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Magic Mondays: Magic in Tír na Cali

Magic in the Tír na Cali world is held almost entirely in the bloodlines of the royal family of California, and is more rightly called psychic powers than magic.

Every grey-eyed royal member of the family has one psychic power. Examples include telepathy, mind control, Love, teleportation, telekinis, and rapid healing, but many variations exist; while “families” of powers run in bloodlines, the specific manifestation of any given child, even within identical twins, is still very hard to predict.

Power level is thought to be determined by the strength of the royal blood in one, and this is often but not always accurate. Thus, royal women are often unwilling to carry the child of any but another royal.

Powers manifest in early teens, and with manifestation, begin a slowing of the aging process that continues through puberty; post-pubescence, empowered royals age immensely slowly, and the pubescent period itself is prolonged in royals.

A millenia ago, the powers of the Californian royalty’s ancestors – who were neither Californian nor royal at that time – could barely lift pennies or sway thoughts. Today, they can move tanks. Their powers are continually evolving and growing.

What tomorrow may bring is terrifying and wonderful.



This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/491654.html. You can comment here or there.

Magic Mondays: Magic in Stranded World

The Stranded World setting is named for the way the practitioners of magic there see their world (its working title was “Spaghetti Squash World.”)

In this world, people who have the talent and skill can see – and more rarely manipulate – the strands of matter and energy that connect everything in the world, and everyone.

Some people can directly alter the flow of the Strands (or, in very rare and heretical cases, sever those strands.  Others work through some sort of focus.

All but a very few, very powerful strand-workers are specialized.  Examples of specialization include:

  • Strand-smoothing (Order-creating) – these strand-manipulators pull tangles smooth, making problems work themselves out and creating calm. Winter.
  • Tanglers (Chaos-creating) – trickers incarnate, these strand-manipulators defy expectations and shatter stagnation. Spring
  • Connection-tracers – these sighters of the Strands do very little manipulation, but their vision and comprehension of the connecting strands is highly honed. Autumn. Spring’s Star-Mapper boyfriend.

For more on Strand-Workers, see this piece

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/473849.html. You can comment here or there.

Encyclopedia Draconis – A Summary of Sentient Hunters of Other Sentient Species in Dragons Next Door

From The Setting Piece Poll for the January Giraffe Call new Donor-New Prompter perks. Please vote, if you haven’t, to tie-break for 2nd place, as there will be a second piece.

Hunters

As long as there have been humans with spears, there have been hunters; nay, as long as there have been creatures on this planet, there have been hunters.

For many centuries, the various sentient races on this planet hunted each other with no consideration for the feelings or culture of the others; although it is nice in this modern age to pretend that it was, for instance, only humans doing the hunting, or only ogres, the truth is that there are, in the closets of all thinking races, skeletal remains of other thinking species.

The “hunters” we concern ourselves with in this article, however, are another sort indeed. They cannot, as our ancestors could, hide behind the shelter of ignorance or cultural bias, as flimsy a protection as those offer. Nay, those hunters work in the modern day, and they know exactly what it is they are doing.

Who are they? They come primarily from the medium-sized races, although there have been the occasional report of pixie hunters and one rumor of a dragon hunter. They are human, dweomer, elkin, harpy… and their reasons fall along a wide spectrum, but can generally be divided into the categories: the religious, the profiteering, and the sportsman.

The Religious
There are still sects of religion in almost every race’s temples that say that some other race, or, perhaps, all other races are apostate, evil, demons, minions of chaos, bringers of temptation. And there are knights, champions, sword-bearers, assassins for each of those religions, people of one stripe or another whose violence is sanctioned by their temple, whose life goal is to eliminate threats to their religious purity.

Of the three kinds of hunter, these are the most dangerous. These hunters cannot be bargained with, can rarely be reasoned with, and are very difficult to stop. In addition, they normally have the resources of a large organization behind them: not only are they well-armed and well-financed, but they are usually also well-educated on their targets.

The oft-misquoted “Fear the day you come against an honest man,” could be better phrased, in the world of hunters and hunted, as “Fear the day you come against a foe of faith.” They will kill you without a second’s hesitation nor a moment’s remorse.

The quote I was misquoting: From Here:

“…So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.” ~Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/287242.html. You can comment here or there.

Ask-the-Characters session: Audrey (Dragons next Door)

She left her apron at home; the woman who steps into the interview chamber is coiffed, trench-coated, and pretty; when she hangs up the coat and fedora to sit down, she looks like a 30’s screen siren. Blond-brown hair falls in perfect ringlets. A tea cup comes to hand, and she smiles at the audience over it.

“I hear you have questions of me?”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/257021.html. You can comment here or there.

Strand-Workers & Strand-Working Organizations, an excerpted article

This is the new-donoerperk from the December Giraffe Call, a setting piece on Stranded World

Strand-Workers and Strand-Working Organizations

by Ernesta Roundtree

It has been said – indeed, it was the way I was taught, and my late husband as well – that Strand-weaving is by nature a solitary occupation, and that those who can see and twist the Strands of life and existence do so on their own.

And, of course, there are many walks of life for which this is true, and many who can see or move Strands who spend their entire life doing so alone: if they are lucky, they are taught, and if they are wise, they teach another, but the time in between is spent alone, working small, single-person effects, having small and often selfish results.

But there is nothing inherently isolationist about the craft itself, and, while the organizations that exist today are nothing compared to the great Leagues and lodges, those that exist do great good (or, in some sad cases, great evil) within their spheres.

I will say nothing about the Order of the Linked Circles except that they exist, that that is not the name that they call themselves, and that they are very secretive. One of my children has met one person who claims to be of this Order, but I myself never have.

The Team I belonged to in my youth, with my husband, was a smaller, and, I believe, more informal, certainly less secretive group, closer to a motorcycle gang that happened to twist Strands than anything formal. We had, however, and still do have, an alliance with the Collegium Filorum, which is a small but world-wide organization.

The Collegium has three major missions:
1) To connect new Strand-weavers with teachers, so that they can not only learn best practices but share innovations.
2) To provide a network of weavers, so that, when an emergency occurs, a single weaver will know where to turn for help
and, in some people’s eyes most important,
3) To look for those who would cut the Strands, and stop them.

As far as I am aware, the Collegium is the only world-spanning organization of Strand-weavers still in existence, although small groups still exist, like our Team, around the world.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/242595.html. You can comment here or there.

Encyclopedia Draconis – A Survey of Reproduction Methods in Dragons Next Door – Dragons

This is the comment perk from the December Giraffe Call, a setting piece on Dragons next Door.

A Survey of Reproduction Methods

When humanity lived apart from the other sentient races of earth, and spent most of its time encountering creatures only on its particular branch of the evolutionary tree, the study of reproduction was a much simpler, more limited thing.

As the magical races, the hidden peoples, and the Secret Ones came out from the shadows and began interacting more and more frequently with humanity, in some situations living next door to them, shopping in the same places, and going to the same schools, human scientists became, as humans are wont to do, curious. Working with the scholars of many of the older races (once they discovered that many of these races had scholars, which took some time), the human leads at Johns Talbot University have begun this Survey of Reproduction Methods.

Part One: Dragons

Possibly the most interesting of the non-human reproduction methods, the dragons, dracon sapiens, have developed a system depending entirely on a second species.

This symbiotic relationship took a great deal of time to explain to scientists of Johns Talbot, who at first believed that the dragons they were speaking with were talking in euphemism – “the stork does it,” is, after all, too close to the human myth we tell our children.

Dragons are, it appears, mono-sexual; all dragons have the same reproductive equipment, both having the ability to lay an egg and the ability to lay the smaller fertilizing seed. It appears that, according to some fossil record recently found, there may have been a time when these two could combine on their own.

The dragons do not speak of such a time, nor do they know how it came to be that their seed and egg would not join on their own. However, the process of fertilization is very well known to them, and that, they are willing to speak of.

A bonded pair of dragons will agree to have a child. One of them will lay an egg, placing it in a specially-prepared bed of gravel (in nesting places outside of their ancestral lands, they will have this particular type and color (coral-red) gravel trucked in for their egg beds). The egg is about the size and shape of an emu egg, although the shell is very thin. The other will place a much smaller seed-egg in the same bed.

Left to their own devices, neither will ripen or join. But with the assistance of a creature they call a stork, which is about one and a half times the size of the storks normally known to humankind and only nominally similar in appearance, the two become one and ripen. The stork places both egg and seed in its brood pouch (similar to a seahorse’s), along with its own eggs. An enzyme in the eggshell reacts with an enzyme in the pouch, and both the stork’s eggs and the dragon’s come to maturity.

Needless to say, the dragons protect the storks fiercely, sheltering them and treating them as sacred animals. Woe to the predator who attacks one!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/239954.html. You can comment here or there.

Description of Genique

She’s a thin dark-haired woman that’s all points, looking a bit like this icon here, a bit like this image, but with dark eyes. Chocolate-brown eyes, dark-chocolate hair. Normally, it’s pulled back into a tidy updo; she wears it about half-way down her back.

In the Pirate ship, she’s wearing a one-piece jumpsuit, something like this – http://www.anchortex.com/products/Q300894 – or this http://shop.uniforms-etc.com/Transcon-Womens-CDC-Utility-Jumpsuit-508FBB-FCG.htm?categoryId=-1- only in a dark denim indigo. The suit is unbuttoned to mid-torso, over a rich red camisole (this, in red); the matching scarf is tied around her narrow waist.

She’s holding a pen, or a data pad (think tablet, nook, kindle)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/228771.html. You can comment here or there.

Encyclopedia Californica: The Modified Humanoid in Tir na Cali Culture

This is the comment perk from the October Giraffe Call, a setting piece on the Tir na Cali cat-people. For whom I really need their own icon.

The Modified Humanoid in Tir na Cali Culture

History

The trend toward today’s Modified Humanoid, or “Moddies,” began as a fad for cosmetically altered slaves in the early sixties.

The first on record were a set of three cat-girls, triplets who were modified to have pointed cat-like ears, tails with some mobility, and dental work to look like sharp, cat-like fangs. The trio belonged to the tycoon Madison Arthur, a man who took great pleasure in appearing as eccentric as possible.

Others soon followed, modified with ever-increasing skill from a small cadre of experienced cosmetic surgeons and the empowered, to look like everything from house pets – dog-girls and mouse-boys – to predators – crocodile-men and wolf-women – to the fantastic – dragon-beings and, once, a failed pair of centaurs.

These slaves, altered through a combination of internal power and surgery to appear in some way inhuman, were genetically and biologically still completely humanoid. Their brain chemistry was still entirely “normal,” and their children, when they were bred, were of course still humanoid. They were no stronger, no more aggressive, no quicker than a normal human, either, and thus the purpose of their modifications was entirely cosmetic.

The trend towards owning “moddies” came and went, as with any fad, and, as with the sad accessories of any fad, the modified slaves were left by the wayside when the trend passed. Some were consigned to fieldwork who have been pampered house slaves; a few lucky ones were modified further to suit the new trend, or returned to their “natural” state. With each surge of the trend, the technology, science, and skill of the innately powered modifiers became more refined, and with each surge, the modified humanoids looked more and more realistic.

The second true wave of modified humanoids have only recently come into existence; the first genetically modified humanoid was made known to the general public in 2002. There are, of course, rumors that the Agency had been working on these genetic changes for as long as a decade earlier, and the rumors of second-generation genetically altered beings seems to lend credence to this theory.

These modified humanoids, better described, perhaps, as “scientifically produced hybrid species” are created by manipulation at the genetic level. At this date, the only producer of said hybrids is the Agency; all known attempts to make genetic hybrids outside of the Agency’s labs have resulted in, at best, failure, and, at worse, death. As such, all such experiments are illegal, save on volunteer free subjects.

The hybrids produced by the Agency are to their predecessors what a real tiger is to a children’s drawing of one. While a well-modified cat-girl might ape the behaviors of a cat, and, in modern times, have catlike ears, tail, and sometimes whiskers and claws that move naturally and serve as part of her body, the Agency’s well-protected hybrid cat-humanoids have brain chemistry and behavior patterns that, in many ways, are more feline than human.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/181097.html. You can comment here or there.

Eep… worldbuilding. What do the Wild Tribes wear?

Okay. So, for the Anthropologist sub-series of the Planners’verse…

The narrator. I picture her original clothing a combination of a British explorer – thus and Evie from the 1st Mummy movie – thus, or dollies.

Her look is something like this girl and this girl (here).

Okay. That’s the easy part. Librarians wear robes, see icon. They have textile production, at least small-scale.

This is 300+ years after the “Conflict,” which, as I can picture it, is a massive economic meltdown leading to total social collapse. Enclaves of “civilization” exist, along with tribes who have gone back to a nomadic lifestyle, who distrust the Tower(s), the villages, etc.

So. What do the Wild Tribes wear?

Also, why hasn’t more technology reasserted itself? *why* is so much of the country still wild?

But more importantly right now, what do the Wild Tribes wear?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/116408.html. You can comment here or there.

IRL Planners

1) This contest is kind of fun… I could probably find a use for “Approximately 2000 calories per day for 375 days”… considering Weightwatchers, that’s almost 2 people x a year.

2) This TV Show, Doomsday Preppers, was a lot of fun.

Why don’t preppers ever stock clothes? Or razors?

(edited to change “why don’t they stock food?” to what I meant: “why don’t they stock CLOTHES?”)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/114723.html. You can comment here or there.