Searching for Answers

[Lucian]

Lucian wandered around the library desperately searching for any book that could give him more insight into his ancestral rune magic. As far as he could tell rune magic itself was fairly common, but not the specific branch practiced by his family. While his father's compendium was filled with information gather over the years, it was from the perspective of one who did not know or understand magic that well. Lucian was hoping to find something from a more knowledgeable source. What he was particularly interested in were the chants and special ink used to do the tattoing.

Maybe, just maybe if I figure out how to perform the ritual the right way I can fix the corrupt tattoos, then I could fully tap into their power...he thought with an inward grin of delight.

[Junpei]

Juinpei taltos still looked over volumes and volume sof Dark Arts books, his mind trying to absorb hundreds of pages of information in a short. The nice thing to most people was that sitting on Junpei's shoulder was an extra brain, one as capable as his own in fact.

Boss i'm starting to feel the effects of all this info on your mind, give me some, i can hodl it till later.

You sure Loish? You know that everytime we do this you can't think straight.

It's fine Boss.

So Junpei began to feed niformatin over to his small companion. All in all Loish coudl usually keep an extra four or five hundred tid bits of niformatino before having to stop. Junpei loved having his own little storage mind at times.

- 30 minutes later -

Junpei leaned back in his chair and sighed heavily, all this information was gettting to both of them now. Junpei figured he'd take a five minutes break and get things over with. Looking up adn around Junpei noticed a familiar person.

"Hey you're the guy with the rune tatoos, right?"

[Lucian]

Lucian looked up from his pile of books and paper. He had been cross-refrencing corresponding information from his father's journal and the research material he had acquired.

"Yes, Junpei...right?" he asked, looking up at the boy.

[Junpei]

"Yeah that's it."

Junpei got up fro the table he was at and streched his arms over his head, followed by a couple of pops. Junpei then proceeded to move his head a bit, stretching out the tight muscle son his neck, thirty minutes of constantly staring at a book would do that to you. On hsi shoulder Loish stretched out his legs like a cat might, his claws extending farther and farther untill it seemed they might fall off.

"What brings you to the library?"

Junpei was actually quite interested in this person's line of magic. Harlow certainly could use magic like that, he was after all limited to close range magic at this point and that made it difficult to work with range. Junpei wandered exactly what Harlow would say to that idea, to have runes inscribed on his arms in order to make him stronger. Knowing Harlow if any gain of power was involved he would be more than happy to help out.

[Lucian]

Lucian yawned a bit, "Just trying to see if I can find any conventional information about my magic style. You see I have a journal my father created which is essentially a compendium of all the knowledge my ancestors had about our runic tattoos but sadly it is from the perspective of one who understands very little about magic. I was hoping to cross-reference information from the journal to more conventional sources but I have yet to find out much that I didn't already know," he said, sighing as he closed the book nearest him, having finished sifting through it for information.

Lucian eyed Losh, "Is that...a dragon?" he asked, having never seen one before even if it was little it was certainly impressive to him.

[Junpei]

Junpei nodded slowly as he explained how the magic of his family worked. Junpei could already tell it was a wrodology magic style, something he had a great deal of knowledge about. Wordology was the other founding principal behind summning, the first being a medium. Picking up one f his wordology books Junpei flipped it open and started to sna threw pages, comming across a page that had a few symbols Junpei flipped hte book over nad held it, middle finger on the binding and two finger on each page, towards the man in front of him.

"It's a Jhereg, kinda of liek a dragon but less powerful, much more itteligent though."

Tapping the book page with his index finger Junpei flipped it back over and looked at it.

"Mind if I see your tatoos?"

[Lucian]

"Well I guess they're not exactly rare runes though," he said, lifting up his left sleeve to show him the intricate pattern of runes that covered his whole arm from the wrist to his shoulder.

[Junpei]

Junpei nodde dan held the book in his right hadn whiel he let his left slip up and scratch under Loush's chin. Loking from book to runes and then back again Junpei got a pretty good idea of what they were. Some were not perfectly drawn, one had an extra line, or maybe that was purposeful?

"Tell me, were these traced form a book or from another person? Or a book that was in you family perhaps?"

Junpei wanted to know how all these things worked, he would need to know if he wanted to give them to Harlow. Still looking from book to arm and then back Junpei was stumped as to what kind of ink he used to do this. Ordinary ink would do no good since the magic lay IN the runes it seemed.

[Lucian]

Lucian, nodded his head indicating the left-arm tattoos he was showing Junpei, "These are not done as well as I could've hoped as I attempted to do them myself. The binding spell I used on these tattoos was also incomplete so these runes do not react as well as the ones on my right arm. But they still work reasonably well for essentially being a forgery of the ones that were tattooed on my right arm. As for where the runes come from, I honestly have no idea, my father's journal makes no mention of their origin. I think it may be a sort of memorization process passed from one family head to the next so as to preserve the tradition. Other than speculation I cannot offer you any other solid information. As I said before my father's journal, while being a wealth of useful information about the runes, is written by a man who comes from a line with little to no understanding of magic. My ancestors may have, at one point, fully understood the magical properties of the tattoos and how to utilize them to their fullest but the knowledge has died with them as far as I know," he said, sighing sadly at the loss of such knowledge.

[Junpei]

Junpei nodded slowly as he lokoed over this man's left arm more intently. They were definately good for being done by one's self. They had errors, a couple of lines were off and a few of them seemed to have smugged during the inking process. All in all Junpei coudl see why this man ha trouble with them. Having no understading of the magic behind them and still using them.. he was lucky he hadn't lost both arms yet. Although Junpei could see where he was comming from, anything for family.

"I see.... so you have no idea how these even work? That's not good... here, come and sit on the table. Maybe I can help you translate your Father's journal into something a bit more.. magially accurate."

[Lucian]

Lucian shook his head, "I do have a basic understanding of how they work. I need merely touch a set of runes in the correct order and a corresponding spell is activated, think of it like coded magic. However I have only a minimal knowledge of how to best exploit the runes and only a handful of spell-codes are still known to my family. I have been experimenting with them however and have discovered a few more useful combat spells," he said, grinning faintly at Junpei's offer of help, "That is what I have been trying to do, unfortunately I'm not having much luck at the moment. Right now I'm trying to find a more proper way of binding the rune tattoos to my left arm. Normally chants are repated during the tattooing process to bind the runes' magics to the users arm, unfortunately my forgeries were bound with a different process resulting in their unpredictable response to my commands, your help would be quite appreciated in trying to convetionalize my father's journal," he said with a grin of thanks.

[Junpei]

"Hehe no problem. First though, what si your name?"

Junpei gave a laugh as he had totally forgotten about asking that little bit of information. He had gotten so caught up in figuring all this out it had gone by faster than he could even think about it. Sitting down Junpei flippe dopen three specific books. The Study of Wordology, Wordology for the advanced learner, and finally Black Magic 101. Junpei suspected these runes to tap either black magic, or elemental magic. If it was elemental then Junpei coudl at least help with the runes and point the guy in the right direction, if not, then could probably help decypher their code.

[Lucian]

Lucian grinned, "Lucian Dragomir, so Junpei since you happen to know my style magic might I inquire as to what your style of magic might be?" he asked, still curiously watching Loish intently. The creature was fascinated Lucian, he had not been exposed to too many magical creatures, let alone those that were tame enough to be used as pets or otherwise.

[Junpei]

"Hmm? Oh style of magic? It's Dark Summoning. Know those satanic bastards you hear about all the time? Yeah they stole that from us. ANyways, I focus on the even darker end of it, summoning fallen angels, demons, devils, right now im working on a spell to summon up a demon that can use magic as well. It's been hard though, since most of them tend to avoid being summoned easily. The last to i tried slipped away and I had no choice but to let them go."

Junpei flipped open the dark arts book adn brought up a page on summoning. It showed a large, rather oprnate circle in the center of a diagram. In the center was a label that read blood seal.

"When you make contact with your summon for the first time, at least in my case, I make a blood seal with said summon. It strengthens my bond to that summon because part of my lifeforce is transfered to them. It's kinda like giving that summon a part of my soul to seal the deal."

Junpei then flipped to the next page that had about 60 lines of latin on it.

"I have to memorize all of this normally, and insert my name and my summons name when I call them for the first time. After that i can merely tap into a database of sorts and call otu certain summons. Most of the time I use blood as a medium and as such I don't use as much mana when summoning. Anything you need repeated?"

[Lucian]

"Interesting, so you sort of have to pay the demon or whatever creature you wish to summon to fight by your side?" he asked, intrigued by this idea of calling forth allies magically to do the fighting for you. "I prefer the visceral experience of going toe to toe with an opponent, it really is quite a rush," he said, flipping through one of the tomes pertaining to runes.

As of right now all the books on runes he had found only pertained to alchemy or magic that was made by inscribing runes to create a spell, not tapping into the power of runes already inscribed which lay dormant until activated in a certain pattern. However he had found interesting translastions for a few of the runes his father had not been able to get translations of. "Junpei, I've found something interesting. According to this book the rune my father translates as wind, can also be translated as beast according to this book. Do you think it might be possible to tap into a power associated with the two different translations of this rune?" he asked, thoroughly interested in the possibilities this presented.