blood sweat tear

[imeanforever]

He's moving her to a different court to see if it'll improve her attitude. She's allowed to fly. It's been a long, long time since she was allowed to -

She is only allowed to fly to her destination, not anywhere else. She notices that she is not where she should be, that she cannot progress to where she was told to go, and she careens out of control when her wings won't flap anymore, and she crashes.

---

with Miles (kappa)

with Minus (kappa)

Comments

[burning_gold]

"That was weird," he says. "Cool, though."

[imeanforever]

"Having established this association what do you do with it?"

[kingsidecastle]

"I move on to the actual warding. Cloak actually seems like a pretty good metaphor to build a sunlight ward off of. Lucky Vampire Two. In practical terms, I restructure this arrangement of chess pieces, add a few extra things, and sit down for a second round of addressing mediocre alliterative verse to inanimate objects. Royal, help me out? I'm thinking keep the steel as-is, give him the pawn in front and the knight at his back, you can sit anchor with the stone, and I'll deal with the miscellaneous circle items."

[imeanforever]

"What does 'alliterative' mean?"

[summa_iniuria]

Royal gets up and starts moving pieces around to achieve the described configuration.

"Alliteration is when words start with the same sound as each other."

[imeanforever]

"Oh."

[kingsidecastle]

Castle retrieves some more presumably-relevant items. Small rocks and round glass pebbles. She passes a large smooth river stone to Royal, who places it prominently in the diagram; the miscellaneous objects go in a circle around the outside, enclosing Castle and Royal and all the chess pieces. Then they sit down again.

"Round two," says Castle. "Quiet please."

This time she talks to the river stone.

She describes in somewhat fanciful language how old it must be, how it was formed by geologic processes and made its way through the forces that shaped it into its current form and carried it at last into her possession. The imagery she calls up comes faster this time, and more strongly: the darkness beneath mountains envelops the room, lightening eventually to the gloom at the bottom of a river. Darkness is a definite theme here.

She asks the stone to lend its strength to this working. She describes a cloak of safety wrapping around 'this traveller', shielding him from the harmful light of day. She describes the strength of stone walls, solidity, opacity, permanence; her personal tower-image surrounds the spellcasting area, a translucent but nevertheless firmly solid stone wall. The metaphor gives him, not a cloak, but a pair of sleek black raven's wings.

Outside the image of the stone tower, an illusory dawn breaks, spilling illusory sunlight into the room. It pours in through the walls of Castle's tower, but loses some of its fire along the way; by the time it reaches Vampire Two, it's thin and weak. He sits in a comfortable shadow. Even as the sun rises to illuminate him fully, the walls are there to protect him. His illusory feathers shine, and he is unharmed.

Castle thanks the stone for its help. The metaphorical sun sets; the metaphorical tower fades; Vampire Two's metaphorical wings are the last to go.

[burning_gold]

"...That was really cool," says Vampire Two.

[imeanforever]

Nod nod.

[kingsidecastle]

Castle smiles.

"Congratulations on your new imperviousness to sunlight," she says. "You can go take a spectator seat now. Tea, your turn."

[burning_gold]

He goes and takes a spectator seat.

[eversomuchfun]

Tea comes and sits in the middle of all the masking tape.

"I'm reasonably confident that I'm a knight but there might be an intricacy I'm missing," he says.

[kingsidecastle]

Castle and Royal get up to rearrange the pieces again, putting away the glass knight and pawn and getting out a fresh set of pawn-rook-bishop-knight-queen to lay out the promotion square. They also clear away the river stone and the outer circle before sitting back down.

Once again - she varies the words slightly, but hardly at all - Castle invites a pawn to discuss its life choices.

All the images are the same at first, down to Tea's vague shadow, but when Castle asks the pawn for its decision it fairly leaps to obey. Sparks rise from the queen, the bishop, and the knight; the queen doesn't offer him more than an indistinct glimmer, but the bishop's light forms an open book floating before him with an arrow engraved on its cover, and the knight's glow becomes a radiant aura depicting him as an armoured figure on a horse.

Castle thanks the pawn for its input. Everything fades.

"Bishop as book, amusingly enough, with a solid hint of arrow," she says. "And a very versatile and open-ended reading of knight. I'd be tempted to summarize it to knight-as-champion, but that's not quite it. You could take queen if you had to but it's pretty firmly a third option, and with such a void of response from the rook in an otherwise lively pawn promotion I tend to conclude you'd be fairly hopeless in that role."

[imeanforever]

"I wish I had asked what all these pieces' properties were, I'm sure this would be more enlightening."

[kingsidecastle]

"I can explain the metaphors in more detail if you like," says Castle.

[eversomuchfun]

"By all means," says Tea.

[imeanforever]

"Yes please. And a summary of the underlying rules of this game."

[kingsidecastle]

"Sure," says Castle. "To start off with - Royal, could you deploy one of the spare sets to show Promise the game setup?"

[summa_iniuria]

"Sure," says Royal. She gets up and fetches a chess set.

The pieces of this one are a dark red wood on one side and a pale brown-beige wood on the other, and the case unfolds into a chessboard in the same theme. She sets up the pieces as though to start a game. Rook, knight, bishop, queen, king, bishop, knight, rook, then a row of pawns, then the same thing on the opposite side.

"Each side gets to move one piece one valid move per turn, then it's the other side's turn. Pawns can move a single step ahead, or two steps if it's that pawn's first move of the game," she explains, demonstrating these capacities on the board. "They capture other pieces with a single diagonal step, like this," and she has one side's advance pawn capture the other's.

"Rooks can move in orthogonal straight lines, any number of steps." She demonstrates the motion of a rook. "Bishops do diagonal straight lines, any number of steps." A bishop sneaks out of its enclosure and darts across the board. "Knights jump, like this." The knight hops around the board. "Always in the same pattern, a combination of two orthogonal steps along one axis and one orthogonal step along the other. Then the queen can move any number of steps in any straight line." She demonstrates the movement of the queen.

"And the king can move a single step at a time in any direction. Except for the pawn, all other pieces capture the same way they move. The objective of the game is to capture the other side's king, but by convention the game is declared over as soon as it's observably impossible for the losing side's king to escape capture, or if the board gets into a state where neither side can effectively win. The actual king-capturing move is never carried out."

[imeanforever]

"Okay. Why is there a system of magic based around this game?"

[kingsidecastle]

"Because I invented one," says Castle.

[imeanforever]

"...Why?"

[kingsidecastle]

"Can you be more specific?"

[imeanforever]

"Why did you choose this game to design a magic system around instead of something else."

[kingsidecastle]

"I like the aesthetic. It has a nice balance of structure and flexibility that lets me compose useful spells without having to completely freeform it. It works well with geometric spell construction," she gestures indicatively at the layout of chess pieces and masking tape on the floor, "which I've always found a very intuitive medium to work with. And it worked the first time I tried it and has been working reliably since, which is more than I can say for some of my experiments with more freeform stuff."