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]

"'Sensible' in this case means 'in a way that made sense to me personally'."

[imeanforever]

"Do concepts along the lines of 'geometric forms' have features that make them useful to grab hold of in those terms apart from what happens to fit neatly in one's mind?"

[kingsidecastle]

"I'm not sure I understand what you mean."

[imeanforever]

"From the perspective of the mortal magic mishmash, is 'geometry' a thing?"

[kingsidecastle]

"I'm not sure whether that's a meaningful question, or how I would find out the answer if it was," she says. "Geometry-focused traditions definitely exist. So do traditions that don't seem to interact with geometry at all."

[imeanforever]

"Do the geometry focused ones have anything else in common?"

[kingsidecastle]

Shrug. "I'm not familiar enough with all of them to say. Off the top of my head it doesn't seem like they do, at least not in a substantial or obvious way."

[imeanforever]

"Can you go into more detail about how you attached magic to what I presume was previously a nonmagical board game?"

[kingsidecastle]

"I'm not sure if I'd say that I attached magic to chess. I might prefer to say I attached chess to magic," she says. "Chess is still the same game, it's just that now I can do magic with it, separately from what anyone else does with either thing. And most of the process involved... trying things and then finding out that they worked. I've read enough to know that this is not normally what happens when someone tries to invent a spell, let alone a whole new magical tradition."

[imeanforever]

"How did you avoid the more usual results?"

[kingsidecastle]

"I don't honestly know for sure," she says. "Maybe I'm just lucky. Maybe I have a talent for guessing which things are going to work. I do think I have an unusually strong sense for what works and what doesn't in magic."

[imeanforever]

"Is that sense... itself magical, or practice-based? And if it seems likely that you were just lucky why were you willing to take the risk?"

[kingsidecastle]

"When I started out I was a lot younger and hadn't heard some of the more dire warnings, and as far as I knew the worst that could happen was a spell failing to work. That still is the worst that's happened to me. If the sense was practice-based, I'd expect more people to have it, and I'd expect my history of spell invention to involve more and worse failure than it in fact did."

[imeanforever]

"But you don't know any more detail about the magical sense you may have."

[kingsidecastle]

"It's very hard to test."

[imeanforever]

"Safely, anyway... is there any subjective quality to it or does it only feel like guessing?"

[kingsidecastle]

"It feels like guessing, or like having aesthetic opinions. Not like anything overtly magical."

[imeanforever]

"Maybe I should not attempt to invent a magic system that suits me. At least not at this time."

[kingsidecastle]

"You could try to get me to invent a magic system that suits you," Castle suggests. "But I can understand if you'd rather steer clear."

[imeanforever]

"That's tempting but I wasn't confident enough in your interest in helping me to ask. It seems like it would be a major undertaking."

[kingsidecastle]

"It would be an interesting undertaking and I like those," she says. "And I'd come out of it with another magic system, if it worked, which is no small thing."

[imeanforever]

"This is true. Where would be the best place to start?"

[kingsidecastle]

"Well," she says. "You could describe the magic system you already know, and what you've learned about the local ones, and what features you like and dislike about each of the above."

[imeanforever]

"Sorcery works by observing the setting and target and concentrating on how one wants it changed - and if the harmonics are loopy by mapping those and counting that under 'observing the setting', although you can dispense with that part if you're good enough at the rest. It rewards working on one's home turf. It can do things like growing plants, invisibility, setting things on fire, healing, turning people into frogs, transmuting materials, candying dewdrops, wards, gates, and traps. The local one or ones appear to be made of mud and sticks and glitter, require dramatically more per-spell but less per-location preparatory work and generally be more flexible about the prerequisites for a casting, and focus almost entirely on combat or at least conflict applications. If that was not editorialized enough to say what features I like, do say so."

[kingsidecastle]

"I might benefit from more editorializing, yes."