Saiven: ter(jir)
she walks into a big enough fire and comes out of a different big enough fire.
that’s it. that’s the whole thing. it’s transport, not a combat blink. like, fast travel.
takes a few uninterrupted minutes to set up and get into. needs a real stable fire she can shove herself into, plus fuel, ventilation, dry ground, room to walk up to it, and her actually wanting to go.
things that will not work: mid-chase, mid-fight, out of a moving car, through an explosion (as cool as that would be), or while the room she’s standing in is flooding.
candles and lighters don’t count. neither do engines, electrical arcs, or the small thingy on your stove. kilns and ovens absolutely do.
two flavors.
attended crossing
Saiven: ter(jir·wir·dur)
someone who genuinely knows her builds the destination fire, keys it with a receiving coal, and sits there thinking of her as her while it burns.
that gets her an exact arrival. even somewhere she’s never been in her life - knowing the person covers for not knowing the place. once it’s keyed, distance doesn’t really matter anymore.
anyone can stack the wood. only someone who actually knows her can do the keying part - handle the coal, tend the fire expecting her specifically, and stay put.
no words to say, no ritual, nothing. you just have to mean it and be there.
the catch is they have to stay.
wander off, take a “quick” bathroom break, pass out, give up, decide it’s not gonna work, and the route closes.
- closes before she steps in: nothing happens, she just doesn’t go
- closes after she’s already in: she gets dumped back out the origin fire. she does not show up halfway, split between fires, or get rerouted somewhere random.
either way the coal’s gone, the fuel’s gone, and the whole attempt still cost her the setup and the effort.
you can hand off to someone else, but the replacement has to also count as someone who knows her, and they have to take over before the first person fucks off, no gap or anything.
drift crossing
Saiven: ter(jir·del·dor)
solo. no attendant. aim by vibes.
she picks a general region and the route grabs some established fire in the area. she doesn’t get to pick which one.
accuracy scales with how well she actually knows the place:
- a city she’s walked: that city, or its outskirts
- familiar area in the same state: right county or the one next door
- somewhere unfamiliar in the same state: probably the right state
- a familiar trip across the continent: right state or its neighbor
- an unfamiliar trip across an ocean: landing in the correct country counts as a win lol
and that’s like, places she’d been to and experienced, not maps.
having actually walked somewhere beats having memorized it.
she can also remember a place perfectly and have it be forty years out of date, which is its own kinda issue.
it likes nice big fires - kilns, furnaces, boiler fireboxes, masonry ovens, incinerators, big hearths, coal seam fires. a wood-fired pizza oven is entirely plausible.
the route does not care about anything. it dodges exactly four things: too small to get out of, straight into deep water, a sealed box with no exit, and a fire that goes out mid-trip.
it does not care about privacy, property, guards, laws, opening hours, whether the room’s occupied, whether she’s allowed to be there, or whether the whole thing is humiliating. it will absolutely drop her into a stranger’s pizza oven at 2am and it does not care that that’s rude.
if the fire it picked turns out to be unusable it grabs another one, worse. if nothing works at all she gets spat back out the origin, dizzy and drained, rather than stuck somewhere in between.
after a drift she’s shaky for several hours and needs some heat and rest before it’s safe to try again. so no rerolling until she likes where she landed.
getting out the other end
the destination doesn’t have to be person-sized.
she’s a slime lady, she’s not stuck with silly things like “bones” or “anatomy” - she can come out crouched, folded, coiled, squished, squashed, whatever fits, and unfold once she’s clear. an oven door is fine.
what it can’t do is put her through a wall. there has to be a real hole she can hold a shape in and a real exit she can use, and the whole thing has to not collapse while she’s climbing out. if that goes wrong before she’s fully out it fails backwards to the origin instead of leaving her stuck in a brick.
what comes with her
clothes and stuff: yes. anything nonliving she’s wearing or holding close comes along. it does not become fireproof, so it reacts to the destination heat exactly how you’d expect once she’s out.
she usually uses like a fireproof pouch/satchel or something to carry her shit in.
living passengers: no. ever.
hold onto her, get carried, get tied to her, get wrapped up inside her, walk into the same fire - nothing happens, except the fact you’re now in the middle of a fire i guess. there’s no half-assed version where you make it halfway. and somebody struggling hard enough can fuck up and stop the whole crossing.
there is one exception, and it’s not a loophole, it’s a horrible fucked up perversion of the whole thing.
the exception
Forced Inclusion
Saiven:
ter(jir·qor·svar)she can force it. it is not a rescue method and it is not a party trick.
she has to expose her core, move it, and wrap the other person inside the same piece of her that’s carrying it. basically presenting the two of them to the crossing as one Vera.
and it works! for a second. the crossing accepts it, then notices, and is like “fuck no that’s not Vera”… and shit hits the fan.
it doesn’t abort and it doesn’t set anyone down. it rips out the bit that isn’t Vera, halfway thru, and finishes the trip like nothing happened.
the other person doesn’t arrive. they don’t turn up back at the origin either. nobody has any idea what happened to them and there’s nothing to check.
every way of getting a person back needs a there to grab them from.
a door needs somewhere to open onto.
a summons needs something to call.
a resurrection needs a body or a record.
hell, not even shit like time travel or reality warping or whatever it works.
why? they all start by pointing at where the person is.it’s not that forced inclusion is “more powerful” than all of that - it’s that there’s no more “there”. there’s nowhere to even start.
and it fucks Vera up too. she comes out with most or nearly all of her body mass stripped off and her core sitting right there exposed, which is the exact thing she’s most afraid of. she needs somebody she trusts waiting on the far side to guard her and give her material to rebuild from.
if the attendant let go somewhere in the middle, the route tries to throw her back to the origin instead. still stripped. the other person is still gone.
conditions, bc there are a lot: the destination has to already be a live attended crossing. she has to physically have hold of the person already, so it can’t be done in an actual struggle. drift can’t do it at all. one person max. and once the crossing notices the trickery there’s no calling it off.