Archive | December 5, 2019

Worldbuilding Wednesday: TIR Talk – Follow-up Questions

Dec5

Kunama asked:

How did the children of Danu become royalty?

Ah, an interesting question from the left there.  Okay.  The children of Danu are royalty because they declared themselves such.

And that is a documented fact, so I’m not risking myself in any way with this question.

The children of Danu came here – to California, to North America – when hundreds and thousands of other people were immigrating here, and they found a place where they could lay claim.

Their powers weren’t as strong back then as they are now, but “in the land of the blind” and all that.  There’s no indication in historical records of any specifics, but considering what Queen Larissa is known to be able to do, one can extrapolate backwards to what her ancestors may have been able to do, and a woman with the ability to, for instance, read her opponents’ minds or convince them to do what she says, convince them to love her, convince them that she is the proper person for a position or simply blackmail them very effectively.

Again – there is no proof or even written suggestions that the early Queens and Duchesses of Tír na Cali used any of those powers on anyone.  None of the contemporary histories mention anything of the sort – the women of Danu’s children of that era were immensely charismatic, and that is documented and also unsurprising. Many women of the Danu today are also very charismatic.

But they created the nation and, in doing so, they created the hierarchy and the positions and titles which made them royal.  And thus they are royalty.

And that is the story that the history books tell, and that is the story that I’m going to tell up here.

This is a follow-up to two weeks ago’s “TIR Talk” post – feel free to ask more questions on any of the Worldbuilding Wednesday posts! 

 

Worldbuilding Wednesday – the Aunt Family

Dec5

Last week I was taking questions on the Aunt Family and magic!  I got two.

Eseme asked: Much of their magic seems to be craft based, and involves imbuing magic in items. Does this only work on handmade objects?

I imagine if you were sitting at a mechanical knitting loom or fabric loom and putting all of your magic and will into it, you could probably imbue magic into its creation as well, but I think that’s not as easy — it takes more concentration & attention to the magic – than doing it the “old-fashioned” way. 

Imbuing an object that you haven’t made at all with magic – a trinket from the store – would require a lot more power, and thus would usually be part of some sort of ritual, generally involving several casters at once.

🍰 

@SamTTC on Twitter asked:  Is there any relationship between calorie cost to the caster relative to the energy output of a spell?

That’s a good question.  I’ve definitely done that in other settings – Fae Apoc, Tír na Cali for sure.

In Aunt Family, I’d say that there IS a relationship, but the ratio depends on the strength of the caster and the strength of the connections she has to pull on.

That is, the same spell and effect would take much more physical energy for a weak caster with no family (or family land) to draw on, than for one of the Aunts of a Family, especially if she was on family land – running a marathon vs. walking a mile, for a bit of an exaggeration. 

👩‍🌾

 

Meter Maid

Dec5

This story was written because Anke posted this toot and I had an idea. 

There’d been a time when Pat’s co-workers had snickered “meter maid” when Pat left for work, but that time – that had been before the city had managed to push through a very obscure translation of a caelo usque ad centrum and managed to make it stick by the sheer tenacity of the city’s lawyers.

Now – now Pat suited up, along with a brigade of other meter maids, grey ghosts, and they strapped onto their jet scooters.

Nobody parked illegally in the city anymore.  There’d been one case, a month ago.  The people nearby had physically moved the car out of the illegal spot and into a fountain several blocks away.  Nobody had listened to the illegal-parker’s complaints.

People fed the meters and the city allowed it, because someone was paying for that spot.  People went out of their way to park tidily.

And Pat and the grey ghosts jetted up into the sky, up out of the atmosphere, and into the parking spots around the asteroid belt and the city’s first space station.   It wasn’t a safe job, not with the Ih(oh)ill bombers still swooping down at seemingly random intervals to hit the stations or the miners, not with the Higun being, well, as Higun as possible in an attempt to counter rumors that them not attacking Earth was a sign of cowardice, not with some of the unknown aliens still trying to test out Earth’s strength on occasion instead of just ignoring their laws and, say, their parking regulations.

But when you could slap a parking ticket and a drive inhibitor on a Higun spacehopper and then very politely explain the city laws, when you dodged an Ih(oh)ill bomber and managed to hit it with an illegal-driving outside of accepted lanes ticket which came with not only the drive inhibitor but also an immediate impound order (self-reinforcing, of course, like the drive inhibitor), when you caught some alien equivalent of a teenager trying to park in the park (which would be “it is free space, no? Then free it should be for any activity.”) and slapped them with just a big enough fine to make them think about pranking some other city next time –

It still wasn’t a safe job, not by a very long shot.  But it was a fun job.

And Pat’s fellow officers saluted when the grey ghosts left and cheered when they came home, and that made it even more fun.

 

Want more?

 

Meter maid (and Wiktionary) and Grey Ghost.