==>

Rex wrote:

WAIT! Quickly look around, maybe he didn’t want to be rude and let you take your time changing?

Notimportant wrote:

Did it work?

It did not work. The road to the coast remains as Legionnaire-free as ever.

\\/\/ wrote:

You look nice! And you accomplished every criteria you set for your outfit. Anyway, are you sure the “blue line” magic visualization is part of healing magic? Perhaps it’s holding you back, sticking to something that might be leading in the wrong direction?

You’re glad you look good! You feel like you managed to hit the fine line between “looking nice” and “looking like you’re not carrying money”. Given your experiences these last few days, you figure that’s probably the right place to be.

As for the “blue line” magic: you absolutely aren’t sure if it’s the right thing to do here. It’s just kind of how you’ve been imagining magic.

Neither the book you read nor anyone else you’ve spoken to have said anything about blue lines – plus, magic looked all angular and purple when the Ideal Master took over your vision. It might just be a subjective thing nobody sees the same way, in which case you feel like it shouldn’t matter how you visualize healing?

In the interest of experimentation, though, you imagine a more realistic cartoon snake vomiting comic panels on your hand. It doesn’t heal your claws, but it does succeed in making the experience much, much more uncomfortable.

Xanith wrote:

Perhaps the problem is that you are having trouble properly envisioning your un-bit nail because the book is making you think of human nails. Try drawing your own hand with the nail for a visual aid, and see if that helps?

This is a borrowed book from the Mages Guild library! A guild you now officially belong to!

Leaving intelligent and helpful notes in the margins would be one thing, but you’re not going to needlessly scribble all over a book you’re probably supposed to return.

llamb-sauce wrote:

Maybe if you commit a crime, you’ll get his attention?

Bad1 wrote:

Maybe if you break the law Asotyl will appear and smite you for the heinous crime of… Uh… Vagrancy? Petty theft of a sausage? Of someone’s nose?

You meticulously vandalize every human depicted in the book.

This does nothing to forward your quest or improve your magical abilities. Not only that, but you have ensured the next owner of the book will know a khajiit was struggling with it and thought this might help.

Zarhon wrote:

Try putting yourself in a jinx-inducing embarrassing position some other way – e.g. by attempting to eat the book.

utterMadness wrote:

Eating the book is thinking like a witchhunter! Do it!

YunGD!ngAl!ng wrote:

I think we should seriously consider eating the book, I mean they make a valid point, everyone learns differently, I remember hearing about this one guy from Morrowind who could just write it down in a notepad and use it at a whim, maybe you’re a naturally born book chomper

brome wrote:

at least lick the book

reversepsychology wrote:

Yeah you’re right, you really shouldn’t eat the book. You probably couldn’t handle its delicious papery secrets anyway.

Well.

That would solve the “book’s next owner judging you” problem.

But: you’re not going to eat the book.

ALocalNerd wrote:

It’s been two hours, right? Asotil should have arrived by now.

It’s been a little longer than that. Closer to three.

Asotil said he’d request a six hour shift in his schedule. It’s most likely he’ll show up either three hours from now (if the schedule shift didn’t get approved and he arrives the normal time) or nine hours from now (if it was shifted six hours forward, not back). It’s also possible he is running ahead of or behind schedule, in which case he could show up at any time.

Even if he doesn’t show up until nighttime, though, you’ll at least have lots of time to read books and practice things. Probably behind timeskips.

Like that one right there. You got tired of sitting so you ran into town to use the bathroom, ran back to the rock to make sure Asotil wasn’t visible on the road (either coming or going), then back into town again where you bought a toy crossbow that shoots toothpicks. You’ve almost gotten good at using it. Back to magic now.

Karnewarrior wrote:

So Destruction magic is based on Emotion. Fire seems like anger so maybe lightning is jealousy or something? Doesn’t really matter. Conjuration is based on Pathfinding. Wildly different skill, not even in the same things-group as emotions. And Mysticism is Logical. Again it’s a wildly different skill, not even in the same group as the others. Perhaps the issue is that you’re trying to think of it as the wrong skill. Maybe the snake wasn’t being metaphorical at all when he said “believe in yourself” – and the issue is that you’re trying to project when what you need to be doing is just believing your hand back to health. Instead of focusing on the emotion of it or trying to click a projection into place like a pick stuck in a keyhole, you need to turn off all your internal censors and just *believe* in yourself, specifically the yourself that existed a couple moments ago. It’s not that you’re projecting it through time, it’s that you’re the same person as that person. Don’t let logic and rationality get in the way of the truth!

Right. You close your eyes and try to forget about all the swirly blue lines and complexities of magic.

You focus on the you in the past. The you that had claws. The you that was “stored” in your mind while preparing to cast the healing spell.

You are that you. She is you. You are one and the same, and the separation of time does not change that.

You are not trying to heal. You are healed.

Yeah, it didn’t work. You are still clawless, and that guard on the wall probably thinks you’re doing some kind of very-low-energy yoga routine.

Pseudo-Freudo wrote:

I noticed that when you listed good things about yourself, you listed objects you have and things you did. But when you feel bad about yourself, you tend to think in terms of personal qualities. The magic may require you to have self-esteem which is actually SELF-esteem. Is there anything you like about you that isn’t a possession or accomplishment? (Hard mode: . . . and is also not a skill?)

That just sounds like a very roundabout way of asking “do you like being a talking animal that panics about everything”.

And no, you take more pride in the fact that you worked stuff out okay despite being a talking animal that panics about everything.

IsabardIsaBard wrote:

Here’s the thing about believing in yourself: it can’t be forced. Faith doesn’t work that way. If you can already do it, then great! You can remind yourself how great/amazing/ostensibly competent you are and foster belief that way. But if you don’t, trying to ‘believe in yourself harder’ just makes you feel like you can’t even more. And let’s be honest; a person whose first thought upon undertaking a relatively simple task is ‘please dear Akatosh don’t let me screw -this- one up’ is not someone with a strong belief in themselves. Believing in yourself takes time, patience, courage and forgiveness. It doesn’t happen overnight, or because a book tells you to. It happens because you learn to forgive yourself for your failures, and accept what they are without letting them become who -you- are. It happens because you keep trying, and because bit by bit you gain little victories which remind you that you -can- accomplish things, even if it’s hard or you had help along the way.

If that’s true, you guess you’re supposed to just… wait until you believe in yourself more? Waiting until you get better feels a little antithetical to the entire idea of healing magic, but maybe there’s some part of you that’s just not ready for healing yet. After you spend some time being a competent and successful mage without huge problems all the time, maybe something you can’t see right now will just click and you’ll be able to use healing magic too.

Or maybe you’re overthinking this and are getting too dramatic for a magic type that can apparently be taught to illiterate people by a cartoon snake.

Well, whatever. If you’re giving up and going back to what you’re good at, at least “what you’re good at” is more respectable than it used to be. And these last few hours weren’t a complete loss: you learned the limits of your abilities. Those limits are higher than you thought they were a week ago, but you guess they’re still… there.

PseudoK wrote:

Why not move on & try to polish conjuration a bit? Maybe reprocess your account with the Soul Cairn® (without selling your soul) to make it more usable.

frmCast351 wrote:

maybe while you have the time to kill, you could actually look into filling out the user preferences on the CairnCorp account that you’d hastily put together. it wouldn’t hurt to learn a bit more about that as an option for the future, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to see if you could at the very least submit your proper name as opposed to “Slutty Meatsack”

Healing can go on the shelf for a while. You reach out along the now-familiar path to the Soul Cairn, and your melancholy is mitigated by the usual blast of sudden happiness.

The skeleton on the other end is pleased that you chose to contact CairnCorp^®, and wonders how they can be of aid.

Additional resource credits:
Squiggles – Asclepius