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.
Exciting! Katie looks through the magic books for any interesting titles.
Titles that might be of interest to her include:
Ooh, let's start with the second one, that's extremely important information.
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...
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the area most studied is anti-aging. While it's impossible to achieve true eternal youth, magic can extend the appearance of youth for vastly longer than normal human limitations, and with more attractive results than conventional procedures.
She's slightly annoyed that it can't keep her young forever, but it's still a hell of a lot better than nothing. What else has such power been used for? Is there any record of past wizards who are the same kind of weird pervert as her? Does using this kind of magic to become physically stronger make killing someone by mundane means a violation of the Laws of Magic? If not, how come all the myths about wizards never depict them being super jacked and killing people with swords? In fact, how come they're stereotypically depicted as gross old men?
There's a section on magical methods of losing weight, which has been annotated by Mara with thoughts on reversal. That section is followed up by a short discussion of the use of magic to mitigate pain and fatigue associated with being "overweight" (scare quotes courtesy of Mara). Long-term magical muscle enhancement is not considered a violation of the Laws, even if it gives an advantage in physical combat, but perhaps relatedly it can't achieve significantly stronger effects than the best mortal steroids (short-term strength enhancement can do a lot more, and its Legal status is much more controversial). The depiction of wizards is not directly addressed in the book, but perhaps Katie could make some inferences from many of the cosmetic techniques being noted as having been developed in the last three centuries, and the dearth of male names among their developers and early adopters.
Huh, weird that Mara has the thoughts on reversal, given what she said last night about having 'never considered that before'. She makes a mental note to ask about that. Strength enhancement of steroids without the nasty side effects is still really valuable though. Common male L not caring about being ugly, but they do tend to at least care about being strong, so it's still weird that you rarely see ripped wizards kicking ass in hand-to-hand combat in myth.
Mara yawns awake in bed and gets up for real. Katie might hear her coming down the stairs.
Katie puts the book back and goes over to meet her. Fuck, she really hopes Mara doesn't think she was trying to escape.
"Great. Hey, not to be rude but I wanna ask this before I forget, I was reading one of your magic books, and I noticed you had some notes in there about reversing weight loss magic, but you said you'd never really thought about uh, this" she points to her head "before. Why did you have those already, then?"
"Oh, God, I forgot about those! The thing is, I'd never thought about doing it to a partner before. I was a teenager sad about having no curves once, and I'm allowed to think about making things easier for future teenage Maras. Of course, Alyssa ended up not needing to gain as much weight as I did to achieve these," she gestures at her breasts, "so in this case my effort was wasted. Or maybe not! Expanding on these—pun retroactively intended—could be a project for you as my apprentice."
"Wow, really? You did this to yourself? Fuck, sorry, that sounds wrong. But not gonna lie, that's hot." She's a little weirded out by her seeming to care an uncomfortable amount about her daughter's breast size, but Katie is willing to ignore a lot of red flags for a woman this hot. It could always be worse, she supposes. She could be into astrology. Fuck, wait, maybe astrology is real, she can't believe she's never thought about it. She'd ask about that now, but she doesn't want to have to explain how her train of thought lead there.
"Yeah. Anyway, on the boobs thing, it's like, don't get me wrong, I love titties, but people's monomaniacal obsession with just boobs is like, if everyone wanted to bang women with really long arms relative to their legs and torsos, but thought it was freakish to be into tall girls, and said things like 'saying you have long arms when you're tall is like saying you have a fast car when it's falling off a cliff'. Like, to me skinny women with big boobs just look disproportionate. Am I making sense here?"
"You're making sense but I disagree. Or, like, yeah they're disproportionate but that can be hot in its own way."
"Anyway, like, did you intend to just make your tits bigger and accidentally made everything else bigger too, or was this the intended result?"
"Oh, I didn't use magic on myself, this was all achieved the old-fashioned way, my thoughts were for the next generation. But for what it's worth, it was intended. I wanted curves, not just tits. Boobs, butt, belly, and thighs," she says, lightly stroking each body part as it's mentioned.
"You're so based. Like, I don't know if you got this in the soul gaze, but like, a woman actively choosing to change herself physically in a way that's all taboo and stigmatized and shit just to be pretty, because she knows it is pretty, no matter what anyone else says, is viscerally beautiful to me in a way I can't put into words."
"I did get that. It's why I offered you an apprenticeship to me instead of Alyssa or David or whoever."
"Lmfao no," she says, pronouncing "lmfao" with her flesh mouth. "He's my friend. The guy I kind of sold my ex-husband to, actually."
"Sold? Do... do wizards get some kind of exception to the 14th Amendment?" Fuck, that's concerning. Katie tenses up.
"You mean the 13th? No, slavery isn't an accepted thing in the supernatural community; I say 'sold' flippantly. Tyler—Charlotte, now—was a rich kid used to his dad providing a certain lifestyle, and then when she fucked things up bad enough he could no longer defend her I stepped in, and when I'd had my fill of that position I'd handed her off to David."
"Well uuuh, I guess I'm already a woman, so I at least don't have to worry about that part. Right?" Right???
"OH lol why would I? Feminizing a male was hot, but where's the sense of power in masculinizing a woman? Where's the aura? You don't have to worry."
Katie is struck by war flashbacks to forcemasc discourse and reaches for a change of subject. "What's David like?"
"He's. about as fuckin based," (Katie can hear the lowercase here), "as a normie with bottom-of-the-barrel (and-even-that-I-had-to-extract-out-of-him) can be. Absolutely cool as fuck about gender, kind of needs to be led by the hand for the rest of it. If I had to put it into words, I'd say 'a fundamentally based underlying personality who was forcibly sent to medical school'. Queer, if anything more bisexual than I can personally relate to, but aside from some video games into some very heteronormative implementations of his kinks.
...wrt non-kink stuff...he's very conventional in aesthetics, very flexible in implementation? He likes very 'if I were the average of 100,000 men..' visuals but very 'what's the absolute lowest-effort prompt to show me an image...'given visuals'.
Uh. To the average person who isn't obsessed with computers...I think you could get along with him if you watched any of his favorite anime. I recommend Puella Magi Madoka Magica or Utena or an extremely abridge cut of One Piece to start. He's...very picky with his private social time in a 'show me what you've got' kind of way, but if you're not to his taste right away, he's happy to give you infinite tries to hang out again?"
She doesn't understand a lot of that, but one thing sticks out. "Wait, he's a doctor and a wizard? How does regular medicine, like, interact with magical healing? Are those not redundant skillsets?"
"Oh, he's barely a regular wizard, just a hedge mage who can do one or two things. Regular magic and medical healing...hmmm, that's a complicated topic. Knowing biology does help you devise some rituals? Like, a kind of ritual that naturally vibes with me is sympathetic magic, drawing correspondences between things and other things. If you go to medical school and work with the amino acids a lot, you might be able to come up with rituals to manipulate them directly.
...but honestly, the most important thing David contributes to my operation is having a medical license and thus being able to source things through respectable mortal supply chains."
"What exactly are you using regular drugs for, though? Presumably not to roofie potential human sacrifices, since that's against the Laws of Magic."
"So like...this is the thing about my contacts like David and my friends Sylvia and Matthew and so on, because my thing is exactly the fuzzy emotional stuff and exactly not the number-crunching. But what the shape rotator types have to say in defense of using mundane methods wherever possible is that anything you do through traditional physical mechanisms is more controllable, more predictable, less influenced by what you're feeling at the time...and that lets you get better data any other wizard could follow to get predictable outcomes."
"So you're like, a researcher? What are you researching? Presumably something that uses animal testing, if you need a supplier for drugs."
"Honestly? I'm a researcher of 'whatever the hell I want', as are many wizards of the council. I've done some work on body modification and mind manipulation that all fits within the Laws, because the target is the one to pull the trigger, as it were.
I've done some work on humans using hormones if I need, though. Nothing I love more than a pretty girl, except perhaps a pretty girl who's literally chained to me."
"Hormones? Like what, trans stuff? Because I don't know which way around you're guessing, but I'm one of the like 5 autists these days who is basically fine with my chromosome situation."
"Oh, I'm not guessing anything about you, just thinking over my past portfolio of work. And I meant MtF, yeah. Nothing against the other way around but it's not, um, a personal interest of mine."
"Honestly, my pet theory is that the autistic mind is just naturally averse to heterosexuality, so when we aren't born gay naturally, we take it upon ourselves to fix it. Like, the whole concept of having a diametrically opposed self-ideal and other-ideal just doesn't make sense to us. I knew a guy once who had very stereotypical transbian interests, and his online icon was an abstract geometric shape and his username had no identifiable gender-coding so I assumed he was one, but it turned out he was a cis gay man."
"Huh, maybe so? I think the word 'diametrically' is doing a lot of work there, though, I certainly don't think I'm rare among queer autist types in preferring some level of contrast between myself and my partner. But then maybe I don't count as autistic in a more-than-colloquial sense."
"Yeah, everything is fuzzy clusters, psychiatric labels are always going to be inexact. I do think it's probably also, like, not liking the imposed arbitrary social roles that come with heterosexuality? But if it's just that they wouldn't also want to take hormones and stuff probably. I definitely do basically want to look the way the women I'm most attracted to look."
"What kind of technically-legal mind manipulation have you done, then?"
"Honestly? Mostly sex stuff. Love potions, aphrodisiacs. The biggest loophole there is that a potion with the direct effect of inducing purely physical sensations doesn't count as mind control at all. But a lot of the experience of attraction is in the physical sensations, and the brain has a way of filling in explanations for them when they occur suddenly.
...I would like to think I'm more ethical than the average contributor to the field, since I've at least never dosed someone without their knowledge, even if the concept of 'consent' gets murky when financial incentives are involved."
"Huh, that's hot but the broader implications are disturbing. Does the CIA have a squad of wizards making torture potions?"
"The CIA is completely uninvolved with the supernatural community! The Library of Congress has some sort of top-secret program for dealing with us, though, and over the years there have been some of our kind working at the FBI. There's a Warden who worked for the DIA, actually, and after her war crimes trial and pardon she released a paper about the use of potions to induce fear. They're not too different from my kind of potions, actually, since the underlying physical sensations are quite similar."
"The Library of Congress? Really? Like, the people who preserve old black and white movies? What's next, is the government's secret anti-vampire task force technically part of the postal service?
"If the government were to take a side on vampires, I'm not so sure it would be 'anti'. Plenty of White Court names among both parties' major donors."`
"Those are the emotional vampires,right? What, do they feed on people's fear of Obamacare death panels and AI data centers draining the lakes?"
"I'm not sure whether the culture war falls more under the purview of the Malvoras—that's the fear vampires—or the Skavis, who deal with despair.
But in any case, the ones who are richer than God are actually the Raiths, the lust vampires, by way of the fashion, beauty, and entertainment industries. And the political donations are about boring stuff like copyright terms and cosmetics ingredients."
"Huh, I wonder how their whole thing interacts with people's feelings toward fictional characters. If they specifically feed off unhealthy emotionally harmful sexual desire, how does that work when one party doesn't actually exist?"
"The thing isn't exactly 'emotionally harmful'. They feed on attraction, and they're allergic to love. So they have an interest in promoting norms that encourage casual sex. But they're just as fed by someone who's genuinely having fun in the hookup scene as someone who's crying mask wojaking about it.
As for fictional characters, you know, I'm not sure? Their ability to feed is dependent on proximity and contact; they basically have to be actually having sex with you to get anything meaningful."
"Huh, that's weird. Does them feeding on you actually hurt or anything? And why are they in the entertainment industry, if that's not just a euphemism for porn and they can't feed at a distance from being jerked off to?"
"Yes, it hurts you. In very small doses, it's in a minor and plausibly deniable way, but in large doses it can kill you, and there are plenty without compunctions about doing so. The entertainment industry is halfway a euphemism for porn, but even safe-for-work media can be used to exert cultural influence aimed at decreasing the number of people in happy marriages and increasing the number hooking up."
"Wow, this is such a weirdly conservative-worldview thing to be true that I'm surprised lesbian sex even hurts them. Is the pain a hot kind of pain, like being electrically shocked or burned, or an unhot kind, like a migraine?"
