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shanastoryteller · 7 years

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the gifts of beauty and song

ok so i think maleficent did a great job of giving us a different kind of sleeping beauty story but here’s another one

what if the three faeries were the dark ones

what if maleficent had been the good faerie all along

fae are all about illusion, about misdirection, about doing one thing and being another. it makes sense that the adorable and seemingly kind faeries would be the bad ones, and the one shrouded and darkness and cruelty would be the one trying to do some good.

“you will be gifted with beauty” says flora, but what is beautiful to the fae is often horrific to everyone else. beauty to the fae is coldness, darkness, it’s emotionless and ruthless and power. it has almost nothing to do with a pretty face.

“you will be gifted with song,” says fauna, but that means voice, pretty words, and oh, who doesn’t know what tangled webs the fae weave with their words, the traps they leave, the same way they’re doing it right now

then maleficent arrives - and she’s too late. the young princess has already been cursed. she’ll grow now not into a young woman, but a young fae. a mercurial being, not someone fit to lead the land of men. so she does what she must. maleficent is a good faerie, she can’t kill directly, so instead she curses the no-longer-human child, gives her a curse of death that will be complete when she pricks her finger on the needle of a spinning wheel. it’s indirect, but it’s the only way she knows to save this kingdom. then she leaves.

but the faeries will not be defeated so easily. so merryweather casts her own spell, alters maleficent’s just enough – she will fall into a deep sleep, one that can be broken by the most powerful magic this world knows: true love’s kiss.

the faeries aren’t worried. true love is an easy enough spell, they only need a suitable, malleable prince to cast it on when the time comes. foolish mortal have been falling in love with beautiful fae since the dawn of time, and this will be no different.

the king announces all the spinning wheels are to either be burned or locked up in a secret room in the palace, and that the faeries will raise aurora in the woods, far away from spinning wheels and evil faeries.

this all works out even better than they could have hoped for. they get to raise aurora on their own, get to teach her the subtle arts of manipulation and misdirection out from under the eyes of the king and queen. aurora grows older, and more beautiful, more dangerous. the fae will have one of their own on the thrown of the mortal realm, will have a fae queen because aurora is more faerie than human now.

aurora isn’t a faerie though. not completely: she’s human enough to lie, to cheat, and steal – to throw off the shackles that hold back the rest of the fae and use her position as queen to tear down the world.

maleficent likes these humans, it’s why she spends so much time in their realm. they’re fun playthings. if the fae succeed at putting one of their own on the thrown, then the mortal realm will turn into something as twisted and cruel as the fae court. that’s not what maleficent wants – humans are twisted and broken, but in the same ways. she likes them how they are, and she wants them to stay that way.

so she steals away the young prince philip in the middle of the night, weaving a spell of sleep on him, and she goes to the forests, deep into them, slipping into the darkest shadows of the oldest trees. she goes to the elves, because they are one of few races who can’t be tricked by their magic, who know the sharp cleverness of their tongue, who know the worst and best of what faeries can be. she goes to the elf king and queen and offers them philip in exchange for an elven prince, one she can place back on the throne in the mortal realm.

“one mortal prince is not worth an elf prince,” says the king, “for the child, you may have a servant child.”

an elf child is pushed forward, and to an untrained eye he looks like all the others, but hers is not an untrained eye. he’s smaller than he should be, his clothes don’t sit as perfectly straight as the others do. but he has kind eyes, and that’s truly what she needs, more than royal blood. besides, she has nothing left to bargain with.

“very well,” she says, and hands the boy to the queen, who quirks an eyebrow but takes the boy agreeably enough. maleficent doesn’t know what they plan to do with the boy. she does not care – they won’t hurt him, but that’s as far as her knowledge extends. the elf child moves to her side, and she bows low before holding out her hand. the elf boy takes it, and they travel back to the mortal realm.

“your name is philip now,” she tells him, “you are a prince here.”

“yes ma’am,” he says, used to taking orders, and not used to being a prince. “what would you like me to do?”

she looks down at him, and he’s staring at her, patient and with those same soft eyes, and she says, “grow up. don’t be afraid. this is your realm now, and these are your people. do you understand?”

his eyebrows dip together, so she knows he doesn’t, but he says, “yes, ma’am.” that’s okay. he’s her only hope to save aurora, to save the world. he doesn’t need to know that.

so philip grows. he has a doting father and is trained to be a little prince, and that’s what he becomes. he grows up honest, and kind, and humble. he becomes a prince that no other elf could be, only someone who’s seen the crueler and harder side of life would know how important it is to strive to make the world just a little softer.

aurora is a young woman now. ethereally beautiful, manipulative and thoughtlessly cruel, just like her faerie guardians raised her to be. except she’s not all fae. she’s a human too, a young mortal girl that loves beautiful things and the warm rays of sunlight on her skin and the soft weight of a fox napping on her lap. one day she’s in the woods, trying to encourage an apple tree to grow. philip is there, having gotten separated from his hunting party and hopelessly lost, and he’s just thankful there are no other elves around to laugh at him. an elf! lost! in the woods!

except instead he bumps into aurora, and he can see under glamour effortlessly, isn’t even sure why she has one when she’s so beautiful underneath. “hello,” he says politely, because the elves considered faeries to be beneath them but his father raised him with manners. besides, she doesn’t feel quite like a fae.

and aurora looks at this handsome young man, not the first she’s seen, but the first she’s seen whom she likes, even if she can’t know why. he feels different, his presence in the air isn’t like the other mortal men she’s encountered. instead, he – he almost – he almost feels like her. like something that doesn’t belong, like something not quite normal and not quiet other, like they’re the answers to something but everyone forgot to tell them the question.

so they’re circling each other, intrigued by each other, and philip and aurora end up spending the day talking and playing and laughing and coaxing trees into growing and enticing woodland creatures to say hello and getting fish to bring them shiny rocks from the stream. all the things normal elvish and fae children get to do, but they never got a chance to because philip was a servant and aurora is a plaything for dark faeries who want her to become something twisted just like them.

and they meet, in secret, again and again. and philip peels away the layers of aurora’s cruelty and hardness, untangles all the bits of her that the faeries had tried so hard to twist together. aurora is still smart and manipulative and powerful – but the scales have tipped just enough, being with philip has healed her just enough so that she’s more human than fae.

philip and aurora fall in love, because of course they do, they’re two of a kind, different sides of the same coin, they don’t believe in destiny but they believe in each other.

philip tells his father he’s found the woman he wants to mary. aurora is whisked back to the castle, and her guardians tell her of their plan: aurora will return to her parents, and she will be named the heir, the crown princess. then the faeries will kill them, and aurora will become queen.

aurora doesn’t care about her parents. the person she was before meeting philip would have been all for this plan, or at least wouldn’t have minded. but now – she knows morality, she knows little girls shouldn’t go around killing the people that bore them. so she hatches a plan instead.

she pretends to go along with it, of course, pretends to be just as agreeable and despicable as always. the faeries are banking the success of their plan on aurora’s ability to lie. they forget that she can lie to them too.

iron can be used against fae, so she goes searching the castle for something she can take and use. she finds a locked room, and when she gets inside it’s filled with broken spinning wheels. she can’t begin to imagine why this room exists, but it doesn’t matter. she carefully goes through, gathering the needles from each wheel. she’ll only have one chance to do this. she has to get it right.

meanwhile, philip can’t find aurora. she’s not in the woods or the cottage, and he’s desperate. he begs the wind for help, knows that he’s not the sort of elf that the wind cares to listen to, but this is important, it’s a matter of love. and the wind helps him, guides him to the castle. it’s the day of aurora’s coronation as crown princess.

she’s prepared, she was up all night carefully weaving magic into the needles, the ones that she’s tucked into the sleeves of her dress. little girls probably shouldn’t be going around killing the beings that raised them either, but thanks to philip she knows the faeries that raised her are not good, that the things they made her do were not good, and she wishes she could feel bad about what she’s going to do, but she doesn’t.

she’s about to be coronated, the faeries by her side, when she spins, knocking the crown from her mother’s hands and onto the floor. she reaches inside and flings the needles with inhuman force. they embed themselves into the faeries, and aurora flings herself between the faeries and her parents, refusing to let harm come to them, because she doesn’t care but she knows she should, because she thinks that if philip was here he would want her to care.

and it’s a vicious fight, of magic and strength, but aurora is just as the faeries made her – powerful and beautiful and strong, and she wins.

the faeries lay dead and aurora turns to her people, the ones staring at her in fear, and she drops her glamour, reveals her blond hair and pink lips, and she almost looks the same, before she looked like something out of a nightmare, and now she looks like what she is – a princess, pretty and hard and broken but in love and with a heart that can learn to love even more than a lost prince with kind eyes. “they were dark faeries. i know it’s hard to tell the difference, but it’s true. they would have destroyed you,” she tells them, and her voice breaks, “just like they tried to destroy me. you are my people. i will protect you.”

and it’s been a long time since this realm has had a warrior princess, a warrior queen, but after a long moment of stunned silence they start cheering, and pressing forward, and aurora is smiling. her parents come forward, wanting to make sure she’s okay, wanting to make sure they’re foolish decision to entrust her to faeries hasn’t broken their only daughter.

aurora reaches out a hand. a single spindle needle falls from her sleeve. she reaches out to grab it and –

– it pricks her finger. she collapses instantly. everyone’s crowding around her, her parents are weeping, because she’s in a death-like sleep, because they were so close to having her back and they’ve lost her.

philip bursts through the doors, “aurora!”

he pushes to the front of the room, hands reaching for her. “philip?” the king asks, staring at the son of one of his best friends, at the boy who they’d arranged to marry his daughter.

“what happened to her?” he asks, hands hovering over her, but not wanting to touch and somehow make it worse. he glances at the dead faeries, “was it them? i knew they were hurting her, i knew it–”

“you know her?” the queen asks.

philip looks between them, and gathers his courage and admits, “i love her.”

the king and queen look at each other, then at him. “true love’s kiss will break the spell,” she says urgently, “please, you must try.”

philip stares, because true love’s kiss is a faeries spell, or a mortal miracle, but it has nothing to do with elvish servants and almost-fae princesses. but he loves her. so he must try.

he bends over, oh so carefully, and they’ve never kissed before, so he closes his eyes, and presses his lips to hers, soft and careful, just enough pressure to make sure it counts and not a bit more. he leans back, and they all wait.

aurora opens her eyes. “philip!” she cries, then: “you kissed me!”

“yes,” he says, even as her parents pull her up and hug her tight. “will you marry me?”

her parents let go and she flings herself into his arms, “yes!”

and the very confused audience for this coronation / murder / engagement starts clapping, because a royal wedding is something to be celebrated, and as confusing as the past couple hours have been, they’re at least clear on that.

aurora and philip stay in love and get married, officially uniting their two kingdoms. they’re are scarily well matched couple, and just and powerful and merciful rulers.

the day of their coronation as king and queen of their newly united land, maleficent stands at the back of the crowd and smiles.

read more of my retold fairytales here

#retold fairytales #my fic #long post #oh my god #this took forever to write its so long why does this always happen to me #sleeping beauty #aurora #disney #btw #human philip in the elf realm #he ends up marrying the elf prince #they're very happy together #the king despairs #the queen is like this is YOUR fault you're the one that keeps striking bargains for human children!!#anywho #i hope you liked it!

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sinrau · 4 years

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Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist and co-founder of Center for Human Technology, appears before Congress in “The Social Dilemma.” (Netflix)

Picture, if you will, a high-tech voodoo doll of you on a server somewhere. Probably more than one server.

While the makers of that reverse-engineered avatar might not be sticking literal pins into it, in “The Social Dilemma,” filmmaker Jeff Orlowski makes a fine case that in mining data from your onscreen interactions, they are constructing a predictive version of you and trying to prick your interests and put a spell on your attention in historically unprecedented ways. (“The Social Dilemma” began streaming on Netflix this week.)

The quotes Orlowski begins his wake-up call of a documentary with — and peppers throughout — aren’t easy to top. There’s Sophocles’ “Nothing vast enters the world of mortals without a curse.” And this from sci-fi giant Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And this wry quip from data-visualization guru Edward Tufte: “There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software.”

Yet, here’s one to add: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” It may not be as elegant as the others, but it represents the tone taken by the tech leaders interviewed by the Boulder-based director who investigated the extraordinary problems wrought by big-tech behemoths, particularly the ones that have entangled so many in the vast web of social media: Twitter, Facebook and Google.

Among the documentary’s smart and personable talking heads: Justin Rosenstein, co-inventor of Facebook’s “like” button; Tim Kendall, former president of Pinterest and former Facebook director of monetization; and Shoshana Zuboff, author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” (That book’s subtitle: “A Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.”)

Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, became notable for writing an early internal and legendary document questioning the addictive tendencies of smartphone tech. Think Jerry Maguire’s manifesto after his dark night of the soul. Harris caused a buzz and then, well, crickets. He went on to co-found the Center for Humane Technology, a non-profit promoting the ethics of consumer tech.

RELATED: Watch this very real Netflix doc about a man who welded himself inside a “killdozer” and destroyed half of Granby

These days, Silicon Valley is referred to in much the way we talk about Hollywood or Washington: It is a global economic force, a wielder of spectacular power, somehow exemplary, too, of some more honorable ideals. Orlowski went to one of its feeder schools.

“I was class of ’06 at Stanford. When we all graduated, that was (around) the birth of the iPhone and the birth of apps. So many of my closest friends went directly to Facebook, Google or Twitter. Multiple friends sold their companies to Twitter for exorbitant amounts of money,” Orlowski said on the phone before his film’s world premiere at January’s Sundance Film Festival.

The project came out of conversations with those friends “who were starting to talk about the problems with the big social media companies back in 2017, at the birth of the tech backlash that we’ve been seeing. Honestly, I’d heard nothing about it, knew nothing about it.”

So many of his creative, thoughtful friends were working in new tech that Orlowski wondered, “How’s it a problem?” A fan of long-form journalism, he set out to answer that question and a few others. “For me, this process was two years of being an investigative journalist. (Of doing) first-hand research with the people who make the technology and trying to understand what the hell is going on.”

Director Jeff Orlowski attends the World Premiere of “The Social Dilemma,” an official selection of the Documentary Premieres program at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. (Azikiwe Aboagye, provided by the Sundance Institute)

He is not alone in trying to wrap his brain — and ours — around that. Orlowski was among a cluster of storytellers at January’s Sundance Film Festival, posing timely questions about societal costs of seemingly free platforms — quandaries that have been reflected in a deluge of headlines about big tech’s role in our lives, in civil discourse, in democracy. (The film’s final cut includes a few recent images of news footage hinting at the rough tango between our lives and the Twittersphere around COVID-19.)

Two other high-profile projects that should prompt a rethink were Shalini Kantayya’s “Coded Bias,” about the MIT Media Lab, where research uncovered just how racially biased facial recognition software is. It’s a searing yet inspiring look at what happens when the people making tech’s design choices, and building its algorithms, create for people who look exactly like them. Co-directors and Karim Amer and Guvenc Ozel’s vivid virtual-reality living-room installation, “Persuasion Machines,” depicts with its jaw-dropping environment the data-mining excesses of a “smart home.”

There have always been concerns about the amount of private information that customers seem so willing to cede with little regard for security. But social media is proving itself a voracious beast. It’s less about identity theft than the potential for manipulation on a mass scale. Advances in AI and machine learning have added a special — arguably dystopian-courting — wrinkle.

It’s little surprise, then, that Orlowski is asking urgent questions. He’s forged a place in the documentary vanguard. He first made a splash when he trailed environmental photographer James Balog around Greenland, Iceland and Alaska. With stunning images, Balog documented the calving of ice shelves, the receding of glaciers, and Orlowski documented him.

The resultant work, “Chasing Ice” (2012), was gorgeous and chilling — in all the wrong ways. It was a different kind of climate change doc, not a screed but a nature film that made a compelling case that there are seismic — likely irreversible — changes afoot. It won an Emmy. (Traveling through Denver International Airport, you may have stopped to watch Balog’s mesmerizing time-lapse video for his Extreme Ice Survey work.)

Orlowski’s 2017 follow-up, “Chasing Coral,” won an Emmy for Best Nature Documentary.

“This is the beginning of a decade of films about technology and the consequences of technology,” Orlowski said of the company. “There’s so much at risk and so much at scale, the way technology is designed.”

In both “Chasing Ice” and “Chasing Coral,” he worked to make concepts starkly or strikingly visual. He faced a similar challenge with “The Social Dilemma. “We were trying to think of ways to show people what’s happening on the other side of their screens that’s invisible,” he said. “How do you show people something that is literally impossible to see? You can’t see what’s happening on the servers, right? You can’t even see the servers. But how are the algorithms designed and what are they doing that control 3 billion people?”

The number is not far off: According to German data-statistics tracking company Statista, there are currently 3.5 billion smartphone users.

For “The Social Dilemma,” Orlowski weaves a narrative tale about a multiracial family wrestling with the role of tech in their home. Think of it as a dramatization of concerns. The strategy evolved out of his own response to the news he was hearing from his Silicon Valley friends and their worries around the industry’s overreach.

“Because of the way they were describing it, every time I looked at my phone, I kept seeing a manipulative machine on the other side trying to puppeteer me. For the year I was on Facebook, I thought, ‘I’m being used.’ And it gave birth to this narrative storyline we figured out this way to interweave with the documentary.”

As a filmmaker, it was a chance to direct actors. Vincent Kartheiser of “Mad Men” plays the three-yammering embodiments of AI, dialing up the needs, nudging impulses and commanding the attention of Ben. Skyler Gisondo portrays the increasingly distracted high schooler. Helping create this intricate dance between the interviews and narrative was Oscar-winning editor Davis Coombe, a local filmmaking luminary. (He also co-wrote the doc with Orlowski and Vickie Curtis.)

“I really loved doing all that,” said Orlowski. “The writing, the shooting, the directing. All of the narrative stuff was really fun and brought, I hope, a different dimension.”

Ben and his family are intended to represent the ways many of us interact with the technology, not as designers but as Instagrammers and Tweeters, friends and over-sharers, TikTok-ing kids and their aggravated parents.

Of course, recanting can be a tricky thing. We admire people who see the flaws — even corruption — in a system and alert us to the dangers. But we can also be suspicious of their declarations. Indeed, there is an undercurrent of quiet hubris intermixed with the insider cautions of a number of Orlowski’s experts.

An intentionally witty moment comes early in the movie when, after a few of them have reflected on the unintended consequences of tech, and the sense that it was meant to help not harm. Although each had been a chatterbox of insights and perspectives, every one of them grows silent, looking for all the world stumped by the simple question that Orlowski asks: “So what’s the problem?” More than once, an interviewee reminds us that one of the tools to address the hyper-speed amassing of power and profit is rather old-school: regulation.

Even more illuminating than confessing their own addictions to email, or push notifications, or Twitter are the moments when these engineers, software designers, marketing whizzes share their own practices for themselves — or their family’s rules for their children — about social media.

“I’ve uninstalled a ton of apps from my phone that I felt were just wasting of my time … and I’ve turned off notifications,” said Rosenstein.

“Never accept a video recommended to you on YouTube. Always choose. That’s another way to fight,” said Jaron Lanier, one of tech’s most innovative minds turned most trenchant critics.

“We’re zealots about it. Crazy,” said Allen, asked about social media and his children. “We don’t let our kids have really any screen time.”

And perhaps the most timely advice: “Before you share, fact check,” said Renée DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. “If it seems like something designed to push your emotional buttons, it probably is.”

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, In The Know, to get entertainment news sent straight to your inbox.

A Boulder filmmaker’s new Netflix documentary will make you want to delete social media forever

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lilietsblog · 6 years

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some magic worldbuilding stuff we’ve been talking about

@synesthetic-feline

so let's start with the magic system bc its kind of the basis of everything else so first of all, there's a 'weave' of reality which is like elementary particles in physics except in a different 'dismension' (like sideways from those). It has a certain inherent stability to it, like a living system (sorta like a plant I guess? not an animal, much less anything sentient) it 'feeds' on life, positive emotions, constructive 'vibes' (various degrees of abstraction here, people in the world dont necessarily understand it in detail either) it gets more 'worn' from death, strong 'vibes' of despair, fear, hatred like, on a small scale, some negative emotions actually help it thrive, but when they overpower the positives bad shit happens

more specifically about Bad Shit, there's a 'neighbouring' hell-like dismension with demons. the philosophical implications of this do not exist nope it was just something i thought was cool for the plot. The demons feed on negative emotions, misery and death of people - all the same things that the weave gets damaged by. They arent happy in their home dismension, and really want to get some destroy on in the human one.

Human mages can 'move apart' the weave, creating openings demons can pass through (this is not the only thing they can do ofc this is just one example). Demons make deals with them, etc, etc. Demons' magic power varies a lot, and the summoners had better know what exactly they are going for, because there are lots and los of ways this can go wrong.

At one point in the story the protagonist discovers that there are actually demons just living undercover in the human world, not doing anything malicious, just low key feeding on the negative emotions they can pick up from others. Well, obviously some of them also do bad shit deliberately to make others suffer, but the smarter ones realize its not good for their long-term perspectives, and they don't really have to.

Anyway, if there's a lot of bad stuff happening - wars, particularly civil; epidemics; badly handled natural disasters; etc, basically just a lot of misery - the weave can wear thin, and demons can invade the human world, and have to be beaten back

This is relevant to start with because that's how the dynasty in the country the story is in started - the first ruler was someone who was in some way personally credited with defeating the demons (powerful mage and military commander I think). They got a nifty magic trinket - a crown - that gave them a certain power over the land, both symbolizing and providing protection for it. However, over the centuries the crown got corrupted pretty badly, along with the dynasty itself, that went from genuinely good people who happened to be rulers to... yeah.

Magic in this setting is an ability all people have inherent access to, to a greater or lesser degree. Talented folks can try to figure out magic on their own, but overall self-taught ppl can't compare to mages who actually receive a formal education. The standard system is master+student, but in various cultures different variations have sprung up. The main character comes from an entirely different overseas country where she was a daughter of a wealthy merchant who wanted to study magic, so her parents found her a teacher - a strong and learned mage who didn't mind taking on a student, especially when he was getting paid for it. Eventually he went overseas to join the rebellion, and master/student ties in magic tend to end up being close enough that she just followed him without question.

In this country the system was a 'tower' of mages, where they more or less got forcibly locked up and then pampered. Kids who showed talent for magic were scouted, torn away from their families and put into the tower, where they then got no freedom of movement but a lot of freedom of research and of course had all their needs provided for, as long as they carried out what orders their master (the king) decided to give. "No freedom of movement" of course only applied with the asterisk of "unless ordered by the king", with the asterisk being hella broad and allowing them to take on various official, semi-official and unofficial jobs. The king relied heavily on loyal mages as enforcers, which turned the local populace against them and reinforced their loyalty out of desperation. A bad mix of top-down horrible orders you couldn't refuse to carry out, and no consequences for lashing out at anyone who wasn't a government official, led to a lot of atrocities committed in the name of the king that he even didn't necessarily personally order.

Magic works basically by manipulating the 'weave', and requires energy. Some magic energy is generated by the mage themselves, the more they train this ability the more they get; some magic energy 'floats freely' generated by natural sources like life and emotions, and can be 'drawn in' by mages who know how to do that (all formally trained mages know how to do that, the question is duration and area, as ambient magic DOES become depleted). Some magic energy gathers into material stuff like ore or plants or water, which can then be gathered and used. Magic can be done purely with a thought, but the more complex the action you're trying to do, the harder it is to get it right, and words and gestures help a lot with 'fixing' it, like using a ruler while drawing. Objects can be enchanted, which isn't principally different from just generating a one-time effect, and depending on how they are made and what they are for can be single use, rechargeable, automatically recharge from ambient magic or owner, draw from owner's magic directly (bad design but hey people sometimes suck), or just have a permanent effect that doesn't 'use up' magic energy in any outside-visible way. Rituals, especially those involving pre-made magic objects, allow game-changing complexity and scale of spells. A mage who foresees trouble can, given enough time, fortify their personal laboratory/house/tower/keep absolutely out of proportion with their personal power. It's not impossible to break through / unravel such fortifications, but breaking through would require so ridiculously much force, looking for design flaws, inaccuracies and loopholes is a much more productive way of trying to hack it. That, or just trying to lure the mage outside - human factor is the weak point of any security system.

Whenever a magic action is performed, it 'leaks' some energy 'colored' by the effect it was made to do. The more harmless example would be a library that was daily illuminated by 'candle' spells for centuries eventually having faint ambient light even when no-one's there. The less harmless example can be more or less accurately compared with nuclear fallout. The amount of energy leaked depends on the degree of control an individual mage (or a group of mages; it's entirely possible to collaborate when doing magic, much like it's possible to collaborate on any other activity) has over what they're doing. Maybe comparable with how much paint gets on your hands, face, clothes and everything when you're painting. The bigger the spell, the harder it is to make it airtight; on the other hand, the smaller the spell, the less motivation there is to try hard to make it 'tight'. This can depend on an individual mage's style or skill, or on outside circumstances - an unexpected factor can make the process more messy than intended.

The social system of the land was more or less classic feudalism, eventually transitioning into absolute monarchy, as the mage-rulers took more and more power in their hands. Nobles stopped trying to give their children magic education, as it would just mean them getting whisked away to the tower (unless this was the intended result, which was also a thing that happened) (it was a whole Thing with some people, particularly poorer peasants, trying to develop magic so they can attract attention and get taken to the tower, and others desperately hiding their abilities/pursuits to avoid it) (obviously the mage searchers took bribes, though had to be careful to not get caught). Surrounding lands have some forms of feudalism too for the most part, though there's a lot of diversity there (I haven't worked out a lot of that). Neither native nor foreign nobility was particularly happy with how the king treated them; really, nobody was happy about anything he did, with rare exceptions mostly just confirming the rule.

It's hard to say when rebellion first started mounting; it's fair to say the king produced the rebellion himself by cranking down harder and harder on those who dared oppose him even a little bit. Overreactions and power trips of mages who wanted to feel superior to objectively freer people resulted in villages, towns and whole regions being wiped from the face of the earth, survivors banding together into either various rebellious movements or just bandit gangs. Rise of banditry led to more unrest, unrest led to prosecution, and so the wheel turned. Eventually, the very big majority of rebellious movements managed to unite under a single banner, with a group of charismatic leaders who were more or less agreed upon as the new rulers when the rebellion wins. Nobody really had the concept of democracy, the idea was changing dynasties.

Changing dynasties in this case was actually a more complicated thing than just toppling a government, because of the whole magic thing. As the country was a whole and single concept in the minds of the people, so the magic bent to actually make it so, and tie it to the crown/rulers. It's kind of complicated, because it's not purely 'whatever people think is true goes', but it is influenced heavily by people's 'mindscape' and also a dozen other factors that nobody keeps track of except particularly dedicated mage researchers... who in this country could be find exclusively in the tower. Rebel mages kind of had more immediate&important things to worry about, and even when someone thought about it, the thought was dismissed with 'let's take it one step at a time; it can't possibly get worse than it is right now' (see: nuclear fallout)

In the last phase of the war, the army + guard mostly switched over to the rebels' side, the problem being the king had long stopped relying on them. It was him and his mages vs everyone else, more or less, with civilian population just submitting to whoever was present.

The Big Final Confrontation was a big battle between the rebellion forces and the king. All people who were meant to evenatually rule the country were there, leading the troops, this being the only possible way people would actually follow them into what was very likely to be a suicide charge. On the other hand, a big layer of students / aides / next in commands was left out of the battle entirely as backup. This proved a wise decision as the battle did in fact end with a suicide attack - the king managed to set up a spell that would destroy the entire rebellion army, and the best the rebellion mages could do was disrupt it so it would detonate, destroying the king himself and his not-very-big-in-size army, AND a huge chunk of rebellion forces that were closer to them, including the mages themselves.

This left the victorious army basically without leadership, and the factually-kids left behind had to quickly figure out what to do. The reason the protagonist ended up in charge was just because she was the one to start telling disoriented others what to do now. She was just an apprentice mage, she didn't really expect to be looked to as a ruler, but she took on the responsibility more or less by accident and had to stick with it.

So, she was left with a ravaged country still actively in the process of destroying itself (remember, banditry, and non-aligned rebellion movements)... and the king's treasury, which she took a look at and went 'holy shit what'. And then she took a look at financial books and went 'holy shit what' a second time.

There was enough money to literally rebuild the whole country... the question was how to organize it (popular rebellions: not the most disciplined of forces) and how to not end up being a tyrant herself.

The plan she came up was was to organize a big big harvest festival in all more or less big population centers all over the country and invite a lot of foreign traders with a lot of goods to it - as much as she estimated would be needed to, in fact, rebuild the country. (The calculations on that were not done instantly and not on her own obviously). The festival would start with a census, where each person, including kids, would give their name, have their 'unique magic imprint' taken, and be given a pretty large sum of money. This would double as a pardon for any past banditry, assuming they did not get caught doing the same thing again. There are a lot of logistical difficulties with it, starting with 'what about people who can't come' proceeding to 'how many mages do we need to do this' and so on and so forth. Well, the revolution happened in the beginning of April, and she has until mid-September (the traditional harvest festival time) to coordinate the whole thing. And figure out what to do with cleanup of land and so so so many other problems (I spent many hours figuring out those problems I don't remember all of it now and I wouldn't be able to write all of them out anyway) (the long term plan is to do this same thing, festival, census and all, every year, because the crown's income is ridiculous and the structures ensuring it still more or less work, the king wasn't /that/ stupid)

One thing she decided on from the very beginning was take the tower as her own. She did keep them under a sort of 'house arrest' from the beginning, but they were not persecuted in any way. Obviously the populace would have problems with it and want to bring them to justice for what they did, but also if she let them do what they wanted they'd just burn down the whole tower and there were /kids/ there, not to mention mages are never not a significant asset. Given access to the king's personal stuff she wouldn't have problems controlling them, and she did need them. This was its own Whole Big Storyline about how she handled it, with individual approach and a lot of showmanship and focusing on giving people the impression that they were heard and believed rather than actual justice.

(There was also its own Whole Big Storyline with her burning out from trying to personally do everything just so she'd be legitimized in people's eyes)

Also she didn't want to take the crown from the beginning, despite everyone thinking she should, if only to make the situation clear and stable in the eyes of foreign powers. Then some facts came to light, and the sum of it was: the complete and absolute shit happening in the country for the last several years weakened the weave, and there's an impending demon invasion. Theoretically it's not yet too late, and if she manages to keep the peace and make everyone happy and make a lot of good vibes happen, the weave might yet hold... but she definitely shouldn't even touch the crown, as it has a lot of Bad Vibes in it by now, and as it was originally an artifact of the land's /protection/ from demons, 'activating' it again via a coronation ceremony would only make things that much worse for the country, not to mention it'd be pretty bad for the ruler personally. On the other hand, if she beats back a demonic invasion, either by force or by peace, she'll pretty much earn her own right to rule the land regardless of the old crown. Hell, she's /already/ earning it by doing everything she does.

So as far as specific questions go:

1) how did he rize to power? he inherited the throne, I think there was a bit of infighting over the crown among relatives and that had its own separate plot with a 'legitimate heir' popping up, but in the end he won out in the family intrigues

2) what prevented the revolt of hiz kingdom, thoze opprezzed to the point of zuicidal urgez gathering in one place? nothing. they did it. repeatedly and consistently. eventually it worked

3) what finally brought him down? see above: a big fucking climactic battle with his own spell detonating on him in the end

4) why didnt thiz happen before it happened? because he was a powerful ruler with a powerful base of mages who had to support his rule or greet an angry mob. It was a combination of random luck, slowly developing the organization over the years, and deterioration of the king's own support structure (there were renegade tower mages in the rebellion too, to give one example) that eventually overcame that

5) what waz the extent of hiz magic ability? that's a Really Good Question. He inherited a fuckton of ready-made magical power in magical items, including the palace itself (the defense spell system being one aspect of what it did), but he was also powerful enough personally to exploit it to its fullest potential. In the end it came down less to his personal 'power' (the amount of energy he could put in a single spell cast from his mind with no external aid) and more to his cunning, sheer nerdery (there was... a lot of creative demonology behind the scenes, and a huge part of demonology is just extensive research of every aspect of what you're going to try beforehand) and full grasp of resources he had at his disposal. Whether he would or would not win an all-out no-external-aid magic duel with the protagonist, or any other rebellion mage, is literally irrelevant. Nobody was fighting fair.

6) where did the kingdom get food? this is another Very Good Question. The country was fucking d e s t r o y e d. A lot of kingdom... simply didn't, and this is one of the problems the protagonist has to contend with. It's worth noting: - the strong foreign support the rebellion was getting, including some food supplies. Nobody wanted the fucker in charge of that world's equivalent of majority of oil wells; - the simple hedge magic a lot of villagers could do to augment their farming. This had to be kept secret from the government, but then, those mages wouldn't know what to look for, for the most part, as this kind of magic, cooperating with the land rather than forcing your will on it, was an entirely different branch than what was studied in the tower. Sure, some who came from there themselves would know, but they also knew this would mean going after literally everyone, and that particular kind of magic was no threat to anything, it was literally just particularly potent harmony with nature; - the economy of the crown getting rich on selling off magic items was built on exploiting the big magic sources, but in this country there were also a lot of tiny ones, that - see above - permitted the land to be a lot more productive than it should have been. Before the nuclear fallout shit, there was no such thing as a 'lean year' in this country, and hunger was basically unheard-of. This entire thing was a purely political problem. (so, yes, overall the answer is 'farming in villages')

7) what level of zcarcity and poverty waz there? See above: no want for food at least, until civil war started destroying everything. However, the state basically hogged all the magic resources that weren't small enough to escape their notice, so magic items were only marginally more common than in other countries. This wasn't always this way, the situation developed gradually as this specific dynasty deteriorated over the last several generations;

8) waz it a police ztate? "police" sounds to me like a much more modern concept, idk what 'police state' would mean Way Back When. But mages were being sent all over the country 'inspecting' and harshly punishing anything wrong, more and more so, so sort of?

9) waz there brainwazhing? if zo, what are the repercuzzionz that your protagonizt haz to face? not really, no. The king relied on brute force to get across his point. The closest is the tower, but mages there had an overall pretty good idea of the situation they were in, though their coping methods were often not the best;

10) how doez the kingdom deal with hygine? how doez that differ between economic clazzez? iz magic involved, and if zo, how zo? how doez that change with the protag? I'm personally a bit of a filthy pig so congratulations you hit on a question I have never thought of before. I'd have to say that in other countries, the ones where magic is available to anyone with money to pay for access, yes, magic piping and plumbing and deodorants and everything are definitely a thing for rich people, and the protagonist probably grew up seeing this as the norm. On the other hand, in this country, and others where magic is more restricted, 'magic hygiene' would come in the form of rare curiosity items. That is, among the common folk - mage laboratories, particularly old and well-equipped ones like the tower, have magic everything, including teleportation circles instead of elevators. Otherwise it's usual historical stuff... which I have no idea what it would specifically be for that climate and perios ahaha *hides*

11) do you have a ztory to tell on a zmaller and grander zcale then the ztory of economiez, that which iznt life itzelf but a facsimile carried out by it'z people? I'm not sure how to parse this question but most of the meat of the story is the protag figuring out her personal relationship with powre, so, IDK??? There are also other characters I like, like one of the aforementioned demons and a 'mundane prophet' (its a scientific term in-universe) maid and her tower mage war criminal brother and the young mage kid and the guy with a connection to the goddess of luck who ends up being her mentor though he isn't even that much of a mage and the ex-tower mage who ended up being in charge of the tower now that the rebellion won and I D K if this answers your question at all

12) what'z the landzcapez? THIS IS A VERY GOOD IDEA I NEED TO GIVE MORE THOUGHT TO. "Exactly like Ukraine" is a bad lazy answer, given the land is sort of alive and shaped a lot by its natural magic >_> but climate-wise, yeah, mostly like Ukraine. There are forests and plains and hills, mostly, with the southeastern border being mostly uninhabited mountains. There is a sea to east/northeast, with the mountains cutting off most of the coastline from the rest of the country. The capital is to the south. I don't know I'm getting vertigo trying to translate the vague mental image I have in my head into actual geographical directions )=

13) what kind of dancing are there? feztivalz? immigration? muzic? Another thing I never thought of... I'm sorry I'm so uninterested in the specifics of some of these that I can just answer 'regular folk dancing with regular folk music'. I literally have no idea how to tell folk music of my own country from folk music of any other European country and the only reason I know our folk dancing is because gopak is a meme. You don't want me trying to figure out these things anyway >_< Immigration was a thing back before the Bad Times, the country was fairly ethnically diverse and still is I guess, in bigger cities skin color variations are barely more memorable than hair color, and in the rural areas closer to the borders too. Festivals are A Thing that was part of the plotline I was figuring out, with the whole nature magic thing. Definitely a harvest festival, of course.

14) what waz there before he took over? how did hiz rule effect all of theze? Overall, the biggest effect is that people are poorer, and more focused on immediate survival. Nobody wants to stick out, nobody knows when a mage will decide that a festival is not respectful enough to the king and level a village. The bigger cities and the most backwater nobody-even-knows-they-exist villages are the two opposites that managed to keep more of the culture - cities were more integrated with the mages' 'policing' even before the Bad Times and so had less to adjust, and the most backwater villages avoided the worst of it. Tiny towns and big villages, those of it that survived, basically stopped any kinds of public celebrations at all. The protag organizing a big harvest festival will not interfere with anyone's pre-existing plans, there. (That she's foreign is a non-factor here, it's not like she's going to be personally micromanaging it, there's lots of people to delegate this particular part to)

15) doez magic work through the human body? more like through the human mind, but body is if not -the- source of energy, at leasts a very important one

16) iz it languaged bazed? no, any verbal formulas are purely to help spellcasters focus. Although given the whole 'magic affected by human concepts' thing, certain phrasings that are only ever used in magic (antiquated words, dead languages) might take on some power of their own. Basically the language basis is: if the spellcaster knows what they're saying and what they're intending to do by it, it works. If they are trying to blindly repeat a spell in a language they don't know without any idea how it works... maybe don't?

17) what'z the power zource? It can be basically summed up as Life. Life is not caused by magic, instead magic is caused by life. Dead worlds like our moon have no magic at all, other than the kind tied to what people think of these places

18) iz it through zpiritz? It can be! Many different kinds of entities that can be called 'spirits' exist. However, this is not the kind that is 'mainstream' in the tower, nor the kind the protagonist focused on when learning. They would know a little about it, like the basic fact it exists and the common principles that apply to it as well as to other kinds of magic, but overall are profoundly ignorant on this matter

19) through permiating magical energy? magic both uses up and generates ambient magic energy, yeah

20) iz it through perzonal power of zoulz? among other things, yes. If, say, two mages with vastly different abilities swapped bodies, the resulting magical abilities of both of them would be a weird fusion of what each of them separately was good at

21) iz it through perzonal power of zoulz? gods exist! like, pagan gods. none other than the goddess of luck came up so far though

22) unholy power? demons have magical power of their own, that is distinctly different in quality from that humans use, and does not interact with the weave much. It is both stronger and weaker, depending how you look at it. A demon could not learn human magic, and humans can not access demonic powers either, but various pacts are possible that allow cooperation or even merging of powers. Straight up work for hire is the most common form though

23) can it be obtained by zacrifice? how would you define zacrifice? ability to use magic, in itself, no; magical energy, yes, in many different ways. For example, it can be granted by a divine entity that likes having sacrifices made to it; more direct 'natural' transformations are possible, like draining life from something living (though this is horribly inefficient and can be compared to burning down the house to keep warm in winter); or for example, blood holds power and blood magic is A Thing

24) doez an offering of pain count? in this specific setting, this is counterproductive to human magic but makes one possible currency when dealing with demons (who feed on pain)

25) what kind of recreational drugz are there? this question sounds weirdly specific to me, and yet is wholly legitimate. Alcohol probably exists, though I'm not sure if I'd even referenced it once in the story proper; I could easily cut it out and make the recreatinal drug scene much weirder if I wanted to. Overall, I would say recreational drugs aren't widespread in this particular country (though for wealthy people there are no doubt all kinds of imports)

26) where do they come from? how doez pharmiceauticalz work? how doez magic come into play with all of thiz? I absolutely love that you asked this question, because I had not considered this before and yet it falls Within My Sphere Of Interest. First of all, there's alchemy: mixing ingredients and magic spells, producing a very weird and diverse variety of effects, though usually not very strong compared to what casting a spell on a 'solid' object can do. (An enchanted branch can be a thousand times more powerful than an enchanted potion, but an enchanted potion can have a weirdly precise effect that a branch would need to be worked at by generations of masters to achieve) Second of all, there's magic in nature: some plants can heal just because they have healing magic stored in them, regardless of what kind of plant they are (though watching out for poison shit is still, y'know, prudent). And third, there's regular folk knowledge of plants and what they do, extending into apothecaries in cities and private doctors tending the rich. There was no any kind of religion-based persecution of, say, wise women who know how to heal people with herbs (at least not in this country), so this remains a respected skillset transfered from parent to child. There are people (more often, yes, women) who specialize with it, but most people who grow up in the country would know what to brew against cough, what to put on a wound to prevent infection, and a couple of more complex family recipes.

27) how widezpread iz the availability of magic? See above: varies by country. A lot depends on how much 'natural' magic is in a specific place; rest assured this country is not the only magic-rich one in the world (though the only one with quite as many big concentrated sources). A lot depends on politics and availability of formal learning. There is the top-down direction of magic spreading, with wisened mages teaching their students arcane mysteries, and there's the grassroots direction, that includes anything from charlatans with annoyingly real disappearing coin tricks to thieves who manage to figure out how to blend with shadows to soldiers whose weapons seem to be blessed by gods of war to farmers who know how to get on the good side of the land. 'Mundane prophet' is its own category: people who get visions, prophetic dreams and other kinds of comes-out-of-nowhere knowledge without ever trying or even wanting to have it. They are, however, generally a sign of the weave weakening and the demonic invastion being imminent )=

28) can it be uzed pazzively or accidentally? On one hand, I want to say no, but on the other hand, with this system of magic I don't really feel like saying no to anything. In some magic traditions and in some environmental conditions (A LOT depends on natural and ambient magic), it probably can. Maybe you can define "I don't know anything about magic but I'm trying really hard to achieve this result I want and it weirdly seems to be working" as "accidentally" (OK, now that I'm thinking about ambient magic and particularly ambient lingering side effects: a person can 'activate' them with their thoughts if they are particularly strong/concentrated somewhere. This wouldn't technically be the person doing the magic, but then again, if they did it knowingly on purpose it might as well be)

29) are people born with it? People are born with a degree of affinity for interacting with the weave, but just as much depends on natural+ambient magic where they were growing up. A kid in a mage family, in a house where some magic is always happening, would have a stronger magical affinity than this same kid growing up in different circumstances and never encountering magic at all. What affinity influences is basically how easy it is for a person to use magic; however, there are lots of different ways to use magic (see: spirits, for example), and people's affinities can take on very different shapes. Partly this is actually cultural, influenced by a sort of collective subconscious: mages from different countries might find entirely different things easier or harder, with overlappng variations between individuals

30) do zome people not have accezz to magic, and if zo, how many and why? First of all, there are places with very little to no 'natural' magic. While ambient magic will exist anywhere there's anything living, lack of natural magic means lack of people instinctively interacting with it, doing the grassroots sort of casual magic. For children who grow up in this kind of land in a remote area that doesn't have formally educated mages, it's entirely possible to never encounter any kind of magic at all. Second of all, there are simply people who don't have access to formal education. Interacting with natural magic is very limited in terms of what you can do - mostly just what nature wants you to do - and people who can only do that and don't have the passion to stubbornly hone this ability until they can access their own energy as well might as well be cut off from magic. Most people belong to this category. Third, it's not impossible for a person to be born with zero magical affinity at all. Natural+ambient magic and inborn affinity are multiplied, not added, so someone who's a zero could never learn any magic at all. It's very rare, though, and if born to a family with a magic tradition could be regarded as a sort of disability. This person could still do certain kinds of demonology and interaction with spirits and divine magic though; gods don't care about magic affinity in picking who they interact with and gift with power. Those things are obscure in the country the story is taking place in, but in some cultures, or even specific places, it might well be a default thing for any person to learn when growing up, making their 'zero' affinity even less relevant than it is for people with simply no access to magic learning at all.

31) how doez magic effect the flora and fauna of your zetting?? VARIOUSLY. Normal farming looks mostly the same, but deep forests, mountains and swamps can look veeeery differently than in our world :> (This applies mostly to places with a lot of natural magic, of course; and in an entirely different way, to places with strong ambient effects. You maybe want to stay away from those latter ones)

#my ocs #sort of #worldbuilding #magic

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aphrosalexein · 4 years

Text

The Jazz Age Whispers

Writing is like weaving, he thought. You begin from a key word, then elaborate. But it all revolves, gravitates towards that encoded unit. Loki got his pen up and quickly scribbled something in the corner of his journal paper.

This has been the daily mental exercise in the last few weeks: he got up early in the morning and wrote down the first idea that came to mind. It was meant as an effort to know himself better by capturing the most unconscious, perhaps useless (but sometimes subtle and shrouded) of thoughts. An effort to attain clarity.

He found this technique while travelling on Midgard. On Realm Eternal literature was much more classic, it both form and meaning. Writers were at the same time philosophers, sorcerers, astronomers, playwrights, historians. Most books were histories of Asgard, papers of magic, epics and works of adventure, or philosophical in manner. Well, there was also an entire series "Heimdallr's considerations on the universe: a detailed description of Niflheim, Muspelheim, Asgard, Midgard, Jotunheim, Vanaheim, Alfheim, Svartalfheim, Helheim", which were 9 tomes describing all stars, planets, galaxies, realms. Other works on astronomy were minor. One separate category were fairytales, yet those fit mostly children.

Thus, sciences in Asgard have not yet separated, as on Earth.

During one of his visits, he entered a Parisian cafè. What attracted him inside was the music he heard; humans call it "jazz". The sinous notes pervaded through the thin glass windows, travelled his hearing channel and captivated him immediately. It was early evening and the diffuse light from this French local seemed like a true invitation to join in; it promised a warm atmosphere and significant knowledge on Midgardian culture.

He opened the door and was met with a noteworthy sight: there was a round table in the middle, surrounded by young earthlings. They seemed in some kind of debate; it was held in a friendly manner. Other people minded their own, drinking and laughing with peers. Everything was covered in a sheer layer of smoke and so the smell of cigarettes was a dominant flavour.

Their clothes complemented the overall ambiance: wood-panelled room walls, small, beige chandeliers, dark green Art Deco chairs (he learnt the precise name afterwards), black tables. Men and women alike were dressed in dark shades, adopting an elegant flair. The females had a peculiar, never seen before, style of garment; he later knew that it was essential to their look: the "flapper" dress.

It was almost dreamlike. However, as opposed to illusions, where shadows seem like real characters and instead you fill in their real role, he was met with strange eyes. Nonetheless, nobody really minded him.

Thus, he was covered with a veil of anonimity, which was truly enjoyable. This way, it was much easier to learn unobserved. On the other side, a part of him wanted some attention.

He got to the bar and sat on a stool. The bartender said in a questioning manner:

"Haven't seen you before in here.. What will it be for you?"

"Just a straight whiskey." The youth put a few coins on the table.

"Here it comes."

He got his glass, took a quick sip and moved towards that group. He looked again at the group sitting around the round table and overheard snippets of conversation. Following their tone, words, mannerisms, even banter, he saw how close they were, even if, in his eyes, they seemed to have known each other for no more than a day. Almost strangers, but youth united them so naturally. Their affinity shone through like a golden aura. He quickly got jealous, comparing them to his stiff almost-friends. Yet, as always, he buried deep this sentiment, thinking he should anyways enjoy himself, while it lasts.

He got closer and distinguished more clearly their matter, only now noticing two were playing a game of cards.

"Renè, accept and move on. You lost, c'est fini. Let's start again, but don't think you'll beat me yet. After all, I taught you the game just two hours ago."

A short-haired, blonde woman said these words, with a strange accent. She chuckled and seemed somewhat prideful, though on merit: apparently she was a good card player and also a good game teacher. She was easily the most traditionally beautiful woman at the table. Diametrically opposite, sat Renè, who looked like a classic dandy, full of poise and manners, but at her right sat one of her friends, supposedly. The other woman was engaged in a conversation with a younger man. They talked about something which she cared very much about; one could see it in the glint of her eyes. Her interest made her features look lively and captured the attention of her partner. Finally, directly in front of him were two more men and one woman, who, based on the previously heard conversation, were called Georges, Bernard and Emilie. The first two were brothers, but they didn't look alike. Emilie seemed the youngest; she was also somewhat quiet and listened to the brothers' talking.

He wanted to get in the group, but he was too reserved to interrupt. However, the second woman, near the blonde, saw his hesitation and invited him in with her gaze. "How observant.." he thought.

And she didn't even look at him, until then.

"Noticed you since you entered in <Les Lilas>... you don't seem like the usual. But don't be shy, this place is for everyone".

The woman greeted him, breaking the ice. She was confident, but in a more mature way than her friends. The youthful taste for coquettery was replaced by a sort of tolerance and accommodating friendliness.

"Feel free to sit here. I am Mathilde, by the way, and this is my husband, Henri."

Henri nod his head as a salute.

"My dear friend here is Alice and the new Bridge player is Renè." Alice smiled and Renè greeted politely. Yet they all seemed to be used to Mathilde being the mediator between old and new acquaintances.

"Finally, these are the Verdi brothers, Bernard and Georges; near them is Emilie; they are all our new friends".

Mathilde waited now to present himself.

In a strained voice, he said: "Nice to meet you all, and thank you Mathilde, if I may, for this easy introduction. Yes, I am not familiar to this place, so one could say this is my holiday. My name is.. "

The night went by in a quick pace. He talked to all of them, although most to Mathilde, as she made him feel most comfortable. This wasn't very long ago, it must have been about 90 years, yet their introduction remains crystal clear in his mind. (However, it is the only, and the last thing he remembers this accurately. The others have long begun to change shapes and meanings. Forgetfullness tastes bitter.)

Although, different memories flow by, some half forgotten, some improved and romanticised by the crafty side of his brain (who doesn't accept that even he can't remember everything). Loki realised that these six people, or mortals (as he referred to them later), were his only friends in his millenium of existence. Disastrous. Yet, he began to reminiscence their times spent together, which helped him understand better than anyone, he thinks, humanity's internal and external crisis of the 20th century. They also helped him understand himself, a great feat, really. So, his writing now is also the result of their encounter.

Once, Mathilde told him: "Always so perceptive about everyone but yourself. You know, you could become a great writer, if only you would dive in and gain clarity."

He responded, thinking of Asgardian epics and legends: "And what? Create another Odysseus? I'm afraid nobody would be interested. These stories are no longer fit for the present society; nobody ever goes to an adventure nowadays to discover himself. You just live in the same place, doing the same things. History moves on, quickly, in a rush (just look at newspapers) and you delude yourself you'll do something new tomorrow. What a pity."

"You're right, but I never said to write about manly men and fair ladies.

Exactly the absence of adventure, as you understand it, is the greatest adventure of our lives. Our journies nowadays are on the inside, concealed, and in your soul there's as much action as in the external lives, conquests and adventures of any classic hero. Yes, outside noise covers it, you said history, but that doesn't undermine the reality. In the past, it was possible to become a valiant warrior, as the background did not change: same old kingdoms, empires, nobility and vassals. Now it is vastly different: social ranks are no longer for life and moreover, the outside rate of change and the oversaturation of (unimportant) information outshine our private lives.

You just need to find a way to express this. Anyways, I'll try to help you. Try to write down everything that comes to mind, without judgement or censorship. Even better, do this as soon as you wake up or in a moment you're most relaxed. I'm sure..."

Her advice continued and he was grateful for it. Maybe not in that moment, but now he appreciates the value.

Where was he before this sentimental intermission? Oh, mornings gave the prince a great opportunity to enjoy and relish in the best time of the day. Nothing surpasses the crystal stillnes of silence before sunrise, even some moments afterwards. It is not an empty quietness ("like in the Void", he thinks with a shudder), but rather the "fullest" one; in an ambigous sense of this word. "Fullness"... when all particles of nature stand unbearably close to each other, affecting all neighbours with their inherent agitation. But the space is so close, that they can't neither reject nor accept eachother totally. They seem as if in a frozen state, separated by equal distances, yet the truth stands on the opposite side. It is the purest form of movement. Each particle identifies with all others, and through it's manipulation, it is able to influence all others. ("What an illuminating thought! Then so is the essence of his seidr, is it not? This particular state of matter, this total unity.")

Just the right moment; it all seems cohesive, no disruptances in flows of energy, everything moves in sync. The puzzle is complete: one can see and identify each piece individually, but also perceive the whole in it's "fullness". "What a strange word"... he wrote it down with beautiful and elegant penmanship on his paper, determining it as the final result of early meditation hours.

Suddenly, calmness washed over him. He lost his peak of focus and felt all muscles in his body lose their imposed rigidity, returning to natural tension. This is what he meant through clarity. A direct sense of perception. He looked inside, finally.

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