Alicornutopia

DanielH wrote:The changes definitely helped, but I was still not clear exactly what it was. It seemed more like he was taking charge in an emergency (where you are supposed to tell individual people what to do, like him telling Sadde to go flag down the ambulance and undo the change). He was also faking at the time in a way Sadde knew about, for the benefit of the paramedics. I would not have been as put off as Sadde was about his behavior; I would have attributed it (not quite correctly) to some combination of the two of those.

Chalk it off to Sadde being more perceptive or something, and us not being good enough writers to pull off describing the changes in enough detail.

DanielH wrote:I am surprised about your saying “She won't die yet.”, but I’d already figured that the last word of that was important before you said it. Was Sadde just not aware enough for that to apply?

Some of that, and it'd feel a bit too gratuitous for her to die as soon as she appeared for the first time (with a face, even!) I want to make her death more... inevitable? In a way? And there are other much more horrific cards than The Sword.

Ezra wrote:Oh nooo, is Jackson going to magic school for an M.R.S.?

M.R.S.?

DanielH wrote:2. The changes definitely helped, but I was still not clear exactly what it was. It seemed more like he was taking charge in an emergency (where you are supposed to tell individual people what to do, like him telling Sadde to go flag down the ambulance and undo the change). He was also faking at the time in a way Sadde knew about, for the benefit of the paramedics. I would not have been as put off as Sadde was about his behavior; I would have attributed it (not quite correctly) to some combination of the two of those.

He was taking charge in an emergency, but it's weird, because he probably wouldn't typically do that. The fake panic for the paramedics probably confused it somewhat, and it was obviously fake to Sadde, but only because it was such a sudden change from 'calm and collected' to 'hyperventilating', and because it's not within his standard range of emotions. He was (in story) convincingly pulling it off, because no-one that the behaviour was targeted at could say 'you don't normally act like that when you're panicking' – the paramedics don't know what he's normally like when he's panicking. It was really different from his normal behaviour, but that was intentional so he could be more convincingly panicky.

Later, at the hospital, he was trying to do a convincing 'normal' Theo instead, and he was failing to convincingly act like a regular Theo who is okay to someone that knew him well, because of the small things associated with how he typically displays each of the emotions; he's still mostly acting like a person displaying those emotions, but he's not acting like Theo. It's like an actor who's trying to play a person who's 'upset', and then you compare that to the reactions of the actual person who they're pretending to be; unless the actor has studied the person really in-depth, they're not going to act the same, though the actor will act within typical boundaries for a regular person who's feeling that emotion. That's the main thing, and I guess I didn't place enough emphasis on it.

pedromvilar wrote:

Ezra wrote:Oh nooo, is Jackson going to magic school for an M.R.S.?

M.R.S.?

It's a reference to an old joke. You'd say a woman was going to college for an M.R.S. degree if she was mostly going there to find someone to marry (and thus become a Mrs. Whoever.)

Of schools you can go to for an M.R.S., Selene is not a bad choice. They don't, I remind you, actually teach magic; nor is Jackson paying through the nose for tuition because they're willing to gamble almost entirely on his possible status as a future generous alumnus. You do magic on your own time and Selene helps by being a supportive environment that will let you get a high school diploma at whatever age is suited to your eclipse schedule and learning pace, without eating all your time that you need for working on magic. And you can reasonably assume anyone there will be able to get a well-paying job sooner or later.

An M.R.S. is a joke degree ("Mrs.") imputed to be the goal of (especially) women attending college with the express goal of finding a collegiate husband.

Okay, yeah, he's actually at a pretty good school for it. But he's going about it so, so wrong!

I'm surprised how easily Sadde got a library job. I'm used to those being way oversubscribed. Maybe they're less so at a school with no tuition.

These are also high school age students. Selene is structured a lot like a college but it doesn't filter nearly as heavily as even a community college does for academic interest.

Since Cam and his translator (in where you think you're going) don’t know how to ask this, and the aliens probably don’t know how to answer:

Why is purity good and filth bad? Is the contagion just literally the ability to become Winged?

Why are there purity keepers on so many planets? Are there other impurities?

The aliens are intensely xenophobic. It is a fundamental moral outrage that intelligent life not of their species exists. But it is not literally their only moral principle.

They used to be much less stringent about killing anyone who associates with the filth creatures of Earth, except that the people who went into the Sphere-maze early on kept coming back and sprouting unprecedented limbs that linked them to the filth creatures, and they had to kill not only those people but also all their friends and in some cases all of the friends of their friends before the problem was properly contained. (The ability to become winged is in fact contagious.)

On planets other than Earth, one of the main jobs of the purity-keepers is making sure that everyone agrees with the moral law. By killing dissenters for their impurity, naturally.

The obvious solution from my perspective is to declare the Spheres human territory, the main universe sans the Solar system alien territory, and the Solar system itself probay something neither side will compromise on so de facto battleground.

Also, it seems like Cam’s original summoner died of suicide? Am I reading the lack-of-narration properly? I don't think so.

Edit: I was; you clarified it after I started this post. What needs to be checked about his Sphere?