Galatea

[pedromvilar]

Hmmm I'm gonna say only if they were around by the time the arcanist was interrupted so they can pick up the "thread" of magic being triggered there.

Also, hour-long incantations are probably not a thing because (as Kaede explains) there are diminishing returns in incantation complexity and I think they're mostly reached before the hour mark. There are probably some particularly complex spells that could be it, though.

[pedromvilar]

Things that can be done with metamancers and not without:

• Golems
• Floating cities
• Any extremes in spell/artefact construction (extreme long-livedness, extreme power, extreme number of targets...)

Things that cannot be done at all:

• Retroactive eidetic memories
• Pre- and post-cognition
• Any time shenanigans

[Ezra]

Permanent effects, with no human feeding them mana: cannot be done at all?

Resurrection: requires time shenanigans, ergo cannot be done at all?

[pedromvilar]

That is correct, these things are not possible with Galatea magic

[Ezra]

Kaede says (deep link!) "The only real limitation in what this world's kind of magic can do is mana, we don't really have things that are in principle impossible." I presume that's just from not having had enough mana to reach the limits.

[pedromvilar]

Yep

[Adelene]

Is there a limit to how much mana a metamancer can have, if they draw from multiple people? If so, how is that limit determined?

[DanielH]

Given the existence of the Northern Storm and that permanent effects aren’t allowed, I would imagine the answer is “no”.

Now that I’ve considered it, one of my top hypotheses regarding that is “somebody’s still feeding it for Reasons”.

[pedromvilar]

It depends on what kind of mana they're storing it as; there's no such thing as "metamancer mana," a metamancer can store mana in the form of enchanter mana, arcanist mana, elementalist mana, or otherworldly kinds if they can convert, and they're limited according to the kind. Arcanists and enchanters don't have a limit so if a meta's storing mana in those forms they don't have that either; elementalists have a mana limit per blessing but not a limited number of blessings, and a meta can convert mana from one blessing to another (or from arcanist/enchanter to elementalist).

Reason why the storm appeared in the first place

---

I don't remember if I mentioned this before but the reason the storm exists in the first place is that a meta from the northern continent put it up so no other metas there would go south and fuck things up like That One Metamancer did, and so humanity would have a shot at surviving. The north's population has since been extinguished. This does not of course answer the question of whether someone is currently feeding the storm or not.

[pedromvilar]

Thing metamancers can learn to do: figure out and manipulate metacausal stuff.

This is related to how they can turn a nonmage into a mage: metamancers can see "potential" magic of sorts. It's difficult to see because everyone has it and it blends in with their very existence, but some particularly metacausally relevant individuals (like, say, the story's protagonists, or anyone who's a template really) can make this little characteristic more obvious after enough staring, although this can easily get mixed up with and confused for otherworldly magic. Once the metamancer realises this bit exists they can use it to tell stuff like "these people are alts" and to manipulate some basic properties of a person, like turning them into a mage or even giving them metamancy, or perhaps attaching magic they don't natively have to them.

When the metamancer has learnt to recognise this potential magic bit, this continues to be significantly harder than manipulating any other kind of magic, taking several months to learn to do. Unlike non-idiosyncratic magic, it is impossible to generalise (even more so than Galatea magic), and each new individual they might want to attach magic to or manipulate in this way is a new several-month-long challenge.