Category: Notes

Kyoko’s Arsenal

People in this setting have and use a wide variety of weapons. I think now is a good time to start breaking down what they are and why, since it’s now apparent what more of them are. There will be more on this in the future, as a broader perspective develops on how people in this setting fight. But this is a good time to start.

Beginning with Kyoko, we can for the moment set aside Thorn; there are a lot more things to say about that sword than would fit here, and it also doesn’t say that much about her given she didn’t exactly pick out what it looks like or how it works. But as was already apparent, when she visited her armory earlier, Kyoko has a whole lot of weapons for someone who hasn’t gotten in fights much. Many of them have never been used. Why?…

Magical Mechanics

Magic in this setting obeys a lot of rules, and they aren’t all obvious at a glance. Since the mechanisms and effects are starting to come up in more depth, I thought I’d talk about that, because they very much do matter. And they actually have more in common than you might think with theoretical physics in the real world. This is going to be a particularly lengthy discussion, and while it may come up over the course of the story, including it directly in the narration would be quite a bit of needlessly-technical exposition. So, while it might be an interesting example of how I think about the setting, it’s not necessary information to understand the story. That said, here are the basic rules about how magic works and where its limits are.…

Mages and Humanity

Now that you’ve seen more of what mages are capable of, the question arises: Are mages human? This is a question that’s kind of interesting to look at, and it isn’t as simple to answer as it might seem. There are a number of elements that have to be considered to really assess it. The first, and probably the most intractable, part is: At what point does someone stop being human?

Certainly they started out human. But Kyoko thinks of vanilla humans and mages as being very distinct categories, and in some ways she has a point. How much humanity can someone shed and still be reasonably called human?…

Drugs and Poisons

So, as is now apparent, drugs and poisons are something Kyoko is linked with. And I think that this provides a good opportunity to showcase some of how I approach character design and writing more generally. There are a lot of details in that character element that are worth examining.

Because most people know very little about these things. They might know some of the names, but even that’s limited, because people rarely use chemical names for things, rarely use generic names. Slang terms and trade names are often the only ones people know. You might have an idea what ecstasy is, in this context, but not have a clue that it’s called methylenedioxymethamphetamine. Similarly, plenty of people take an over-the-counter acid reducer called Zantac. They will mostly not know that Zantac is the trade name being applied to a drug called famotidine, much less know that in the past Zantac was the trade name applied to a different, related drug called ranitidine, nor that the change happened because ranitidine was recalled after it was found to decay into a carcinogenic compound when stored for a prolonged time.…

The Sidhe Courts

The idea of Seelie and Unseelie Courts, as well as many other details about them in this setting, is a bit syncretic. The terms come from the British Isles, where various local variations of those words were used to distinguish between kind and unkind faeries. (I use the spelling fae and faerie both because of etymology and the cultural associations around “fairy” not fitting well. Fey is a very different, archaic word I use as an adjective, not as a term for the fae; the etymology is unrelated.) But a lot of the details are things I had to fit together from a wide variety of source material, much of which contradicts itself.…

Supernatural Language

The consultant says something interesting here, and there’s more to unpack than there might seem. In particular, I want to take a moment to address his comments on language, ambiguity, and to an extent on the actual magic in use, and all three tie together.…