Marcus' Tools of the Trade

NAME:
→ Pigmentation Alchemy
→ Eidetic Alkahestry
→ Formation Alkahestry

TYPE:
→ Alchemy: Chemical
→ Alkahestry: Body Enhancement
→ Alkahestry: Physical Projection

LEVEL:
→ Two.

FORM:
→ The transmutation circle is engraved on the nib of Marcus' pen.
→ The alkahestric array is tattooed onto Marcus' left temple on a miniscule scale. Hair has regrown over it.
→ The alkahestric array is partially tattooed onto the pad of Marcus' right index finger, and partially engraved onto the haft of Marcus' pen. Only when he holds the pen in a specific manner do the two interlink and activate.


BRIEFING:
→ Pigmentation Alchemy is through-and-through a non-battle alchemical branch. The major use it has is simply the ability to drain colour from any - at level one - non-living surface or substance (usually synthetic, although dyes can be collected from plant offcuts, so long as it's disconnected from the main body) before the pen's mechanisms kick in, and it's sucked into the tank of the pen, ready to be 'accepted' by a solution that Marcus carries phials of. The alchemy itself just draws the pigment, 'draining' a patch of colour from the surface in question; everything else happens courtesy of the actual pen, leaving a bleak, white-coloured patch of around three-four inches in diameter. If he tries to absorb any more than this, the ink itself actually intensifies in colour; within reason, if Marcus simply wants to drain colour, he can do it to anything. It works best if he removes the cap of the pen, however, to allow the fluid to drain.

The ink that Marcus uses is made of three parts; water, the pigment, and a catalytic agent. He keeps phials of the ready-made solution - made of simply water and the agent dissolved in it - and the pen's naturally constructed - well, has been tweaked, anyway - to hold tanks of this with three times the volume of a natural long ink cartridge. The catalytic agent itself is actually a collection of solvents, containing binders and additives, which is everything ready for the pigment; the agent is everything you'd find in a regular ink, in liquid form, aside from water - the carrier - and the pigment.

Anyway, the pigment is collected - courtesy of the transmutation circle - in a natural liquid form, and diluted with the solution to create a long-lasting coloured ink of Marcus' choosing. The alchemy itself is only actually extraction, drawing it into a tube which leads further up into the tank.

The colour has to be consistent enough for Marcus to differentiate and isolate it; meaning that if it's jagged, or a mish-mash of very different colours, then he can't realistically do anything. If the shade changes over a distance, then the pigment he draws will be an amalgamated colour of the pigments collected.

→ Eidetic Alkahestry, Marcus learnt during his tenure in the Yakuza. Many of the members were alkahestric specialists, with Makoto himself dabbling in alchemy, too. After careful studying and a few longs weeks flicking through books, Marcus finally realised that his penchant for science wasn't just limited to arts he knew. Expanding through alkahestry, he discovered his ability to sense and tweak the Dragon's Pulse to his bidding, in two forms. The first of these is Eidetic Alkahestry.

Tattooed on Marcus' left temple and typically obscured by his hair hanging down, the array is minute but sized enough that the Xingese characters are clear. They read: "Blessed be the memories of man, for they build towers to the heavens and draw inspiration. Let us look to the past now, and see the future."

Forging links - using the Dragon's Pulse - between the amygdala and hippocampus in order to access and vividly link together memories and their emotional responses, the alkahestric links then lance out into both retinas, essentially allowing him to replay memories. The alkahestry itself isn't too complex, but makes extensive use of the Dragon's Pulse, and must be concentrated.

Use of it sends Marcus into a trance-like state within which he needs to be careful. He could easily lapse into this for hours and possibly even days without realising, and awaken again starving and exhausted. The memories are addictive to toy with and relive, and Marcus, with a past as his, could - and will - get easily lost in.

The trance state can be shattered fairly easily with physical impact, strong vibration, loud noise, or illness of any real sort, so hunger will jar him out of it easily. Using it safely requires Marcus to know in-depth the psychology surrounding memory and emotion, and have a spattering of biological knowledge when it comes to the amygdala and hippocampus.

→ Formation Alkahestry, in spite of the mundane and usual-sounding name, is actually a wildly complex art, and arguably the most useful of Marcus'. Whereas Eidetic Alkahestry simply allows him to live out his spare moments indulging in vivid memories of his wife and son... Formation Alkahestry is entirely different.

In the same vein as Eidetic Alkahestry, it forms a swift link through Marcus' fingertip up to his retinas using the Dragon's Pulse. However, as it does so, it also forces links into all of the tendons and muscles in his forearm and some in his upper arm, allowing the alkahestry to take complete control, more or less, of one hand. The Dragon's Pulse then actively allows Marcus to sketch a complex version of whatever he sees in front of him.

Marcus needs to know a good deal about muscles in order to use this appropriately, and actually needs to keep his head still for long and quite possibly painful amounts of time; jarring it will ruin the image and give it an almost blurred effect. Of course, Marcus doesn't stir a lot, and he isn't too fidgety, so this shouldn't be too difficult.

PICTURE:
→

Pigmentation Alchemy Circle:

→

Eidetic Alkahestry Hexagram:

→

Formation Alkahestry Array:

→

Frostbrook Heirloom:

SPECIAL ABILITIES:
→ Ink Burst - The only real tactical application of Marcus' alchemy is that he's tweaked his pen to be able to release the entire tank of ink at once at the press of a small button on the side, and use it as a distraction, usually whilst he runs away. If he adds further agents to the pen's liquid tank, this could probably be used to fire corrosive liquids, but the chances are that without further modifications - mechanical and alchemical - this wouldn't work efficiently enough.

→ Eliciting Memory - Using his Eidetic Alkahestry, named so for the condition where one can actually relive and lose themselves in memory (at its pinnacle) Marcus can access anything he can remember and plays it back out as vividly as it happened in that mind. For most people, memories are vague, flashes and snapshots of what happened telling the story as you recall the details. Marcus can relive segments of his own past as he saw them.

For starters, Marcus' greatest limitation is an inability to access anything he can't remember. If he looks at the morning paper and turns around, walks out of the door, then stops outside an hour or two later and tries to trigger this alkahestry, it simply won't work. This alkahestry functions only on something Marcus has snapshots on, further digging into the blackened abyss of his mind to dig out the whole story.

The alkahestry itself, as mentioned above, must maintain a constant link for the memory's duration. Hypothetically, Marcus could lose himself in memories for the rest of his life; but hunger, illness, impacts, loud noises, and other such stimuli will awaken him from his trance-like state - as will the end of a specific memory string coming on.

Using the amygdala and hippocampus, Marcus can actually recreate emotional and sensory data from memories that happened even years ago. Whereas most people only get an echo of what their tenth birthday cake tasted like, or the smell of their wife's perfume a decade after she threw the bottle out, Marcus can embrace it fully and in vividity, and often manipulating the alkahestry further so the smells, sounds, tastes, and sights are even more intense than they once were. Note that Marcus can pause memories and flick through as if he were a prudent observer watching a video, but the more he watches from the start, the more he loses awareness of the fact that he lives in a memory.

This alkahestry is dangerous; it can allow Marcus to lose himself in memories for indefinite periods of time, and if not careful, Marcus could easily drift into a not-so-savoury memory. The pain and shock of some things, a man's body can only withstand once...

To summarise, the alkahestry itself allows the user to make all those dreams and memories as intense as they once were and should be now, and get lost in it again. Marcus, of course, as expected, uses it to remember his times with Maria and Leon, before the former died, and the latter was taken away.

→ Retinal Image Reproduction - Marcus was once a writer. Now, he's an artist, too.

Formation Alkahestry is interesting. It allows the user, Marcus, to sketch out the current image imprinted on his retinas through use of a link sustained by the Dragon's Pulse rippling through the muscle of his right arm up to his eyes. Marcus draws out everything as detailed as he sees it, with no blurring and no spoiling courtesy of the middleman. He becomes, essentially, a perfect artist.

Of course, these are on a number of conditions. For starters, his head has to remain completely still. As does the scene. Otherwise, the picture will appear skewed and often to be absolutely nonsensical. In a lot of contexts, considering the world really does like to move, this makes this alkahestry's use limited, at best.

However, when Marcus uses this in tandem with his Eidetic Alkahestry, it becomes a whole lot more useful. Able to stop and pause memories as if he were watching them on a television, and considering they're blasted up on the TV, if Marcus triggers both of his alkahestric abilities simultaneously and pauses the memory soon enough to keep from diving into the instilled trance-like state, he can sketch out all sorts of things. Faces of criminals. Pictures of his son to pin up on the lost and found. What his family used to look like before he was told he could never see them again.

Hell, with the right ink from his first ability... Marcus could even counterfeit money.

When Marcus uses this alkahestry normally, his eyes are open; however, when he uses it in tandem with the Eidetic Alkahestry, his eyes shut. A well-thought-out combination of alkahestric abilities, using the pair in tandem gives them an incredible amount of use - and Marcus still manages to remain ever a non-combatant, despite the calling of other battle-purposed alchemies.

Credit to Kenny (DarkKaizer/Massino Vecchi/Randolph Styxx) for the circles. He knows I wubs him.

BUMP

Uh, sorry. I thought Aki moved this back, you put it here because I had to edit something in iirc ^_^; Should've said earlier, this is all done.

All ready for review~

REVISE

1. Type: You have to put the Alkahestric type here by referencing: https://mdalchemist.rpg-board.net/t2472-alkahestrist-information You can check out Spade's for reference.

Derp. Forgot about that. Edited.

Wouldn't the second ability be Mental Stimulation?

No, it's projecting an aspect of his psyche/the image burnt onto his retinas using his muscles.

APPROVED

Fair enough. Now I sound like Dai.