Supplemental worldbuilding questions

[Alicorn]

Social experiments are safer (especially if you don't try to draw a general inference about anything vast and universey like ~human nature~), although the same general principle of caution makes them unpopular.

[DanielH]

I don’t know if this is explicitly the case in Tales of MU, but it seems like you are just assuming that magic in Materia works exactly like in D&D. If that is the case, has Aether just never heard of Scholar’s Touch, or does it not exist? That seems like an even better birthday present than the super jump and like it would be useful for her in particular, and I can’t see her not learning it.

[Ezra]

Meaning she should have learned it along with her other spells, if it exists, and so she should have it available without further research? I think she's already shared all her pre-research spells with him, so they're not very good gifts.

If you mean she should research it, I don't think she has a way of researching already-existing spells, and I don't think her wizardry is far enough along to invent Scholar's Touch from scratch.

[Alicorn]

I resort to D&D when I don't have solid Materia canon or something else I super wanna do. It's *thematically* right, *mostly*. It's not exact, and I have declared (for canon-based reasons) that the "specific spells" distinction breaks down at higher levels (she's not gonna learn "Wish").

Also I have a lot of D&D ebooks but it's wayyyyy easier to just use the SRD so I'm being lazy on the assumption that soon I won't be using canon spell references hardly at all. Scholar's Touch is not in the SRD, so I didn't put it on her starting spell list (remember, too, she was not an arcanist at home, she was a subtle artist with a very bog standard high school curriculum of arcana).

[DanielH]

My thinking is that if she had heard of it at home, and had heard that it was a very easy spell, she would have learned it. Presumably that would mean it wouldn’t make a good present, as Ezra points out, but it would still have come up. I suppose it makes sense to make an equivalence between “not in SRD” and “obscure” so that she might not have learned about the spell in the first place.

If it does exist in Materia, then I have Things to say about their education system. Scholar’s Touch is a more important spell for a collegebound highschool student than Dancing Lights.

[Lambda]

I imagine Scholar's Touch would be less generally useful in Materia due to copyright-protection wards on commercial books. (I don't actually know that such wards exist, but it seems broadly like the kind of thing that would.)

[DanielH]

Probably something like that would, yeah. And, based on the US educational system, they would probably apply to textbooks and even some reprints of out-of-copyright books. So, yeah, maybe it wouldn’t be that useful. But that just means I have other Things to say about the educational system of Materia.

[DanielH]

Did the Tesseract give Loki the full sorcerous alphabet or only the parts relevant to movement or location in some way? It seems like it did the latter; does it do much else unrelated to Space?

[Alicorn]

It's the whole alphabet; illusions and healing and stuff would be a major stretch to call Space Stuff.

My take on the infinity stones is that you can use any of them for any small-minded application and they all know tons of stuff (so: mind stone lasers if you're Vision, sorcerous alphabet) but if you're going to do big dramatic things you need the right one for the job.

[Timepoof]

What are infinity stones? What's Vision?