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trade my soul for a wish
Isabella summons Cam
Permalink Mark Unread

Cam is dipping a grilled cheese sandwich into a bowl of tomato soup when he feels the summons. He goes ahead and grabs it. Doesn't even drop the sandwich.

Permalink Mark Unread
Flickering gaslamps light the stone-walled room, where a precise circle has been drawn on the floor in blood. A small girl in a astonishingly over-elaborate dress stares up at him, crimson-stained finger still touching the edge of the circle.

Some sort of porcelain mannequin stands about a foot to his left. A scattering of similar automatons sit or stand around the room, in postures that suggest contemplation. It would probably be a lot easier to tell what emotions they were experiencing if they had any facial features to read: as it is, they're only barely differentiatable from statues.
Permalink Mark Unread
Cam looks around, turning over new languages in his mind. One of them is more fleshed out than the other. What is this, the bastard child of Japanese and Latin? With something else thrown in. Gaelic? And the other thing's like freakish ancient Greek. The blood circle and the creepy decor are almost less weird.

"Hello, summoner," he says to the summoner in her peculiar creole. "What can I do for you?"

He munches his sandwich.
Permalink Mark Unread
The girl blinks, then stands.

"Well, you could start by explaining why you suddenly appeared just as I was about to start doing a delicate thaumatological process. I think you're the first thing that's taken me legitimately off-guard in about a decade."

She gestures to her automatons, and a pair take up positions to each side of her, each a full head taller than herself. This is more due to her being short than them being particularly tall: at a rough guess, she's perhaps twelve years old?
Permalink Mark Unread

Cam glances at them, then peers at the circle. "...Your circle's unconventional and unnecessarily bloody, but it's obviously a valid demon summoning in some language or I wouldn't be here."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The circle is necessarily bloody - what, do you think I enjoy getting this stuff on my hands? - and is not intended for summoning anything. I wasn't aware that summoning demons was even possible. Is this the part where you rip out my soul and turn me into a slavering were-beast?" She raises an eyebrow.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not my style. Usually this is the part where you want some medium-sized material good and offer me a list of your favorite authors as payment. This is clearly not usually. Unless you've been living under one hell of a rock which has had a few centuries to generate languages I've never heard of among other peculiarities."

Permalink Mark Unread
She snorts.

"Well, there's another one the Victorian priesthood got wrong, then. Hello, mysterious demon. My name is Isabella Katarina Markova, but you can address me as the Lady Markova - or Isabella, since I highly doubt you count as one of my subjects. This - " she waves vaguely at the surrounding walls " - is my castle. Now that the introductions are done: What sort of books do you like to read, what material goods are on offer, and are there any other issues I should know about?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"Now hang on a minute, can I get more detail on where I am than 'your castle'? Not that it isn't nice, or anything, but the last time I was summoned it was to a world where this language we're speaking did not exist - at least not as anybody's native tongue - and also everybody knows you can summon demons in lieu of shopping if you want."

Permalink Mark Unread
Isabella tilts her head and makes a small humming sound.

"That would be rather unsettling. However, the question of our current location is somewhat of a difficult one to answer. Perhaps I should just start listing nations and other locations I know. Grand Victoria, Mori, Lupinia, Oceania, Ulvenwald? Are any of these familiar to you?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"Nnnnope. What's the planet called?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Isabella frowns. "Vikai?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's not one of the ones I frequent either."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It would appear that you have found a very undisturbed rock."

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"This isn't 'you live under a rock' territory, this is 'you live on a different rock, in a different universe'." Pause. "Which is fascinating! Tell me all about your rock."

Permalink Mark Unread
Isabella closes her eyes for a moment before she speaks.

"I'm most familiar with Grand Victoria. I was born there about seventy or eighty years ago, now, but I've kept up with the times, more or less. Grand Victoria is a mercantile empire, with colonies in the south and west. They used to have a major colony in Ulvenwald as well, but it attempted a revolution and collapsed. The state religion is Taifide, the veneration of the sun and the Empress Hikari Gloriana's line as its mortal agents here on earth, in addition to standards of proper ettiquette and behaviour. There's also a smattering of folk religions, which are generally looked-down-upon but not exactly heresy. Victorian manufacturing is the best known in the world, being the only country with truly interchangeable parts: they are especially known for their airships, which are exceedingly fast and long-range compared to any of their competitors."

She spreads her hands. "Should I go on, or would you prefer I gave you some books from my library?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"I'd love some books. I would love an index of your entire library."

Permalink Mark Unread
"Give me just a moment, if you don't mind. And please, don't be put off by the dolls: they're entirely harmless."

Isabella steps out of the room through a finely-fitted oak door with brass hinges.
Permalink Mark Unread

Cam makes a chair, sits on it, and peers at the reputedly harmless dolls.

Permalink Mark Unread
The dolls appear content to quietly observe him in turn. At first glance, they appear to be made entirely of a seamless white ceramic: closer inspection reveals seams in the exoskeleton at the joints. Without a direct light source it's hard to tell what exactly is beneath.

A moment later, Isabella returns, bearing a small sheaf of cards in neat handwriting.

"Please, be careful not to damage these: I wrote them myself."

She offers them to the demon, then looks at the chair.

"... What material is that chair made of, exactly? It seems organic, but at the same time not. It's almost like someone took 'essence of chair' and made it a thing, that's how subsumed the material is to the design. Does it even have fasteners in it?"
Permalink Mark Unread

Cam glances at the notecards in her hand, then duplicates them. "No need to hand over your originals. Chair's plastic, and why would I bother with fasteners when I made it from scratch?"

Permalink Mark Unread
The girl tilts her head, then tucks the cards away in a convenient pocket among the ruffles of her dress.

"Plastic, hm? I've never heard of the material. Is it always like this, or only when demons make it?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"There's lots of kinds of plastic. It can be molded in single pieces like this, although plastic chairs that mortals make often do have fasteners because they're easier to pack and ship in pieces."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That would seem to make sense, yes. You say that plastic can be molded, like cast-iron. How pliable is it? How is it produced?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't actually know much about the manufacturing process, because why would I, a demon, bother to learn about a manufacturing process? It can be just about arbitrarily flexible depending on the kind." He makes a small square of plastic wrap and folds it in half a few times.

Permalink Mark Unread
Isabella makes an interested noise.

"It's almost like a fabric at this thinness. How fascinating."

Then she suddenly straightens from her lean inwards, the movement almost a start.

"One moment, I've just realized I'm being a terrible hostess. Would you care to have some tea and a better-appointed room? This is intended as a ritual space, so I keep it quite bare: one of my parlors or sitting-rooms would likely be much more comfortable."
Permalink Mark Unread

"When I want tea, I have tea," he points out. (He has finished his sandwich since she's been gone.) "But I'm fine with relocating."

Permalink Mark Unread
"True, but apparently you cannot conjure things you don't know about - otherwise you would have simply appeared a card catalog instead of asking for one. It's quite possible my local teas are different from yours."

She smiles, then opens the brass-hinged door again, revealing a distinctly different room from the last time she did so: rather than stone hallway, the room behind the door is a small parlor with a hearth and a pair of tables, one of which is set up with a small set of stone game pieces on a checkered board.

The other, larger table sits in a wide alcove, lacquered wood reflecting the faint glow of the moon through the three large picture windows. An observant person might notice that they can see the moon three times, once through each of the windows: indeed, each of the glass panes opens onto an entirely different landscape.

Isabella pulls out a chair for her guest. "Please, sit, and if you want tea I'll be happy to fetch it."
Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure, I'll try some local tea," he says, following her and sitting in the chair offered. It's not designed for his wings, but he manages. He does indeed look out the window. "Are those screens? No, probably more magic, isn't it, you haven't invented plastic and probably don't have monitors."

Permalink Mark Unread
"No, those are not highly detailed depictions of landscapes: those are legitimately different locations. It's rare that I get to show it off like this, but I suppose it loses some effect when everything is equally implausible to you."

She sighs.

"Oh well."

Making a small hand-sign to one of the dolls that followed her in - tea - she settles into her chair, her eyes lingering on her servant just long enough for it to affirm her request.

"While we're waiting for tea, did you have any other questions you would like to ask?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"Do those dolls take orders from everyone or just you?" he asks. "What manner of aristocracy supplies you with your title and castle? Are there any significant social problems that could be solved with the application of a large quantity of nonmagical material goods?"

Permalink Mark Unread
"One: They are my personal servants, I build them myself. The process is complex and will require quite a bit of additional context to explain to you, but if you feel it's necessary I will make an attempt. Two, it's an inheritance with a shocking lack of responsibility attached, though far too many assassination attempts. Three, possibly. There's certainly a very large set of social problems to be attacked, but I'm uncertain what 'nonmagical material goods' might manage, since you've already demonstrated that you have access to objects I've never seen."

Isabella settles into her chair with a small smile.

"Which should I elaborate on first?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"...Regarding assassination attempts, it is possible - but I cannot guarantee it, since I don't know how I got into an unprecedented other world in the first place - that if and when you die you will become a demon, angel, or fairy. That's what happens to summoners who die back home."

Permalink Mark Unread
Isabella's eyebrows rise significantly.

"What exactly does being a demon, angel, or fairy mean, exactly? Apparently if I become a demon I can conjure things out of nowhere, but I wouldn't expect it to require a... species name? ... unless there was some other major difference. The wings and tail are definitely at least part of it, but I would rather not assume."
Permalink Mark Unread

"The three species are collectively called 'daeva'. You wouldn't start out with wings, let alone a tail, you'd have to make those yourself - or if you were a fairy you'd have to take a sort of potion thing they have in Fairyland if you wanted a set, but that'd be optional. Fairies are telekinetic, angels change existing matter. Daeva are also indestructible, though I'm not sure I'd bet on that against magical harm, there just isn't any on offer at home."

Permalink Mark Unread
Lioncourt lets out a low 'hmm.'

"Does 'indestructible' include 'unaging'?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"Summoners who are kids tend to age up a bit but then stop. I'm a hundred seventy-two, myself."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That is a much better deal than I got. Agelessness was forced on me at twelve, and now I have to keep inheriting everything from myself every five years or so. It's very awkward."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That sounds very inconvenient. If it turns out that summonings and dismissals from here work the same as those from the usual destination, an angel may be able to help you with that, although it'd be tremendously complicated and delicate. If it doesn't work the same, I might be stuck here forever, or you might not be able to get anyone else, or - something else may be in effect, I don't know."

Permalink Mark Unread
"I've gotten used to my body by now, to be honest: it turns out that when you spend eighty years looking the same, you tend to start associating that with your self-image."

She shrugs.

"In any case, I'm glad to hear that I now have a decent alternative to going insane in another century or so."
Permalink Mark Unread

"...Why would you go insane?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's a side-effect of my particular brand of immortality. Instead of dying from old age, you get about two centuries at the outside before your mind goes. No-one knows why, to my knowledge."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, that's a raw deal. I can't guarantee you wouldn't keep it if you turned into a daeva, though, there's no precedent for daevahood interacting with magic."

Permalink Mark Unread
"Well, it's certainly better than being assured of going mad. But let's put this depressing topic aside: you must have other questions."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Loads, but I'm not sure where to start; this possibility hasn't actually occurred to me before. List some social problems?"

Permalink Mark Unread
"The social problems are magical and terrible, both. Give me a moment to get my thoughts in order."

She lets out a small breath.

"Alright. As far as this castle can be said to have a real location, it exists in Shadescast, which is a vampire city. I am a vampire. Vampires are hated almost everywhere else in the world, for good reasons: the vast majority of vampire culture sees humans as little more than slaves, chattel, and food. This is a result of a bad power structure, which has been further corrupted by horrible and or insane people in power. Vampires need to feed on blood from humans every month or so on average, requiring no other sustenance: animal blood doesn't work, it has to be blood from a thinking organism. Side-effects of chronic or acute exposure to vampire feeding include short or long-term memory loss, fugue states, and catatonia. Given vampire attitudes towards humans, few of them are careful."
Permalink Mark Unread


"Well, that's terrible. How safe is this to experiment with? If I make you some blood, and it turns out that pins all the side effects on me, what am I looking at?"
Permalink Mark Unread
"I am careful. I feed rarely and lightly, and have had eighty years of practice. Even if I were to inflict side-effects on you, I would be highly unlikely to do anything worse than cause you to lose the last thirty seconds of your memory."

She smiles, showing her fangs now.

"Would you care to try the experiment?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe. One sec." He makes a black stick-shaped device, and without appearing to manipulate it in any way, sets it up to reflect the immediate surroundings. "Marker," he says to it. "Recording a test of offering this vampire here half a cup of blood designed to be from the hypothetical offspring of, oh, let's say C.S. Lewis and Joan of Arc, I think I can be tolerably sure they have never actually reproduced." He looks at Isabella. "How do you take it? Teacup? Straw? Aerosol?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Teacup. The fangs are instinctual and unnecessary. As far as I can tell from biological study, Vampires don't actually digest blood; we must gain nutrition from it in some other way, but..." She shrugs.

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam makes a prettily patterned little teacup. He thinks for a moment, and it fills with blood, and then he hands it over.

Permalink Mark Unread
The vampiress takes a sip, and then a swallow. She looks up with a puzzled look on her face.

"You're certain that this is blood? It's absolutely tasteless."
Permalink Mark Unread

"Yep, it's blood, but it's from a person who doesn't exist. They could've, but do not. Okay, I'll try some of what would have been mine back when I ran on biology." He makes another, matching teacup, puts a dram of blood in that one too, and offers it, crossing his fingers.

Permalink Mark Unread
Lioncourt takes the teacup, and raises it to her lips.

She swallows.

"Equally tasteless. It's odd: animal blood is violently repellent to vampires. Human blood tastes vaguely sweet, with variations by person. This... is neither."
Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. ...I'm going to give you a quantity of blood belonging to a real person who is dead who has spent no time as a daeva. But they were a total jerk so I don't mind mildly inconveniencing them for science." One teacup of Hitler blood.

Permalink Mark Unread
This teacup is likewise tasteless. Isabella frowns.

"Could it be that created blood doesn't work for some reason?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, looks like it. There goes the cunning application of demonic power to the problem of blood supply. Damn."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Perhaps it's somehow related to the fact that if you feed off someone until they go catatonic, you stop being able to draw sustenance from them, even if they still have blood left. I haven't done this experiment myself for obvious reasons, but I have confirmation from multiple vaguely trustworthy sources."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I could try a live person." Cup of the blood of an asshole serial killer currently imprisoned on the Moon?

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Isabella takes a sip, then swallows and shakes her head.

"No, still nothing."
Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay, I'm out of ideas for categories of demonically created blood. I guess I could do angel or fairy but I can't think of a principled reason for them to be different from demon blood." Cam picks up his device again. The reflection of their surroundings winks out. A few lines of text in a language Isabella won't recognize appear in its place, and then they too disappear.

Permalink Mark Unread

"... There is one more thing we could try, from a scientific perspective. Would you be willing to let me bite you? It could be that it's blood from people from your world that doesn't work."

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"I mean, if that's your hypothesis, name someone from here and I'll make a cup of their blood," suggests Cam. "Biting me won't scale unless I turn out to be totally immune to the side effects and want to spend most of my time getting bit."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, my blood's out for obvious reasons, and I don't know of anyone who I both dislike and isn't a vampire. I suppose one of my human servants will have to do. Sophia Leanne is next in the rotation."

Permalink Mark Unread

"These people are cool with it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I wouldn't say they're enthusiastic about it, but they accept it as part of their duties. It's a much better option for them than most any other they might encounter in Shadescast."

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"That's not exactly a signed consent form, and I assume none of your servants are literally Hitler."

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"Would you prefer for me to starve to death, or to have to concentrate my feedings such that they would permanently harm those I fed upon? I have to maintain a certain number of servants in order to limit exposure, and those who would willingly be fed upon out of the goodness of their hearts are few and far between. The current arrangement is not ideal, but it is acceptable to all parties."

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam peers at her assessingly. He sighs and makes a teacup of the named person's blood.

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The blood proves tasteless once more.

Lioncourt sighs.

"It appears that we've determined that created blood doesn't work."
Permalink Mark Unread

"Pity."

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"Yes. I would love to never have to bite anyone ever again. And while we're wishing, I would also like to not spontaneously combust in daylight."

Permalink Mark Unread

"How does that one work?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"If I go outdoors on a bright, sunny day, I spontaneously catch on fire wherever the light touches me, regardless of how many layers of clothing I'm wearing. If I go out on an overcast day or towards twilight, that can be safe, but if have to watch the sky carefully and keep a tight hold on my parasol."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sunscreen? Ultraviolet light alone?" inquires Cam.

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"I don't get peeling, irritated skin, I ignite. Sunscreen doesn't help. What's ultraviolet?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Light has many parts. For example, the reason plants are green is because they eat all of the parts of sunlight that are not green, and the green part bounces off so you can see it. One of the most salient things that sunshine has that other kinds of light usually don't is an ultraviolet part."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And you think this ultraviolet part could be what causes me to ignite. It seems plausible. Do you have something that would produce ultraviolet light? I wouldn't mind a bit of singed skin if it would let me know for sure."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can make an ultraviolet penlight, yeah. Will water put you out? I can douse you if you catch."

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"Things that douse regular fire generally work. I have had to hastily stamp myself out more than once." She smiles ruefully.

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Cam makes a little UV penlight. "Do you want to do the honors? Just push that button, if you let go it'll stop."

Permalink Mark Unread
Lioncourt curls one hand around the light end of the pen, then grits her teeth and clicks the button.

There is a distinct lack of ignition.

She sits back in her chair, takes a sip of her tea, and sighs.

"Well, it would appear we have another discarded hypothesis."
Permalink Mark Unread

"Apparently. UV's just the most obvious thing, though, it could be something else."

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"Quite possibly. "

She taps her fingers on the table.

"While we're discussing my local magic, I should let you know that conjurors have been known to exist in my world on occasion, every few centuries or so. Even the specialized ones tend to have wars fought over them. I would reccommend keeping your ability to create whatever you want secret, though the wings and tail already rather preclude normal social contact."
Permalink Mark Unread

"I could cut 'em off if I expect to need to interact with anyone."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That seems rather convenient. It's not painful to you? And you can simply replace them later?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I made them without nerves where they attach, the wound'll heal very fast, and yeah, I can just re-make them whenever."

Permalink Mark Unread
"Quite sensible." The girl smiles, then her gaze drops back to the penlight in her hand.

"Incidentally, how does this device function? Is it magical or technological? It doesn't seem to do anything when I press the button: how are you certain that it's working correctly?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"It's technological, I know it works because I made it, and UV light is invisible by itself."

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Isabella coughs. "Apologies, I didn't mean to slight your craftsmanship."

She turns the penlight over in her fingers, examining its plastic casing more closely.

"It appears that you have access to technology beyond my own. Would you object to producing a few more technological artifacts that you would consider 'common' in your own world?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"Anything in particular? A lot of them will have finite power supplies without an attached way to generate more electricity. Technology runs on lightning."

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Isabella looks down at the small device in her hand.

"This runs on electricity? I've always thought of electricians as purveyors of amusing tricks, more akin to stage magicians than scientists. I did hear that there was recently a demonstration of a brilliantly white arc-lamp in one of the new Moric universities, but I had put it down to propaganda."
Permalink Mark Unread

"Electricity is the future! Invest wisely." Pause. "Unless your laws of physics are different or something. How long have 'electricians' been doing their thing, here?" He makes another little penlight; this one lights up with a visible laser dot. "That works..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Electricity has been known in some form or another since before I was born, but we've only known that electricity was lightning for about the last thirty. I remember the headlines. While I'm aware of sparks being created by electricity, I would be tremendously surprised if someone had actually managed to generate and contain enough charge to maintain a continuous arc. I take it your world managed to overcome that problem?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yep. I have enough engineering knowhow to put down a nice modern electrical grid from scratch, in fact. Assuming your laws of physics are the same, but batteries work, at least."

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Lioncourt eyes the penlight with newfound respect. "You have an entire battery of cells in this single device? That's quite the feat of miniaturization."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Mostly efficiency, not miniaturization. It's one little thing."

Permalink Mark Unread

Lioncourt raises an eyebrow. "Nonetheless, quite remarkable. What exactly is electricity capable of in your world, beyond producing light? If you were able to produce sufficient quantities of charge, then you might actually be able to put electric force to useful work."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Kitchen appliances. Vehicles. Computing."

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"Computing?"

Lioncourt frowns.

"The last time I checked, computing was a job you did for the Admiralty involving calculating extremely precise navigation tables. Are you saying that electricity in your world is capable of mental work?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh yes. Machines - appropriately programmed - can, say, translate from one language to another."

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Isabella manages to set her teacup back down without spilling any.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Appropriate programming here of course represents tons of skilled labor, but still."

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"But you only have to do the skilled labour once, correct? And then anyone can use the resulting tool, much like one does not have to be a blacksmith in order to use a hammer?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yep. Unfortunately your local languages have never been programmed into a translator, so this isn't immediately useful to you - like, they resemble some Earth languages but not to the point of good mutual intelligibility. Unless there's an actual Japanese and an actual Greek and so on floating around too there would be massive frontloading to get it into a computer."

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Isabella is grinning, now.

"Yes, but what other tasks do computers commonly automate in your world?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not sure how to explain most of them without context... hmm... Okay, so one things computers can do is talk to each other. In addition to the electrical grid there is what is called the Internet, which is a network of all of the computers that there are, talking to each other whenever this would be useful. People send each other mail that way, or just talk aloud over it. You can get basically the entire corpus of human knowledge and creativity off the Internet. A computer can store anything that you can render as information - text, trivially, but also pictures, including moving ones, and audio recordings. Programs can turn charts of raw data into pretty graphs or models of the solar system or whatever. Banking is totally automated. You can order delivery pizza online. I think you can still do that, anyway, I don't live on Earth myself, I'm a demon and I live in Hell and have no need to be brought pizza."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So... Mostly, it's much more efficient communication, along with visualization of existing data? If that's all you're using the ability to have machines do mental work for, I'm not very impressed."

Permalink Mark Unread

"They don't have minds. They are not people. They are not creative. They can only do what they're programmed to do. 'Mental work' is not a natural category."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, but we already have such things as artillery charts for sighting in cannons and tables of logarithms for celestial navigation. There are many important calculations that could be eliminated or automated by this sort of device, and you use it to order food?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam shakes his head. "The very triviality of it is one of the most important features. People use the 'net - it's actually the 'extranet' now, the 'internet' is the single-planet version but people live on the moon and Mars these days - to do everything. Yes, including order pizza, and look up song lyrics, and settle arguments about what year the Vietnam War ended, and share knitting patterns, and figure out the bus schedule between Phoenix and Tucson, and play stupid little timewaster games, and see what diseases their symptoms that are probably nothing correspond to, and teach themselves to play the ukelele, and collect the complete works of Shakespeare, and warn each other about incoming earthquakes, and subvert government information suppression - no specific individual thing on that list is that important, sure. Shakespeare is maybe important but regular libraries were distributing him pretty effectively before the internet. People have been subverting governments for millennia. But if you add it all up it's a fucking miracle, I tell you."

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Isabella blinks.

"People live on the moon. The ball of rock up in the sky, that reflects the sun's light and that shamans in Lupinia worship? That moon?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"...As far as I know the moon the shamans worship and the moon people live on are different moons. But yes! Earth has a moon. People live on it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"How would you even get to the moon? Do people in your world have the ability to teleport to places that they can't otherwise travel to?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"No. I mentioned vehicles? Flying vehicles which hold air in and can escape the Earth's gravity."

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"How do you fly when there's no air to fly in?"

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"Not with flapping. Propulsion."

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"There are such things as propeller-driven airships in my world. They have a maximum operating altitude far short of the moon. Even if the crew doesn't succumb to hypoxia, there's an eventual point at which the air is too thin for the gasbag to provide any more lift."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's not the kind of propulsion I mean. In their simplest form, spaceships are propelled by explosions. If you show me an appropriate outdoors location I can show you a little model rocket."

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"I've seen rockets before during firework shows. You say you built one large enough to carry people to the moon? And your planet survived?" She raises an eyebrow.

Permalink Mark Unread

"In a word: yep."

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"My sympathies for all the people lost to that particular engineering project."

Permalink Mark Unread

"A couple spaceships blew up in early days but overall they're quite safe. They don't create massive craters, or anything, if that's what you're thinking."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Apparently your world has better workplace safety standards than mine."

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"Wouldn't surprise me a bit."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Any chance of me being able to come to your world if and when you leave? It seems to have a number of advantages."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Doubt it. Unless you can magic it with local tools. Or unless you turn into a daeva upon death, in which case you'll be confined to the world of whichever species you get until and unless you catch a summons."

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"Alas, the proper sort of tranportation magic is unvailable to me or my world, so it appears I'm stuck here. Unless I care to commit suicide and hope. Which I don't."

She pours herself some more tea.

"In any case, I believe we were talking about the 'net.' Apparently it's the best thing since fire."
Permalink Mark Unread

"Mmm, if you go back as far as fire there's competition like 'literacy' and 'inoculations' and 'physics', but yeah, the internet's pretty marvelous."

Permalink Mark Unread

Lioncourt frowns. "'Inoculations', plural? A vaccine for smallpox was derived from cows about thirty or so years ago, but I haven't heard of any major advancements on that front for some time now."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Do you still have smallpox?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's been eradicated in most civilized societies, but persists in some places in Ulvenwald and Lupinia."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We got rid of it altogether, and can vaccinate against almost everything else and have gotten rid of some of those too. Polio, malaria - we still have the flu but we can vaccinate against each year's new strain - etcetera."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We have no other vaccines of note yet. I would love to see how your medical technology has progressed beyond ours."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I am a fully qualified medical demon, you're in luck. Although a lot of stuff is done with angels, who can bypass the need for a lot of the intermediate technological stuff, so we haven't advanced as far as we might have done without. Better outcomes, worse process documentation and exportability."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's somewhat unfortunate, considering the lack of angels on this planet. However, whatever you have is still years ahead of the current state of the art, so I hardly have reason to complain."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean, you summoned me. Maybe if summonings work normally here I will teach you to summon angels."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That is a very good point." She smiles. "Let's hope that summonings do work normally here."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I will want to be a little careful about it. There's major downside potential to summoning too. For example, an improperly contained and malicious demon could destroy your entire planet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think you might be putting it a little strongly, but conjuring arbitrary matter will do that, yes. There is a reason why there have been wars over conjurors."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not putting it strongly. Unless there's some local magic stopping me, I could destroy the planet. You might not know what a black hole is, but imagine I just made an entire sun, right here."

Permalink Mark Unread
Isabella is already too pale to lose color, but she pauses significantly before responding.

"Please do not make an entire sun right here."

She shakes her head.

"Gods. Do you really not have any upper bound on size?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"I promise not to make an entire sun right here. I probably have some upper bound, but it is definitely astronomical in scale. Demons can and have made stars. Oh, also, if you die I vanish - assuming normal rules are in effect - so if I did want to destroy the planet I'd have to put you off it first or I'd only wind up destroying however much of it sufficed to take you with it. Not that I expect this to be very comforting."

Permalink Mark Unread
"Given that I would possibly wake up afterwards, that is somewhat comforting, yes."

She breathes out.

"Alright. So. I think I've more or less exhausted myself on questions for the moment. I have a lot to think about. Do you have anything more you'd like to ask about my world?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, you're a vampire. Back where I'm from there are daeva and humans, plus non-sapient animals, and that's it. What else have you got?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"So far as I know, only humans. Victorian propaganda says that there are vicious were-creatures that live in Lupinia and occasionally take the forms of humans, but I am understandably suspicious of this considering that they are trying to colonize Lupinia. Ulvenwald definitely has strange things living in it, but if any of them are sentient and nonhuman we haven't found them yet. There are also rumors that Oceania is awake-in-itself - stones talking to people, hurricanes demanding tolls, that sort of thing - but it's so far away and so few explorers have been there that such stories are likely to be more myth and tall tale than fact."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are days here twenty-four hours?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, if you live in Grand Victoria. Mori recently moved to a twenty-hour day with 100-minute hours as part of a general crusade against nonstandardized units."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay, that and the gravity suggest the place is Earth-sized... and you have one moon..." He picks up his computer again and does nothing obvious to manipulate it. It flickers between various displays and settles on a picture of the Earth, spinning languidly. "Does this look familiar?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Why is it backwards?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you put this pole on top in your maps?" he asks, pointing at Antarctica.

Permalink Mark Unread
"No. I'm saying that it looks like you took west and east and changed which direction they were pointing."

She points at where England is on the map.

"This island is clearly Grand Victoria, but that would place Ulvenwald to the east. That coast is clearly the mainland with Mori." Her finger slides across the pacific to North America. "And here's Ulvenwald, but it's inexplicably to the west. Is this what the rest of the continent looks like? It's enormous!"
Permalink Mark Unread

"This is a picture of my Earth. If this is some kind of mirror Earth, that's... weird." The picture winks out; he fiddles with some settings in the image's metadata; the Earth reappears, flipped horizontally. "That look more familiar?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"That looks more correct to me, but the planet's still spinning the wrong direction. The sun rises in the west."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What an interesting definition of 'west'." He switches the direction of rotation too.

Permalink Mark Unread
"And you're saying the sun rises in the east? How odd."

Lioncourt shrugs with a smile.

"I suppose it's fairly arbitrary which word you use to refer to the direction, so long as you're consistent."
Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah. We probably wouldn't even have this translation difficulty if your language weren't apparently related to some I already speak, I'd just translate your 'west' as whatever local word for where the sun rises. But, no, 'nishi'."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Your world has languages close enough to mine to prove inconvenient? ... Wait, I should have asked this question first. How are you able to understand me in the first place?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, summoned daeva get summoner languages instantly on appearing. Very convenient, prevents translation difficulties where the summoner is speaking German and the demon is trying to speak Arabic."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Both of which I have never heard of, so go on: Your world has languages that are similar to mine?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"This one we're speaking now is like a cross between Japanese, Latin, and I think maybe Gaelic but I have very little Gaelic so I couldn't say for sure."

Permalink Mark Unread

"This language is Victorian. I know one other, which is Old Lupinian, but I'm hardly fluent in it. In Mori they speak Moritic, and New Lupinian is a completely different language from the Old Lupinian. I have no idea what they use in Ulvenwald. It's most likely Victorian."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, your Old Lupinian is like a weird dialect of Ancient Greece. ...Do you happen to know where these languages are from, and what other languages they're related to? Locally?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Isabella shakes her head. "Alas, I am not an expert on etymology or linguistics."

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam points at Mirror Japan. "This is where Japanese is from, Gaelic would be from here or here," Scotland and Ireland "depending on the kind, and Latin is a dead language out of here," he points at Italy. "Greece is here."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, Victorian being descended from Gaelic and Latin seems reasonable, but Japanese is in what we would call Oceania, which doesn't make much sense to me at all. Old Lupinian as a greek-analogue seems likely though, since you're pointing at the right general area there."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Victorian is substantially more Japanese than it is anything else, although it's inherited enough Latin grammar to be even worse than Japanese in that department and enough Gaelic to be really awkward to pronounce."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And yet Japan is the furthest away of any of the locations you have pointed out to me. It's quite a puzzle."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, weird. Can you identify languages you don't speak, if you hear them? I could give samples of a few of mine and you could see what they sound like to you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I've heard a number of languages on the docks of Mark and other places in the world. Feel free, though I can't promise I'll recognize everything."

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam produces samples of German and English and Mandarin and Spanish and French and Finnish.

Permalink Mark Unread

Isabella identifies the cluster of Romance languages as all sounding vaguely like various dialects of Moritic. Mandarin gets a raised eyebrow and a 'That sounds sort of like the Church language.' Finnish appears to exist in roughly the same location as in Cam's world.

Permalink Mark Unread

Arabic? Tagalog? Hindi? Cantonese?

Permalink Mark Unread

Arabic is similar to New Lupinian. Cantonese and Tagalog get shakes of Isabella's head after a few minutes' listening. Hindi is recognizably similar to something Isabella's heard before, but she can't place where she's heard it.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Very hit and miss. So you've got airships but they don't go that far, there's unmapped portions of the planet?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"There are unmapped portions of the planet. Victorian airships are fast and have a maximum operating range of roughly four thousand kilometers, but have the unfortunate limitation of requiring mooring masts to anchor safely. Most colonies are set up first by the navy and then kept supplied by air. Also, Mori is in a state of cold war with Victoria and is between them and the continent's interior. They may have a better idea of what exactly is in Oceania."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm tempted to just make a tiny spaceship and circumnavigate the globe real quick."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If you could do that with a modicum of stealth, it might well give us some useful information. Would that be possible?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not sure what kind of detection I'm trying to operate around, here. It can be quiet, it can't be invisible but it can be small, it can be immune to a bunch of sensors I bet you don't have, and I got absolutely nothing on any magical divination that may be flying around."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If you can evade curious people with telescopes, you've defeated our most advanced detection technology and magic."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Like I said, can't be invisible. If somebody aims a telescope right at me... Well, I guess I could make myself cloud cover as I go, if spontaneous clouds won't alarm anybody."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That would probably alarm people less than an unknown flying object, yes. Strange meterological phenomena are less interesting than hyper-advanced rockets."

Permalink Mark Unread

"All right. But this castle does some kind of weird multiple presence thing?" He gestures at the window.

Permalink Mark Unread
"Yes. I'll give you a door to the least-inhabited locale it exists in, which is Ulvenwald."

She pushes back her chair, takes a moment to finish her tea, and then opens the door she came in from out onto a stone front porch, where gaslights flicker in the almost-starless night.
Permalink Mark Unread

"And this door will still be here in, say, an hour?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"The door has been here for a decade and will continue to be here unless I tell it not to continue. I would very much like it to continue existing, therefore it will be here when you return."

Permalink Mark Unread
"Neat trick." And he steps out and - a little one-seater spaceship appears.

When it's done, he opens the door, hops in, salutes at her through the front pane, generates dense fog cover - and takes off.
Permalink Mark Unread

The trip is about as uneventful as covert space reconnissance of an unknown planet can be. As expected, the planet is a mirrored earth - except for China and Australia, which appear to have become an enormous volcanic archipelago with highly unusual weather-patterns.

Permalink Mark Unread
Weird.

Cam records his entire trip, then lands whence he came.
Permalink Mark Unread
Isabella is sitting on the stoop, nibbling on a piece of eclair. She looks up as he approaches.

"Welcome back, casual circumnavigator. Did you discover anything interesting?
Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, China - whence the language you thought sounded churchy and one of the ones you couldn't identify - and also Australia - have both been replaced with a lot of volcanic islands."

Permalink Mark Unread
Isabella hums.

"That is rather interesting, considering that that area is what I would call Oceania, whence of the unusual rumors."
Permalink Mark Unread

"Where did the church language come from?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's hundreds of years old. Quite possibly as old as the Imperial Line. I would say 'Victoria' but that would be unhelpful."

Permalink Mark Unread

"In my world Chinese in all its dialects is extremely old, but I'm not sure we're going to get anything much out of this kind of spotty view of history - no offense, I'm sure I wouldn't know much world history either in a world with no Internet and no casual intercontinental travel."

Permalink Mark Unread

"History is not my field, no." Lioncourt smiles. "I would expect you might have better luck in one of the scientific libraries in Victoria."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Quite possibly. But even down two wings and a tail I don't know if I could conduct myself inconspicuously."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You might have to enlist me to borrow a card catalog."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah."

Permalink Mark Unread

"At least looking like a child tends to make me beneath suspicion." She smiles lopsidedly.

Permalink Mark Unread

"If it had no upsides at all that would just be unfair."

Permalink Mark Unread
"A hundred extra years is hardly insignificant. If I wasn't a vampire, I would probably be dead by now."

She shrugs.

"Life goes on, and we've just got to do the best we can with it."
Permalink Mark Unread

"Very philosophical. You want a look at Oceania from the air?"

Permalink Mark Unread
"I doubt it would be particularly illuminating. I have other duties to attend to, and while it would probably be enjoyable, I'm not certain it's worth risking another spotting merely for fun's sake. Thank you for the offer, in any case."

Permalink Mark Unread


"No, I mean, I recorded it on flyover."
Permalink Mark Unread

"... You have screens that display images. Of course you also have methods of recording images. Please forgive me for forgetting that photography exists."

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam smiles good-naturedly and pulls his computer out of his pocket and shows her Oceania.

Permalink Mark Unread
Isabella examines it.

"As you said, it hasn't got anything like the shape of your world, unlike everywhere else in my world. Would you mind bringing up the mirrored map of your world again?"
Permalink Mark Unread

Here that is again.

Permalink Mark Unread
Isabella looks from one to the other.

"... You know, this would probably be a lot more enlightening if I were a geologist. One thing that does leap out at me is that there are no additions - there's no extra landmass from your own world, only additional ocean. Perhaps there was some sort of natural disaster in my world that sank most of - China, you said?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe, but if the sea level rose or fell much in general you'd expect the coastlines to be different."

Permalink Mark Unread

"True. Perhaps it's that the land sank, rather than the sea rising?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"The sea would still have to fill in the area, and it's a fair amount of area. If they didn't sink very far it might look the same without taking up too much ocean... I'm not immediately sure how to do the math on the hypothetical but maybe I can dig up some sort of geology simulation."

Permalink Mark Unread
"Computers actually being useful again, hmm?"

She smiles.

"So, I've been thinking while you were away. Would you be willing to generate some vaccines for me?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"How are you planning on distributing 'em?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I have an airship yard in Mark that I can sell my stake in to raise operating capital for a clinic. If we charge a nominal fee for vaccinations, then the entire venture should only produce money, given that we have absolutely no manufacturing costs and vaccine is not excessively difficult to transport. If we can then produce a working manufacturing process, we might even win the Imperial prize for Medicine this year... Or, at least, whichever trustworthy person we select as the 'inventor.'"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. I like this plan. However, I don't know if I can guarantee that the infectious diseases here are exactly like the ones I know how to vaccinate for. I can in general produce dead viruses and bacteria and so on based on local strains, but immunology is a little more complicated than that. When you say it's not difficult to transport are you including that it has to be in sterile containers and many kinds need to be kept cold?"

Permalink Mark Unread
"Ice-carts and ice-cellars exist, which should allow for adequate refrigeration over short distances. Long-distance transportation is more of an issue, but Grand Victoria is not a large country, and by the time we wish to expand beyond its borders we will have many more resources with which to do so. Furthermore, given that our plan is not 'become fabulously wealthy' but 'vaccinate people', we can always let our patents lapse and allow others to continue developing the vaccine. Once again, subject to a manufacturing method that is not 'wish for it from thin air.'"

She tilts her head.

"Now, what exactly do you mean by a 'sterile container'? Containers don't usually breed in this universe."
Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean it has to be really, really, really clean. You don't want to inject somebody with dead polio and find that accompanying it is live tetanus or botulism or something. I can make things that start that clean, but they need to be handled appropriately on their way to point B."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If you have safety guidelines to follow, they can be made known to the staff. Is there any way that containers could be made sterile without involving your personal handling?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, you can do it if you get them hot enough. Boiling does the trick."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That seems simple enough to not be an enormously significant issue, then, so long as all staff are properly instructed."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah. And you never, ever use a needle more than once, stuff like that, I'll write up instructions I guess."

Permalink Mark Unread

"People might start to notice if we're conjuring many hundreds of injection needles from nowhere... They can't be made sterile effectively, you say?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"The needles? It's not just sterility, it's tiny abrasions in the metal. Also, people have different blood types, even if everything in the needle was boiled to death you might have problems with antigens or something, that I'm not actually sure of because needle scarcity's not a problem I ever expected to encounter."

Permalink Mark Unread
"I doubt it's impossible to manufacture that many needles, but that kind of precision metalworking on that scale might well bankrupt us."

She hums.

"Well, we can't actually clean the needles, but we could make a show of them needing to be cleaned specially - have our locations send back their used needles to a central location, where they are replaced with completely new needles that coincidentally look exactly the same. Then the old needles would be carefully and secretly disposed of."
Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure, I can slag them and you can sell the steel or something."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Mysterious new iron deposits are the kind of thing that conjurors get discovered by attempting. It's a waste of materials, but I would rather not be excessively greedy regarding my total lack of manufacturing costs."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay, I can launch 'em into space, as you like."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sinking them in the ocean would probably be less conspicuous, unless you believe that the remains would still be dangerous after they had been fused to slag."

Permalink Mark Unread

"No, not that dangerous, just a public health no-no to be sticking them into people. Ocean dumping isn't a good habit but a wad of steel is hardly the worst thing you could drop, s'pose."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If you happened to form the chunks into the vague shapes of ship parts, we could then probably 'salvage' them credibly in a few years' time."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sculpting a ship out of medical waste is definitely an angel's job, not a demon's."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Right, you only make things. I guess we'll have to set that aside for when we have more information on how summoning works in this world."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah. The way to find that out with minimum risk is to get all the essentials you want from me alone handled, then try dismissing me, then try resummoning me. Some daeva would take serious exception to being stranded if it turned out summoning was one-way here or something."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's probably a good idea before we attempt anything with possibly permanent consequences. Do you have a set of standard textbooks from your world that you could conjure for me?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"On summoning?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"That wasn't actually my intent, but those would also be useful if they exist. I was thinking more about chemistry, physics, biology, and so on, since your world is apparently much more advanced technologically than mine."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean. Not in a language you know."

Permalink Mark Unread
"... Ah. Yes. That would be an issue."

She sighs.

"Well, it wouldn't be the first time I taught myself a language from poor sources. Would you be willing to be my instructor in whichever is the most useful of your local languages while we're setting up the clinics?"
Permalink Mark Unread

"English is likely the most useful, and yeah, I can probably teach it to you. The clinics are a swell idea but I'm wondering if there should be lots of parallel projects. For example, in my world people have invented high-yield, pest-resistant crops, if those would be of particular use anywhere. I can make seeds of 'em."

Permalink Mark Unread
"The more things we attempt at once, the higher the chance that someone somewhere will notice something strange going on. That said, I've had many years of assassination attempts: what's a few more?" She chuckles.

"Higher-yield crops could be quite useful in Victoria. There's not a lot of space on the island to grow food in, given all the people on it."
Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean, we don't have to implement them all at once, but laying groundwork should be relatively easy to keep surreptitious? Naively. You know the place."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Each amazing technological breakthrough is going to need a different face behind it: either that, or we need someone prepared to wear the titles of 'genius' and 'polymath.' Setting up that kind of trustworthy agent is not exactly easy. Either that or we need to start dropping 'hints' covertly, and that comes with its own set of attendant risks."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean, I'm indestructible possibly unless someone starts slinging magic, but unfamiliarity with the locale might make me a bad public face. Do you not have, you know, people? You have subjects and people you bite, none of 'em are competent?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Competence, trustworthiness, loyalty, and intelligence are different things. I need someone who has all four. My 'subjects' are a downtrodden group of slaves, servants, and lesser vampires. In the vampiric political climate, I can barely manage to keep them alive, let alone happy. There are a few good candidates, but none are so obvious that I would immediately say 'this is the person we need.'"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Why does the political climate affect how happy you can keep them?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"The vampiric political climate is that I am unimportant among the noblity and have to deal with other vampires attempting to poach my servants. In the sense that you might poach a deer from another noble's forest."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So you have to sink resources into defense rather than infrastructure, because the servants don't get enough say in the matter that keeping them happy is a good strategy?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Essentially yes. The full answer is longer and uglier than that, but yes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Separate question. I can make an entire, mindless, living human organism. Want to try biting one? They're kind of disturbing to have around, but."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That sounds like a reasonable thing to try. It seems more likely to work to me than a vial of blood."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay! One basement-dweller, coming up. Any requests? Do blondes taste more fun?"

Permalink Mark Unread
Isabella's fingers tense on the sleeve of her dress.

"That was a disgusting joke, and I trust you not to repeat it."
Permalink Mark Unread

"If I can't make tasteless blonde jokes what fun can I have?" asks Cam. "Seriously, specs on the basement-dweller, otherwise I'll probably wind up templating it after someone I've met and that'll just be gross."

Permalink Mark Unread
"You can have fun that does not involve joking about the utter irresponsibility of my fellow vampires and the possibility that I will accidentally kill someone by biting them one day."

Isabella takes a breath.

"If you seriously need specifications, fine. Black hair, short for convenience but not a child, female. Do you need more?"
Permalink Mark Unread
"I'll make do."

And there comes to exist on the floor, lying down, wearing a sort of white sundress, a human.

She opens her eyes unfocusedly; her mouth falls open; she does not make a sound.

"Never made one of these before. Demons are really bad at making minds. We can't even make, like, a dog, that will act like a dog, let alone a person."
Permalink Mark Unread
Isabella takes a breath, then kneels down next to the basement-dweller, lifts her wrist to her lips, and bites.

A moment later she pulls away, shaking her head. Blood drips onto the woman's dress and spatters the floor as Isabella carefully places the arm back on the woman's chest.

"Still nothing."

She looks at the woman again.

"I'm honestly not surprised. She looks like someone who's been fed from too heavily already."
Permalink Mark Unread

"Right. Let's put her out of her disturbingness, then -" The already fairly limp basement-dweller goes still. "And now we have a corpse, that's delightful. Well, it was worth a try. I'm beginning to suspect the blood part is basically entirely cosmetic and you actually eat, I don't know, souls."

Permalink Mark Unread
"Some shamans in Lupinia are supposed to be able to interact with souls, but I've never actually seen any sort of soul-based magic. There are the inexplicable things-vampires-can-do, but I have no idea if that's related."

She looks down at the corpse.

"... I'm sad to say that we will probably have absolutely no trouble disposing of this body."
Permalink Mark Unread

"What things can vampires do?" asks Cam.

Permalink Mark Unread
"Allow me to demonstrate."

She steps up into the air, and stays there. There's a vague suggestion of shadowy wings in the way the light flickers around her.

"So yes, flight. Also, we can nudge people with our voices - vampires can make things they say sound naturally reasonable and sensible. Jumping off of cliffs is a good idea. The sky is pink. As you can hear, it doesn't make you actually believe the statement, but it makes you less likely to question it. Vampires that are skilled in its use can brainwash people by suggesting things that actually are on the cusp of reasonable, and then a little further, a little further..."

She shakes her head.

"Or, if they make direct eye contact, they can dominate you outright. Domination is a unsubtle but effective tool: it's obvious to everyone that someone's been dominated, but that doesn't prevent the dominating vampire from giving orders."

"I'm also generally stronger, faster, and tougher than the average human, though I wouldn't be able to quantify it for you."
Permalink Mark Unread


"I am alarmed by the suggestion and domination abilities."
Permalink Mark Unread

Isabella nods. "They are the primary reason why my security measures have to be so extensive."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So vampires can do this to each other too."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Unfortunately, yes. It's generally much more of a contest between two vampires, however, and I am happy to report that I have not yet met a vampire who wants to meet my eyes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Does anything block this?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Training. I developed my current capacity for this, I was not born with it. Vampires only have the advantage because they have had the opportunity to practice."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I was thinking along the lines of, like, contact lenses, or background static, or running all the words through a recording before listening to them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Glasses don't affect it, nor does background noise. Listening to or watching a recording might well work, however."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If necessary I can go around with a high-tech setup that turns everything I hear into a recording a moment before I hear it. I can probably even make it inconspicuous."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That might actually be a feasible defence. I'm impressed."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll make you one too if you like. Worth testing. Gimme a sec." Cam fiddles with his computer. He adds a shirt to his ensemble; it has holes for the wings but looks like it won't come off without scissors. He tugs on one of his earlobes, and puts his computer in his pocket. "Try me. Gently, please."

Permalink Mark Unread

"There isn't an adjustment dial on the effect: It's more a matter of phrasing things properly. I'll start with something blatantly wrong. I am not standing here in front of you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, that sounds like a blatant lie."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's good. My dress is about the same color as the porch, and it makes it difficult to tell where I am in this half-light."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Bullshit."

Permalink Mark Unread

Isabella smiles. "Alright." Her tone shifts, becoming brighter and cheerier. "My father owns this castle, but he's away on business. Would you like to come in?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm already in your castle," Cam says. "And strongly suspect your father is dead or something, though you haven't mentioned him."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Eighty years dead, yes. It appears that your device works, at least against voice alone. Would you care to look into my eyes for this next part? Also, can you tell when I'm trying to nudge you?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"The eyes thing has a verbal component, right? I could set up something similar to my audio thing with a pair of glasses but it would be way more obvious. I can sort of tell, more of a tone of voice thing than anything else."

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"That's good. It takes a little practice for people to be able to notice sometimes. The eyes thing does have a verbal component, but it's sufficiently different that glasses might be necessary."

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"And it can be recovered from in short order, no lasting side effects?"

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"Side effects would only be likely if you were dominated for an extended length of time. A test should be reasonably safe."

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"Right. I suppose if you were going to do this maliciously you could have done it without warning me." Sigh. "Go."

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She meets his eyes, and there's an immediate feeling of pressure as she speaks. "Raise your right hand."

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Cam hisses. His hand twitches, but that's all. "Okay, unless that was at full oomph, my earplugs aren't helping me here."

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"Would you care to try it again without them? It would be useful to know wether the earplugs have any effect at all."

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"Sure." A bit of wire materializes sticking out of each of his ears; Cam pulls and they turn out to be hooks attached to bits of electronics.

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Isabella waits for all the electronic bits to be cleared. "Again, then." She raises her eyes to meet his once more. "Raise your right hand." This time, the pressure is at least twice as strong.

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"That's stronger," says Cam, although he materializes a block of ice chained with more ice around his wrist fast enough to keep his arm from going up very far. "And now I have a block of ice, do you have a use for ice or should it be chucked outside and allowed to melt?"

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"The cellar could always use more ice, but a block of that size shouldn't melt particularly fast. Leave it on the stoop and I'll have someone deal with it later."

She tilts her head. "It appears that the earplugs aren't entirely useless, but I am not currently putting any significant amount of force behind my commands. If you're to be protected from a true attack, I would recommend adding glasses."
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Cam goes and puts the ice out the door; the bit around his wrist appears to spontaneously melt. "Yeah. Do people wear glasses in this world? What do they look like?"

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"The ones I've seen have been wire-rimmed, with thick lenses, but anything that appears to be made out of brass or wood would likely pass without too much comment."

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"Okay..." Cam fiddles with his computer. "Thick lenses helps... Unrelatedly I can cure some forms of color-blindness temporarily..." Fiddle fiddle. He puts his ear-things back in. Eventually he comes up with a pair of glasses, with slightly chunky brass frames and glass lenses. "That took some doing." He puts them on, and blinks. "Ugh, the delay is just slightly noticeable. Do my eyes look more distorted than they ought?"

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"The glasses are a little unusual in their style, but not so much as to attract comment. I can't tell if your eyes are any different than they should be for lenses that thick."

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"Okay, good. Try me again."

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"Raise your right hand."

There's a distinct lack of pressure behind the words.
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Cam wags his tail. "Success."

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Isabella grins. "A good start, at least. Should I put a bit more force behind it?"

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"Uh, what's the worst case scenario if you explode my glasses or something?"

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"You'll be unable to prevent yourself from raising your right hand."

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"No ongoing effects, just a raised hand?" Pause. "How does this sort of thing normally interact with tricks like my block of ice?"

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"If you had had the full weight of it hit you, you wouldn't have been able to generate the block of ice. It instills the desire to achieve the command, but not necessarily the means."

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"Right then. Okay, ramp it up."

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"I command you: Raise your right hand immediately!"

There's a wave of pressure, but it feels unfocused and indistinct.
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"Huh. I can sort of tell you're doing something, but it isn't really hitting."

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"I'll try it at full power, then."

Isabella draws herself up to her full height, squares her shoulders to Cam, and proclaims: "I, Isabella Katarina Markova, command and compel you to raise your right hand!"

The wave of pressure is much more noticeable now, though it's still just as vague and unfocused.
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Cam squints at her. "...Kind of makes me want to take off my glasses, which is kind of unsettling all by itself, but still really blunted and not affecting my hand."

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Isabella hums.

"At the level that I was using it, vampires have been known to compel entire crowds at once. That never made much sense to me, considering that they would have to make continuous eye contact with fifty people or more... But if there's an underlying effect of 'pay attention to me', suddenly that becomes much more reasonable."
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"Makes sense. Hmmm, I wonder what the best way is to really securely attach these to my face without looking like I had a run-in with a piercing shop. I guess I could bolt them through my nose. Be uncomfortable if I were going to sleep, but I don't have to do that."

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"Pins behind the ears might also help."

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"More visible, I think. Okay, this is gonna suck..." There is a pause, during which his eyes close. A small trickle of blood dribbles down one side of his nose; he makes a tissue to dab at it.

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"You know, if you had asked before just going ahead and doing it, I might have been of some help to you."

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"Yeah, what would you've done?"

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"Painlessly pierced your nose beforehand."

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"I was numbed up. Pain's not the issue, it's just weird making objects inside myself."

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Isabella inclines her head.

"I can understand that."
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"What kind of painlessness do you have on offer? More magic?"

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Isabella nods.

"Yes. Of the non-vampire type, this time. I didn't learn Old Lupinian on a whim: it was necessary in order to gain access to the best texts on the formation of Memni."
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"Do tell."

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The girl pauses a moment, closing her eyes.

"Just let me get my thoughts in order..."

She steeples her hands.

"Mm. Best to start at the beginning. Memni are mental tools that emulate the function of physical ones. They are acquired by ritually practicing the action performed with the tool until the physical tool becomes unnecessary. Those who practice for decades with Memni formed from tools that work well together occasionally form Memnodynes, which are 'sets' of mental tools that have... metamorphosed? Congealed? They work together fluidly as one ability, rather than individual tools."
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"Interesting. Any downsides besides the time expenditure?"

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"None that I know of. It is a much better deal than turning into a vampire."

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"'Cause, I'm immortal, and picking up magic besides demon powers sounds great. What makes a practice 'ritualistic'? Does this require any features that might be exclusive to people from this world?"

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"I don't believe so. The 'ritual' component is a extended period where you practice a specific action - say, picking up a stone - until you can do it in precisely the same way every time you do it. Once that is achieved, you begin attempting to substitute your will for the last component step - say, drawing the stone up into your palm with your fingers. It's an exercise in extremely precise visualization, more than anything else."

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"How do you pick up anaesthesia that way? Inject it into patients on a tremendous number of occasions?"

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"Yes. I know of no other practicing mages with a true medical Memnodyne. This is not to say that they don't exist, but we're thinly scattered enough that we don't have weekly meetings."

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"What other kinds of tools can you pick up?"

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"Practically anything that can be sufficiently ritualized. One of the most common and useful ones is to make a Memnos of your own hands, which allows for short-range telekinesis of anything you could normally hold in both hands."

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"Nifty. I want one. What kind of time investment am I looking at?"

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"Roughly a year of study to start seeing significant results, and then four more years to manifest your first Memnos, if you do it properly. If you have a particular skill that you're already an expert at, that can sometimes shorten the amount of time spent on an acquisition - but I would not reccommend using one of those to form your first Memnos. Many new students go from a quickly-acquired first Memnos to a much-harder-to-acquire second one, and that causes the vast majority of them to give up due to the disheartening spike in difficulty."

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"I know my engineering and physics and chem and medicine, but in a very demonic way, and they're pretty demonic-magic-friendly territory, so probably best to start somewhere else anyway. Teekay would be nice. I can be a fairy demon."

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"I'll be happy to instruct you in how to properly pick up rocks."

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"Any particular sort of rock work best?"

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"You are going to pick up this rock several thousand times. Choose something not too heavy, that's easy to grip, and ideally aesthetically pleasing. Take your time over the decision: after all, you don't want to get halfway through the process and then decide you hate your rock after it slips out of your hand for the five hundredth time."

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"Switching rocks ruins it?"

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"Switching rocks ruins it."

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"So I'd better not go with anything somebody would want to steal, either, no getting fancy with an opal in the middle of a diamond or whatever. It has to be the exact individual object, one exactly alike down to the atomic level won't do?"

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Lioncourt shrugs. "No-one's ever tried the latter. I would stick with the proven method."

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"Okay. Agate isn't really valuable here or anything, is it?"

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"Agate's not particularly valuable here, no."

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"Cool." Cam opens his hand and produces therein an egg-shaped banded agate in various shades of blue. "Like so?"

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Isabella leans in a little to inspect it more closely.

"It's very pretty, but I'm not sure you want something quite so polished. If you drop your agate and it breaks..."
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"It might scratch, I wouldn't expect it to break. If scratches are an issue I could put it in a thin layer of diamond, too small to see. ...What does polishing have to do with breakage?"

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"Not much, but it is likely to make your rock more slippery. A scratch wouldn't be a disaster, but if it was at all significant it might set you back a few days as you reacclimated."

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The rock gets a teeny bit sparklier. "Diamond applied."

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"That ought to make it sufficiently indestructible, then."

She tilts her head.

"... I would hesitate to be too optimistic, but working with an ideally suited tool like this might actually cut a week or two from the time necessary for proper ritualization."
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"Really? How? It's not more of a rock than anything you'd pick up off the ground, it's just a little sturdier and pretty."

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"Yes, but that increase in durability means that you won't have to compensate for everyday wear and tear. Degradation of tools slows the learning process, since you have to adjust your motion, even if it is by the tiniest of amounts."

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"Oh. Cool."

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"I've never heard of anyone training with a diamond-coated anything. It might be possible that you'll form your first Memnos in a month and it will be a miracle."

She smirks.

"I somehow doubt it, though."
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"It probably won't help that I'm a very clumsy person. Though mostly for balance and not manual dexterity, I can play the violin just fine."

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"Can you bend down and pick a rock up off the ground without falling over?"

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"Yes." It has to be from the ground?"

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"That is the standard first exercise, since it will give you the range of motion from your feet to where you hold the rock steady. At least, in the vertical direction. Others might be possible, but will give you even less useful parlor tricks than 'pick up things that weigh less than a rock from the ground.'"

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"...Should I make a bigger rock for better weight limit?"

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Isabella shakes her head.

"We train that separately. No need to exhaust yourself."
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"Okay. What next, exactly? I gather exactitude is called for."

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"I'll want to set aside a ritual room with a mark for you to place the stone into, and marks for you to place your feet into. The room is otherwise unimportant, but I personally find that it helps my concentration if I make the room aesthetically pleasing."

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"Sure, I can decorate a spot if you give me a spot to decorate."

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Isabella and her magic castle quickly produce a small, unfurnished stone room.

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"How thoroughly can I integrate stuff into your architecture here?"

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"Do not damage the castle. It dislikes being damaged."

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"Okay, but does adding a layer of rock that attaches like it was always there to the existing rock count as a form of damage?"

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"Probably not. The Castle would probably enjoy the change of pace."

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"By what form of magic do you have a castle that dislikes or enjoys things? I'm not sure how you could build it out of the kind of tools that I'm about to start developing with this rock."

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"I have absolutely no idea. The Castles are inherited. They say the First - the first vampire, that is - made them, hundreds of years ago. Nobody knows how they work. So far as I can tell, the Castle is about as smart as a particularly bright dog."

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"How does it make its pleasure or displeasure known?" wonders Cam.

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"Mostly by moving around rooms. It seems to enjoy attention, particularly in the form of new furnishings."

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"Cool. So, regarding decor and installations, how much of my attention does picking up the rock need? Do I need to look at it? Could I have music on?"

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"It requires your full attention. If you practice sloppily, you will have little to no results. Form is of the utmost importance - it can be casual, but it must be reproducible to a very high degree. If you can pick up the rock the same way every time without needing to pay attention, then that means you are done the first stage of the training."

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"Okay. Wow, this is gonna be boring. You're really, really sure it will work for people who aren't from here?"

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"There is a reason why not everyone in my world is a mage. That said, I can legitimately say that I cannot think of any reason why you would not be able to learn this."

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"I suppose 'pick up a rock in the exact same way many hundreds of times' has probably not been tried in my world. How was this even discovered here?"

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"There's some debate as to the exact origin, but the most commonly accepted answer is that it probably originated with a master craftsman, who practiced their work to the level of pure muscle memory, and then noticed something odd occuring over several further decades of work. The techniques have been significantly refined since then: this level of precision is not strictly necessary, but if you ever want to do anything significant with the magic..."

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"We did have craftspeople, in my world, doing things... Maybe it got written off as a parlor trick. That's tiny stupid magic anyone can do which is almost totally worthless."

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"If your world doesn't understand how to build proper Memni and hasn't developed proper training techniques, I wouldn't be surprised if they dismissed it as useless."

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"Yeah. Okay, so, nondistracting decor. Do you suppose the castle likes marble? I like marble."

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"Marble is a good choice. The castle would probably appreciate it as well."

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"Finest Carrara coming right up."

The walls grow a layer of lovely white marble, with a few minimalist swirl textures making it look almost like interestingly draped fabric. He adds some half-arches in the corners and covers the ceiling enough to dangle a minimalist frosted-glass chandelier from it. "I can do the floor too, if you will just jump at the same time as me to get out of the way," he says. "Three, two, one -" He jumps.
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Lioncourt hovers sedately on three.

"Vampire."
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"Pardon, I didn't know vampirism came with levitation," says Cam, landing on a smooth marble floor. He stumbles slightly but manages to catch himself with flared wings before taking a spill. "All right, that's this place all prettied up."

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"I did demonstrate for you earlier." Isabella settles back down to the ground, a teasing smile on her face.

"Now, the marks. Please, place your stone on the floor and reach down for it as if you were about to pick it up. Stop when your fingers touch the top."
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Cam puts his stone on the floor. It rolls slightly, then stop. "Maybe I should make a divot for it? Or just make the mark out of rough tape or something." He straightens back up, then bends to touch the rock and freezes.

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"A divot is traditional, yes. I should have thought ahead when you were making the floor."

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"I can add another layer to the floor. How deep a divot?"

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"Just enough to prevent the stone from rolling. Perhaps an inch?"

Her not-wings flare as she steps up into the air once more.
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"Sure." Cam jumps again and manages to land on his feet, and lands an inch above where he started, and now there is a smooth dip in the floor.

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Isabella settles back to the floor.

"That's better. The Castle should adjust the door to the correct height the next time you return here. Now, back to the stone."

She produces a piece of chalk from a pocket of her dress.

"So. We've confirmed that you can pick up the rock from your current position. Does it feel natural and comfortable? Once you start in earnest, you won't be able to adjust, so do as many practice trials as you need to be certain that you're the right distance from the stone."
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Cam tries picking up the rock a few times. After a couple tries he picks up his feet one at a time just long enough to put shoes on them, and then he resumes. He experiments with wing positions. Eventually: "This is good, I think."

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Isabella carefully marks Cam's footprints on the marble floor with her chalk.

"There. If you would like to make those outlines more permanent, feel free."
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He applies tape of the sort that actors use for blocking.

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"Excellent. Your first task is to find a way to pick up that rock that you can repeat exactly the same way every time. With sufficient daily practice, most students build the muscle memory within three to six months. I'll check in on you from time to time to evaluate your progress and consistency. Once that first hurdle is mastered, we can move on to visualization practice and the exercise of the will."

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"How many hours a day do people usually invest?"

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"In the academies? Eight. For people like us who do not sleep, the process can be accelerated significantly. I acquired my first Memnos in three years, rather than the usual five."

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"I don't sleep, but I'm very subject to boredom. Maybe I should rig up something that records me and beeps if I deviate from the pattern? That might get me into a groove quicker."

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"The method doesn't matter, only the resulting form. If it works for you, do it. Personally, I find the process meditative: it's something useful to do with my time when I would normally be asleep, and it effectively prevents me from becoming preoccupied with stress. I've practiced for so long now that I can find the flow almost instinctually. In that space, there is only myself and the form."

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"I've tried meditating. It doesn't really work for me. I'll put up with it to get more magic, but seeing as I'm immortal I might want to spread it out a bit. Well, we'll see."

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"You would probably learn to enjoy meditation as well, if you were incapable of sleeping."

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"I honestly don't sleep most of the time. Sometimes if I'm bored with all my projects and don't have a new one lined up, or I'm sick of being that little bit jittery I get on the relevant dose of caffeine, but not more than a couple times a month unless I'm on a really boring summon with a tight binding. I feel like my life would not substantially change if sleeping became impossible instead of optional except that I'd drink less coffee. I thrive on things to do. Hell's kind of short on meaningful things to do but I can still learn stuff and read and play games and perform experiments and correspond with people and see what the summoners have for me to do. And fly! Flying is great."

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"Flying is great. But because I combust in sunlight, I'm often inconveniently stuck indoors. Practicing my Memni helps me avoid frustration and relax. That and books. Books are wonderful."

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"Books are lovely. It'll be nice to have access to an entire new set. I usually do summoning work in exchange for lists of books and music and so on to conjure at home but it's slow going finding anything really good that way."

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"I'll be happy to direct you to some of my favorite books in the card catalog."

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"Spiffy."

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"Would you prefer fiction or nonfiction?"

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"Nonfiction to start with, get my bearings."

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Isabella opens a nearby door into a large library, two stories of books filling every wall. A brass-and-crystal chandelier puffs to life as she switches on the gas.

"This is my nonfiction library. What subject would you be most interested in? I maintain a large section on the state of the medical art, but I also have smaller ones for other scientific works, biographies and so on that interest me."
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"I want to say history, overview maybe, but if you've got major historical figures whose lives make a good vantage point from which to observe what-all else I'll take those too."

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She pulls out a slim volume from one shelf.

"Here we are. 'A Short History of Hastum and the Lands Therein, Being the Heart of Civilization.' Pretentious and opiniated, but at least broadly factual, and a decent read. I have the distinct impression Marcus S. wishes Lupinia never fell."

She offers the book with one hand, while her eyes scan the shelf for another.

"And... here, something more contemporary to give you a handle on the current political situation. 'An Empire of Brothers and an Empire of Sons', by T. H. Kaita." She offers the book: the cover depicts a man with a bayonetted rifle astride a warhorse, pointing the muzzle at an elegant serpent that coils through the sky above him.
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"Excellent, this should keep me busy for a couple hours."

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Isabella smiles.

"Would you like anything more, or are those two enough for you?"
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"May as well load me up with a whole stack."

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Isabella turns back to the bookcase, flitting upwards slightly on her not-wings to browse the upper levels.

"Hmm. Hmm. Yes, this. And this. Alright."

She alights, cradling an unsteady stack of four thick volumes under one arm.

"Here we are. 'Breaking the Pack: The Fall of Lupinia.' As you would expect from the title, about how the old Lupine empire finally collapsed. 'One Sun, One Heart.' A theological and cultural history of Grand Victoria. 'City of Light, City of Darkness.' About the failed attempts to colonize Ulvenwald, and the rise of the free city-state of Eyesocket. 'An Account of Tribal Customs', by Leon Zaya - the most plausible-seeming book I've ever been able to find on the shamanistic practices and customs of the New Lupinians and Ulvenwalders, though it is far more a travelogue than a historical study."
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"Eyesocket?"
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"Yes, Eyesocket. It has a much more respectable formal name, which came along later - I believe 'Illumine' or some such - but the frontier town was founded on the site of a successful direwolf slaughter, in a small circular valley that may have been a dried-up lakebed. Hence the original name. It's really quite an interesting story: the colony was founded in large part by scientists and innovators hoping to be free of Victorian strictures, particularly the indictment of any form of autopsy as desecrating remains... but scientific skills do not a survivalist make. The colony foundered, and 'Illumine' is not worth addressing by that title anymore. Hence the common lapse back to the name of the original frontier town."

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"Is autopsy illegal hereabouts today, still?"

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"Not anymore, thankfully. There has been significant progress on multiple social fronts since the Empress Hikari took power. That said, people will find you distasteful at best if you admit to cutting up corpses." There's a wry twist to her voice.

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"I hope they're practicing decent hygiene. Corpses are very informative things but sometimes people who die turn out to have been sick."

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"And the people who perform autopies become sick as a result. Yes. We have at least noticed that link, though we don't know exactly why it occurs. Of course, the traditionalists insist that it's because we're desecrating the dead and thereby incurring their wrath, but if that were truly the case, why would they so consistently curse us with the thing that killed them? And only when it was a particular sort of disease? Clearly, it's no more blasphemy than associating with those who are sick but alive."

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"Does this place have germ theory yet?"

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"I have only ever heard of germ in the context of wheat. Enlighten me."

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"Okay. Most diseases, all contagious diseases but not the ones that just run in families because that's not contagious, are composed of organisms too small to see parasitizing the infected person. A lot of the common symptoms like fever are the body trying to fight them off. Vaccines work because they teach the immune system what a disease looks like without being strong enough to make you sick all by itself - the immune system is mostly some specialized cells in the blood which can sometimes make mistakes about what's a disease, and cause allergies."

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Isabella blinks.

"Slow down a second and let me think. Animalcules cause diseases by parasitizing the infected? That sounds... vaguely reasonable."

She pauses significantly.

"So... assuming your knowledge holds, most transmissible diseases are caused by the movement of tiny parasites from one person to another. Let me guess - boiling kills these parasites? They cannot withstand heat, and that's why the body fights them with fevers?"
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"Boiling kills 'em, they don't love heat but fevers are actually not that effective so it's safe to take symptom-reducing medications. There are two meaningfully different kinds of 'animalcule's that are most often operative, bacteria and viruses. Bacteria can be killed by a class of drugs called antibiotics, because they are alive in a fairly conventional way. Viruses are not alive in a conventional way and need different, more advanced drugs, or just symptom control and vaccinations. Some infections are instead caused by prions or protozoans or fungi or multicelluar parasites, the former of which are less alive and the latter several of which are normal amounts of alive but which you should identify so you don't try to kill them with something specialized for bacteria."

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"It appears that animalcules have been a fruitful avenue of research for you, if you've studied them enough to have different types."

She steeples her hands.

"... I've been following an alleged ritual practice of the New Lupinians by washing my instruments in purified alcohol and then water between surgeries. It appears to work, so far as I can tell. Does that also kill the animalcules, or have I just been lucky?"
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"Alcohol's pretty good for it, yes, and it doesn't take high tech to distill all the animalcules out of naturally occurring water. Also peroxide, radiation, some other stuff."

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"Radiation?"

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"Remember I mentioned the part of sunshine that I thought might set vampires on fire but turns out not to? There are a lot of invisible light-like things like that and radiation is the general term and some kinds are really good at sterilizing stuff."

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"I see. Does that mean that I could sterilize things by leaving them out in sunlight?"

She tilts her head.

"Come to think of it, that raises a rather interesting question - perhaps vampires have some form of animalcule? Oh, but we've eliminated 'ultraviolet' already."
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"Sunlight doesn't produce really strong ultraviolet, or it would hurt humans, who are also pretty easy to kill with substantial quantities of many forms of radiation. Aaaand I don't think a kind of animalcule would explain you catching fire. There are conditions which cause extreme sensitivity to light but not literally catching fire."

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"It would explain the transmissability... but then again, vampirism doesn't exactly work like a disease. You have to will it. So it is a strange animalcule indeed, if it is one."

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"Yeah, animalcule-based disease transmission has no clear mechanism by which it could matter if you willed something."

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"That said, Memni exist in this world, so perhaps will plays a larger role in my local physics than yours."

She shrugs.

"So, since it has been determined that you'll be staying with me for some time - would you like me to provide a room for you?"
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"Probably more convenient than me skulking around the halls at all hours of the day, although since I wasn't planning to sleep it's not urgent."

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"I would imagine skulking constantly would become tiring after a while."

She opens another door, producing another empty room, this one of middling size with a window.

"Go ahead, work your magic."
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"Apart from not damaging the existing walls I can decorate as I like?"

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"No-one other than me and mine will ever see this room, so feel free to generate as many otherworldly things as you like."

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"Cool."

Cam has fairly conservative decorative tastes, but he puts in a nice abstract-patterned rug and nice curtains and a hammock, and a big-screen TV/monitor (to which he attaches the computer he's holding) flanked by a pair of speakers, and a chair with a squooshy back suitably for comfortably sitting in while winged.
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Isabella raises an eyebrow. "No bookcases?"

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"My books are all on here," says Cam, pointing at his computer. "I mean, except the ones you gave me, which I am going to read and then put back in their library. I can always add a case if I acquire a permanent family of physical books."

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Isabella tilts her head.

"I see. I suppose I haven't fully appreciated the usefulness of conjuring arbitrary things when you need them yet."
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"What's the garbage disposal situation?"

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"We have a massive, uninhabited forest outside one of our doors. I'm sure we can find somewhere appropriate."

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"Eugh, I don't like the idea of dumping in the forest. A real one, even, not just a list of five species somebody grew to liven up a place. I guess there isn't necessarily a better option."

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"Where would you prefer to dump things, then?"

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"At home I have a tiny black hole. Impractical on a planet. I guess I could make a little pit digging robot to dig a pit in your forest and then at least the footprint wouldn't be too huge."

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"... Alright then?"

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"Do you have other uses for a pit digging robot after it has made a small landfill?"

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"Well, I suppose it could dig basements for houses, or some such thing."

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"It could! Also tunnels, although tunnels are probably more useful when you have trains, do you have trains?"

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"We are beginning to have trains."

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"Trains can go in tunnels and not take up space on the surface! It's great. But you have to run them without pouring exhaust into the air, kind of a key component. Which means running them on electricity, basically."

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"We do not, regrettably, have electric trains."

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"Well, one day."

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"One day. Shall I leave you with your books for the moment? I believe the sun is beginning to set, and I'd rather not spend my active hours speaking with you at length - please understand, no offense intended - I simply need to use this time as efficiently as I can."

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"Go for it, I'll read."

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Isabella nods cordially and vanishes off into the hallway.

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And Cam puts on some music, flomps into his hammock, and starts in on his stack of books.

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Which to start with? The beat-up paperback that triumphs 'TALES OF THE LANDS OF THE SAVAGES'? The hardcover volume with the silvery outline of a new moon on the cover? The interestingly-illustrated tale of how the Victoria-Mori cold war came about?

Or perhaps none of those appeal. There are three more books, after all. The cultural history of Victoria: 'One Sun, One Heart.' The tale of Illumine and how it came to be called Eyesocket: 'City of Light, City of Darkness.' Or perhaps he should start with the general history, the one with a picture of a spearpoint shaped like Europe on its cover?
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General history. He is not in quite the detached mood to read someone who thinks "tales of the lands of the savages" is a good phrase to emblazon on a front cover.

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The general history opens with ponitification on the importance of Old Lupinia. "No other civilization," opines the author, "has ever come so close to the civility and glory of Grand Victoria; and we should endeavour to carry on their spirit with our own, in these dark and troubled times of revolution overseas."

More windbaggery in this vein follows. Marcus S. explains that "Hastum in whole takes its name from its peninsula shape, which the old Lupinians thought was spearlike: Thus, Hastum, from Hasta, their word for spear. They could name it because they owned it: In the glory days of Old Lupinia, every lesser civilization would quake with fear at the coming of the full moon, for they knew that the Lupinian legions would march in strength."

He admits later in the text that the Lupinians "...did not necessarily draw their strength directly from the moon, as the Imperial Line does from the sun, and did not always campaign under full moons, but their success can be majorly attributed to their pack-bonds that allowed a hundred men to fight as one..."

However, he roundly decries that the "slavering were-beasts holding the ruined glories of the Old Lupinian empire in the south" could possibly share any kinship whatsoever with the ancient Lupinians and their pack-bond. "Their degraded shamanism merely apes the true power of their ancient betters, much as the revolutionary empire of Mori claims their ideals of democracy while practicing dictatorship."

Eventually, he does manage to start describing the histories of nations that are not Lupinian. Would Cam care to skip ahead to any in particular, or would he prefer to simply read them in order?
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Eh, he's got all night. Reading them all it is.

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The author skips hastily over the fall of Lupinia, as if allerigic to it. "After the fall ... the barbarians clans and tribes of Hastum ... were quick to reestablish their mockery-monarchies." ...but apparently were not so important as to actually include in the history.

At least, not until the rise of Mori. Mori is, of course, roundly decried at every point as a mockery of the concept of an empire, but even pompous Marcus S. has to credit them for uniting dozens of disparate pocket kingdoms into an empire. "The Brothers Mori have an uncanny and unnatural gift for conquest, wether by the sword or by the word: popular opinion has it that they are never apart from each other, and teleport from place to place. Given their encouragement of the training of enlightened will among their citizens, it may actually be possible that they are travel adepts." He details their rise somewhat sketchily: while he says they were voted into power in their native pocket kingdom, far to the west, he nonetheless takes every opportunity to say that they are dictators.

After a short rant about the "deplorable southwestern barbarians", he goes on to excessively detail Grand Victoria, praising it as a "bastion of civilization" and a "guiding light", with "over 2,000 years of unbroken Imperial rule", etc, etc.
Apparently he knows which side his toast is buttered on.
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What an interesting writer this fellow is. So good at driving home the value of primary sources.

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One rather suspects that Marcus S. has never consulted one in his life... save where he writes about Grand Victoria. There, in-between bouts of patriotic fervour, he paints a surprisingly complex picture of the small island nation. 

Grand Victoria, he writes, “...inherits the customs of the Krenna tribes as the foundation of its common-law system, but these common-sense daily laws have been majorly complicated by a history of repeated conquest and colonization, culminating in the full establishment of the Solars approximately one millennium ago. Their establishment as the de facto religious and political leaders has not been untroubled, but their reign has remained relatively stable and is now displacing older Krenna forms of worship entirely, especially as Empress Hikari consolidates her power against the Morite Scourge...” 

A few paragraphs of boasting about airship building... oh, what’s this aside? “Some Victorian dockworkers hold sympathetic or even outright traitorous opinions, and on occasion Rays must be tasked with strike-breaking. A major issue is some docks’ usage of company scrip in lieu of imperial coinage, which some argue is in contravention of Imperial laws against slavery...”