Alicornutopia

Lurker asserts that if the setting has a her-compatable species, Lioncourt Making A Friend out of her is a thing that could happen. (The thing where part of what makes a species her-compatable is that other species question whether they're people is relevant, here.) Also possible: Making A Friend and it turning out to be a her.

I would read that thread.

I would write that thread, but Kappa would need to Be The Setting so... Three-person thread?

Or just wait 'till we've seen enough of the setting to run it ourselves, if Kappa's okay with that. *shrug*

Thinking about how exactly my various people would geomance. Since they'll *all* geomance if they get magic.

Arthur (assuming he's an Earth) does really large-scale geomancy. Raising castles-scale, possibly building entire cities if he's playing into its expectations pretty well. (He probably is, being who you need to be to solve the important problems and do right by your people is an Arthur trait.) Also stoneforging, both weapons and armor.

Suzy is a shapeshifting artist, and grows herself working wings. She probably ends up joining armies or something whenever there's a cause she likes and being a stone-armored angelic warrior.

Sam's aesthetics don't really approve of the choices he gets here. He will settle for doing really fast land-skating, being able to pass through earth and rock without a trace, and probably being a part-time burglar because why the hell not.

Theo is probably not going to be a good guy here. He doesn't like the arbitrariness of the magic, or that it inexplicably runs in families, and especially doesn't like that if he gets any powers they won't be ones that let him do anything about it. He'll do something with making restraints but never get much more because being a mage in this world is fundamentally dissonant to himself. He'll try to muscle himself into being a triple-element personality, but the best he'll ever manage is Water for a day or so at a time (and it wipes out everything but basic elemental kinesis while and after he's trying). He may try to propagandize a pair of weak-willed Light and Air mages into deitying with him with the goal of eliminating or fundamentally altering the mechanics of magic.

No nonhuman sapients except *maybe* if somebody deliberately made some, but I don't think anyone has in fact done that as of the "modern day" when Serg-alt rules the world.

The mechanics of magic decline to be altered. And you can't even eliminate magic by killing all the mages, because as long as there are sapient beings in this world, some of them will randomly be born mages sometimes. I suppose he could evacuate all the non-mages in the world to another universe, since if the world is populated entirely by mages, nearly all of their children will also be mages.

(Well, I shouldn't say the mechanics of magic completely decline to be altered... I'd have to decide about specific alterations on a case by case basis. But for the most part, someone trying to Change How Magic Itself Works is going to hit a wall of Nope.)

Yeah, I didn't think Theo was likely to succeed. But he is Going To Try, Dammit. (And probably while he does his powers would be the strongest they'd ever been. Which would of course frustrate him to no end.)

Would he evacuate all the non-mages to another universe to balance things out, if that solution presented itself?

(It would be less tidy than it might appear - I'm not sure you can tell someone's mage potential until it manifests or doesn't, so anyone under twenty who's not yet a mage could go either way, and some people a little over twenty might be late-bloomers.)

It depends how frustrated he'd gotten by then. If he's already exhausted his first few attempts and gotten to the 'find pliable people to pressure into letting him deity', this is almost certainly a Theo embedded firmly in his deeply unhealthy mindset. Combine that with the general instability of deities, and unless the evacuation solution presents itself fairly quickly while he's discovering that the rules can't be changed, he's likely to start genociding mages before it occurs to him to try. (The slaughter is not something that would strengthen his powers, since it is sort of self-determination-y but is very much lack of self-mastery. On the other hand it also is not dissonant or unnatural, nor is it a misunderstanding of who he is, so that's fun.)

Most of my characters can come in 'villain' if pushed the right way, but Theo can most easily go full Knight Templar (memetic warning: TvTropes).

Genociding mages won't even help! They will continue to be randomly born! XD