call me maybe

[from_scratch]

Cam is out flying. There's a decent cloud of atmosphere around the gold plane, now, millenia of demons making air around themselves for comfort and not sealing it up because why would you bother. There's a small forest, here - the effect is kind of ruined by the lamps it has to grow under, but it's still pretty.

He feels an open summons and lets it grab him -

with the Joker (kappa)

with Ripper (kappa)

with Darren (Aestrix)

with Minus (kappa)

with Emma (Marri)

with Facility 3141592 (armokGoB)

with the admin (kappa)

with Jarvis (kappa, Aestrix)

with Miles (kappa)

with Hank (Nemo)

Comments

[from_scratch]

Cam sits where directed. Just for completeness he poses his wings the way the queen's are.

[queensidecastle]

"Nice," Chris says again.

She proceeds to lay out the fairies, and her assortment of agate and tourmaline and tiger's eye and diamond, into a more complex geometric figure based around the central chess square. The fairies are distributed evenly in a circle around the outer perimeter, with the white pawns behind the black rooks and the black pawns behind the white rooks; some of the diamonds Cam made earlier find places between black pawns, and some pieces of black tourmaline take up corresponding positions between white pawns, while the rest of the circle is filled in with agate. There is a noticeable gap in the circle directly in front of Cam, behind the white rook; if he looks behind him he will see a second such gap behind the other white rook, with James sitting in it, facing him. (The black king and queen also face inward.) More agate, and watermelon tourmaline, and some tiger's eye, are all set down according to inscrutable geometric principles in the space between outer circle and inner square.

[from_scratch]

"What's with the rocks?"

[queensidecastle]

"Agate, tourmaline, and tiger's eye are traditional protective stones. Diamond also has a certain informal resonance with the concept. Putting them in specific arrangements—" she sets down an agate in front of the white queen "—helps pin down the spell metaphors a little, strengthen them, make them more concrete. Circle outside everything because circles are a longstanding tradition in all kinds of spells, which gives them punch, and because it's a good base for my rook-as-tower. Square in the middle because of which major pieces we have in play and what configuration I want them in, taking into account who's sitting in the circle and where - you'll notice there's a lot of symmetry going on in those main figures. Symmetry is very supportive. With everything else, in between the circle and the square, I'm mostly going by feel - connecting one thing to another through the geometry of the floor by putting stones at key intersections."

She sits down in front of Cam, facing into the circle, with the white rook in front of her. Symmetrical with James behind him.

"You don't have to do anything but sit there - good thinking with the wings, though. Helps build the connection between you and your queen. You might find yourself seeing some weird things, but that's just the spell metaphors at work. We're all still sitting on the floor and any mysteriously appearing objects, landscapes, or architecture are not physically real. Any more questions before we start?"

[from_scratch]

Cam continues to pose his wings. "Should I acquire a giant fountain pen, too? And where will the images of things be - coming from? Will they resemble any real objects, landscapes, or architecture?"

[queensidecastle]

"I don't think a giant fountain pen would add much. Although you might see a metaphorical one floating in front of you. There's likely to be a crown floating over the position of the black king, a sword over the black queen, and a stone wall encircling all of us; we might see some images from the life cycle of rocks, like the inside of a volcano or the outside of a mountain. Other than that, details may vary; in particular, the spell is going to represent you with some kind of queen-related metaphor that I might or might not have ever seen before, but that will probably make sense to me and Jamie when we see it and maybe even to you."

[from_scratch]

"Okay, but you're not going to get sneak peeks of my backstory or anything?"

[queensidecastle]

"It's conceivable but not likely. And if we did, it would be in a form more comprehensible to you than us - if you got a pen for your metaphor, it might resemble some specific pen that's been important to you at some point in your life, but we wouldn't be able to tell that unless you told us. If the metaphor ended up representing some place you've been before, it would show the place but not any events that have happened there, and it might show an abstracted version that's different from the real one. Things like that."

[from_scratch]

"Okay. How long will this take?"

[queensidecastle]

"A few minutes," she says. "I talk to the rock James is holding for a while - if you speak Anglo-Saxon you will be treated to my mediocre alliterative verse - and we see some metaphors, and then the spell settles in and it's done and we can clean up."

[from_scratch]

"That is not one of my languages, alas. Okay, go for it."

[queensidecastle]

Chris nods, and starts talking. Her poetry may be mediocre, but at least her accent sounds nice. She's fairly quiet, fairly casual.

After a few words, the room around them starts to fade slightly. Colours become less vivid, and the walls and floor seem smokily translucent, with a pale blue glow behind them. The only things that stay exactly the same are Cam, James, Chris, and the various rocks and chess pieces on the floor.

Chris keeps talking. The outer ring of stones and fairies starts to fade the same way. Life-size ghostly fairies appear, standing behind their corresponding pieces in the circle; the white fairies are all Chris, with sparkling diamond wings, and the black fairies are all James with wings of glossy black tourmaline. The ring of fairies all reach out simultaneously to hold each other's hands. All of them are wearing identical vaguely wizardly robes, the Chrises in black and the Jameses in white; none of them have their backs turned to the inside of the circle, so how their wings emerge from those will remain a mystery.

The glow under the floor changes from sky-blue to orange-red, and the colour change rises slowly along the walls until it covers even the ghostly ceiling. There is a sense of distant heat. The cadence of Chris's verse changes slightly, going longer between pauses. The circle of fairies all step back, still holding hands, and a formidable-looking stone wall takes shape between them and the spell participants; it's a perfect unbroken circle, without a door, and seems to be made of unpolished granite.

To Cam's left, over the faded angel king, a life-size golden crown hovers in the air. To his right, over the angel queen, a life-size silver sword. Neither one matches the corresponding item on the physical piece.

The red glow coming through floor and ceiling fades to an unlit grey, then to black; the heat fades at the same time. There is the sound of moving water - a river flowing over rocks.

In front of Cam, his own personal metaphor takes shape at last. It's... a quill pen, dark blue like his wings and tail. The writing point of the quill has the suggestion of the shape of a beak, and if he looks at it for long enough, the pen fades and a kind of stylized abstraction of all birds of prey appears in its place, also dark blue. Then the two shapes move apart from each other and coexist normally, with the bird holding the pen in its claws in a vaguely heraldic pose, wings spread and head turned to the side.

Chris says a few final words. The metaphors fade out; reality fades back in. There they are, sitting on an unchanged floor between unchanged walls, surrounded by unchanged rocks and chess pieces.

"All done," she says. "Want us to interpret your pen-bird metaphor for you?"

[from_scratch]

"...Suuuure."

[queensidecastle]

"I've never seen queen-as-pen or queen-as-bird before, mind you. But the pen makes me think of an inversion of queen-as-sword: nonviolence, subtlety over force, precision over power. And the bird makes me think of the queen's movement aspect. Travel, speed, breadth of scope. Together, I'm reminded of your interesting superpower - it only does one thing, but it does it to exacting specifications and with a pretty much limitless range of possibilities."

[from_scratch]

"I gave my queen a pen because I'm kind of obsessive about notetaking. I haven't used a literal pen for most of it in decades, but it works aesthetically much better than my current technological choices."

[neverbeatme]

"The fact that you gave your queen a pen probably has something to do with the fact that you got one, but your specific reasons might not necessarily play into it as much," says James, getting up from her place in the circle and starting to collect rocks. "I definitely agree with Chris that queen-as-pen stands in opposition to queen-as-sword somehow, and that the bird at least partly represents a wide scope - you're the kind of person who has or intends to have a big impact on things. I'd have to know you better before I made a judgment about further details."

[from_scratch]

"Big impact sounds about right."

[neverbeatme]

"I," says James, "am good at getting a sense of people."

[queensidecastle]

Chris starts collecting rocks too. The circle is much quicker to take apart than it was to put together.

[from_scratch]

"Slayer thing, magic thing, personal skill?"

[neverbeatme]

"Personal skill. Absolutely no magic to it as far as I know."

[from_scratch]

"Nice quirk if you can get it."

[neverbeatme]

"It comes in handy!"

[from_scratch]

"Okay. Well, thanks for the spell and the phone." Cam hauls himself up off the floor, re-folds his wings, picks up his coat.

[neverbeatme]

"You're welcome. Happy queening," says James.