Bread baking

BREAD BAKING!!!

cleaning Mikasa's kitchen if Leslie isn't stopped.

i still need to hit up Leslie sometime

It was a busy month for we newcomers! And you even went on the midmonth event.

We'll get a chance, I'm sure.

It's mostly cleam! The last owners just abandoned everything

Then it will be quick to finish the job. '

1) Magic: I haven't updated Leslie's magic tracking or had opportunity to mention this anywhere, but I'm thinking that Leslie probably managed her first non-dream spell earlier this week or late last week. She can do magic now!!

She still has a long way to go even on what she wants for getting a handle on basic, universal magic, but this breakthrough means she'll finally start making actual progress and she might look into starting to decide on a school of magic to start with.

I initially thought it would be Evocation, because she kind of misses the sort of get-out-of-jail-free card she had back home in terms of knowing that she had fantastically powerful magic in her back pocket, even if actually using it lead to really bad consequences later.

But her first school is probably going to be Abjuration, mostly because she's had a couple of times (like with Mikasa scratching off her exoskeleton) where Leslie really wishes she had the option to use healing rather than her untrained first aid.

She does have reason to be interested in the barrier end of things, too, but while I expect a lot of people will be glad the tiny is getting something defensive/backline focus rather than offensive magic, healing apparently is especially known for requiring a lot (even if it's mostly the greater healing spells that aren't in abjuration),

and since a lot of magic here is Casts From Stamina and Leslie can't go more than like six chapters at a time in her canon without someone commenting on how little stamina she has (even if magical stamina is not 1:1 with physical stamina), this leads into:

2) Exercising/Learning To Use A Sword Maybe. Now that Leslie has had an extra month from her canon point of eating actually good food, she's getting to the point where Duchess Salvatore promised she would teach her about swords to build up her strength and stamina.

Don't train with Mikasa, that's a terrible idea

LMAO SHE'D DIE

Have you settled on a familiar for her?

They are like batteries, so if she's not using magic some days she can draw from the familiar for bigger magic days. If i understand how this all works, haha

Or at least, I know Leslie asked more about familiars

Yes! Or, rather, two familiar options. There's the kitten that she might be adopting from Lorenz as he looks for homes for them, but before that (possibly waiting on that one for the kitten to be bigger), she wants to make the living shadows that follow her around a familiar.

Because she misses that connection.

oh shit, is that an option?

I asked, and I was told yes!

damn, that's a fine option

HECK YEA.

H

But on the other end, what she doesn't know is that attaching the shadows to the world's magic like that, it will become extremely obvious to everywhere where they are.

So after she does that, it's just going to be...something in Leslie's shadow is clearly moving and alive all the time.

I asked a lot of questions about the shadows once I got permission to app such a young character.

Regarding the exercise, Leslie is going to need direction on this, because she doesn't actually know what is involved in this kind of thing.

In her first lesson in canon (which she hasn't experienced yet), her thoughts are immediately "oh, am I going to get to use the big swords of the knights? or train with a staff? or [what is clearly a rapier in her imagination that she saw once in a book but doesn't know the name of]?" and the Duchess says, "all right, twenty laps."

Because the Salvatore family are all monstrously strong, this is twenty laps around a field that is...I don't think it's quite as big as a football field, but I'm not certain. The knight who was also overseeing this cut it down to ten, at least.

She doesn't complain at all about the much less exciting starting point and the knight is surprised she didn't give up. (She does end up in basically a pile on the floor at the end.)

But she doesn't realize that you don't start with swinging a sword around.

she tried

She tries so hard all the time.

Since this relates to the familiar question earlier: 3) Bonds. Leslie does not have a bond at the moment. I did say that I expected people to start pushing her to get one if she doesn't have one by the end of two months, but with how familiars can do some of that lifting for a limited amount of time, I'm not going to push for it if it doesn't happen.

if she wants combat training in aef btw i can offer birb

it'd be more like Don't Die training because she is an infant but

Thank you, birb, that would be helpful. Especially when adjusted for Until-Recently-Malnourished Infant.

I have a couple of people among her CR who I have in mind that if I really wanted a bond right now, I'd probably ask them about it and it would probably work, but I want this sort of thing to happen naturally.

Mika won't push bonds, because gonna go feral but please don't explode. But also one thing I've been meaning to mention, feral monsters can be dangerous towards witches

Uh Oh.

Oh with that comment. Mikasa would probably except bonding with Leslie if she asked because then she's not going to be worried about her being controlled via it, but I'm leaving bonds for now cause feral stuff seems fun to mess with.

Dalrint was suggesting maybe getting Leslie's sword training started off by having Leslie get into (not extreme) danger to give a reason for her to start training, but that could easily turn into Leslie being told she can't play with Mikasa anymore.

But the bond alternative for monsters can make them want to drink witch blood

Mikasa is one of the people of "if I needed for Leslie to get a bond, I could probably ask," but I'm not going to be worried unless several months pass thanks to the familiars.

LMAO Leslie is living with a vampire but it's actually a fairy who has any chance of drinking her blood.

I mean this isn't going to be for months at least. It's 3 months till they start going feral, and that can be extended via potions. So she'll have probably started training by then

Just a bit of peril.

Just enough peril to spice things up.

But that's true, it does take a while for the feral to kick in.

A lot of fae drink blood too

it's true

Mikasa's countdown got restarted via temp bond too, so this isn't happening till like......October. I can't be bothered to math

Haha, I know that feeling even as a mathmatician.

*mathematician

I'm definitely going to want to play with the bond mechanic, but I also know that a bond with Leslie is going to be...weird, I guess? Because she's a child. And bonds require a lot of honesty and communication. So if Leslie were to bond with an adult, that adult would have to be fine with no longer hiding anything from The Child.

....Thinking of it I got the highest possible grade in maths for gcse level. What happened

You can do it, but you don't want to do it, I guess.

Well done, though.

And also, like. Leslie isn't exactly subtle about her feelings at the best of times, but there's a lot of trauma hidden in Leslie and so, like. Leslie is going to be a handful for someone bonding with her.

So it's Complicated in both directions.

It's tragic. I aced maths and science, then failed English(didn't get C grade) by 5 points....

Ooof.

Rough.

Well, learning from Mikasa can't be worse than learning from Fang ha

Our teacher left due to illness and took our coursework with her so we had to redo 2 years of work in a month but that's unrelated

LMAO so there are several people who I expect Edelgard would forbid from giving a second lesson to Leslie.

:|

With the extension that the familiar ceremony will give her, I think I'll stay relaxed about when/how a bond happens for the first four months or so. That will give more time to build up CR to see if anyone moves in a bonding direction, and it will also let me go through a couple more app cycles to find new CR.

So long story short: Leslie doesn't have a bond and I'm not worried about it. It'll happen when it happens.

Mikasa would probably be okay. She helped Armin and Christa/Historia and only threw the bigger people...

Leslie certainly is not one of those.

Yeah. I want to build up the cr, instead of rushing

Corrin learned how to teach from Xander so her sword lessons might be a bit...intense...

Sometimes, CR just clicks immediately for a bond or you have canonmates who would bond, but I'm definitely not having the latter and at the moment, while I've got great CR that has clicked, it hasn't clicked in a bond way with any monsters.

Isn't Xander's sword, person sized? Though I really like the Camilla being the stronkest sib there

Dalrint: LMAO I LIKE HOW EVERYONE IS JUST LIKE "I can train people VERY INTENSELY."

How else is she supposed to learn?!

Look Gran Pulse WAS intense

And yeah Xander's sword is crazy big. So is his horse. Also him.

The thing is that Leslie would absolutely 100% do whatever intense training she is told to do, but it's probably bad for tiny child with no stamina and arms that people keep talking about easily snapping.

being at the bottom of the food chain means GO HARD OR GO DEAD

So unless anyone is watching to make sure she has good instructors, she'd absolutely do that death training without complaints, but also she might actually die.

Have faith in her would-be instructors! she's just... going to miserable, that's all

Leslie might not even be miserable. It's...it's better than her childhood, after all.

Like I said Mika can do nice training. But there's probably people better for it like... I think Qrow is an actual teacher? goodluckmodes and idk who else has offered

qrow is an ex-teacher ye

I've had at least three other people who haven't responded here who have previously said they'd want to help Leslie learn how to sword, so I expect this is going to be less a one-on-one thing and more "it takes a village to raise a child" kind of training.

he trained his own niece so he def knows how hard to go

and when to hit the brakes as it were

Just Leslie being cheered on by all these buff as fuck adults

So unless something develops into a "just this one" relationship, I'll just be leaving it open as a CR opportunity for the various train people.

cute....

goodluckmodes: Thanks Uncle Qrow!

kittylyoko: Awwww.

4) The other reason I think Leslie would want to study Abjuration relates to what she's seen about The Bright Wall. This is a very, very long term thing that I actually expect to go nowhere, but Leslie wants to find out, more or less, what is stopping people from expanding the Bright Wall to actually encompass everyone.

I'll be getting that post up in the coming week, so you can totally have a cat

woodrift: HECK YES. Possible future familiar #2.

even in a Pokemon game, i couldn't do more than one critter in threads on the regular

Haha, yeah, more than fair.

Even if she had a terrible childhood, she grew up inside a noble mansion, so she's not really aware of how slums are. When she went to see what it looked like over the walls, she assumed that such a dangerous place means that the houses must be abandoned. She was horrified to realize there were people who just...live there out in the open.

since i was left with no specs re color and temperament, just base them off of the non lorenz and marianne golden deer

So she wants to figure out if there's a way to, like. Build a bigger Bright Wall so everyone gets to live in safety. Which there probably isn't, but I asked the mods and she'll be looking into it eventually.

Also, nice. I don't know which one Leslie will get, but I know about the Deer and all of them would make for great cat personalities.

Also I guess 5) is that I'm slowly trying to build up possible prompts so that I can do a monthly catch-all in March. I had a busy past few days that meant that I wasn't able to keep up with my current threads very well and now that it's the day before we find out what's going on in March, it's in a weird spot to start anything new.

But I wanna make sure I can be out and about a bit more in March, since in February I got...a little swamped in the intro log (which was an amazing problem to have, but I want to be better about tagging out to other people).

Anyway, those are my vague thoughts that I've been thinking about since the first one of the plot with me for March posts came up, but it never seemed like a good time to post it.

Yeah. I've got a list of prompts to write up for March, but waiting till I know about events

I only really have one firm one, but I'm hoping the event stuff will help jumpstart me.

With so many people wanting to teach her sword things, she could get like, a different type of sword type training from each of them.

She's going to grow up to be one of those anime characters with a million weapons once she's tall enough that she can carry any of them without them dragging on the ground.

That'll be never...

Don't deny her dreams!!!!

Just you wait, now that she's being treated well, she might ever hit puberty!!!!!!

And then you'll see!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I still like the emote meme, may she one day be big enough to give headpats

I'm still undecided with Mikasa shrinking cause Fae. But she's based on an insect where the female is 3x the size of the male and she's kinda tall.

Maybe Leslie will only need to grow one and a quarter feet rather than one and a half.

when she's like slightly less baby he'll teach u how to gun with your sword, leslie

because teenagers with gunswords can't possibly go wrong

She promises to only kill abusive people with it.

I don’t know what yet but follow ups with mr krüger .... esp after muffin

Please let her know before you disappear this time, Mr. Krüger.

checking up on her magic-ing could be a cute but let’s see what the month does

That sounds good! We'll put a pin in the possibility of magic-ing.

And be flexible if something else comes up.

I want Leslie to do the grape-stomping part time work and have rainbow feet, but I’m looking at everything I said here about her stamina and strength.

The research request might be one I go for.

I'm planning on sending Mika on the wine one if you want to do it for a little while for rainbow!

Would you be interested in having leslie and corrin do the crying tree quest? It's probably relatively safe but they could still get into a little bit of trouble. haha.

kittylyoko: That might be a fun interaction! I'm down.
Dalrint: I actually did consider offering when I saw your plurk for that very reason! But you have to have a bond before you can go into the Wilde. On the other hand, there are those temporary bond poitions.

So it could work!

At least, if Edelgard would give permission, since Child. Intercession

totally ok

All right, then. You've got yourself a tiny partner in this lifesaving mission, Corrin.

She's even got a little magic now! ...It's mostly very weak but at least she knows how to make a light!

Huzzah!