Alicornutopia

Someone with magic bond-severing or contract-nullification powers might be able to work as a more targeted Secret. Time manipulation per se seems unlikely to help but I might be convinced with more details.

Would it work on themselves, is the main question - would that fall under the same protections as "no hurting your master"?

The character in question explicitly has "永遠と須臾を操る程度の能力", lit. "a degree of power over the eternal and the instantaneous." It's not quite time manipulation, so much as a somewhat related power over "things that last forever" and "things that take no time." She's used it to make an Elixir of immortality that is roughly as absolute as torching, cause her home to remain in "the state of not being discovered" indefinitely until she broke it, and live a sort of 'second life' in the indivisible instants between seconds, Zeno's Paradox style. Possibly more relevantly, she also once used it to break a spell of imperishable night.

In this case, she would cause the "eternal binding" to become "instantaneous", skipping over the intervening "forever" and breaking its "eternity" or equivalently skipping to "the day after forever" in much the same way she ended the Imperishable Night Incident. An otherwise eternal food-binding would cease immediately; I'm not entirely sure what it would do to a name binding - possibly force all involved to forget her name? Or just bypass the magic entirely somehow... I think it'd reach for a logical ending if it had the option, though.

(It doesn't have to be a real I-mean-forever (I like that quote, I really like that quote, can you tell I like that quote?) eternity, either - the spell of imperishable night was meant to be forever but was already failing anyway and would've been gone in a few more hours anyway.)

I don't see any reasons why powers like that couldn't work reflexively, because they don't directly attack the master. (Vassals can e.g. get other people to harm their masters.)

Name binding is usually not permanent because it relies on memory so I don't think your character could affect it, but she could disintegrate a food binding, sounds like, maybe.

Alicorn wrote:I don't see any reasons why powers like that couldn't work reflexively, because they don't directly attack the master. (Vassals can e.g. get other people to harm their masters.)

Name binding is usually not permanent because it relies on memory so I don't think your character could affect it, but she could disintegrate a food binding, sounds like, maybe.

Ah, I see. Then yeah, if the bond won't defend itself then Rule Breaker and whatnot should work.

And yeah, that makes sense. Ironically that actually means she'd be safer from the Queen than everybody else, because the Queen can't forget her name. (If I alted her in as a fairy, anyway.)

Well, I wouldn't put affecting something that was merely extremely long-lived past her if she was really pushed... there's precedent, like for the eternal night thing, which was never going to last forever even if the magic was aimed at pushing it as far as it would go. But then, Touhou characters are infamously mythologically nonspecific in their power levels, so that one's up to plot.

The Queen's ability is not unusual memory or related thereto, particularly. She just has names available for fairies whenever she needs them. I don't think the described power could meaningfully remove fairies from her service unless it was used to directly end her eternal lifespan or something.

Alicorn wrote:The Queen's ability is not unusual memory or related thereto, particularly. She just has names available for fairies whenever she needs them. I don't think the described power could meaningfully remove fairies from her service unless it was used to directly end her eternal lifespan or something.

Well, it's more - all of Touhou's abilities are conceptual. They don't really care about the mechanics, they care about whatever you're using them on.

So in this case, even if the particular vassal-bond is finite in length, the fact that a particular fairy is bonded to the Queen is still as eternal as the Queen, and that's just as valid a target. Like, for that matter, if there was no magic backing up the orders but there was some social construct that placed all fairies eternally at a lower caste from the Queen, that would be a valid target too, though fiddling with that would probably necessarily involve implicit mind control.

(Er. Touhou is the name of the source canon, FYI. The character in question is named Houraisan Kaguya. If you know anything about Japanese myth, she's intended to be the same Kaguya-hime that was raised by bamboo cutters and came from the moon.)

How/Why did you guys decide to make Elspeth adopt Harley? Were there any substantial talk about other templates adopting the baby joker?

I don't remember, but once we came up with the idea of it being Elspeth this just seemed to work.

Sometimes Mommies or Daddies marrying other people having other kinds kids like Elspeth or the forest princess kids or the -" handwave "ones with that one guy or whatever.

Who is "that one guy or whatever"? All I can think of is Ripper but he and Pattern don't have kids yet, right?

From skimming the rollcall, it does look like Pattern and Golden are the only pealed Bell with a unique romantic partner.

(I went here wondering the same thing and hoping somebody had already answered that question, but it looks like I needed to do it myself)