"Choki doesn't sense any threat, and I have much the same image. It might be somebody transporting something to town."

"Isn't that what roads are for?" Alana inquires with a shrug.

"We should probably head back anyway, grab some lunch, and spend the afternoon working on our focus if we are going to make progress by dinner."

Annoyed at the interruption, Rhiannon's eyes opened and darted about. Why a tractor overloaded with boxes was cause to bark out alarms was beyond her understanding. Especially after Natsuki affirmed that there was no threat. But maybe the dog was worried that Alana would be seen in her birthday suit. Modesty watch was an important responsibility for a talking dog.

"I suppose that may be best." Her response came after the suggestion to go back to the mansion. "I wasn't getting very far anyway. Did either of you have any luck manifesting the pattern? I must be doing something wrong. If ordelia felt confident we could do this by dinner, then there has to be something I'm missing."

Alana shakes her head to indicate no real progress.

If you're all heading back to the Mansion then it will take you about an hour.. so it'll be approx 13:10 by the time you get back. Are you heading for your rooms first or directly to the dining room?

And the track is the road!

If it's lunch time then I don't see the need to go back to the room. I may swing up there to drop off a towel and throw on some shorts.

Alana will likewise do no more than drop off a towel and maybe put on a different top.

By the time Rhiannon and Alana have made a quick visit to their rooms, grabbed what they need and made it back to the dinning room it will be approaching 20 past one (13:20).
Natsuki having chosen to not return to her room is in the process of eating lunch (Lunch, which will be a mix of help yourself steamed rice, noodles, a selection of sources, Kimchi, salad, and/or Mandu (3 varieties - cooked to order)).
Cathal who's finished eating will say..
"Hi, I was about to go back to the grind. I take it you had a good swim and a relaxing morning."

Though she had been hungrier than ever before since walking the pattern, Rhiannon still only filled a small bowl with rice, then added some sauce and a couple mandu. For her it was a lot. By the time she made it to the table, Nat was already eating, but Alana was right there with her. As she sat Cathal politely asked about their morning.

"It was nice, thank you. I wasn't expecting a three mile walk in flip flops, but it was like a new experience with my sharper senses. I might have complained more at the beginning of the week, but I ended up enjoying it. The water was lovely, as was the company. I tried to use that relaxation to conjure up the pattern, but to no avail. I was wondering if you had any better luck"

"I think I've managed to work out a technique that works, but it's damned difficult to hold the pieces together without the whole thing falling apart. I almost got as far as the first veil before lunch, but I really needed the break. I think trying to do it in one session without a break isn't going to work, at least not for me.
I think I'm going to do a couple more hours this afternoon, then take a dip in the pool for an hour, then see what happens after that."

Alana takes some mental notes as she politely shovels food into her mouth.  "I never got to the walking part, maybe I was just enjoying lying in the sun too much," Alana adds.

"I was trying to visualize the whole pattern at once. That's actually not that hard, but there seems to be a difference between the image of the pattern and the totality of it. So, what's the technique you figured out so far?"

"It's a bit difficult to describe, or at least part of it is.
I start by rotating the image about one hundred and twenty degrees anticlockwise, so that the point where you step onto the pattern is at about five o'clock with the first veil at about 7 o'clock.
It's then just a case of walking the image of the Pattern in your mind as you walked it physically, step by step, and fitting each step into the image your creating.
For most of this first section, it means you're building counter clockwise, which isn't in and of itself difficult. The hard part is holding the bits representing the steps together. Getting the bit of the outer edge to hold in place was the hardest, but after that it got easier, until I got close to the switch back that takes you down to the first veil.
I'm hoping that once I can get through that the whole of the first section will sort of lock together, which will hopefully then make it easier to hold whilst I build the rest of the outer ring which forms the first part of the second section of the Pattern, which hopefully will increase the stability of the image further.
At the moment this is for the most part all theory and supposition."

"That makes sense, actually." Rhiannon nodded. "Picture the pattern, then walk it. Like you said, though, it sounds easy enough in theory. Practice, practice. Right? I suppose it's worth a go. This is even harder than walking the pattern itself At least there we knew what we had to do to succeed." She stood and cleaned up her place. "Well, I guess I'm off to try it. Thank you, Cathal."

With a smile and a nod, Rhiannon went back to her room to do exactly that. When she reached her room, she hopped up on her bed and laid back. "Zou Yan, notify me when it's dinner time." Once comfortable, she pictured the pattern as she had all morning. She didn't really see a need to rotate it, but there was no reason not to imitate Cathal's success. The next step was to walk it. She didn't simply imagine her feet on it, she summoned her experience. Every step, every strain, every breath and the it felt as it was changing her. She knew the pattern was inside her, inscribed on her DNA, she just had to connect her imagination to it.

Winter arrived a bit late to lunch and gathered some food. She didn't have much to say to the conversation that was going on, but she nodded pleasantly to the others.
This message was last edited by the GM at 14:32, Fri 23 Dec 2022.

Alana bids Rhiannon good luck before sitting and contemplating for a while.  Eventually, she turns to Winter, "did you have any success?  I could visualize the Pattern well enough but trying to do more . . . it just sort of fell apart," she confides.

Winter shook her head. "I think I got about halfway through a full projection," she said. "I'm used to meditation, but usually I like to clear my head, not burn an image into the world. It's a change in my practice." She smiled. "But I'm making progress. I'll have it visualized before I know it!" She chose to be optimistic.

His first attempt had been somewhat less than stellar. Cormac wasn't sure what the problem was other than that he would probably need some more practice. Whatever the case the effort was rather hungry work. Gathering his wits he shook off the fatigue and made his way towards the kitchen. Looked like he was late to lunch. Maybe he could see if the others had managed to project the Pattern from memory.

It only took him a few moments to make his way to the kitchen. Some of his cousins had already gathered and he could over hear from their conversations that they had tried to summon the image just as he had. At least he wasn't the only one who wasn't successful.

"So, did anyone manage to summon the image? It turned out a lot harder than I imagined it would."

This message was last edited by the GM at 20:15, Wed 28 Dec 2022.

RE: Winter

"I wish I had your confidence.  I feel like I am missing something important.  Like there is some trick to this that I am not getting," Alana replies.  With a shrug she adds, "well, I'll keep trying and maybe something with snap into place."

Rising she says, "see you at dinner, maybe we'll both have figured something out by then."

Alana heads back to her room with a couple of pieces of fruit and a roll in case she gets hungry later.  Finding a comfortable spot on the floor, she sits and clears her mind.  She then recalls the image of the Pattern, easy enough to do as it seems burned into her memory, and holds it there for a while, examining it from all sides, spinning it around to get a feel for it.  She spends most of the first hour just constructing and deconstructing the shell holding everything together.  Getting a feel for it and becoming familiar with how it fits together, hoping that familiarity will make holding it together easier when she starts putting the steps of the path in.

Once she feels comfortable with this step, she moves to trying to add the steps into the form she has created.  It does not go well.  After a while of this, she gets up, grabs a banana and eats it thoughtfully.  Pacing the room for a while, she then goes over to the door and wedges her fingertips above the molding and pulls herself up and down several times before dropping back to the ground.

As she is about halfway through her apple, a thought occurs to her.  Lego.  She always loved playing with it as a kid.  Maybe if she builds her Pattern out of Lego, it will hold better than trying to just form it out of bricks?  Finishing her apple, she sits once more.  This time, she visualizes the Pattern as an interconnected set of Lego bricks, each attached to its neighbors.  Once in place, she starts to walk the Pattern from memory, feeling each step and emotion and image as if it were her walking the thing once more.  Each step another piece of Lego snaps into her visualized model.

OOC:  Sorry, I thought that I responded to Winter earlier but we were celebrating Christmas early and apparently I forgot.  Ooops.  :)

"No, although it sounds like Winter did slightly better than I did.
On which subject, if you'll excuse me I'll get back to the grind stone as it were. I'll see you at dinner, and with a bit of luck I'll have a better outcome to report by then.
With which he will depart for his room, at least for a couple if hours..
He'll be in the pool for about an hour between 4pm and 5pm..

Winter nodded to Alana. "Practice makes perfect, that's all I can say."

As the luncheon broke up, she headed back to her room and went for a new approach. Instead of art, she tried to visualize the Pattern as a terrain map, which she had some knowledge of reading. She used that analogy in her next attempt to project the three-dimensional Pattern.

Cathal:


He glanced towards Cathal and nodded.

"Good luck then," he said as the other took his leave of the dining room. It looked as if the others were making their way out as well. Nothing for it then but to try to practice more on his own as well. This was something they would each have to master on their own. There wasn't much of a way they could help one another.

Finishing his own lunch Cormac pondered the chore ahead of him. He hadn't got far but it was still early going yet. Taking his own leave he retreated towards his own room and double checked the mental clock that he had seemed to develop after walking the Pattern. He would practice as much as he could till it was time to get ready for dinner, leaving just enough time to clean up and make it to the evening meal. Somehow he got the impression that tonight's discussions might be a bit more telling than previous ones.

For those that complete their first Pattern Manifestations (Run:#0) the whole process of extreme mental exercise through-out the day to achieve this will leave you totally mentally exhausted, not that those who don't manage it before dinner won't be in a similar state.
You won't be able to start your next iterative attempt until you've had several hours of sleep (Run:#1).
You will get faster and find it less mentally exhausting with each successful instantiation.

I've moved "Dinner" to a new thread.. anything you want to do before dinner you can either continue here or, depending on what it is and/or who it involves use another thread such as the Zou Yan and your Assistants thread (if applicable)



This message was last edited by the GM at 15:26, Sat 07 Jan 2023.

Alana makes it about halfway through, she thinks, before everything starts to slip and then it is all gone, leaving her in a daze.  Sitting there for a while, she eventually manages to mumble something at Zou Yan that may or may not have included the word 'dinner' before collapsing on her bed, fast asleep.

Something is annoying.  Buzzing?  Poking?  Something.  Alana opens her eyes and has absolutely no idea where she is, what time it might be, or really even what direction is up for a little while.  "Uuuugh," she manages after a couple of minutes as her head starts to clear, slightly.  It is still some time before she figures out who and where she is.  It could basically be anytime from half-an-hour or so from when she most recently failed to materialize the Pattern to several days later.

It then occurs to her that she actually knows exactly what time it is.  It is 19:36, a little more than an hour has passed.  She lets that settle in for a moment before realizing that dinner already started.  She rolls awkwardly off the bed and wanders to the bathroom to clean up a little.  Maybe I can sneak into the dining room behind a waiter or something? she thinks to herself as she heads down the hall toward dinner.

All sense of time had long since evaporated. For Rhiannon, there was only the mental picture of the pattern lighting up and burning as she followed its curves. Feeling it by remembering her earlier ideal, it became more and more real. There were some moment when she thought she might stumble or falter, but she managed to keep going, and going until finally, she was rewarded by the manifestation of the patterns image floating before her. It was a success. If she wasn't so exhausted, she would be overjoyed and screaming with excitement. In her mind, it took about the same amount of time, but once clear headed, she realized that it was after 6.

Now that she had the pattern, Rhiannon wondered what she should do with it. Just getting the manifestation was the goal, and she really didn't know what she could do with it. After all that work, she was loathe to let it go, but she was tired and keeping it was probably just going to exhaust her further. So with some regret, she decided that the only thing she would try is to project the pattern back on her mind, hoping to imprint it and make it easier the next time.

"Zou Yan," She let her eyes close. "I'm going to take a nap. Make sure I get up in time for dinner. Thanks."