and tear. Recalling the fights in which she'd received many of them. Some were gained in more mundane adventures, but most were battle scars. She sighed recalling her life in the wilderness. The longer she studied at Vytal, the more like a distant memory those days became.
She had stretched her two months at Vytal very thin. The amount of time she'd spent in her semblance reading, studying, and training was much closer to three months. She extended every day by a matter of hours thanks to the previously underutilized facet of her semblance that allows her perception to keep pace with her speed. A book that might take a fellow student a full day to read through might take Lily just under an hour if she were to maintain her semblance throughout the entire reading. However, the full day's worth of reading would still be felt by Lily. It sped up the rate at which her brain processed information, but it also sped up the rate at which the brain, and body grow fatigued. Abuse of this power had left her without half of the sleep she needed to function properly. She still managed though. Despite her complete lack of education when entering the school, she was already rising to the top tier of students both combat wise and academically. She always told herself that soon she could stop treating her semblance like a free ticket to study for both classes and remedial learning she needed in order to simply be on par with the rest of the students, but no matter how much she learned, she always felt like there was still more to be gained from the library's vast pool of resources. It was an addiction in some ways, one that would hold out as long as her semblance did. One that she had been using in every aspect of her life ever since she'd arrived at school.
Even with a liberal use of her semblance, she doubted that she could fix the dress properly. It would take quite a lot of effort and skill that she simply didn't possess yet. Perhaps if Guinivere were to write out in fine detail exactly what she needed to do in a very exhaustive report. She might be able to manage by the festival if that were the case, but it would be difficult. Or at least, Lily presumed it would be. She had honestly no idea whatsoever how involved the repair of this dress might actually be. The task simply seemed too insurmountable to her to believe that it would take any less than a few weeks. Even then, she didn't see how it might be restored to it's former state. The idea of improving upon it hadn't even occurred to her.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 27, 2016 5:59:11 GMT -6
Guinevere looked at Lily, holding a finger up to pause her while closing her own eyes. She thought back to her time at Cela, learning the breathing and partitioning exercises the monks taught the orphans. If there was any way they would enter society successfully, they would need to learn how to compartmentalize things, partition them, and let go. They never went into extreme depth with this, just teaching the children to calm themselves and those with more troublesome auras to state them temporarily. Guin fell very cleanly into that second group. Most of the time, she didn’t need to restrain her aura or compartmentalize things – the Grimm she fought with were already dead, and she was usually preoccupied with her team’s hearts to really need to put hers down any.
But this was one girl, who didn’t know how to use Dust. Though she might be able to use her Aura or Semblance, it was by sheer dumb luck more than anything. She felt sorry, in a way. She took a deep breath in over several seconds, loud enough to hear. As she breathed out, a series of faint ripples following the double beat of her pulse started travelling down her limbs. Another repetition and it grew more pronounced. All the while, Guinevere was steeling parts of her mind from getting out while opening a couple others. With a third breath, the ripples softened slightly, now coming at a slightly slower pace as well.
Eyes slowly fluttering open, she looked over at Lily. “I have no intention of verbally teaching it all to you when, for me, there is a bit more efficient way. I assure you, you will be able finish it before the next two hours are out.” She caught herself, “Or get it into a state where another hour of work outside this would let you finish.” She shifted forward a small amount, reaching her hand across the table. With the small ripples travelling the length of her arm and dissipating at her fingertips, her hand now hovered a short distance away from Lily’s upper arm/shoulder area.
“But you will have to trust me.”
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Post by lilywilde on Oct 27, 2016 14:09:55 GMT -6
Lily sat apprehensively as Guin pondered whatever it was that was on her mind. She was wondering if she was in the process of deciding that Lily's liklihood of failure were indeed utterly insurmountable. She felt self conscious in a way that she'd never been used to prior to her time in Vytal. It was a sensation that was becoming more and more common place.
As she opened her eyes again, Lily's heart practically skipped a beat. She'd let the tension build so much in herself in the passing moments prior, that she'd almost jumped at the eyes scanned Lily once more. She had no response for Guin's next words.
How could she possibly be ready after no more than an two hours worth of work? What was this girl planning? Her natural distrust of strangers did battle with her desire to have her dress fixed. Slowly, shakily, she nodded. "I... I will trust you, you have helped me so far, and I shouldn't believe that you would stop simply because I placed some amount of faith in me. What would you have me do?" She said as her aura blossomed into light. The soft white light served to set the tensions of anyone within it's light at ease. She took a moment to let her natural stress reliever wash over her and calm her nerves. She took a few deep breaths, closing her eyes. After no more than a minute she opened them again, unsure what she'd been preparing herself for. She had prepared herself nonetheless.
"Very well, I am ready." She said as the white light of her pleasant aura faded.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 27, 2016 16:10:40 GMT -6
Guinevere noted Lily’s hesitation. She let the girl prepare her aura – though she didn’t need the help, it would help Lily resist anything that might accidentally slip through her safeguards. She didn’t exactly want to traumatize her here. She waited for her line.
“I am ready.”
With that, Guinevere closed her eyes, and made contact. As her hand flattened against Lily’s shoulder, a cooling numbness would envelop that general area on her body. Though it might be less a numbness and more that feeling when your crush pokes you – that spark that sends shivers across your body. On the note of shivers though, a more noteworthy thing occurred on contact.
At that very instant, the crimson ripples of Guinevere’s aura would flow over her body, preceding the spark by a couple brief instants. The first wave carried with it an almost deafening echo – not a physical one to be hears, but one felt resounding within Lily’s soul itself. This echo flowed in tune with the ripples of Guinevere’s aura – her heartbeat. It was slow, much slower than you could probably dub “normal,” but it had a depth to it few doctors would be able to describe.
With a second wave, that tingly numbness spread from the point of contact, and the sound of Guinevere’s pulse became a little quieter. With a third, that physical feeling would begin to normalize a bit, and her pulse would grow quieter still. Still a couple pulses away from synchronization, without opening her eyes, she addressed Lily.
“It takes a few moments to balance this properly. How are you feeling?” Testing the waters with the synchronization, she sent the concerned/questioning emotion through the connection, letting Lily feel her question on an emotional level a bit deeper than just the tone from hearing her voice.
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Post by lilywilde on Oct 29, 2016 0:15:18 GMT -6
Lily's skin prickled into goosebumps as Guinevere's hand closed over her shoulder. She was still not at all used to physical contact with others. She breathed repetitively, slowly in, slowly out. Doing her best to steel her nerves for whatever was happening.
She felt the strange sensation deep within her core as Guin's aura washed over her. It was unlike anything the girl had ever experienced. And the awful loud beating that began resounding through her very being seemed to unsettle her deeply.
It wasn't until she realized that the thundering, yet diminishing thumping coincided with Guin's heart that she calmed down slightly, just in time for the wave of concern and confusion to take hold.
"I feel, uhh, a little strange, I guess I'm worried but I don't really know why, and I guess a little confused? It almost feels external, is this you?" She asked looking down at her hands as the unique sensation washed over her. It left her feeling tingly, and feeling close to this stranger in a way that she had never felt close to anyone before. Was this ability her semblance? What a beautiful soul the girl must have if her semblance allowed her to connect to the souls of others. She felt envy for a split second, wishing her own semblance weren't so cowardly, followed by the usual lasting self loathing that always followed such thoughts.
She hated her semblance, and what it said about her nature. The ability to run faster and further than anyone else. To leave everything behind with only a pale flash of light to indicate she'd ever been there at all. And while this ability was arguably the only reason she'd been able to survive the long years alone in the wilderness with the grimm and unsavory tribes nipping at her heels, she had never stopped looking at it as something to be abhorred. She saw the wonderful things that other people's souls reflected, and couldn't help but feel jealous of the things that they implied.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 29, 2016 0:46:36 GMT -6
Guinevere held still, not making herself rigid, but remaining in a pose that allowed her to move if acted upon. Making a link was not the simplest thing to do, both on the part of the Aura refinement she needed and on the part of her and on the emotional detachment from herself that she needed for the act. After Lily spoke, she took yet another slow and deep breath, focusing on calming the beat of her heart down some. The tone of the pulse dimmed slowly over a beat or two, becoming much more like background noise to everything that Lily experienced.
“That’s normal. People get caught off guard by my Semblance the first time. It still makes one of my teammates jump from time to time.” She thought to the fuzzy bear Faunus that she happened to know. What had he been up to all day? By now she would have expected one of her teammates to have dropped her a line. Regardless, she was I the middle of something now, and she’d be damned if she let them interrupt it. “But yeah,” she said, letting that feeling of an inwards shrug accompanied by a sigh go down the link, “this is all me.”
She felt the slight pangs of nervous anger and frustration coming up in Lily though the link. She should probably stop that. Making note that she could slightly feel what the girl was going though, she put her own emotion into the link – that warming and uplifting sensation you get from hugging someone close to you. “You are doing fine.” She smiled, and sent the feeling of a genuine smile through the connection as a follow up.
She did however also notice she was looking at her hands. Though her own eyes were closed, this had to be Lily’s perception. “Since you’re already looking at your hands, I suppose we can start.” She settles into her seat a little better – she probably wouldn’t be moving for a little while. “If you’ve ever read a really dense book, and I mean really dense – something like a bit of writing from Cela in your coursework – you’re going to start feeling something like that now. It will be kind of like reading, but also a bit of instant muscle memory.”
With that, she slowly opened the part of her that was a seamstress for full observation. Instead of being actual words, it was an intuition that Lily would almost be able to touch mentally. As it opened to her, it would allow her mind, body, and aura to tap into everything Guinevere had to offer. “Go at whatever pace feels comfortable. I can keep this up a while, though faster would give us a little more time to sew.” She did not want to pressure Lily, but she knew that she had almost exactly two hours to work with.
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Post by lilywilde on Oct 30, 2016 17:56:46 GMT -6
Lily couldn't help but smile as Guin's emotions came through the link. The warmth the girl was capable of producing on the drop of a dime was impressive. Lily wished that she had such a capacity to will her emotion to change so suddenly.
She did not dwell on what possible negative implications that sort of emotional plasticity carried with it.
Instead, she was busy trying to digest the wealth of information that had flooded into her mind all at once. She looked down at the fabric in front of her. Suddenly, it seemed to come alive before her. She saw stitches and some other, more advanced repair techniques as clearly as she might have seen how to construct a campfire, or how to skin a squirrel. Things made sense, and as she held the needle and thread in front of her, everything seemed to click.
She was caught up in her own world for a minute, so she did what came naturally. She didn't consider that her semblance would startle the girl near her, as she often failed to. Instead, she became a white blur before her eyes. Lily's features could hardly be made out, all that could really be seen of her was a white outline where her main body sat. Her head, and especially her hands were constantly shifting, leaving white trailing light in their wake as they traveled at mach two speeds to complete their task.
Lily spent no more than a minute and a half of real time in her semblance before coming out of it. In that time, just under half of the work had been completed. The melted rubber still remained in tact, but the majority of the small rips and larger tears had been repaired. All that was was left was to repair the troublesome rubber and to reinforce some of the threadbare areas.
Roughly forty minutes had passed from Lily's perspective, and as she came out of her semblance to give her taxed aura a break, she could hear a concussive pop, and a brighter flash of light than was typical. This was not something she was used to hearing as she came out of her semblance, and it startled even her. "You said we had a few hours right?" She asked breathing a little heavily. She had been using her semblance all day, sometimes in class, and several times in her earlier training sessions. She still had aura reserves, but they would be depleted pretty rapidly after another few rounds of that.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 30, 2016 20:27:58 GMT -6
Guinevere watched as Lily’s own aura kicked in, and then her semblance. She was used to working for four, but this was considerably faster. She mentally did one of those twitches that you normally do due physical exhaustion. No one had ever operated this fast in her mind, and it was a little taxing on her end keeping things coming without letting any bad stuff through. She could handle it, but this was incredible. She may have to talk to Lily about helping her process some more information in the future.
As soon as she felt things start, they finished, temporarily. It seemed Lily had some limits in place as to how quickly she could do that. For the next bit – with that area of rubber, she’d probably need to work with some Ice dust to crack away the mess. She’d probably want fire too, just in case she needed to melt some of it a little more. “You’re doing great; at this rate, you will probably be done in another 10 minutes.” An inward laugh of modest encouragement went towards Lily. “A truly wonderful semblance, by the way.”
With her free hand, she reached down to her belt, grabbing a marble sized sky blue flower and a red one from pouches at the bottom of her vest. Setting the two glass dust containers down on the table, she made note of something else. Lily’s aura seemed to be waning a little bit from this. It wasn’t really surprising that doing such work would be taxing, though. She nodded to herself, and passed about a quarter of her own aura over to Lily to make use of. In the process, she sat the two dust crystals on the table, making a sort of mental neon sign towards a part of her mind dealing with melted rubber on fabrics and carpets.
“It seems you could use a bit of help with keeping this up, though,” she mentioned the Aura she had passed to Lily. “And you will probably need these for the next part, as well,” she mentally gestured towards the fire and ice dust crystal flowers she had placed on the piece of fabric in front of Lily. The girl had done quite a good job with it – mentally Guinevere hoped she would keep the majority of what she was working with. Most people she would do this with promptly forgot the things, though she tended to have better success when she had people d things with the information - like sew a project.
Still without opening her eyes, she looked over Lily’s work through her own perception. “Overall, this is looking better than most things I could do. You have a knack for this.” She inwardly smiled at this, sending the thought towards Lily as encouragement. It was true; most big projects like this took Guinevere several months to do because of motivation and bouncing between a lot of other subjects. Well, time to see how things got closer to finishing.
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Post by lilywilde on Oct 31, 2016 17:44:25 GMT -6
Lily's mood temporarily turned black as the other girl complimented her semblance, but she calmed herself quickly enough, and went back to her normal, guarded self.
"I disagree." she said, her face a confusing tapestry of pain and confusion, all veiled behind a stoic grimace. She could speak at length about why her semblance was awful, but she barely knew this girl. She wouldn't subject her to that level of self loathing, not when she didn't even know her.
Still, it was possible that Lily's emotions were clear to Guin. Even without her semblance active, the years of solitude in the wilderness had left the girl's sense of guile underdeveloped.
She focused once more returning to a halfway normal emotional state. If her understanding of how Guin's semblance was even remotely correct, she didn't think the link was one way, and she didn't want to burden the girl with negative feelings if she could avoid it.
Once calm had returned to the girl, she spent a moment in preparation. Studying the font of knowledge that was flowing freely into her mind. Invigorated by the shared aura, a fact which did not go unnoticed by Lily, she quickly dove into the process of mending her dress once more. This time, she focused entirely on the rubber. The first thing she did was apply the cold dust crystal to the rubber and wait. After a few moments had passed, and the rubber had been given a chance to properly cool, she once again activated her semblance.
Once again, she became a white blur. Her individual features lost in the luminescent white glow. From her own perspective, time progressed normally. She held her left index finger out toward the dress in front of her. Extending one of her claws, the cat faunus used the curved claw to pierce the solid rubber. The rubber shattered, but retained it's shape so long as she was in her semblance state. She watched the frozen military grade rubber's sudden cracks spiderweb into tiny shards around the impact sites of her claws. The rubber was absolutely obliterated by the faunus girl's mach two assault. She carefully collected as many of the shards of rubber as she could and focused her defensive aura in her hands that were holding the debris. Once she was sure that she had as much of the rubber as she could gather held within her hands, she dropped her semblance, only briefly.
The frozen shards of rubber held within her glowing hands attempted to explode into several directions, but Lily's tight grip and aura defense absorbed all of the explosive kinetic energy that had built up within them after the mach two strikes. She then sat them harmlessly on the table beside her and applied the heat dust to the rubber which had clung to the dress despite the violent removal of the majority of rubber. As soon as she did so, she launched into her semblance once more, almost effortlessly.
It was a simple task, to rub all of the molten rubber out of the dress. The tricky part came next, as she had to sew the replacement fabric into place in such a way that it was not too obvious. Thankfully, Guin had produced some fabric that was a near perfect match for the material her mother had used to create the dress. The difference between fabrics was only noticeable if one were really paying attention. A problem that might eventually come up, as the melted rubber had predominantly been centered around the portion of the shirt near Lily's chest.
After that bit of patchwork had been completed, she spent a little bit of time repairing the threadbare portions of the dress in a similar manner, but simply sewing patches onto the interior of the dress. One such patch, roughly in the portion of the dress which would hug Lily's left hip, she left the top portion of the interior patch unfastened. It wouldn't be visible from the outside, but would provide Lily with a small pocket inside of her dress. It wouldn't be easily accessible, but if she ever had reason to hide something on her person, it could be useful.
After all of that was taken care of, she dropped her semblance for the final time. All told, the second burst of productivity had taken roughly two and a half minutes of real time. However, for Lily the amount of time which had seemed to pass was closer to an hour, perhaps longer. Her perception of time was always altered when she entered her semblance, but as she'd constructed her schedule around real time, she would just deal with the perceived two hours of total time that had passed between the first and second bursts of productivity. The result was worth it. In front of her sat a neatly repaired, and once again presentable dress. It wasn't the exact same as her mother had originally made it, but it was similar enough to satisfy Lily.
The faunus would be very tired the next day. She'd been given a boon of extra aura to use this day, but unfortunately that also meant extra time tacked into her perceived day. When she would finally go to sleep that night, it would appear to her as if nearly forty hours had passed. Between her training, school work, and lengthy trips to the library, she had been using her semblance perhaps too liberally of late. She didn't concern herself with that thought however. Her hated semblance was finally doing something for her other than allowing her to run away. It was allowing her to catch up.
Without any formal education, she absolutely had to push herself this hard in order to catch up with all of the other students. The black rings under her eyes were hardly a difficult price to pay in exchange for the reward she was hoping to work her way towards.
"Your thoughts?" Lily finally asked, after examining the dress in detail for a short while.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 1, 2016 17:38:21 GMT -6
Okay then. Lily did not like her semblance. Though it was truly magnificent in what she could do, Guinevere would let sleeping dogs lie. She may poke at Lily sometime in the future about it though. She watched as the girl worked the fabric and rubber. To be honest, her head was starting to hurt a fair bit from all the processing and work going on, and her Aura itself was starting to wan a bit faster than she was used to. Perhaps this time dilation Lily had going on put that amount of tax on Guinevere.
Regardless, the dress was done, and it looked quite good. She particularly liked the addition of the hidden pocket. Without thinking too much of it, she lifted her hand from Lily’s shoulder so she could get a more personal look at the dress. When would she learn to check someone’s aura before doing this? Every bit of the unused Aura came flooding back to Guinevere. She sharply inhaled, and the breathing through her nose was a little ragged. New emotions flooding back on her mind weren’t the greatest things ever. At least these were mostly positive – confidence and contentment, with a hint of insomnia. Well, it was better than a Grimm, she would admit that much.
At the same time, Lily would lose the slight empowering note from Guinevere’s Aura. At the same time as the aura was retracting, the font of knowledge she was drawing would draw away for the most part, though it would leave residues here and there on her Aura and muscle memory. With easily two hours of work completed, she would remember a large number of the more straightforward techniques she had used, and perhaps some of the more advanced ones, like the fixing of the threadbare areas or removing the melted rubber.
She fluttered her eyes open, welcoming the familiar perspective of her own. Looking at the dress she smiled, running her hands along some of its stitches, impressed that the knowledge and application would link so well. This would be one way to teach, she guessed. Looking up towards Lily she worked up a smile, head still reeling a bit from the influx of emotions. “It looks lovely!” She wiggled her hand into the pocket “I particularly like that you did this” she fluttered her fingers around in the pocket. “It’s not too often you get women’s clothes with appropriately sized pockets. It’s why I just modify stuff for guys most of the time.”
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