Making the time to listen and talk

[Chambers]

True enough. "But for that you need total awareness and knowledge of every factor involved and unfortunely such hefty precaution come with costs." A few moments are taken to think of an example, one it might be the topic of the soul that brought to this one in particular. "We can reduce the risk of paradox down to nothing with the creation of a demesne but to do so requires ripping out part of your soul." A risky thing to do in its own right and not mention the dangers to the soul stone itself. "There is always a price to be paid we just have to ask what we are willing to pay." The Mysterium had the right of it there, nothing came free. "But that is a grand thing and I personally advocate for paying more attention to smaller scale endeavours that might not be much alone but build up." A slow and steady process, not grand or flashy but much more stable.

They all had mentors and likely none of them perfect. "The one who took me in when I awoke had equal distain for the pentacle and seers both. We have been estranged since I joined the Mysterium." And that troubled him clearly but here he was.

At the idea of lens Chambers opens the box of wood and brass at his feet revealing jars of heavy glass filled with powders, sticks of chalk and wool. One of the small central draws is opened and a watchmaker loupe removed. "Something like this? The lens is made of diamond try looking through it with your sight active."

Looking through a diamond gives +3 to scrutiny rolls to study resonance

As for the next. "Do you mean supress? If so having no aura is as noticeable as having a mages aura." Everyone had an aura so being conspicuous by absence was just as bad. "Studies into prime would help you a great deal I think." That arcana had a better tool for the job of hiding. "The greatest edge we have is caution." No amount of tools could replace that. "Care and consideration." Mastering the self and keeping the ego in check. "This will sound harsh but do you think any number of tools could have saved Corn? Or would they have made him worse?" When people thought they were safe is when they got complacent. Now if this had been a group setting the slip could well have gone unnoticed but one to one it is caught. "Thaumium glows when charged with the mana it needs to counter spell. A ring no matter how romantic would be more of a beacon then protection." Unless he had had read this wrong and Guru actually wanted to doom someone but that didn't seem like the Sharman who was talking of not wanting to lose anymore.

His own curiosity tickled as Guru offers an example and the question becomes is it an example and nothing more? But with restraint the question is buried. "Knowledge of a verge and its conditions are indeed very difficult to weigh and I ma not skilled enough to say. There's a reason I'm not curator." Easy in theory devilishly hard in practice. "I try to practice it yes, otherwise it won't become habit and I won't improve. At the point I am required to lean more Guanxi then I would like but that is what it is." Both debts owed and debts in his favour.

A nod in agreement. "Yes ideals are hard to live up to, unrelenting with all the pressure on us to do it. But what is worth doing that was every easy?" Shadow names were interesting and not for the first time the insight explains a few things. "Curious. As for mine well I didn't choose it I was given it." Far from unheard of for mentors to give their newly awakened charges a shadow name. "I met a few who claimed the title guru while in India, they were a mixed bag of individuals for sure." A few had been very questionable. "It is hard to put a finger on what made the good ones good but a few exuded something that set them apart from the rest." Curious to see if the mage who turned the title into a name knew what he meant.

A slight tilt of the head. "We are still talking but think of it less like a pass or fail, its not a test in that way more like a journey." A pause to carefully word the next answer. "The next steps will be for me to cast a divination to determine what you need to do to progress in the order and once you have fulfilled that you will under go a ritual to advance to where I am now." As for improving. "Try to incorporate the Mysterium's ideology into your practice." How to put this into a useful analogy. "This is not a good one but the best I can do in the moment. In a university the new teaching assistant isn't immediately promoted to department head or in a religious organisation a lay person isn't given the office of spiritual leader immediately. What is it that these individuals must do to advance?" Yeah that had room to go in the wrong direction. "Be worried, You and I? What reason would we have to be worried?" Having missed the wider question for lack on context.

Oh the medieval scholar had an ego for sure. "If you believed you had seen angels as a young man while being surrounded by the pressure of the church at the time would you have turned out differently?" The question carries a hint of the Moros mirth even as he adds the context. "But the gnostic gospels are still around and can still be read." They just lacked the mainstream attention. "A good question to ask is why where they buried?" What was the church trying to hide by doing so. Followed by a chuckle. "Now on religious teaching I think the Buddha might disagree with you about suffering being a must." The dharmic religions were much more interesting then the Abrahamic when it came to closeness to the truth and breaking down assumed requirements.

As for the sewer plant. "Just be careful the mages that got in trouble there were powerful, skilled or both from what I understand." So whatever had bested them was unlikely to be a push over. "Reconnaissance over immediate solutions unless there really is no alternatives." None of it sat easy, not one of the problems that had reared or how they were having to divide their forces to try and conquer them all. "Oh, yes having a guardian in the sanctum is a smart move." The assumption that sleepers didn't frequent a mages sanctum was unsaid.

[Guru]

Chamber's point was poignant and clear on the matter, the Shaman nodding along his understanding as he commented. "I've always seen the creation of a demesne as a great sacrifice." And why they're exceedingly rare. "Building a stable foundation and starting on a smaller scale let's you more safely and manageably start to change the scale while managing the risk." It sounded rote the way he said it, because it had been, it was something he'd been told and something he told others in turn. It was the basis of that long ago dream turned nightmare. No nothing is free, we don't always see the cost until after. The topic of mentors was a shared pain between the two which created an awkward tension for the shaman as he clearly wanted to do something to -fix- the problem. Maybe it was Wisdom or precaution but he let that one lay for now.


Guru's eyes went down to the box, it had glanced there more than a time or two already but he didn't want to talk about the elephant in the room. So his eyes lit up with visible excitement as the contents inside were finally revealed. Guru gingerly took the watchmaker's loupe and placed it into his left eye and brought a hand up to study since it would be comparing like to like to see how fine a detail it could get into. "Something similar, yes. Though I'd make it so you can swap out the lenses for each resonance type. It'd be something others can add and build onto. We all need different ways to see things." He offered with a smile as he slid the loupe out of his eye and handed it back to Chambers.


"No, not suppress because like you said...no, just make us appear asleep like everyone else." Caution, Care, Consideration we could call them the three C's, "And the only way to engrain caution, care, and consideration is through rote and ritual." He continued the rest of the thought out loud knowing it was hard to ask people to go slow. Knowing from well lived, personal, and heavily biased experience. And the question about Corn hit him in the chest like a load of bricks, he could feel himself pull in and tense up again. He shook his head at the question though, the reply soft. "No, what he needed was care and a quicker intervention. I pushed my skepticism of the ordeal onto him, I didn't think it was a good idea but he was still happy...until he wasn't. A story I've seen repeated in a thousand different forms."


He took in a deep breath and shook his head, "I think it's about finding a balance, within reason, or knowing and accepting the risks that come with it. I don't think he could do the latter which is why he ended up the way he is." By the end of the statement his eyes were off in the middle distance, his voice robotic and cold as he had to take a moment to come out of it and shake off the still fresh grief. The information about Thaumium almost instantly pulled him from that state, his eyes blinking as he processed that. "Certainly we could encase it in a noble metal to hide that without diminishing the effect?" It was a question because he his knowledge was all theoretical at this point and unfortunately his rudimentary knowledge of Prime was displaying itself.


A smile as they shared that curiosity together but he had to accept that he may never be worthy for such a seat. He was going to have to work on integrating that into his daily life as he was free and loose with his information regarding the lie as he had previously regarded it as not mattering in comparison to the truth. "Think I need to work on that too, have a lot I feel I owe at the moment." A nod of solemn acknowledgement though the fact they were both working on their Guanxi now brought a smile of amusement that tugged at the shamans lips. "Oh that's an understatement." He added with a laugh on the topic of Guru's being a mixed bag. Though when asked about what made the good ones good that shadow return to cast over him. Though it hung in his posture, an invisible weight on those shoulders he gave a small nod. "Some get closer to the Truth then the others. They just need to make that next realization and have their eyes opened for good."




The real question behind the fear he had wanted to ask was if he was acceptable, if he was going to be let go, discarded. But the fact that he was willing to cast the divination was a positive indicator to Guru, that was the pass condition to himself. It had been a long time since the Shaman had cared about what anyone else thought of him and it was an uncomfortable but necessary position. A nod when he said to add the Mysterium ideals into his everyday life, he needed to make it part of rote, habit, and identity. It was not going to be the easiest journey for the affable shaman. The analogy Chamber's tried to make was lost on the shaman as he scrunched up his face in thought. "I mean, in any organization you generally put the time in. Learn the role you have so you can teach it to the next person and then you fill in all the way up. Ideally you organize with redundancies in place. Hello, hi, it's us, we are the redundancies." He added with a small laugh at the dark joke.


He grew somber when asked about the worries, "San Francisco, the treatment plant, Corn, Philip. It just feels like something is on the wind, but I'm not Acanthus and this is pure conjecture." He shrugged knowing it didn't make any sense that it wasn't anything but instinct he had to go on. Though at the question on if he would be different he couldn't help but laugh loudly and nod. At its core it was the difference between and Obrimos and a Shaman. "Yes! You've seen my first reaction to authority of any kind. Like touching a hot stove. I am wary of power and the structures that hold it, of course I would have been different." The question as to why they were buried were the point Guru was trying to get to, the young mage unknowingly using the socratic method in most of his questioning. "Exactly! Could you imagine if that was the prevailing doctrine now? Just how much we could have saved? How better off we might be? Or it could have been suppressed for a reason, a finger put on the scale from opening up Pandora's Box." He was not privy to those secrets and how could one weigh reality saved? "Would they disagree though? On calling it suffering maybe, if I changed the terminology to difficult or challenging I don't know they would."


He gave a small, two fingered salute at the direction for the water plant. "That's my plan, but I want to get as much intel as possible as discreetly as possible. From my initial research I don't know if it's something just the two of us could handle either way. Go in and come back with a better plan of attack since the first team is out of contact. From what I know already it's not good and it's only going to get worse. I have a way for us to get in discreetly, see more of what's around without raising too much question. Getting into the "inner sanctum" is going to be the hard part and where I'm likely to fail. If I need to abort I can shapeshift out. I'll see what kind of potion I need to make." He knew he wasn't bound to a form of flesh and blood if he didn't wish to be but the levels of effort and preparation varied when a simple rat would do to blend in and escape. "They say you shouldn't plan to fail but anyone who follows that hasn't ever faced real failure before."

[Chambers]

Sacrifice was one way to put it, trade was another limited potential to safely practice powerful magics drawing the gap between maximum potential and achievable potential closer from both directions. "Some might view it as such yes, others are all to eager to rip their soul into pieces." And what more proof was needed that magic was of the soul when even a piece of it could be put to such a mighty endeavour as totally crushing the lie albeit in a limited space. "And then Guru would you do if the a task fell before you that was so great that even to start small was a greater endeavour then you had ever considered undertaking? When each of the bricks needed to set a foundation is a separate hurdle beyond any challenge you have yet to face?" Great works could be made of lesser but the scale was different lesser on such a scale didn't mean easy or safe.

Taking the loupe back it safely stored in its cushioned draw, the box however remains open there was a good chance the contents would be needed again before they were done. "You speak of an imbued item or set of items then each lens imbued with a separate Arcanum's sight." Such ideas were fanciful but had one overwhelming flaw that none yet had manged to over come. "Such a thing would push a mages contagion to it's limits, unless you knew what lens you needed ahead of time but then why would you need the device?" If Guru had the idea maybe he had succeeded where none had managed before and found a solution to the problem.

The ability to transform aura for extended durations would if the Moros knew his arcana. which he did, require a disciple of prime to imbue the item. "Our aura gives us away to those who know yes, much as the reverse is true. use of supernal sight or scrutiny can be very useful in learning these things and no measure is completely safe." High potency sight beating out lower potency attempts to hide. "But such things are possible so I ask you, why are they not mass produced already?" It was another idea that was far from knew which means it had a flaw of its own.

Honestly as for his deceased path mate. "I don't know what Corn needed, from what I understand many mages warned him of the danger impressed on him what would happen if he continued." But something be it ego or hubris or pride or something else had resulted in every warning falling death. "His tale is one we have all heard many times of mages he could, would only learn through the experience and one they normally don't survive." Not many mages die of old age that was certain.

The eyebrows of The Moros rise a little. "I had not considered encasing it in another material." Guru well and truly had him here, the idea was totally new to the Moros. "I have no idea what that might do or affect. You would have to experiment." His knowledge of perfected metals was as purely thermotical as the Sharman's and rather lacking in anything more then the basics.

Guanxi existed to allow for the trade of information in a hierarchal system without totally disadvantaging those lower on the rungs. "It is no shame to owe Guanxi, in a way it makes me look for opportunities to pay it back." And hadn't that lead to an interesting commitment recently. "I know Aurora is interested in recovering what was taken from this place." Gesturing to the empty room around them. "And I am on the cusp of having a way to find it. Is that something that would interest you to help with?" The first offer of a tangible task. The talk of some Gurus being closer then others gets a appreciative nod the same is true of most sleepers.

The brazen joke gets a small chuckle from Chambers along side Gurus own. "Redundancy is one thing we don't have with only three members of the order and as of the moment only I having passed the first real test we barely qualify as being worthy of notice." In most Athenaea Chambers would be on par with the janitor or in the role himself. "But that is no excuse to rush things ahead of when they should be." And before to terribly long he hoped both Aurora and Guru would apricate why. "But yes time, loyalty, commitment and tradition are all valuable things to a company, a religious group and to the Mysterium." They could accurately be described as a mystery cult after all.

The currently list of problems is laid out to bare and he takes a gentle sigh. "Out of perspective yes it seems like alot but we have a city's worth of problems and far from a cities worth of mages to handle them." Between councillors, provosts, sentinels, heralds and a hierarch a full Consilia had around twenty official positions going spare and anywhere from double to five times the number of affiliated pentacle mages and apostates in the general population. Sacramento was a rare rare exception. A true outlier. "It does not help that some of the problems are brought on by the very few mages we do have." Or that some of those mages barely seem to exist. "Yes we have problems. But we can are are solving those." He and Cavendish had the San Fran situation well in hand. "Knowledge is power and between Skye's report and Cavendish's additions San Fran are not as strongly positioned as would first appear." Which also brought him to a good point. "Both Skye and Cavendish mentioned you might have been present for the acclaimed murder of one of our own in front of other supernaturals?" Sacramento clearly had a history of problematic mages.

Now a touch unsure how much that was being applied to the long dead saint or the recent changes in the Consilium. "I am aware not everyone likes authority and it has been and still is heavily abused." No such thing as a system free from the possibility of abuse. "I'm honestly surprised Councillor Salem agreed me needed a hierarch." But it had saved him a battle so certainly not complaining. "But leadership and structures do have advantages when used properly, its why I stepped down as councillor of the Moros, so I wouldn't be advising myself." Under the charter that he himself had written giving up the seat had not been required. "And why I've been giving lessons of the lex, make it less scary for people." Harder to abuse a system that others understand.

But as for dharmic teachings. "Yes I think they would disagree, the teaching of Buddhism resolve around removing suffering from your life the how and why have become a little more complex as different traditions arise but generally a sign of success is the enlightened state they strive for." A good deal of the stories might be hagiography or have truth to them but even so the sheer degree of common sense at the core of it was astounding.

Now hidden doctrines and suppressed knowledge that was a conversation to get stuck into. "How much do you know of the Mysterium's teaching on pancryptia?" It had been on the check list of topics to clear up if needed and this was a good a way to introduce it as he was likely to get.

The connections that is what worried him the most. "Good I'm glad someone else understands that sometimes leaving is the best option to come back better prepared." The rush in one and done reckless mentality often lead to far to many unnecessary risks. "Would you mind sharing what you do know so far, of all of the problems this one has be the most concerned." So many unknowns. Why where they there at all? What went so wrong? "A master of matter can make holes in any material, but Corn still managed to get arrested." The lesson hopefully clear, having options to escape might not always be enough.