The knife doesn't move.
"If he tasted you, he can track you. Anywhere." Sha'ark leans just far forwards enough that he can give me a sideways glare. "Did? He? Bite? You?"
Good, he's definitely being appropriately paranoid in a situation this bad.
"Yes, but I transmuted my tissue before-."
"Bah! Master blood mages commune with the essence of anything they eat! You think that just changing what your flesh is made of is enough?"
So even a taste of his aura would be enough to work magic on, with enough skill. That makes the guy that much scarier...
"What happens if they eat part of themselves?"
"What?"
"I was able to disengage by giving him an overwhelming desire to bite his own arm."
Sometimes, OL says such insane things, yet you know he's entirely serious about it.
His hold on me grows very slightly weaker. "Eating part of another blood mage allows the one who does it to take a portion of their own strength. But eating.. his own flesh… That… Might have been enough. How?"
"Oh that's right, we haven't spoken for a while. I can use a connection made through the orange light to manipulate someone's desires. When he ingested the power from my rings, he made a connection which bypassed his defences."
So it's kind of like a data cache, and his own body was enough to blank out OL's aura. Eh, just nod and move on.
"And you just made him want to eat his.. arm?"
"For someone with his particular skill set, wanting to eat parts of people isn't all that strange."
Just a matter of changing the target of his desire, I suppose. With a side order of overriding 'I don't want to injure myself' instincts.
While I had Mr. Thornton as a construct lantern, I used his knowledge of magic to confirm my suspicion that it would be possible to back hack a spell which relied on your attacker having a part of your body as a focus. And since it turns out that it is, I've been trying to drain whatever residual energy could still be connecting me to the blood mage. In theory, it should have worked, and since I'm pretty sure I wasn't followed, either it did or something else is going on.
That feels like a possible thing, especially by using Satanus' mystical knowledge to his advantage. I expect that one Identity theft helped give him some useful insight into building his own form of magic use.
"Who did you eat to get that body?"
"That's not how it works for me."
I mean, you didn't question him being a Manta a few minutes ago.
"Mm." He removes the knife, stows it, and then releases his hold on my neck. "Shame."
I smile, swimming away from him a little before turning around. "No one searching for you?"
And no hard feelings about the knife thing, it's not like OL is concerned much by such
minor lethal injuries.
"No. They should be."
"I still think it was telepathic. I'm not sure why the rest of us weren't affected."
That does seem curious. A blanket effect would have tagged at least some of the good guys here. I doubt Stevie has much in the way of mystical mental resistance, and Lori already got whammied once before, according to her. Might want to watch her for signs of backsliding into that state.
"Mass mind control? I thought that was rare."
"Mass mind control is. Most people can't handle directly puppetting more than one body. Miss Martian can do a few more, but that's not what that was."
On the other hand, you don't always need to
assume direct control. Stuff like what OL does by manipulating desires is a lot more effective.
"What do you mean?"
"You heard them. 'You shouldn't be here'. A strong telepath could project an idea into a lot of people who were prepared to think that sort of thing. Soldiers. But not civilians or out-of-area superheroes. But they could have made you think that of me, unless you were deliberately targetted for attack."
I expect Nanaue's warding scars would be strong enough to protect him. He definitely seems to think they would.
"Ahri'ahn isn't a telepath. No Atlantean is."
"It's been a long time. Telepaths can learn magic. And there are telepaths people can hire."
And it can't be
that hard to develop magic that emulates the effects of telepathy, can it? Especially if it's tailored to overcome people's natural magical resistance.
"No, we've researched this. There are no such thing as 'meta-Atlanteans'. I don't know if it's because we're all changed by magic or something else, but those unique changes some surface people have? We don't get those."
"Never?"
Though some are exceptional in
other ways. The royal line's psychic powers, for instance.
"No. Sometimes the spells which give us aquatic characteristics start going wrong, but that's its own thing. And that doesn't happen to sharks."
"Why not?"
I assume biomancy is used to correct that sort of thing for most cases as infants. later onsets might be trickier.
"Basic blood magic. We all get fed a little blood from our parents. It makes sure that the spell stays the same every generation."
"Why don't the-?"
That's a nasty way of doing it, but it seems pretty effective thus far.
"Why don't the others use it? Because the spells are different. Ours didn't come from Ahri'ahn."
"How significant is that?"
There must be quite the backstory behind that. And I imagine Ahri'ahn might not like that detail either.
"The trance thing he's doing doesn't work on us."
I frown. "You said that he did something to make you stupid when you confronted him."
To be fair, with a sufficiently subtle spell, you could stupefy anyone not
heavily protected against that sort of thing..
"Yes, but I had to be right there." He grimaces. "Emotional manipulation isn't something traditional Atlantean magic is good at, but he's Ahri'ahn. He's the archmage."
"Are you sure it wasn't telepathy or drugs?"
How would he know it's the former? As for the latter, I'd bet he'd sense any chemical difference in the water or food.
"I'm not a master blood magician, but I've learned enough to become immune to ingested poison. And once I got out of the palace I could taste his magic."
"He didn't disguise it?"
Probably overconfident that no-one could sense it.
"He probably did." He snorts. "Do you think he bothered to learn blood magic? Magic that uses animal spirits? I could taste his essence on my skin."
Maybe not, but I'd be surprised.
It depends on how much of a min-maxer he is. He might not bother to absolutely master methods other than his preferred, but he almost certainly knows of them.
"Alright, plan of action. What have you got?"
"I want to find the High King and High Queen. Until then, we can't take any action against Ahri'ahn. And we can't even do that if someone can mind control my people."
Plus, extracting and deprogramming them, if needed, removes a lot of his legitimacy.
"Highest priority: find the telepath." He nods. "Anyone unusual in the city?"
"Ahri'ahn's been sending fish-type Atlanteans here. We know roughly where most of them are, but it's almost impossible that it's one of them."
And how can you be
that certain, then?
"'Almost'?"
"There are a few people from the surface who get citizenship. You met Ambassador Vallambrosa. He's not the only one."
I expect most people who move to an Atlantean city undergo whatever modification they need to survive here... there's probably records of that somewhere anyway.
"Are there any living here?"
"There weren't, but we've had a lot of people move here recently. A few might have come here."
And they've seen that the Sharks don't seem
too concerned about headcounts or record-keeping of them.
"Do you keep detailed records?"
"No. There's a census, but the last one was three years ago and it's mostly for us sharks."
Welp, not much use there, then.
Telepath, shark city… One overlap.
"Does the name 'Karshon' mean anything to you?"
Huh, there's a
deep cut. I seem to remember OL or an alternate encountering him at some point. <one quick search later> Ah, yes,
back in '
Wait Time'.
"No. What is it?"
"The supervillain 'Killer Shark'. A normal shark who got his brain augmented to full sophoncy. He looks enough like your kind that he might be able to fit in here, except… Last time I saw him, he'd been turned back into a normal shark."
"I've got no idea who that is, but biomancy is a common Atlantean profession. If someone wanted to sneak a telepath in here, sending him would make sense."
Especially if he retained his human intellect and telepathic abilities, which I think he did. Regaining limbs would probably appeal to him as a carrot for Ahri'ahn to dangle before him as a willing servant. Or simply mind-control him as a tool...
