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]

"I would, although it's less important than some other desiderata."

[kingsidecastle]

"Well, I'm not expecting to pull together a whole system in the next hour, so there's time to think about it and consider options and maybe try a few things. Thoughts on aesthetic and structure?"

[imeanforever]

"My aesthetic mostly revolves around things like trees and lights and colors. I'm not sure if that gets us anywhere. What do you mean by structure?"

[kingsidecastle]

"Well, the conceptual structure of chess magic is useful because instead of being limited by whatever spells happen to exist to do the thing I want, I can construct a narrative out of distantly chess-based metaphors and as long as I have the right pieces to fill it and can cover any gaps with things like my focus stone, it works. I'd probably be most comfortable inventing a new system if it had some kind of structured conceptual basis like that. Not necessarily based in a game of any kind."

[imeanforever]

"I'm not sure I feel an affinity for anything quite that... modular. Is modularity the thing?"

[kingsidecastle]

"Modularity is definitely an important aspect."

[imeanforever]

"I like books but they're closer to freeform than modular..."

[kingsidecastle]

"Yes. I can't think of a good way to turn books as a general category into the basis for a magic system."

[imeanforever]

"Writing? I just had a mental image of being able to draw a harmonic map and impose it on the world. Although that would take forever..."

[kingsidecastle]

"Writing... has possibilities," she muses.

[imeanforever]

"Possibilities that don't take forever? I can write very quickly with fairylights but only in situations where I can already do some sorcery acceptably well."

[kingsidecastle]

"I'm sure if Royal were here she'd suggest you use math," says Castle. "Which isn't a bad thought, but you'd need to know the math to get any good out of it, and most people are less eager than Royal to learn math. Hmm. Do you want to come up to my workroom and experiment with affecting harmonics?"

[imeanforever]

"Okay."

[kingsidecastle]

Up the stairs to the workroom they go, then.

The workroom has a bare wooden floor, one wall that is mostly window over a long counter supporting lots and lots of boxes, and two chairs.

"So what do the harmonics look like in here to start with?" she asks, sitting in a chair.

[imeanforever]

"Mapping it will take me hours," Promise warns.

[kingsidecastle]

"You don't necessarily need the whole thing, do you?"

[imeanforever]

"Not necessarily, unless the harmonics here are drunk in some completely new way." She starts gridding.

[kingsidecastle]

Castle watches curiously.

The harmonics here are drunk in an unusually predictable and regular fashion, actually. Symmetrical patterns centered on approximately the middle of the room. They're not normal, but the symmetry is strong enough that the weirdness of any given location is pretty easy to predict if you have its opposite or neighbouring corner to compare. The symmetry is strongest at floor level, and it's actually possible to trace out its lines using the floor itself as a guide.

[imeanforever]

"This is strange," Promise says. "Doing mortal magic definitely affects harmonics. If you do magic along these floor lines, as I strongly suspect you do, it's making cliffs and slopes accordingly."

[kingsidecastle]

"Yes, the floor patterns are my guidelines for marking out spell layouts, so I don't have to get out the masking tape every time," she says. "That's interesting."

[imeanforever]

"Harmonics are normally somewhat affected by things around them. Sorcery, living things, landscape. But not so dramatically."

[kingsidecastle]

"Hmm. Well, let me know when you've got a solid enough idea of the space that I can start trying things and seeing how it changes."

[imeanforever]

Promise nods. She makes a few more grids, then starts making lines only a few lights across along features that seem likely to exist to confirm that they're there, and finally she says, "I think I have a manageable working knowledge."

[kingsidecastle]

"All right. Let's see..."

She goes to the boxes and picks up a double handful of small rounded stones in a lovely mix of blue, green, and purple. These she arranges in a wide circle on the floor, dragging the chairs out of the way so that they face each other across the circle, one by the window and the other by the door. In the very center of all this, she places a glossy black rook with a minimalist design. Then she sits in one of the chairs and gestures Promise into the other.

"I'm going to see if I can make the patterns even more orderly and geometric than they already are," she explains. "I'm hoping for the space inside that circle to achieve perfect twenty-four-point radial symmetry; I'm not sure what the space outside the circle will do, but I guess we'll find out."

[imeanforever]

Nod, nod. Promise finds a spot outside the circle to perch.