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

[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."

[imeanforever]

"Fair enough."

[burning_gold]

"Okay, so what about the metaphors?" says Vampire Two. "What's my weird chess horoscope, what does 'knight-as-cloak' actually mean?"

[kingsidecastle]

"Knight-as-cloak... I haven't seen it before, but it's interesting," she says. "Surprisingly, hmm, passive for a knight metaphor. And the secondary association with the wings is interesting too. If I ever wanted to design a spell to let someone actually fly, I might call you up and ask you to stand in. That's another thing I like about chess magic, actually - it lets people stand as part of the spell without having to actively do any magic themselves, and they still contribute."

[imeanforever]

"How freely can you design arbitrary new spells?"

[kingsidecastle]

"Pretty freely. The limits are hard to quantify because they're so dependent on how creatively I can combine metaphors into a workable narrative. Having more possible spell participants available is a big help. If you have a spell you want designed and cast, I'd be happy to work on it as long as Royal doesn't think it would be bad idea."

[imeanforever]

"I don't have a specific idea off the top of my head... Can you affect other magic this way?"

[kingsidecastle]

"What do you mean by other magic?"

[imeanforever]

"Non-chess-magic. I'm specifically wondering if you could let me break the rules of my own sort of magic in some way, but presumably you haven't interacted with sorcery in particular; but if you can't even affect other people's... interpretations of the tangle that is mortal magic... then that would be a clue."