Katia: Try a few more things

Fargone wrote:

Use your claws to make a small cut in the palm of your hand, then visualise your uncut hand while using the spell, keep trying Katia

Okay, for one, you have no claws left on any of your hands or feet. For two, you saw how practicing on your claws turned out, right? Given that you need some kind of new bodily damage every time the spell fails to take, moving on to actual wounds seems like a slippery slope that will end nowhere good.

You thank the very confused textile merchant for helping you frame the visual gag, and keep true to your promise to buy a scarf afterwards.

When asked about Imperial Legionnaires, he reports seeing a few between here and Elsweyr, but all headed the opposite way as him. You tell him he’s very nice for a khajiit. He’s not sure how to take that and says he wants to go now.

Deracanos wrote:

You could try seeing if you can practice the healing spell on plants nearby? Form a mental image of them, then break and try to heal them? See if the book has further information on this. Seems odd that the recommended way to learn involves potentially ruining your fingernails.

While the book is frustratingly light on details, the later pages do give a bit of justification for why it had you practicing on yourself.

Apparently, healing other people is something that only comes once you’ve mastered the basics. It’s not just a matter of storing someone’s uninjured state and willing them back to it: it involves storing your own uninjured state and willing it onto them. In the words of the cheerful cartoon snake, “you have to learn to catch before you can juggle”.

The book goes on to explain that “Restoration” is a misnomer, and that a practiced master can move beyond simple healing. They can temporarily displace entire experiences into someone’s history, giving them education or training they never received. The first step to this, though, is the basic self-healing spell: learning how to bottle up a little piece of time and release it right back where you got it. And that “incredibly simple” thing seems to be what you’re stuck on.

Bookconsumptionenthusiast wrote:

I still think you should try eating the book. I mean, what does the author know anyways? Learning magic is a very induvidual experience so what may have not have worked for them may work for you. So be brave and give that book a good ol’ nibble!

You’re not going to eat the book.

Benjamin wrote:

The healing spell probably involves emotion like the other spells.

Fireballs involved emotion. When you learned telekinesis, though, it was completely different; you were giving tiny little pushes to the magical properties of things to make them work a different way. And when you briefly used conjuration, it was different from both of them, with you navigating through extradimensional space by the stars.

The fact that the Mages Guild had entirely different sections on the bookshelves for different magic types suggests that each one probably has its own theory and principles. There might be some overlap – you did manage to get a tiny bit of telekinesis from a bird pun, and started the conjuration spell with the normal blue line stuff – but you wouldn’t count on the secret to Restoration being something as simple as a different kind of wordplay.

For all you know, it might not even be something you can approach like a puzzle. The snake did say intelligence wasn’t a factor, and that if it didn’t work, you had to “believe in yourself harder”.

andwhyisit wrote:

It may be that the image you are currently seeing is making it difficult to mentally retrieve the image you saw in the past. Try closing your eyes first and then empty your mind of everything else.

kaay wrote:

use this as reference for restoring your claws: Superimpost it over your hand. Make it stay that way. After all, your body will feel better if it does.

You thought for sure that one was gonna work. It was a solid idea and you did the dramatic darkvision flash and everything.

YourNails wrote:

You fool you’re out of magika, that’s why this isn’t working!

Nope, you can still make fire.

Unless that was the last of your magicka just then.

Nope, it wasn’t.

Unless that was. You have wasted two fire spells worth of magicka confirming you have magicka, and you still don’t know.

Also: Asotil still hasn’t shown up. You didn’t forget, you’re still checking.

TheFinalWraith wrote:

I don’t want to get too touchy-feely with things, but could one of the problems you’re experiencing with restoration be that you’re having problems accurately perceiving things (in this case, yourself) in the present and past how they actually are/were, and are instead projecting your impression of yourself as either better or worse than reality?

You don’t… think that’s the issue? Sure, you’ve had plenty of times where you comforted yourself with lies, but you feel like your overall self-perception isn’t off base. It might seem like you’re hard on yourself sometimes, but really you just have a lot of problems and you’re extremely aware of them. And you’re not blind to the good things about yourself, either! Like, you did a cool thing last night and saved the day. Plus, you’ve been in Cyrodiil for less than a week and have already become a hundredaire. A high-end hundredaire too, over halfway to thousandaire. You’re okay.

And if your self-perception is screwed up in some weird way you don’t understand… well, that just makes you feel a little worse about yourself. Like, there’s something broken inside you that you can’t see, and it’s keeping you from learning the magic spell you want to learn. The thought is making you sad, which is pretty much the opposite of the snake’s advice to “believe in yourself”.

Maybe it’s time to take that break to mess with your clothes.

Videogamer80 wrote:

Switch out the shawl/hood thing for your cloak of gray something-or-other. The invisibility one

mines wrote:

Why don’t you try replacing your wizard hood of awesomeness with your invisibility cloak?

Well for one: these greens don’t get along at all. It’s like someone was halfway through a painting and had to remix all their colors, but ran out of yellow. You know aesthetics should come second to practicality, but there’s still a line you’d rather not cross.

Even on a practicality level, though, this is just throwing on even more layers on your body in the middle of summer. It’s not adding any actual armor, and honestly, if you needed to turn invisible, you could get the invisibility cloak out of your inventory about as fast as you could put up the hood.

WhiteCoatSyndrome wrote:

But regarding clothes, keep in mind the impression you’re going to be giving. Remember Sigrun robbed you in the first place because she *thought* you were rich just because you dressed nicely.

Gekquerel wrote:

Overshirt from sneaking suit, pants and boots from arena armor, belt from mage robes. should be light enough to be wearable over fur and cool enough for summer, and leaves the hood to use as a backpack

That, though… is actually surprisingly functional. It’s good for walking, good for riding, good for summer, and doesn’t scream “rob me, I’m a high-end hundredaire”. You’d have to alter the sleeves a little, but it’s nothing you can’t handle with a silver dagger and a dangerous amount of believing in yourself.

Gaedar wrote:

Do you know what that means? Change… veeery… slowly. Not enough to get spotted by passerby, but slow enough that it isn’t your standard time! 😀

Gorbash wrote:

Change provocatively to ensure he shows up.

You’re gonna do it. You’re gonna change super slow and seductively to jinx Asotil into appearing.

The guard is on a different part of the wall right now and the merchant is inside. Plus, changing clothes is a very functional and purposeful thing, so it won’t be too weird if someone sees you. Though, hopefully still awkward enough to make Asotil show up. You stand on the away-from-the-city side of the rock just to be safe.

The slow kind of seduction has never exactly been what you were known for, but you figure it’s basically just changing clothes but slower.

Here we go.

How is this something you are bad at.