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

[alicornucopia]

"They are in fact not uncommon, although I imagine the reverse also occurs. There's always Thanetan street preachers who don't know when to shut up and Aleist churches always have - reasonably pretty, I suppose - hymns wafting out the windows."

[ending_of]

"I see. I will be pleased if none of these people succeed in complaining to me about the implications of my existence."

[alicornucopia]

"Yeah... I mean if it gets really bad the school will start refusing to admit anybody but students, but some fraction of students are this or that. Pretty sure my Nanela History class has a Kovin and an Aleist in it."

[ending_of]

"Although I suppose if I am to instantiate large numbers of valuable objects, I will have to be let out of the circle and will therefore be able to escape their attention by leaving this building if I choose."

[alicornucopia]

"They don't have to let you out of the circle to take stuff you make. They could do that with a calling circle. I dunno why you haven't been let out, but needing to remove things prrrrobably won't be the deciding factor."

[ending_of]

"I did express a lack of any strong preference over whether my time here is spent in this circle or out of it."

[alicornucopia]

"Might be it, though I'd still expect it to be a pain in the neck for somebody to feed you and so on, unless you... don't... eat or anything?"

[ending_of]

"I do not require food or other maintenance from any outside source."

[alicornucopia]

"Handy-dandy, how do you do that?"

[ending_of]

"It is technically the same form of restoration available to the dead of my domain, but while they must wait for otherwise fatal conditions to trigger the process, I can cause it to happen whenever I choose."

[alicornucopia]

"Interesting... sort of like mages only instead of specific causes of death and fancy elemental powers you get to start over in mint condition?"

[ending_of]

"Yes. It looks like this," she says, and she is briefly consumed by a wash of very real-looking fire that doesn't seem to burn her exactly so much as - gently dissolve. It doesn't do a thing to her clothes or her chair, despite extensive physical contact with both. When it dissipates, she looks exactly the same as she did before.

[alicornucopia]

"That's... cosmetically interesting. Is it going to interact weird with people who die with unactivated mage potential?"

[ending_of]

"Mage potential is the type of magic conditional on a near-death experience? No," she says. "This form of restoration - colloquially called 'torching' - acts strictly as a last resort. A dead unactivated mage who subsequently encounters the conditions of their activation will activate. And," she adds, "since it seems much more convenient that way, the restoration will not deactivate them."

[alicornucopia]

"Yeah, people would be annoyed if they had to reactivate their maging all the time, they get really attached to it. I assume lights and sorcerers annnnd merfolk have those colorists and shamans, they're also covered?"

[ending_of]

"Yes. Mages are a special case because the active or inactive state of their powers is determined by a specific trigger event rather than developing naturally regardless of environmental stimulus, or being a species-wide learnable magic like the two kinds unique to merfolk. 'Lights' is obvious, but are 'sorcerers' the innate magical ability to remotely manipulate objects, or the species-specific information-gathering power?"

[alicornucopia]

"Sorcerers are the remote manipulator thing. I'm not sure what you're talking about for the other one. Which species? What information-gathering?"

[ending_of]

"The species with limited shapechange between a humanoid form and one resembling a bat. Some members have a magical ability to receive information from nearby nonliving objects, presented in the form of audible speech."

[alicornucopia]

"Thaaaaat was widely considered a mental illness. This is. Interesting."

[ending_of]

"I wonder if I have any more disconcerting revelations available. It is not obvious to me which facts about your world are widely known and which are not."

[alicornucopia]

"Yeah, I dunno where to start summarizing. Am I missing any other forms of magic people have? Channeling capacities, mages lights sorcerers, colorists shamans... the vampire kind... dragon magic for dragons and enough to shift with for near descendants, shifting for vampires, aaaand wolfrider mindlinks?"

[ending_of]

"Wolfrider mindlinks are an interesting case. I have stored pairs together, and the unpaired infants each with the potential match who died soonest after them, starting from the beginning. There is one female unpaired rider left over at the moment."

[alicornucopia]

"Yeah, the pairs are going to need to wake up at the exact same time, and I think the ones who aren't paired yet need to have some... thing... done to pair them off so they'll need to wait till somebody's going to do that for them, I guess."

[ending_of]

"I will arrange for the unpaired infants to be woken only with another woken or living pair present; that seems easiest. Your world has a remarkable diversity of aware life."

[alicornucopia]

"Yyyyyes. I know. You probably have more than enough information to figure out the weird little secret of why."