"It may be relevant to mention that one of Ealasiva's blessings is enhanced memory," she says. Although that alone does not explain how good she is getting at this game, or how quickly.
Oooh
Eala might not exist in Pantheon, but I wonder if it is worth searching for a God with memory blessings and "bribing" them to get one.
Sorry for my bad english
"Yambe Akka take the stars, they’re zombies!" - Isabella Amariah
Having just read Golden Knife, I now want to put a Rayne in this setting, because Raynes have exactly one favourite person and having one obliged to tell all his secrets to the attached Kingfisher amuses me. Except I don't think Raynes guilt. What happens to somebody who doesn't guilt?
I imagine that even if they don't feel guilt, their brains are still capable of it. Actually, inexperience with the feeling might actually make it that much more unpleasant since they wouldn't really have a tolerance for it built up. And even if their brains in and of themselves aren't capable of it, that's probably not the kind of thing magic cares about.
Now I have the mental image of a Rayne saying "nah don't worry, I'm gaming the system, I don't even feel guilty about things," touching the horn expecting to just get the power with no drawbacks, and getting completely floored by horrible unfamiliar brainfeelings while his Kingfisher laughs his ass off nearby.
Their brains might be capable of it, but I'm not sure their minds are...
Under ordinary circumstances, guilt is not a state a Rayne can occupy. There are no paths that lead to it. And even the approximation that sometimes serves for Jokers - intense empathy for someone's suffering, without the self-blame component - doesn't work for Raynes, because they don't have very many natural paths to empathy either and the ones they have are kind of idiosyncratic and don't generalize well.
So I see it going one of two ways, if somebody magically forces a Rayne's mind into this unnatural state.
The first and less interesting one, I'll call "guilt asymbolia" by analogy to "pain asymbolia". The foreign emotion appears, but it makes so little sense that it doesn't even come off as unpleasant, just unfamiliar. The Rayne fails to comprehend what everyone else thinks is so bad about it.
The second, more interesting one is that maybe it does come off as unpleasant - but the self-blame component is still missing. So the state of magically enforced guilt is something like, "[Thing I'm being made to feel guilty about] is the case, and also, I am suffering intensely." They'd almost certainly guess that this was the result of some outside force even if they didn't know about it beforehand, and if nobody clued them in they would have some trouble figuring out what to change in order to get the suffering to go away, because they would lack the automatically felt connection between guilt and the source of guilt. They could figure it out, but it would take figuring - consciously noticing the correlation between the thought of [thing] and the mysterious alien emotion.
In the case of a tracker Rayne experiencing option two, of course he'd immediately know what was going on, but he'd get no help from his internal feelings in determining the exact boundaries of the problem. And lacking that direct impetus, I imagine he'd have a hard time really digging up and straightforwardly divulging all those secrets - even though Raynes don't even have anything resembling a principled objection to telling their Kingfishers ~*~everything~*~ (just individual practical objections on the level of "if Robin knew the half of what I'm really like when I'm alone with Trouble, she'd probably want to shoot me with alien death rays" or "letting Ripper know I'm still alive would defeat the entire purpose of this fake-my-own-death plot").
Yeah, the latter is pretty much what I was thinking. "Holy shit this is AWFUL how do I get it out of my brain immediately, do other people seriously feel like this even when they're not being tortured by horrible magical artifacts?"
I like this new setting very much and want to read more things set in it!
Kappa: what sort of circumstances would lead a Rayne to becoming a tracker? What would the local Kingfisher get up to? Which stage of life would they be in?
Alicorn/Aestrix: is there going to be a worldbuilding info thread for the new setting? I want to know about All The Artifacts and also All The History :D
