Elcenia Spoilers

[Alicorn]

Mallyn has a photographic memory and he is very motivated and has spent his life very starved for mental stimulation. Rejiggering the dates would also be a disaster, so I'm calling it Mallyn Has A Photographic Memory Handwave Handwave. Kenar visits too often to just slide things; it's important to have them onscreen the first time they encounter each other.

Mallyn forgot that she had a boyfriend. It's not like she wrote it down.

[DanielH]

I have a few other things which I will PM you shortly (as soon as I find my list).

[Alicorn]

PMs on this forum are not a good way to get my attention. Please use email, IM, public forum posts, Tumblr asks, or Twitter @s before resorting to them.

[DanielH]

Oh, ok. I’m posting what I have here, then. Most of these are minor things on the order of wording or other small changes.

• Siaddaki 5: They fly west at sunset towards the edge of the world. While there, the sun sets behind them, and the sky they see over the edge gets bluer. This seems to imply they were at the east edge of the world (or that it was an odd translation choice to name their direction “west”). Given Esmaar’s location and the fact that having the sun in your eyes is probably bad, I’m not sure how to fix this (either moving the scene to sunrise or having them teleport near the eastern edge of the world first seem unreasonable given the situation).
• Siaddaki 5: When Mallyn decides to work more efficiently, “If he learned more words one day than the next… if Cenem said he had a better accent one week than the next”, he took this to mean he was making positive changes. If you do better one week than the next week, whatever you changed between the two weeks makes things worse.
• If I remember correctly, Silver is done. If so, then you probably want to fix the last page having “next” and “last” buttons; if not, you probably want to add a “forthcoming” to the TOC.

Also, I was apparently keeping questions in that list too. Here they are:

• Hhikiiias translate everything into Vampire. Are they able to work on written or recorded Draconic? It’s supposed to be untranslatable by magic, but offworld magic (including Barashin gods) handles it fine so that might just be wizardry which has trouble.
• I assume dragonishes have access to Lojban and Esperanto; at what point do conlangs become understandable to them? What about ciphers (such as letter-substitution, or Kiri (Ardelay)’s notebooking) or more complex codes? Can they do made-up words right away, or do they need to pass some threshold into becoming real words (if they aren’t obvious to a native speaker). For an example of what I mean by the last, you probably can’t understand what I mean by the word “adson” in “Mallyn is Ehail’s adson”, even if the sentence itself is a clue, until I tell you I coined it to mean “adopted son”. Would a dragonish understand that without the explanation? I have similar questions about any other panlinguism you control: Barashin gods, Bar/Milliways translation, HHikiiias translating to vampire, etc. Basically, all the same questions Spring asked about Rae in Incandescence, as appropriate for the various types of panlinguism.
• How does lighthood interact with vampirism? Leekath implied that vampire lights are not harmed by sunlight in Blood 34, but that was only in passing and didn’t have any details. How would it interact with other kinds of vampirism from across the multiverse? My first guess is that Elcenian vampire lights are not harmed by sunlight in either form and can absorb it in either form, while lights who become Sunny vampires would be screwed (without a Gem of Amara, etc).
• Can people have Voyen number CCs, or is it only pulls? If they can, how does that affect CCs now being a transferable commodity?
• Has word gotten out generally that CCs are a (theoretically or practically) transferable commodity? If so, what are the common views among Sand Dusk Chanters about this, or for that matter Rhysel’s view? If not, what does it say in Talyn’s file mentioned in the beginning of Blood 21?

[Alicorn]

Oof. Fixed, fixed, fixed, thanks.

Leekath can understand written Draconic that is on hearable objects.

I have no reason to identify a specific point at which conlangs become available. You're probably correct about Lojban and Esperanto. They don't do things designed to be codes at any point. Non-obvious neologisms are not transparent unless at least several people have them in working vocabulary. I actually parsed "adson" with the example alone, but in the case of similar examples, yeah, idiosyncratic/idiolectic abbreviations and portmanteaus and so on are not more permeable to dragons than they are to native nondragonish speakers of the language. None of the other listed things do better at this task (except maybe Pantheon gods, but consult Aestrix on that).

Vampires can be lights. They work as normal for lights (they photosynthesize and don't burn in the sun, they need more water, they can make balls of sparks and heal). Lights in general need to be exposed to direct sunlight at least once before they'd normally activate in order to activate properly; without that they can't make the sparks, but still do the photosynthesis and extra water intake things. It is customary to check baby vampires for this even though it burns most of the kids they test, because otherwise you wind up with a broken light some of the time and that's sad. Bat-shape fur and pigment substantially protects from the sun, and would not be favored for photosynthesizing in. I think I'd probably have lighthood fail to coexist with Sunnyvampitude at all - turn, wake up, no light powers of any kind. I'd let a Twivamp keep it, which would be nice for them.

I don't remember if I've ruled anywhere on Voyan number CCs.

Word is not quite public on that yet. Sand Dusk Chanters are in general quite progressive on that sort of thing, though. Rhysel has no particularly strong opinion except to be concerned about people being exploited for their CCs. Wizard school student files all include CC so teachers know what to expect in terms of sting and capacity limit from their students; I don't specify whether his has an explanation attached.

[DanielH]

You already consulted Aestrix on that (in Incandescence, via Spring and Idania); they borrow the understanding of the person saying things. This makes them harder to lie to, but allows them to understand gibberish you say if you ascribe it meaning; I don’t know how this would translate to writing or to more complex codes, but they could definitely understand “adson” even if they didn’t know the relationships involved. The details were close enough to mindreading as to give Spring pause, although obviously it wasn’t enough mindreading to make her want to stay in Milliways or try her luck going back into the magic.

[jalapeno_dude]

Okay, here's something non-plot-related. Siaddaki Ch. 8 is broken (i.e. displays poorly) on mobile devices. The problem is that default html won't break lines in the middle of words, and that forces every line in the chapter (or in the whole story, if it's all on one page) to be at least as long as "Sashparkphyrnarelprathdennadninkalinnsemiserizeler". I am not an HTML expert, but it looks like you can fix this by using either a css style or inserting ­ (a "soft hyphen") in the middle of long words where you want them to break. See here and here. I suspect this is also a problem in Summons where Keo's full name is given, etc., but I read the MOBI version of that and so didn't have to deal with it.

[Alicorn]

I'll go put some shys in Sashpark's name.

[jalapeno_dude]

Yep, that did it. Thanks!

[jalapeno_dude]

Questions prompted by Siaddaki Ch. 12 (oh no, I'm getting close to the in-progress point...):

-The number read spell displays a number in the air. What number system does that use? That of your first language? If you know multiple languages with multiple number systems, can you change the number system you see the numbers in? If so, how? Presumably not via either gesture or word, since then it'd be a different spell, so is it some mental component? What if the caster is innumerate?
-Speaking of languages: I think it's been stated that Draconic has a written form. Is it innate, or do dragons have to learn to read? (I'm trying to decide why the former seems weirder to me than being able to speak a language in the first place. I think it's because I didn't have to make a conscious effort to learn to speak my native language, but I did have to learn to read.)
-Gestures seem to be discovered, not created (this is stated somewhere in Blood, I think). If this is the case, why are they in base 10? (I can imagine Kaylo flipping out about this...)
-The text states that they have to learn 18 gestures in total to get up to 100 units. This should be 19 (1 through 10 is ten, 20 through 90 is eight, 100 is the last).