"Anyway.  New sheet of paper, check, some idea of what I'm doing, some amount of check...Let's think about elements."

"...Man, we are going to get into some Opus Magnum shit, here.  Alright.  Let's try it anyway."

"Let's start with the primitives..."

SPIRIT

DECAY

FIRE

WATER

EARTH

AIR

"...and see where I can go from here.  I feel like...there ought to be primary correspondences, of some sort...and possibly some other...Oh.  Right.  Can't forget..."

RADIANCE

SHADOW

TIME?

"These aren't...really quite as-written in the original work that I'm cribbing from.  I think they had time magic just stuffed under Arcane.  But they're pretty important concepts to have!

"And I'd say that time is something - uniquely of the Material Plane, and - to some extent sustaining it and sustained by it.  The more you start messing with time, the closer you drag yourself to the - it's not, really, a membrane, but it's...well honestly for all I know it might be an endoplasmic reticulum - anyway.  Time to talk about the Twisting Nether.

"So you recall Light and Void from the principles diagram, right?  Those interact 'explosively'.  But they're also - the fundamental creative forces, from which all else sprung.  And that's a hell of a circle to square, ne?  So you square it by - zooming out a bit.  Looking at what the intersection of purpose and possibility is or ought to be.

"And what you get isn't exactly the flames that surround Nobilis's World Ash...but it's kind of close, really, on a cosmic scale.  The Twisting Nether, or - let's call it the Nethersea - is - sort of this...singular, infinite place, beneath what you'd normally think of as 'stable reality'.  The formless chaos of creation unending, the moment of the Big Bang infinitely preserved.

"...Well, not quite the Big Bang, because it's not a nigh-infinitely hot burst of energy that turns into all the matter and energy in the universe, but it's still...

"That sort of cosmic importance.

"Anyway as you may be able to imagine it's pretty Fel-heavy.  It's this - constant churn of time and space and place and stuff; you can hold yourself together in there with enough Light, or really good Order, but it takes effort, and the world is changing around you as you do.

"Sort of like 40K's Warp if the Warp was only amoral and not immoral.  I mean it's not like there aren't demons or whatever, but it's mostly just - weird shit.

"And on that sea, float the various worlds.  Or the world, if we're - thinking small-scale.  To start off with.

"...I think I want to have there be proper interstellar space, though.  It would be really cool.

"...Anyway.  It's sort of a fourth dimension, how stable your local region of space is.  ana and kata.  Towards the timeless singular origin, or towards the empty infinite order.

"...Did you get all that down?  I'm pretty sure I'd forget half the good bits if I tried to transcribe it now.

"Um.  Where was I.  Light, Void, Nether...  Realness.  Important fact about the Void: Everything is vacuously true, from its perspective, especially things like 'P And ~P'.  Meanwhile there's this singular perspective of the Light but it's really totalizing.  Because its purpose is - being the Light, and not, actually, anything else.  It's infinitely real, but meaninglessly so.  ...and how did I get here from talking about elements?"

"Oh, right.  I was trying to figure out if I could make them arise from the principles directly or if they needed to be handwaved.

"...Alright, let's...

"Alright.  So let's think about...

"Bloody hell I'm about to bring subatomic physics into this."

"I think, though, that - there's something useful there.

"The distinction between fields and objects is that fields have massless carrier particles, or something?  It's something about bosons.

"And there's a few fields, on this list of elements, I think.

"Now some of this shit I am just making up, but...hmm."

"Let's separate these out into bosons and - what was the other thing, fermions? - fermions, actually."

BOSON: Force carrier, field, defines an interaction?

Spirit/Decay: ""Building-up""/""Breaking-apart"" force, respectively.

Shadow: carrier for "thing-is-possible" interaction??? (cf rogue stealth!)  Mass?  Higgs?  Also mind control because...uh....good question?

Arcane?  Mana?: Motion???  Where is lightning.

Mana: force of 'reorganize things'?; Nether-related?

?????

Light?: carrier for "thing-is-probable"?  Something is really off about this.  I just wanted to have some forces.  And there's magic that touches elements, but - this seems off.

"...Though, right, that's why Life is ascending and Death is descending, because of the forces tied to their principles - Spirit is a Lifey thing, Decay is a Deathy thing, and you don't really have much...ability to use pure Life or Death for helpful things, I would think.  Only...well...Growing things or killing them."

FERMION: Object-ness, interacting with things, exclusionary principle (see also: elementals don't naturally like not-their-type elementals.)

Fire:

Water:

Earth:

Air:

"...That's more straightforward, at least...but I'm not sure how much it's going to work.  Fuck, designing a half-decent physics is really bloody difficult."

"And sure, I could just slap magic on top of Earth's physics and call it a day, but I don't want to, that's boring."

...New sheet of paper?  New sheet of paper.

Right.  So.  There's...Something she wasn't quite approaching right, in the original formulations of this.

It's probably that fire isn't really a fucking element, Aristotle.  Even more than the rest of these aren't!

So what is she going to do about that...

...She likes the light/shadow - measure of available doingness vs. measure of things that can be done - line, she's keeping that.

But she needs to figure out a bunch of other stuff that goes into this, and she's not really sure what.

Onto the paper go notes:

Earth -> ++Light, Crystal?, --Shadow, Metal?

...Crystals (gemstones) have fire.

 

...Think abt. Decay: polluted water?  Particle of fire: ash.

...Oh, there's an idea.

Fire: Emits Light, Emits Shadow

Earth: Absorbs Light, Absorbs Shadow

Water: Absorbs Light, Emits Shadow

Air: Emits Light, Absorbs Shadow

"...Yeah, that ought to do nicely.  For a first pass.  Now let's see if this extends..."

"...Gotta figure out what the atomic and molecular and whatnot, structures, look like, too...How much do I care about...Oh, that's just supercritical air, okay - well actually no - hmm.  There needs to be - something else."

"Or maybe I have the way it goes the wrong way around, but I do still have to figure out the mana bar regardless..."

"...Oh!  That's it!  Mana has a spin!  Hah!"

"...Wait, no - well, maybe...If Life and Death are the plus-minus vectors...rassafrassing why am I trying this hard..."

"...Well, actually, if I'm thinking about gluons, there's three colors of those...I mean I probably want to be thinking of quarks, but yeah, hmm...."

The angel watches with growing interest.  Several times, she almost interrupts to give Alicia the something-like-a-holotank she's asked for, but she's doing such a good job with paper and pen.

She wishes she'd paid more attention to Alicia's world.  If she's cribbing from an existing system... a system invented as a story, obviously, since her world doesn't have any magic or inter-world travel.  But it's certainly none the worse for that.

"Three dimensions..." she muses aloud, perfectly sincerely.  "Interesting scope; much more than the two dimensions I'm more familiar with.  And a different flavor for your story - pushing it away from good-evil might be helpful if Fate is setting you as the antagonist.  Or it might close off some handy avenues.  But that's why the Will of the Multiverse is setting up stories for people like you."

"And don't worry about the molecular structure and... sub-atomic physics.  We have a team to do the detail work like that, if you want to work on other more interesting things."

What is "sub-atomic," even?  Dividing the things that are indivisible?  And then "gluons" would be... things that try to glue them back together again?  Is Alicia trying to give an origin-story for this new universe by analogy?

(But the angel's not going to ask; that would spoil the image she's given herself.)

(But she's really curious...)

"Oh but these are interesting things!  Even if they're also frustrating to attempt to understand things!  Or, rather, generate from observed principles, things?  I suppose?  It's, hmm - I'm not going to get into the specifics like what sort of ratio of base elemental earth plus fire plus water would make - I think there was cobalt - but, having an idea of the framework means I can play with it more readily when I get there."

Oh, if the angel is looking for the origin story, she wants to take a look at the bit where Alicia was talking about primordial Light and Void, not about atoms.

"I think I'll give it one more go before I just rough out the elemental magics and leave the underlying physics to y'all."

"And - hm - as for good and evil -

"Those were never things you are; they're things you do.  The Scarlet Crusade convinced themselves that cleansing the world of all nonhuman life was righteous, and despite its aesthetic, the Light didn't leave them whatsoever."

That's at least a little more like the sort of worldbuilding they're supposed to be doing here.  "What is this Scarlet Crusade?  And - you want to play with magic in this world, aside from being entangled in the otome story?"

She'll try one more time to bring Alicia back to this, before... she doesn't know what.

"In a minute, I need to write this down -"

SPIN

Three mparticles, <-1, +1> spin along i, j, k axes.

Positive: Life, Light, Order

Negative: Death, Void, Chaos

Null?: Nether-energy?

Stable elements have +1 or -1 spin

Forces have +-3

Elements:

FIRE: Life Light Chaos (+1)

EARTH: Death Void Order (-1)

WATER: Death Light Chaos (-1)

AIR: Life Void Order (+1) (Sound as Order?)

Entangle particles to build composites?  Crystal earth+air by this logic...floating rocks for a reason?

...Crystal: Earth Air Fire.  (++-) (--+) (+-+).

Crystal: Fire Earth Air (++-) (--+) (+-+) (we're keeping this)

Metal: Fire Earth Water (++-) (--+) (-+-)

Process of consumption powered by air-earth mana entanglement, destabilization?  Explains why food works.

Missing:

+-- Life Void Chaos (-1)

-++ Death Light Order (+1)

Wood/Flesh?  Crystal?  Spirit?  ...Not spirit, but - soul?  Soul sounds right.

FLESH: Life Void Chaos (-1)

SOUL: Death Light Order (+1)

Spontaneous regeneration...

!

Soul is seat of magic by virtue of ability to maintain nonspin environment?  ...Doesn't sound right.  Does sound right that soul is why magic but does not sound right why.  Oh.  Fel sieve theory!

"Ooh, and this theory of soul even explains why fel fucks it up and the Emerald Dream, although it's not like we're necessarily keeping Ysera...Or the Titans who charged her with its maintenance, for that matter.  The Titans were a horrible idea, honestly, because - where did they come from?"

Floating rocks.  She likes the picture of floating rocks.  And souls being made in some way of wood and flesh is an interesting idea... maybe; that could imply interesting things about magic in forests if they want to go that way... and all food being in some way magical...

... but magical in this way?  It's on a totally different level, and... but... why does food work... and...

The angel's eyes brighten, and her hair suddenly frizzes up with a crackling.

She's interested now.

"How do different sorts of food work differently, then?  And do you mean that all rocks are going to be floating?"

"Well I certainly haven't yet otherwise implemented gravity!  But I do think that I'm going to be a little bit boring and keep spacetime broadly like Earth does it, at least as far as mass and gravity and whatnot go?  There's just, some things have inherent counterforces, sort of?"

"That'd probably help keep it understandable to us... but are those things even more inherent than the sub-atomic things you were changing up?"

"I mean, yes and no?  You can still model a lot of things as - working the same way, on the macro scale - just with different stuff?  Like, I don't know which of the strong and weak nuclear forces does what, but I think I've described a way in which something that looks like them still exists?

"Actually, I think it's harder to find electromagnetism."

"Maybe... fire and air can attract like magnets?"

"I don't think that's quite right, but maybe you're on to something.  I just...can't figure out what the carrier of lightning ought to be."

"...Actually let me just see what happens if I try -"

LIGHT+VOID: Photons (cf. double-slit experiment)

LIGHT+FEL: Electrons?

LIGHT+DEATH: Entropic carrier force?  No, that's DECAY.  ...Gravitons?

VOID+LIFE: ??? is this DNA?

VOID+ORDER: ??? probability-mass?

"...Fuck, I might need to rework something here, because - if Fire is Life-Chaos-Light, that suggests associating electricity with fire and it's not, that's an air thing in canon - unless - but I should probably shuffle a bit anyway, Fire isn't actually lifey -

"- maybe I should cross-compare this with -"

FIRE: Life Light Chaos || Death Light Chaos?

WATER: Death Light Chaos || Life Light Chaos?

EARTH: Death Void Order

AIR: Life Void Order || Life Void Chaos?

FLESH: Life Void Chaos || Life Void Order?

SOUL: Death Light Order

"- and I do need to figure out how this ought to - work - how it goes from micro to macro-scale...

"Because it's not actually clear to me how it ought to, is mostly the thing, not yet, there's - models of a sort but they're - unrefined -

"...Let's see..."

"...Yeah, I think let's go with..."

"Yeah that does make sense of all the known Decayed elementals, to do that swap - Fire into ash, Air into smog, Water into - poison or pollution, Earth into - this weird crumblyness, apparently - and those play counter to the Life-Light-Order of the usual sort -"

"I think it also explains why it's mostly Decay magic that you have people drawing on for zombies, actually.  It's a lot different from grasping deathly certainty - which is also a lot different from grasping utter conviction that you would draw upon the Light with.  ...I imagine you don't know what a Green Lantern is."