The Weight of Legacy

An embarrassing percentage of Malwine’s successes in this life must have come from the least thought-through of her plans somehow not blowing up in her face. Granted, thanks to [Unpacifiable], she’d always put at least the minimum effort into knowing her ideas weren’t bound to bring disastrous results… not that her jump to the Mortal Esse had gone great, despite it not having been dangerous.

It made deciding to once again embrace her recklessness all the more troubling, not because she wasn’t willing to, but because she’d actually gone quite the while without having to deal with any messes of her own making. Despite her Skill’s silence, Malwine felt as though she were staring down a ‘Days since the last incident:’ sign and seriously considering how it might look better at 0.

Something tells me Veit knows exactly what he’s unleashed… She never really questioned the forester’s logic when it came to his suggestions, even if she did think his perspective was beyond skewed—they weren’t that different in that regard.

But for someone who’d more than once warned her not to do anything too reckless without consulting him, to be the one encouraging her to just wing it? She hadn’t been expecting it.

Even if she’d resolved to fully take advantage of his endorsement.

When I brought Forgery up, Teach asked me if I had any Affinities other than {Foresight}. Malwine had mulled over it repeatedly, yet her conclusions remained flimsy. She’d only know once she tested things, and she had admittedly been putting it off, giving herself the time to review her thoughts after a nap to look at it with fresher eyes. After several naps, maybe.

The point stood that between the comment about Forgery not being solely about Skills, and that question about Affinities, Malwine found she had reason to wonder if she was supposed to be using raw mana for it. That wasn’t something she’d done outside of her attempts to grow her Control and Acclimation—not intentionally, at least.

Veit seemed confident that the ‘nudging’ she occasionally did to get her Skills to behave in certain ways must have counted, but it was so situational that proving it went one way or the other wouldn’t be done in a single conversation. He’d confirmed freehand manipulation of mana was something people did, though—a silver lining to how utterly unrelatable she found the examples he was willing to give her.

Why he didn’t want to use something more esoteric like {Vanagloria} was beyond her, but things like {Mosaic} and {Bone} weren’t conceptual. Save for {Ore}—which was also her only unplanted Affinity—Malwine didn’t exactly have any Mana Sources with a form that was easy to determine.

For one, she understood the concept of {Legacy} beyond words, and could raise its values easily enough, but how would that be represented in reality?

I guess stealing Adelheid’s good old ambiguous shadowy tendrils could work as a strategy…

A part of her still wanted to use {Foresight} purely out of spite, but in the end, she stuck to the one she knew best, even better for its status as the planted Root of her <Soul> category.

In her initial cursory glance—which she would never call a skim in this context—she hadn’t noticed it, but now that she gave it her full attention, Malwine couldn’t help but raise her eyebrows at the feedback loop between one of her oldest Skills and its Aspect.