chalk

[alicornucopia]

In Paraasilan, Esmaar, a pair of roommates are about to break a rule that, compared to the one about running in the corridors or even the one about unlicensed teleportation, is there for a good reason.

In unison, they complete their shared spell.

~~~

with Adarin (Aestrix)

with Ekador (kappa)

with Brilliance (kappa)

with the admin (kappa)

with Teah (kappa)

with Katran (lambda)

with Hall (kappa)

with Joy (kappa)

with Kalinda (Christy Hotwater)

Comments

[aeskhyne]

"Short. I figured out most things right when I saw them. But I missed a couple things about dragon magic until they came around in prayers - the dying babies thing and the old age thing - and I think if I saw something else like that now, I'd be able to catch that stuff faster."

[alicornucopia]

"Like that within the scope of dragons, or if some other species cropped up with similar issues in a different kind of magic you'd spot it faster?"

[aeskhyne]

"Yeah. Or just - if I saw a complicated magic thing like dragons are a complicated magic thing, I could figure out the parts without having something specifically call my attention to all of them."

[alicornucopia]

"Is that an actual expansion in your ability or just - an update based on the information you've acquired about how complicatedly magical things can relevantly be?"

[aeskhyne]

"It's not an expansion in my ability exactly, but it's a skill I've learned."

[alicornucopia]

"...Explain?"

[aeskhyne]

"Seeing magic I didn't make is something I could apparently always do, but there wasn't any magic I didn't make in my world, so I only knew how to figure out magic I made. And there's some figuring out to that, if it's something I made in a previous incarnation, but it's not on the same level as trying to figure out magic that was designed either by somebody else or not at all. It's sort of like... I don't know if this is a perfect analogy, but you're a dragon. Imagine growing up in a world where you're the only person who uses language. Then you come here, and there's people talking languages all over the place - you have the ability to use them, but there's still kind of an element of skill to it, when before the only person you could talk to was yourself?"

[alicornucopia]

"I think I'd have socialization problems that went well beyond figuring out how to use language, if that happened, but point taken. I wonder if there's anything else you can already do but have never had affordances to check..."

[aeskhyne]

"If there is, I'd love to find out."

[alicornucopia]

"I'll let you know if I think of anything. Might matter what your world is like. No magic besides you? At all?"

[aeskhyne]

"No magic besides me at all. Lots of fancy gadgets I had mostly nothing to do with inventing, all of which work without magic."

[alicornucopia]

"Fancy gadgets? Like what, Erubian clockwork?"

[aeskhyne]

"Like - you have communication crystals; the thing my world has that's like communication crystals is called a phone, and you can use any one of them to contact any other one if you know its number, and you can also take pictures or play music with it. And the thing my world has that's like picture crystals is called a camera and there's kinds that can record sight-and-sound the way music crystals record sound. And I did none of this, it was all humans - my world's only got humans - figuring out how to make cool stuff and then doing it."

[alicornucopia]

"Only humans. Huh. And this is not magic, it's ultra-fancy clockwork?"

[aeskhyne]

"Basically ultra-fancy clockwork, yeah."

[alicornucopia]

"Weird."

[aeskhyne]

"I guess. I think I might find it a little weirder that you guys have magic and your magic is still way behind my world's fancy clockwork on a whole shitload of stuff."

[alicornucopia]

"We ahead on anything?"

[aeskhyne]

"Well, yeah, they don't have scrying or past-scrying. Although with enough cameras it gets so's you can barely tell the difference. And they don't have teleportation, but I think they're working on it. Mostly, though, it seems like anything I can think of that you can do both with wizardry and with Fancy Clockwork, Fancy Clockwork does it better. Except translation. Fancy Clockwork translation is kind of hilarious. Getting better every year, though."

[alicornucopia]

"How does translation by fancy clockwork go about being hilarious?"

[aeskhyne]

"It's like... imagine you have to invent a translation spell where you can't have it pick up anything about language from things that exist in the world, you have to manually specify which words and phrases in Language One tend to correspond to which words and phrases in Language Two and then let it take in some sentences and try to match them up. That's how it used to be, anyway, they're getting better. These days you can translate a reasonably complicated sentence and when you translate it back it still means basically the same thing as when you started. But that's just text - there's no Fancy Clockwork that'll translate speech even as badly as it translated text fifteen years ago."

[alicornucopia]

"That sounds terrible," says Kaylo, "and like if I ever find myself unexpectedly stranded on your world where I can't get at wizardry I shall have to open a translations business."

[aeskhyne]

"Knock yourself out. There's people who translate, but, y'know, they're not dragons."

[alicornucopia]

"Dragons're pretty great. Hmmm." Kaylo peers at the map's activity. "Remind me what you wanted to accomplish by getting me to quiz you and propose experiments?"

[aeskhyne]

The map has been practically fizzing this whole time, as Teah answers prayers all around the world.

"My unlikely dream goal is to be able to be 'on' full-time here and at home, somehow. But if I can't have that, which I probably can't, I still want to figure out what the limits are of being me - what it's safe to do with my body, if I can magic it so people don't need to keep feeding it, if I can wake it up again, if I can wake it up again and stay 'on' while it's awake. And if there's anything I can change about how I work. Multitasking or something, I dunno."