chalk | Glowfic Constellation

"Yeah, I'm a dragon. Guys with funny-colored eyes and girls with funny-colored hair are more likely than not dragons. In what way do you not have one?"

cardistry

"Is that a funny eye colour?" he inquires, peering into the relevant set of eyes. "It's rare on some planets, I guess. Anyway, Devices speak and understand all languages. There's a language I heard first but it's not really any more mine than any of the others and it's not my favourite. How about..." he thinks for a few seconds, then switches languages, "English, they spoke it in parts of the planet I was just on and it has a lot of the right technical vocabulary for some reason even though barely anybody there could do magic and most people didn't even know it was a thing."

"Funny colored for a human," says Kaylo. "English, fine. What makes somebody able to use your kind of magic - are all mages humans?"

cardistry

"Humans are it for intelligent biological life, in the worlds I'm used to," he says. "And plenty of them have red eyes. So yeah, all mages are humans, but that's not necessarily because people aren't humans can't be mages, it's because people who aren't humans aren't even there. And the thing that mages have that lets them use mana is called a linker core. It's a... I have no idea how to describe it in any language, I don't think I've ever heard one that had good words for Device magical senses. I can sense them, anyway. They are magic."

And now, more ice cream. He hugs his spoon. It is a good spoon. It makes eating ice cream easier and that is great.

"...Do you speak Draconic by any chance?" inquires the dragon.

cardistry

"Is it a language? Then yes," he says, ceasing to hug his spoon and instead spooning some more ice cream with it. "I have to hear some before I can use it, though, just the name in a different language won't work."

Nom!

"This is a sentence in Draconic," says the dragon, sounding skeptical. "It is useful for talking about things."

cardistry

"...Whoa," says Brilliance, also in Draconic. "Yeah, that's a lot of vocabulary, all right. Why does it have words for this stuff? It's a dragon language, not a Device language. Is it magic? It's totally magic."

"It's very magic. Translation spells from around here bounce off Draconic like you never cast them but you seem to have it down."

cardistry

"Yeah - it's not a spell, it's not even a function, it's the same kind of deal as Devices being intelligent, it's a thing-we-just-are," he says, finding that Draconic has this concept neatly encapsulated. "We just have minds the size of our natural power levels and complexity, and we just speak all languages if we speak at all."

Pause for ice cream. Ice cream is important.

"Is combat a primary purpose in making Devices or is that uncommon?"

cardistry

"It's pretty common. Some of the most basic Device stuff, things that are common across all Device types, has combat applications - you remember I said, we protect our wielders from harm? The thing that does that is called a Barrier Jacket, and it's basically magical combat armor. Almost any Device can do it. I don't actually know of a way to do it without one. It'll protect from lots of things, not just straight magical damage, but it's definitely combat-oriented."

"But you currently appear to be way more geared towards eating ice cream than combat applications - people who make Devices don't get to pick personalities for them?"

cardistry

"They do not even slightly get to pick our personalities," Brilliance confirms. "Also, ice cream is the best."

"Making powerful people with non-custom personalities sounds hazardous, how does that get handled?"

cardistry

"...Really, really badly," he says, from experience.

"I'm asking primarily from a magic theory perspective, not an anthropological one."

cardistry

"Yeah, well, my perspective here is the exact opposite of theoretical. I don't know of any good way to handle it, but I've been through plenty of bad ones."

Kaylo appears to have a brief internal debate, then says, "So, where do people get linker cores?"

cardistry

"They're born with them. As far as I know, there's no other way to get one, but it's not a blatant magical fact like Device intelligence, there could be some way to get them from another source. Other things about linker cores... they're connected to mana colour; the core has a 'colour'" (the word he uses is the equivalent of colour for one of his magical senses, and is clearly linked to the visual version of the concept) "that translates to the visual colour you see when somebody uses visible mana. Devices don't have linker cores but we do have mana colours; mine looks like this," and he holds his hand out over the table and deploys a small magic circle on its surface. The circles and lines of the glowing diagram ripple through all the colours of the rainbow in a semi-random order at varying speeds.

"So you can use magic without a linker core because...? What does the linker core do in a human mage and how are you skipping it?"

cardistry

"I... hmm," he says. "Thinking about it."

Thinking about it over another bite of ice cream. How is this stuff so tasty? It is amazing.

Ice cream complete for now, he says thoughtfully, "It might be more accurate to say I am a linker core, instead of that it's something I'm skipping somehow. Humans... on humans it's more like a function module, a pretty central one, but still something that's... a part of them rather than part of them? With me it's seamless, there is no separation between me and the part of me that handles mana because I just am a kind of thing that handles mana. With human mages, there's a human, and then they have an integrated linker core."

"Innnnteresting. Are you staying around the school, if I come up with an analysis spell that'll let me have a look at your kind of magic can I point it at you and see what I can see?"

cardistry

"Sure. I mean, I might go away, but I'll come back, they give me food."