as above, so below
Derek has some comments here about werewolves and the experience of being one. Some of this has been mentioned already, but other parts are new information, and it seems like a good time to talk more about it metatextually as well. A lot of information about them isn’t widely known, and some of those details may be revisited later, but for now I’m going to be focusing more on basic information that’s easily learned in-setting.…
Derek lived east of Pittsburgh proper, around the border between eastern Pitcairn and Monroeville. This, in and of itself, would be enough to make it an unexpected place for me to be. Pitcairn was an odd mix of abandoned and stuck-up, and Monroeville was worse, the kind of suburb you’d hold up as an example of why suburbia is a diseased phenomenon. I liked Derek enough to visit his place, but I sure as hell wasn’t prone to dropping in because I happened to be in the area.
But I could cope. I had the rideshare driver drop us off several blocks away outside a Chinese restaurant, just in case someone had both the ability and inclination to trace it, and we walked the rest of the way. It was significantly less pleasant than earlier. It was solidly night by now, and it was cold, and “walkable” was not an adjective I could apply to Monroeville with a straight face if I tried. By the time we got there, I was feeling drained as hell, and even Raincloud looked a bit bedraggled. I told her as much, and got a flicker of amusement from her at how specific the adjective was in its mood.…
Saori left a few minutes later. The innuendos and public display of affection hadn’t exactly been a joke; I knew from experience that she wasn’t bluffing. If I’d expressed interest, she’d have been absolutely fine with ignoring an urgent situation in favor of hedonistic indulgence. Caution and prudence were not on the list of words anyone sane would apply to Saori, except perhaps to use her as a bad example. Safety wasn’t first for her, and was generally lucky to come in a distant third.
But it was, ultimately, a relatively urgent situation. I wasn’t sure when the next attack might come, or from what. I didn’t know how much said attacker would know about me, but my address was hardly a secret. I wasn’t going back there until this was done, and while that didn’t fuck with me like it would some people, it was inconvenient as hell.
So I wasn’t terribly interested in delays. And Saori was reckless, not stupid. She knew this needed done. She only lingered a few more minutes, and then she was off to start reaching out to her contacts. I’d offered to come with, but she said it would be likely to cause more issues than it solved. Her contacts were not fond of strangers, and given that she seemed to be expecting strain on those relationships already, I was forced to agree it was smarter not to bring me along.…
Things with Alice hadn’t taken as long as I’d expected, and it was still relatively early when I walked into Softened Dreams. I’d thought about going somewhere else first, but even if I could have thought of anything useful to do, I probably wouldn’t have. The coffeehouse had a number of good qualities, but right now the one I was most interested in was that it was pretty damn safe. Nobody in their right mind, and few people who are out of it, will start shit in that building. The consequences of ignoring Hope’s policy of neutral ground and peaceful conduct are just too immediate and scary.
Normally, that only really mattered to me in that I liked the quiet. It was a very low-stress, lowkey kind of environment, and I appreciated that about it.
Today, though? I mean…someone tried to kill me last night. Granted she hadn’t done a great job of it, but as the ache in my left shoulder was happy to remind me, I’d gotten pretty damn lucky. And worse, I still had no idea whatsoever who she was, why she wanted me dead, or whether she had friends who felt similarly.…
It’s been mentioned that trying to classify mages is difficult or impossible. But it’s also been mentioned that people have tried and they have created various systems for doing this. The reason is pretty straightforward. Even if these systems are intrinsically imperfect, they’re informative, and having language for easily describing someone is useful. The motivation for systems both informal and rigorous is easy to see. Theories about why they work the way they do are often very complex, and are largely beyond the scope of this note, a phrase you should get ready to see a lot.
Despite ignoring the underlying theory and the reason things take some of these forms, this is going to be a long note. It’s not important to fully understand the back-end reasoning in order to understand the story. In case you want to know the categories that are mentioned throughout the narrative but not to read the full essay, I’ll go ahead and list those up front. The main categorization system, aside from just going “that mage works with this specialty”, has five categories: Wizard, sorcerer, druid, shaman, witch. Wizards and sorcerers both work with physical forces; wizards do so using rational logic, while sorcerers work with emotion and intuition. Druids interact with the physical world, and shamans interact with the spirit world. Witches interact with living things.
Knowing this set of terms is enough to get by in the narrative itself without losing anything. The rest of this essay is just for people who are interested in the back-end reasoning I use for this, which (as usual) is much more elaborate and abstract than it first seems.…
Teleportation is almost impossible. For the vast majority of people, human and otherwise, it is completely out of reach, impossible; it is among the most complex and difficult types of working there is, in this setting. The reason for this goes back to something that was mentioned in the Magical Mechanics note: Location is among the most fundamental and difficult-to-change parts of the world. Any time you want to screw with spatial dimensions and the concept of position, things get difficult fast.
Now, to start, let’s define teleportation. What people in-setting mean by this is that someone is in one spatial location, and is then in a different spatial location, without having moved and without having engaged with the space in between.…