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

[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."

[kingsidecastle]

"My specialty is protection and my niece is the Slayer. I have cast wards that held up against the hostile application of other people's non-chess-based magic. But I'm not sure if that's the kind of 'affecting' you mean...?"

[imeanforever]

"Things like... could you make a gate settle instantly. Could you affect harmonics."

[kingsidecastle]

"I don't know enough about either phenomenon to say."

[imeanforever]

"What would you need to know to perform the experiment or make a guess?"

[kingsidecastle]

"Well, if a gate is anything along the lines of a portal, and settling is a thing they naturally do, I can think of a few ways I might try to speed one up about it but I'd have to test them on an actual gate to find out whether they worked. Confirming my guesses about what they are and what you want me to do with them would help me be more precise. As for harmonics, I don't even know enough to know what questions I should be asking."

[imeanforever]

"Harmonics are an invisible feature of locations which affect how sorcery is done. I can map them by watching them affect something simple," Promise makes a fairylight, "and in Fairyland I can typically cast reasonably well without doing that, but here the harmonics are thoroughly bizarre for some reason and I have to map an entire space grid by grid to be sure I can get a more complicated spell to go right." Pause. "It would also be interesting, if potentially disastrously complicated, if you turned out to be able to affect fairy orders, but those are not sorcery."

[kingsidecastle]

"I'd be interested in experimenting, but we're getting a little off-track; I should cast Tea's sunlight ward before moving on to your interesting theoretical problems," says Castle. "Royal, a little help with the setup?"

Once again the pieces are reconfigured. Tea gets his glass knight and glass bishop, on his left and right respectively instead of in front and behind. The steel pieces stay put. The river stone and outer circle come back. Castle and Royal sit back down in their accustomed places.

Castle talks to the river stone again. This time, instead of leaning on the cloak metaphor, she emphasizes the 'champion' aspect of Tea's knight association - inherent strength, resilience, being armoured against harm. She talks about night and day, light and shadow. She talks about the relation of a book's cover to its pages.

Appropriately, Tea gets illusory plate mail rather than illusory wings. It shades him from the light of illusory noon, and though fire burns around him, it does not touch him.

And then Castle thanks the stone and all the images fade away.

"There, you're all set."

[eversomuchfun]

"Thanks," says Tea. "A vista of unimaginable convenience opens before me."

[imeanforever]

"There goes all I did to adjust my sleep schedule so he could show me around."

[eversomuchfun]

"Sorry. I can stay mostly nocturnal if you prefer."

[kingsidecastle]

"Anyway. Promise, while we're all here, would you like a pawn promotion in case you're interested in participating in future spells?"

[imeanforever]

"I prefer operating in daylight all else being equal," Promise tells Tea. "And sure, why not."

[kingsidecastle]

"All right. Tea, back to the spectator seats with you."

Castle and Royal clear away the protective items and Tea's glass pieces from the floor diagram.

[eversomuchfun]

Tea returns to the spectator seats.