Semblance Master Request

[Carina]

I am requesting the rank of Master for Semblance on Carina. I believe she has repeatedly demonstrated a unique and substantial grasp on the magic, from its fundamentals to non-obvious uses and the quirks she has developed. Carina uses Semblance near constantly on people and especially buildings, and has much of Gel'Grandal mapped out via her Semblance quirk.

Specific uses that demonstrate her skill at a variety of levels

Carina's expression didn't change, but she funneled more aether through her rune and began to dig through Hector's aura in detail. A person's aura was... complicated, and finding memories and history was significantly more difficult than finding the impression of every person who had walked on a pavestone in the last three hours, for instance. She was skilled at Semblance, that part wasn't a lie, and so she was able to begin sifting through the part of his aura that resembled his memories much like one would flip through a filing cabinet. His aura was chaotic and she couldn't see them as they existed — it was more like a smattering of impressions over time. People, places, feelings. Things that he had imprinted on. Even those were unclear, as if Hector himself could hardly remember them.

[...]

While she couldn't quite feel Vergil's aura in front of her, she could feel his aura through Hector's memories of him, and those were myriad and bountiful. Everything she could find, however, was after the summer prior. She knew Hector had been in Zaichaer; they had spoken about it. She recognized his accent, so different from the Imperials. He had been a member of a coven, confirmed in front of her by Vergil. And now she had practically laid Hector bare in her haphazard searching of his aura, she had felt glimpses of pain and love that he had felt, and her wild internal speculation that they had met Imogen was correct, because she could sense when someone else had been sufficiently around Imogen for it to make a difference.

Carina blinked. His history stopped abruptly, as if it had never existed. There was a trace aura, far more powerful than anything Carina had encountered herself, but she could not place it or its origins. It was entirely unfamiliar.

She had been attempting to shoot with pure mundane skill, but she was not too skilled in the art of gunslinging. Carina loaded another two caster shells into her rifle and looked through the scope, aether pooling in her runed eye. Nigh-instantly she had the windspeed and direction in her head and the exact distance of the target from her, judging by the span of earth and grass between her and it, and by the length between the spatial coordinates. It was close enough that she would only have to align the pathways between here and there, rather than a string of them, but it was far enough she would need to aim well to even hit the target, let alone in the right spot.

Carina, alone on this particular shooting range at this particular hour, immediately noticed when someone new began to approach her. It was enough that she had looked at her with more than a passing glance; the prickle on the back of her neck told her that someone was near before she had even looked up from loading the rifle. She turned around with it in hand, finger off the trigger. A very slightly taller woman who have easily passed as her sister with their matching dark hair and pale skin. The pistol at her hip and her thigh were loaded, but the half-assembled rifle was, of course, not. She had just driven in on a motorcycle, too — Carina had wanted to get one of those, but she'd never so much as ridden a horse, let alone driven a car or a motorcycle like they had in Gel'Grandal.

Carina found herself in the second story of the ruins, somehow still intact, and the quiet dark encroached upon her. She crept through towards the only source of light through a dim, empty doorway. Two crumbling steps led to a strip of wall that once held a roof, now caved in, and Carina followed it, each step measured by the structure's aura. If it would turn to dust beneath her feet. She was not skilled in stealth, but she could step lightly, and quiet as a mouse she walked along that stone wall.

[...]

The roof was barely holding her, however, and with that glimmering eye she could sense that it would not hold her long. But she had yet to find her quarry. A shifting noise came, and out of the corner of her eye, she spotted the hint of amethyst veins, and an abundance of glowing moss. The stone beneath her footing began to crumble, and Carina took one step off the edge.

She projected the aura of the apothecary they had just been inside into his aura, allowing him to view it as she could — glowing blueprints that lived on the back of the eyelids, visible with closed eyes and faint with eyes open. The aura comprised of everything from his storage and herbal drying rooms to the contents of his till when they had left and the doors that were locked. She had been in there enough times that there were even accurate points of what in the building needed to be repaired now, and what would need to be repaired soon.

"The rail depot, yes. Did you know that trains have an aura? And if you study it, you can learn what is inside...and who. And who has been inside. And that sometimes, the railcars full of coal are not full of coal at all. And sometimes the railcars full of people are full of inquisitors, and you really don't want to get onto those." [...]

Carina had noticed one night — if it had been night, indeed, while perching on the roof of the rail depot, that there was a car that went into the depot with a much different aura than it had left with. And while most of the coal was dropped off to power steam and back up the magitech works of Gel'Grandal, this car — and a few like it — left with their coal untouched. But they were too quick for Carina to Semble in entirety once she had noticed this. [...]

The Office of Imperial Revenue was a massive, imposing building, with multiple wings and many tiny little offices and closets — with very little to differentiate the two. Alike in locked doors and layered wards, it was difficult to get the full picture just by standing outside it. Carina lingered near the steps to the front door, a cigarette held between her fingers, burning up faster than she could smoke it. As focused on her Semblance as she was, it wasn't until it was reduced to a stub and burnt her that she dropped it and snuffed it out with a boot-clad foot.

She had stopped there every night for the past week, briefly enough for a smoke, her runed eye scanning and analyzing as much as she could before she felt she'd be noticed by the guards and ushered away. So far they hadn't noticed her, neither magically nor visually. It may have been helped by the particularly large shrub she stood next to, but also her cloak of concealment, averting the eyes of people who would have normally glanced her way.

The eclipse made it dark, always, and monsters lurked in the night, but in this part of the city it was well taken care of by the Kathar. At this point, she had been waiting for one of the employees at the OIR to make a mistake — an open window, a side-door not fully closed. Even with what seemed a calamity, the magic around the building was just as strong and the money flowed through the emperor's coffers with just as much importance as usual. Tax evasion was one of the more serious crimes, Carina had found out, as it had earned her a stay in prison for nearly a season. While she could have perhaps escaped, patience won out, and she was released with a warning and a debt. Not that she had earned much in the Imperium for them to tax. Most importantly, she wanted to see what information they had on her here in the tax office. As the Empire revolved around money, she had learned that many important dossiers were kept in some wing or another in rooms of endless filing cabinets. She just had to find hers.

Carina continued her walk, this time walking towards the side of the building. No one was watching her yet. Portals may have been too flashy for this sort of thing, and she didn't want to leave a magical residue. She had already reduced her aura to be as nonchalant as possible — visible, so as to not arouse suspicion, but devoid of magic and interest.

Carina eyed the wards, looking in particular for the corner where they met. Negation mages sometimes took shortcuts — everyone took shortcuts, but for these mages, it was at the edges. Edges had weaker force and unless the mage was very lackadaisical with their aether, they wouldn't make them meet, but not overlap.

Then she saw the metal pipes, painted white against the wall so that they would blend in, but uncovered in this basement corner. She traced it down with her gaze. It was hard to see through dirt and earth or concrete, but she had a trick for scanning buildings — follow the wall. Now she followed the pipe, and it revealed the sewer beneath them. It must have been a maintenance room, though Carina knew very little about sewers.

Carina nodded. She could see the connection between Vergil and Hector was more than just friend or even mentor, but she did not comment on it. As Vergil explained his caveats — such as ensuring they spend some time finding the rare flora she had mentioned — Carina watched him. Vergil's aura was blocked from her, which was unusual but she could see that the source of the block was a warding pendant around his neck. But she inspected Hector's aura, and when her inner gaze shifted to that of his Summoning rune, she realized how familiar it was. She couldn't remember if she had noticed this before, as their first meeting was nearly a year prior, but he, too, had been a member of Covens of Zaichaer. It was a logical leap that Vergil too had been a part of the Covens.

At one point, it had been the desk of the leader of a gang, but she did not know who or what gang, and she otherwise did not care but for one purpose: there was a locked drawer in this desk that held permits. With a lock-pick in hand, a softly glowing lumicite around her neck, and her gaze shifted to the aura of the locking mechanism, Carina got to work to the tune of shouts and fighting in the streets around them.

She was not a very good lock-picker, but the benefits of Semblance meant she didn't have to guess if she was getting something right. Smuggling was more her scene, but she couldn't argue with the benefits of expanding her repertoire. A few moments of fiddling and the lock clicked open, revealing the contents of the drawer.

The auras of buildings were an underutilized part of Semblance, she had always thought, and so she spent a great amount of aether keeping track of them. Few realized how much was revealed when one could view a building's aura, even among mages, even among semblers. One such thing had been revealed to her, in a room that was warded against Traversion, but weakly, and otherwise not well-guarded, from what she could tell from here. Railrunners, however, could get in anywhere — it was what they were known for. And she was not even the most skilled Railrunner, but the Imperium was not prepared for their presence as much as Zaichaer was.

"Did you know there's a locked room on the third floor of this department store where..." She paused, again furrowing her brow in concentration as she examined the auras of the contents of that room. "they store excess jewelry? Some of it has dragonshards..." She whispered. "Do you want to go see it?" She asked, a conspiratorial tone to her voice. "We're on floor four, and I passed it earlier." She smiled again, with a far more mischievous look on her lips than the smile from before.

Threads
I Armed Myself Against Justice
Distance
Descriptions of Disquiet
Seekers of Flowers and Fortune
Seekers of Flowers and Fortune II
Dissonance
Wild Goose Chase

[Mirage]

After a review of these threads I approve Carina to advance to Master Semblance