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The first rays of dawn break through the window and fall on Mara's face.
"Mrrrrggh," she says eloquently as she gestures at the curtain, which closes. Once again swathed in glorious darkness, she squeezes the pretty girl in bed with her and falls back asleep.
Katie awakens. As nice as being in Mara's arms is, at a certain point the body heat trapped in by the blankets becomes too much to bear. She realizes she doesn't have her phone on her, so she slips out of bed and gets up to explore the house like a recently adopted kitten.
How about downstairs first. She's tempted to go get her phone but holds off for fear of magic breaking it.
If she wanders around to explore, she might find a kitchen fully stocked with a wide variety of ingredients, and some magic formulae for summoning spirits to cook for a user.
Katie's not hungry yet, and even if she was she wouldn't want to risk fucking up and accidentally letting a demon loose. She's more surprised Mara still needs to have these written down given how experienced she apparently is.
Why devote precious brain space to memorizing formulae that could instead remember recipes, or where to score the best drugs, or—Katie wouldn't wanna know about what she did with her previous partner, anyway.
On each side of the kitchen? A library, stocked with books of all genres (though, perhaps, a particular focus on the borderline pornographic), and a bathroom with a hot tub big enough to swim around in and solid gold handles on everything.
Wow! She hopes Mara has some kind of workaround for playing music without tech issues to go with the library, she has a hard time concentrating in silence. Are any of the books on magic, or are those stored separately?
There is a section on magic in the library! And a record player, though if Katie wants an over-ear solution for playing music she'll need to wait until Mara is up.
Titles that might be of interest to her include:
The book covers a wide range of topics, starting with a section on managing one's physical environment to protect devices. There are tables on average radii of wizards' techbane auras depending on age, active magic use, and state of emotional distress. Mara has sketched out rough floor plans of her house under the tables with "?"s in various rooms; the one where the "?" is in her current computer lab is circled. This is followed by discussion of more "vibes-based" aspects of the techbane aura. The author complains at length about how it tends to spike when a wizards walk into a new room, despite "room" being a parameter that has no meaning in the underlying physical reality. It also seems to be the case that devices designed to survive various extreme environmental conditions are more magic-tolerant, with the gold standard being computers radiation-hardened for space travel.
The second half of the book is on metamagic: spells to direct and control the flow of magical energies. The basic underlying technique is a suppression spell, one that shuts off a wizard's magical abilities for a time. More advanced techniques are variants on the suppression spell that suppress the magical energies only in a particular area, directing them at the particular technological component you want to hit with magic and keeping them away from the others. It seems these techniques all require a great deal of fine control and emotional self-discipline; the suggested meditation and breathing techniques are annotated by Mara with increasing profanity.
Emotional discipline? You need that for magic? God damnit, she's screwed. This is stressing her out. She puts this book back on the shelf and pulls out the Unseelie Accords one in hopes that it'll calm her down.
Some magic requires emotional discipline; other magic requires emotional intensity. Mara's complaints are that the specific spells discussed in the book are the former kind, and not the latter.
The Unseelie Accords book is an overview of the major factions of the supernatural world: the White Council of wizards; White, Red, and Jade Courts of vampires; and Summer and Winter courts of Sidhe. It compares their variations on a few axes: language, geography, view of regular mortals, and culture/general mode of operation.
Several factions have official languages: Latin for the White Council, Etruscan for the White Court vampires, Spanish for the Red, Classical Chinese for the Jade, and English for the fae. The White Council and Jade Court speak their dead languages alongside the local vernacular and push them in official communications. The Red Court mostly communicates in Spanish during day-to-day life and official business alike, though there's a significant minority whose first language is Portuguese; likewise with the fae, English, and Gaelic.
Some factions are associated with particular geographic spheres of influence. The Whites (both Council and Court) trace their origins to Greece and Rome, and have a modern-day sphere of influence centered in North America and Europe. The Reds trace their origins to the Mesoamerican civilizations, and rule over Latin America with an iron fist from the Rio Grande down to Patagonia. The Jade Court's capital has followed that of China; currently they're based in Beijing. The fae operate almost exclusively out of the Nevernever; insofar as they can be said to have a terrestrial geographic origin at all, it's theorized to be in the British Isles.
The Reds and Jades view regular humans as prey animals to be hunted, the White Court vamps and Winter Court fae view them as livestock to be managed and protected from the wolves of the world, and the wizards view them as part of their ingroup (it's a misconception, the author says, that the Summer Court do as well; actually, they're in the "livestock" camp, it's just that they're vegans). The author goes on at some length about the question of whether supernatural beings can be considered "human"; the traditional view (shared by everyone, though with different emotional valences attached to each side) is that wizards are and everyone else isn't. However, the author explains, there's a "yes" and "no" case for just about everyone. Even wizards (those who have so thoroughly practiced their magic that it's unlikely to ever atrophy, in any case) vary so significantly from baseline humans in their molecular processes of healing and aging as to be potentially considered a separate subspecies. Vampires (with the exception of the Black Court, who are true undead) are human-demon hybrids, and the demon half can be indefinitely deferred from predominating, or in some cases even killed. Many fae, notably including the Queens and Knights, were once fully human before their acceptance of a magical mantle. The only unambiguous nonhumans are the lower-ranked fae.
Each faction has a distinct culture and set of abilities, which informs the safety rules for interacting with them. Technology is useless against wizards, who tend to fry it. Avoiding physical contact is essential with the Red Court, as their bodily fluids are addictive. The vampire courts in general, especially the White Court, operate on a "power behind the throne" basis, with it being seen as cringe to take open action rather than manipulating a catspaw. When it comes to the fae, essential practices include a keen awareness of exact words, good habits around debts and promises, and not calling them "the fae".
Huh, did the Fae invent Chess? If they've got Queens and Knights, where are the Kings? Were those a later addition by primitive patriarchal humans? Also, wizard magic can atrophy? That's concerning. In any case, Katie agrees with consensus that wizards are human. From a sample size of 2, they seem to come in the same range of heights, weights, colors, etc as other humans, which is more than you can say for dogs, and different dog breeds aren't even considered subspecies, and neither are humans whose bodies function significantly worse due to genetic conditions like diabetes or colorblindness are still considered human, so people whose bodies function significantly better due to a genetic condition should be as well.
(You have to be really trying to let your magic atrophy. Some have argued that it's actually a variant of the suppression spell, that that's what it looks like when fueled by wild emotion rather than careful discipline.)
Self-transformation magic comes in two clusters: "usually accomplished by a spell, at-will, reversible, most often into something other than human" and "usually accomplished through potions or artifacts, long-term or permanent, most often slight incremental changes to one's existing form". The simplest form of transformation magic, often mastered even by non-wizards, is changing into a large quadrupedal mammal, most often a wolf. Once mastered, this can be done very quickly and with very little energy.
Is large a requirement? Could she turn into a housecat, or would she have to settle for a tiger or panther or something?
It seems an animal is easier to turn into the more boxes it ticks off of:
A housecat animal form would be easier to achieve than a mouse or octopus, but harder than a tiger. Though magic users of sufficient power—anyone who qualifies to become a White Council wizard falls into this category—can, with enough mastery of the spell, transcend the limitation of having a single animal form, and turn at will into any animal.
Huh! Sounds cool, but not like something she immediately needs. The permanent, slight incremental changes, on the other hand...
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