Questions about Visitor

[DanielH]

Of course, but I was imagining there might be times when you and a coauthor disagreed on what an exact wording meant, or you disagreed on the presence of a loophole, or something.

[Alicorn]

In those cases what's happening tends to be "we edit the wording till we agree or do whatever's plotty".

[DanielH]

If a random fairy were to pick a haw from Promise’s tree and hand-feed it to a mortal, I assume that the mortal would become the vassal of both that fairy and Promise even though hand-feeding is usually safe? Could they feed it to one of their masters assuming that master had no vassal relation with Promise?

Does one fairy hand-feeding another fairy vassalize them if there’s nothing special about the food, or does the fairy food usually being safe heuristic win there?

[Alicorn]

Hand-feeding overrides even the haw. Might not override a berrybush.

Fairy food is usually safe for fairies even if handfed.

[AndaisQ]

How does plainspeaking handle magical languages? Specifically I'm thinking of the Correspondence from Fallen London, which is partly expressed through light and flame when spoken, can be used as a weapon, and when written down violently combusts and causes physical and mental damage to those who read it. Naively I'd think that fairies could understand it, couldn't speak it (or couldn't weaponize it at least), couldn't write it without the same letter-tracing workarounds as for other languages, and wouldn't suffer damage from reading it; thoughts?

(Same question goes for dragons, if I shouldn't just make a separate post in the Elcenia discussion thread.)

[DanielH]

I would expect them to be hurt by reading it, depending on details of how the language hurts you, but obviously not to the point of death.

Don’t tell a Daevinity Earth about the language or they’ll have to gag all daeva

[Alicorn]

I am not familiar with the Correspondence but I think fairies would interpret that as code, not a language (that is to say, even more of a code than they already find language). They'd probably suffer damage from reading it as normal.

Plainspeaking interacts fine with Draconic. Fairy speaks plain, dragon hears Draconic, dragon speaks Draconic, fairy hears "you know, words, why is this so interesting, it's all just words". Draconic is magical but not, like, imperturbable.

[pedromvilar]

I think he meant to ask how Draconic and magic languages like Correspondence interact, not plain + Draconic?

[DanielH]

Could a fairy who was interested in these weird codes mortals use in place of just plain words learn the Speech?

[Alicorn]

Draconic doesn't crack code either.

Fairies can learn languages if they like.