earth_367 | a small mix-up...

final rituals & a small mix-up

Illyana is ready to execute the shield spell on the mansion which she's been working on for the past couple months. For the final rituals, she needs everyone out of the house for a day, and when they come back they discover some unusual complications...

the shield spell...

The shield is in the shape of a large dome which encircles the entire campus and grounds. Most people will not be able to see or sense it at all, although certain individuals who are particularly sensitive to magic, psionics, or just have enhanced senses may be able to perceive it. It looks like a geodesic soap bubble, smells vaguely metallic, and sounds like the resonances of a singing bowl.

The shield blocks all magic users and demonic entities from entering the grounds, and also acts as a barrier against magic spells and demonic energies. While a handful of individuals were also added to the shield banlist, it does not neutralize mutant powers the way it neutralizes magic.

Additionally, the shield spell stops the following individuals from entering the school: Magneto & the Acolytes, Mr Sinister, Shinobi Shaw, Jean-Luc Lebeau, Bella Donna Boudreaux, Winston Frost, Jack Winters, Jason Wyngarde, and on Illyana’s own initiative after no consensus was reached, Madelyne Pryor.

The following individuals are not affected by the spell despite being magic users or demonic entities: Illyana, Ambrose, Jimaine, Kurt, and Kitty (just in case).

The spell can be turned on and off. Illyana enchanted Kitty's Beholder keychain to help non-magic users perform this simple task. While it isn't difficult to do, you do need some magical aptitude to operate the switch. You can all determine on your own if your character is capable of doing this. Operating the switch does not make you a "magic user" and will not activate the barrier against you.

final rituals & a small mix-up...

Xavier's staff and students get an early start on Tuesday morning as they load onto buses to head into the city for a field trip. Before they can embark, Illyana requests that Manuel de la Rocha stay behind and be her assistant for the day, a job she assures them will be mostly "holding things and hanging out".

The field trip to the city goes smoothly, with staff and students enjoying various tourist activities for the majority of the morning and afternoon. Meanwhile, Illyana is hard at work. At around 4pm, shortly before the others are due to arrive back to the school, she explains to her assistant that the final step in the process will require her to "fold the school in half through a higher dimension". As soon as they enter the building upon the completion of the spell, it is immediately evident that something went wrong along the way.

After scouting out the mansion, the pair return to the driveway to greet everyone else. Illyana explains that her spellwork has caused the mansion to become twisted into non-Euclidian geometries, but happily reports that it is already untwisting itself and should be back to normal soon. Inside, hallways are twisted over on themselves, gravity shifts 90 or 180 degrees seemingly at random, doors lead to places they shouldn't, and entire rooms seem to have been duplicated or gone missing entirely.

Laura Kinney quickly discovers that they are particularly adept at navigating the labyrinth of the mansion's Escherian hallways and takes it upon themself to help the residents get from place to place while the building untwists itself.

Everything in Warren Worthington's room has been slightly rearranged and doesn't seem to be untangling itself as the rest of the mansion does. They'll have to enlist Illyana's help to set the room to rights if they want to use it for anything.

After dinner, Emma Frost is enlisted by the students to help them organize a mansion-wide game of Sardines which lasts almost until midnight.

By 6pm on Wednesday, the building has mostly sorted itself out.

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It's getting late, but Emma doesn't really want to call off the game the students are playing - they're having fun, and it's summer so it's not like they have too much to get done tomorrow, anyways. While she's not actively playing she's still referee, scolding students who cheat with their powers and gently guiding the hopelessly lost back to somewhere more familiar when necessary. It's fun, honestly.

Her perch for all this is in the main living room, and she's seated on a couch that's sort of on the ceiling. If she thinks about it too much it gives her a headache, so she simply appreciates the odd and new experience as she sips at some tea. On seeing one of the other X-Men she tilts her chin up in greeting. "We need to teach some of them better investigative skills."

Edited Date: 2025-07-02 12:41 am (UTC)

Being on the ceiling isn't a foreign sensation for Kurt, although people rarely join him. What's really bothering him is not knowing what's behind any given wall anymore. Manually locating his room isn't something he's had to do in over a decade.

He's crouched on the arm of Emma's couch. "Maybe," he reluctantly agrees. Kurt suspects some of them aren't trying nearly as hard as they could, having too much fun in the impromptu maze. However, it's undeniably taking a long time. "You can find them if they get lost, and they're having fun. Silver lining, ja?"

"Arguably them having fun is the point of this whole exercise but... really. Some of them are a little hopeless." She sounds fond, though, as she says this.

"Three left, so maybe we can go to sleep soon." A glance in Kurt's direction. "Are you really just going to wander around until you find your room?"

Despite Illyana’s tendency to over-exaggerate or understate things with seemingly random frequency, she hadn’t been fibbing about Manny’s role today being moral support for the most part. She does have him holding the tome which she spent the majority of her budget on. It’s leather-bound, arcane looking and very heavy, and if it has any inherent magical properties, they aren’t immediately obvious. She's yet to consult it even once, so it has been little more than dead weight to the process thus far.

True to her word, she has been doing her best to explain each step of the process to Manny as she works. It’s just after lunch time, and the majority of the morning has been spent on two tedious tasks: triple-checking the perimeter of the spell to make sure 169 silver medallions are placed perfectly equidistant from each other (which takes her three hours on its own) and reciting an incantation from memory which is comically long thanks to the six-page list of names Scott had asked her to include (which she manages in a single attempt that still takes a half hour).

While she can tell him what she’s doing, she often struggles to articulate why it needs to be done. She’s also made no mention whatsoever of her offer to let him read her emotions while spellcasting. As loathe as she is to admit it, she’s a little nervous about executing the spell. She’s done this kind of work plenty before, but this is a particularly large and complex effort, and she knows the X-Men are skeptical about her ability to complete it. Recitation and geometry aren’t particularly emotional endeavors anyway.

This next thing she needs to do is emotional and intuitive. But as she glances over her shoulder at him, an unpleasant pang of embarrassment goes through her and is immediately redoubled by the idea of him perceiving it. Again, she disregards the idea of offering. Her soulsword materializes in her hand as she lets a heavy sigh out and rolls her neck.

“I am almost done now,” she informs him, then spins the blade in a decorative flourish before amending: “Well. More than half-done.”

Manuel hasn't forgotten about Illyana's offer to drop her psychic defenses for him either and it remains on his mind throughout much of the morning even as he focuses his attention on the task at hand. But...he knows that it isn't his place to ask. The offer is hers to make and hers to retract. So, instead, he dutifully carries around the arcane tome Illyana claims to need but doesn't seem to need, doing whatever she asks of him and observing her process and taking quick, neat notes in a spiral-bound notebook that's considerably less suited for the occasion.

He still doesn't know if he'll ever be able to make sense of all this...but he's certainly going to try to comprehend the fundamentals, at least. It will just be an irritating splinter in his brain if he doesn't.

When the woman looks back at him and summons her otherworldly blade, he glances up from his writing with uplifted eyebrows. At her rapidly changing estimate, though, his lips twitch into a faint smirk.

"Do not rush on my account," he returns dryly before prompting, "So. What is next?"

For the first time today, Illyana purses her lips in thought before answering this question. Maybe her trouble in finding the words to describe the task is because it’s more emotional. The other problem is that while she is not-so-secretly tickled by the fact that he has been taking notes about what’s she saying, it also makes her feel like she needs to be saying things worth writing down.

But Illyana doesn’t know what goes into note-taking. Her studies in Limbo had been much less formal and more self-directed. Oftentimes when Belasco had wanted to teach her something, he would provide her the necessary textbooks to figure it out and then ignore her entirely until she succeeded on her own. Reading and writing had never come easily to her, though, even before her abduction, and it had never occurred to her to hand-write notes for her own reference back then. She’s been trying to surreptitiously sneak glances at what Manuel is writing in his notebook, but the spell is taking nearly her full concentration.

“I must summon the arcane energies which will become the shield,” she says after a moment’s pensive consideration, and then nods, apparently pleased with her own summary. Then her gaze flicks over to meet his. “You’re not getting bored or anything, are you?”

An X-Men GPSL (IC)

a small mix-up...

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