Threefold (help I accidentally a setting)

[Kappa]

No. :P

[Kappa]

History talk!

So a while ago (~1500 years?) there were some gods who slaughtered each other in a continent-sinking war. It only sunk the one continent, but the other two-ish continents on the planet were pretty shaken up, physically in some places, psychologically in others. There was an empire surrounded by a bunch of assorted kingdoms and city-states. It ate up a bunch of those, then fractured into multiple warring pieces, which continued to expand more aggressively and with more infighting, and then some of the pieces also broke up, and it was a huge mess and then this universe's Dorca came along and united the empire in a surprisingly short and comparatively bloodless campaign. He relinquished some of the most recent conquests, established sane formal relationships with them and all other remaining foreign polities, and settled in for a relatively peaceful reign until his death by old age. And of course he had a Yuri, the Yuri had a problem, the problem had an Ezar, the Ezar had a Serg...

...and the Ezar looked at family history and went "hmmm maybe we should be transitioning to a method of governance that's less of a crapshoot than hereditary dictatorship", and the Serg went "fuck that" and had him assassinated, thus completely and totally proving his point. The Serg then went on to messily conquer all those remaining foreign polities that had enjoyed a brief respite from looming imperial attention over the past century or so. He now rules the world, badly, and has for quite a while, because his mistress (the Ges) is a Wood mage and she's making him immortal. (The imperial family are not personally mages in this world I don't think. Maybe. I'll think about it.)

The local Vorkosigan alts were all killed in the scuffles following Ezar's assassination. The Miles was sixteen at the time. The Ges has a crush. She really wants to resurrect the Aral, but she'll settle for cloning the Miles and then creeping on the clone as Ges alts are wont to do.

[Kappa]

Magic stuff!

There's a bunch of assorted ongoing magical effects in the world. Stuff like fountains of youth and anything else in that weight class is probably the fault of some god or other, but there are minor artifacts created by Air, Fire, or Water mages, and minor hereditary magical properties running in various families that were put in place by assorted kinds of mage working on themselves or others as appropriate.

Metamagic as such is a God Thing, but any mage can have some effect on things other mages have done. An Air mage can break an artifact, a Light mage can lift a curse (or a blessing) from someone else, an Earth mage can lift a curse or blessing from themselves. To some extent you have to be more powerful than the mage who put it there; mages working on themselves have the least amount of trouble with this, mages working on other people have some, mages working on artifacts have the most.

[Eva]

Kappa. Kappa, I think your setting has produced a Lioncourt that aggressively befriends people.

What have you done to me, Kappa?

[Kappa]

<33333333333333 I love you Evenstar

[Eva]

Okay so here's how it goes.
- Lioncourt is a Wood mage.
- Lioncourt leans HEAVILY on the Earth side of their development.
- Lioncourt gets their ass kicked by the Light drawback because they are being Insufficiently Social.
- Lioncourt sighs heavily and resolves to MAKE FRIENDS because they need MORE POWER.
- ... Lioncourt "makes" friends because that's easier than being Actually Social.
- Hopefully this results in dolls and not Chelseaing. Probably a Rose template gets made. Hopefully they weren't a different person before.
- If they were a different person before then that person was probably a Soph and the elements work out right holy crap.
- Lioncourt probably abandons "making friends" when her experiments don't work and decides to do things the hard way.
- This is likely rather complicated by the "friends" she made.

[Kappa]

Haha oh dear

I mean if she has deep meaningful friendships with her Made Friends then that works out for her, but...

Also you only really need one deep friendship to avoid the Light drawback. You need more if you want to gain power that way, but one friendship that you don't fuck up or betray will do for keeping the drawback out of your hair.

[Ezra]

I'm still not clear on why clone Miles instead of Aral?

[Kappa]

When I want a Ges to clone a Miles, I make the Aral's remains irrecoverable somehow. Default is "died in a fire, burned to ash".

[Eva]

Haha oh dear

I mean if she has deep meaningful friendships with her Made Friends then that works out for her, but...

Also you only really need one deep friendship to avoid the Light drawback. You need more if you want to gain power that way, but one friendship that you don't fuck up or betray will do for keeping the drawback out of your hair.

Lioncourts aren't generally big on creating people who might contradict them, which usually rules out genuine friendship. Roses are really the only major exception, but they... Don't tend to work out too well.

(Also, Lioncourts really tend towards isolation. It's quite possible that the single deep friendship was that Lioncourt's Scarlet.)