This post has the following content warnings:
In which [redacted] does an urban fantasy awakening.
Permalink

It's a bleary and dark morning as Alex Marche wakes up, which is why it happens at all.  She's lived a life rather amazingly free of noticeable incident so far - only a few cases of being swept up by a reassuring feeling.

Even this is minor.

But nonetheless, it is indisputable that when she fumbles for the lightswitch on the stairs of her rental housing, once, twice, thrice she tries and she is so done with this -

That they flick on, but she has not even touched the base-plate, despite feeling her finger flick the switch in a sense that is and yet isn't touch at all.

She stares at her hand.  She stares at the switch.  She stares at that strange un-feeling still there upon her fingers, insofar as one can stare at anything at all.

 

She hesitantly takes a picture of the scene, to hopefully confirm her eyes aren't lying to her.

 

And then she kind of panics.

She doesn't want to be a magic cop!  ...Okay she kind of wants to punch a baddie or two ever because who hasn't had a superhero fantasy ever in their life, but she doesn't want to be a cop about it!

Shit, she has no idea what to do now.  It's not exactly like there's a manual for this kind of stuff, is there?

...Is there?  Help her out here, Internet.  "Manual for new practitioners"?  Anybody?  Bueller?

...If that doesn't work she does have some ideas, at least, but she'd really like it to work.  C'mon.  Somebody please have a professional guide to onboard new mages or whatever.  She doesn't like fumbling in the dark.

Total: 592
Posts Per Page:
Permalink

The first result is a listicle of Little Rituals To Try If You Think You Might Be Magic. Candle lighting, cleaning, putting someone to sleep, making a loud noise, condensing moisture into dewdrops.

Permalink

Well.  Sure.  She'll take a look at that cleaning one, it seems actually practical unlike most of the other cantrips.  Prestidigitation, here she comes.

Maybe also the sleep spell if it can self-target or quick-cast in self-defense...

Does it say why the rituals are designed that way at all?

Permalink

The cleaning spell apparently involves reciting a short poem in sotto voce while also making three simple hand signs (the Tiger sign from Naruto, I.E. hands clasped with index fingers pointing up, then both palms up separate, then two clenched fists against each other) in time in a cycle- with the meter, and tapping the surface to be cleaned.

It does not say why. Very bottom-barrel clickbaity writing quality, here. Festooned in ads too. In this case for incense, 'energy crystals', and overpriced health supplements.

Permalink

...If it's stupid and it works...

Well, it's still stupid, but it does, probably, work.

Does it describe what clean is, or is she meant to supply that herself, spell-writer?

Permalink

It magically loosens and unbinds 'filth'. It notes that stubborn stains may require repeated applications, and that you should wipe down or rinse afterwards to remove the loosened material. It does not repair damage, such as permanent loss of dye to bleach/acid, fire damage, etc.

Permalink

"...Well, here goes nothing."  She'll just...  Use some scribbled-on paper as her test subject, Thinking Really Hard that the carbon is totally filth.  ...Huh, you could maybe use this to undye clothes...

She also sets up her phone to record this test.

Permalink

It feels like she's trying to insert the wrong key into a lock, when she tries this.  (While wearing boxing gloves, for good measure.)

Permalink

...Maybe if she thinks about what clean is instead?  She's going to need to start a blog of her own about this, at this rate...

Permalink

That one fits.  The paper is now less pencil-marked, after she raps it on the desk.

Permalink

...Yeah, that's...  That's evidence.

Fuck.  Existential crisis later.  Right now, she has learning to do.  To the library!  Because she has a funny feeling they're going to have better resources than Google.  Surely they will have proper research available, no matter the headache she might get beating her head against the jargon...

...Is there going to be jargon?  It's not as if she saw a Mage Studies major in the catalog...  Would that be anthropology?  It'd probably be anthropology.  Study of humans and whatnot.  Maybe that's a good place to start looking, too.  That and psychology; there's a significant element of thinking in the right way that's evidently involved here...

Well, she is pretty good at perspective-taking when she remembers to try, at least.  Most of the time.

 

...Hey, wait a minute, if that spell is making a pop culture reference, where are the Jedi?  Can she use the Force?  That would be so fucking cool.  (She adds 'and pop culture' to her to-look-up list.)

...Damn, now she really wants a lightsaber.  (In the coolest possible color, which is purple.  Or maybe in octarine...  Would that one be powered by crystallized narrativium?)

She's positively buzzing with ideas and theories and wonder that she'd long since resigned herself to the lack of.  It wasn't like she was special enough to be magic.

(Except she apparently was.)

Permalink

Regardless of her rushing thoughts, however, the library awaits.  Who knows what lore awaits this seeker of knowledge within its storied walls and quiet halls?

Permalink

This is a university library, and the contents lean very academic. Much less fiction or bookstore-reading. And the overall academic view on magic appears to be... Not skeptical, exactly, they admit it exists, but kind of 'collectively throwing hands up about understanding or verifying any of this'. There's some stuff on anthropology, psychology, and history as regards magic. There are few hard scientific studies. There doesn't seem to be an encyclopedia of magic that anyone agrees is actually correct or definitive.

Things that very probably exist: 

Magical girls.
Puchuus.
Demons, or at least succubi. There's apparently a special law for them as regards medical licenses in the state of New York.
Tinkers/Mad Scientists/Artificers. People who make magical objects. Some of them have been studied in engineering papers, to much bafflement.
Tentacle monsters, apparently, are plants.
"Lesser" Magical Girls- Puchuu have stated before that they don't recruit everyone because not everyone has the same potential.
A lot of folkloric monsters have various amounts of evidence for their existence.

Permalink

Interesting.

And if they're throwing their hands up about it, that smells like a research opportunity.

...She is not a mad scientist, she did not cackle.  The present thunderstorm is a coincidence.

Hmm.  ...What's that about succubi and medical licenses in the state of New York, anyway?  One wouldn't, normally, expect to put those words together.  But it feels like a string to tug on.  ...Why is she tugging on strings, you ask?  Because they're there.  And because she can get a clearer picture of things when they interact with other things, like medical bureaucracy, that she already (kind of) understands.  ...And because she's following Obi-wan's advice and trusting her feelings, which think that this seems like a good idea, for...  Reasons.  (No, it's not rampant lesbianism.  Really.)

Permalink

Succubi can have said licenses even if they are not a US citizen, and can choose to take alternate forms of some of the tests. They have biomancy magic, apparently.

Permalink

Huh.  Cool.  She wonders how transhuman they can go about it.

...Where was she?  Spell design?  Was she anywhere near spell design?

...Okay, no, she was at 'magic replicates, but in a soft-science way'...

So what does happen if she just makes something up, anyway?  That's leaping, like, several dozen steps ahead, but...  She really wants to try.

 

...Later, though.  What's the demography of practitioners look like?  Has anybody put together a survey or something?  She feels like she's likely to be an outlier somewhere on that scale just based on her history, but for all she knows this is normal - though the (probably fictional) precedent of Hogwarts et al. suggests that she's coming to the field a bit late.  (...Is Hogwarts based off a real school goes on to the interminable research pile.)

...And if one wanted to get in touch with a succubus with a medical license, for medical purposes - how might one go about that, anyway?  What do succubi even want?  ...Presumably, currency.  Possibly other things, too, though, because where else could the mythos she's all too aware of have even come from?

(She's had thoughts about solving some of her problems that way, but until now, they'd all seemed like only distant fantasy.  Much like magic, despite how much it intrigued her even before she found out that she had any.)

...She needs to talk to somebody with a research-oriented background about maybe putting together some experiments, speaking of, and if she goes poking into too many things too fast, she might break blinding - as much as it's even possible to blind yourself in experiments you'll be integral to performing - so while she's googling things like "biomancer near me", she also pulls up the faculty pages and sees if she can find some names that're on any of the papers (metaphorically) in front of her.

Permalink

One study posits about a 1 in 13000 rate of people having magic in America. Doesn't seem heritable. No relevant genetic markers.

There doesn't seem to be a comprehensive survey of lifestyle conditions. Puchuu near exclusively recruit young teens, and disproportionately girls and the queer community. Commonly mentioned traditions include Magical Girl, Witch, Wizard, Druid, and Tinker.

Succubi want magic energy, which they extract through sex. No apparent long term effects, can't rule either way on potential for addiction.

Tentacle monsters are kind of... Mindbreaky? There's a whole three shelves of medical knowledge on trying to deal with it.

Permalink

...That thing about tentacle monsters is vaguely concerning!  And a good thing to know before she encounters one!

 

...Witch, wizard, druid, tinker - what, still no Jedi?  Or would they fall into the druidic category - and how much should she be reading into the analogy from D&D, anyway?  ...And speaking of classes - Hey!  Where are the monks!  What kind of Eurocentric bias is this?  Surely the xianxia tropes don't have no backing in historical practice!  (Yes, she just used a double negative, no, she's not changing her mind, hypothetical telepathic pedants; while she is given to pedantry herself in most circumstances and therefore shouldn't throw stones, anyone suggesting that it's inappropriate to use a 'not ... none' construction here, when she expects that there are very few admissible bits of evidence in the first place, let alone evident connections, can bite her.)

(Magical girls, being rather a sort of soldier rather than necessarily a practitioner's methodology, are...)

(...Rapidly thrown into the bucket labelled 'warlock/pact-bound', when she thinks about it for five seconds.  She's vaguely surprised by having made this decision, but...  It does make sense.)

...Coming back around to some of the earlier lines of thought, she does find herself thinking that you could put the stereotypical cultivator 'monk' somewhere in between wizard and druid, but she's still bemused that the Middle Kingdom's ample historical record hasn't seen more review...

And, well, the rest of Asia, too.  The king who fell off his horse in 670-something and failed to keep it from the history monks to then become a Tumblr meme would like a word.

...Say, what about shamans?  Are they lumped under druidry?  It would make an amount of sense, but it rankles her sense of definition.

 

...Ugh, this state of knowledge, in the Internet age, is going to frustrate her, she can tell.

Time to put on some good calm thinking music and get her priorities in order.

Permalink

...Alright.  So.  Her priorities are as follows:

  1. Make sure she is not going to be eaten by a grue.
  2. Make sure she is not going to be assassinated by a shadowy cabal that doesn't like magic being scienced or conscripted for some stupid war by the government or the Puchuu or any such thing. (This has a very low presence in her threat model, but it's still high priority because she'd really hate to miss it.)
  3. Determine what professional niches are available to her based on the fact of having magic.
  4. Determine where she stands in relation to the expected power and capacity of average practitioners.
  5. Develop training/paradigm to maximize amount of cool and/or useful shit she can do.  She'd like to break entropy over her knee, please and thank you.
  6. Actually make useful knowledge of what magic is slash how and why it works more widely available, if she can find any!

...Okay, those last couple things are more of an unordered priority list at this point, but it's more than she had five minutes ago. Now she just needs to...  ...Talk... to people... ...if she can even find any.

Oh dear.  That might be the hardest part of this whole endeavour.  ...Maybe her academic advisor will have contacts?  It's not like she wasn't already slated for a meeting soon enough...

Permalink

The library does not offer her a solution to this conundrum.

Permalink

It wouldn't, no.

She shoots off a quick email to the academic advisor in question to the tune of "This just in: I have had a Sudden Life Event and need to re-evaluate the suitability of my degree program; would the scheduled advisory meeting be suitable to discuss that", except with more painfully formal academese.  The response will get there when it gets there, and the meeting's already scheduled anyway.  Right now, with that taken care of, she's going to turn to her greatest informal knowledge resource, to see if she's miraculously rolled a 1-in-13000 chance: her collection of Random Internet People.

Setting her status to "halp, I'm apparently magical, what *do?!*" is not exactly a thorough search, but it'll get to the people she wants to see it soon enough, regardless.  If nothing else because she doesn't even normally use that field and someone's bound to ask.

Permalink

Her academic advisor is happy to discuss whatever she needs. Here is her current calendar if Alex needs an earlier appointment.

The internet is the internet, but it seems nobody immediately comments. Not in the first, like, sixty seconds, anyway.

Permalink

Re: email: ...Would the 2:30 timeslot today work?

 

As for the Internet: Yeah, that's about what she expected to begin with.  She's got a few people she's going to tell directly - though maybe she'll wait til there's slightly more to tell, because at this point it's almost all questions, and certainly no answers; she's noticed that most people don't really like that sort of conversation much - but this is more of a fire-and-forget sort of thing.

 

(...Maybe she'll tell a couple of her closer confidantes right now.  Just for emotional support.  It's been a day and it's barely started.)

(...Augh, she's going to have to tell her parents about this.)

Permalink

Her advisor can do 2:30 today if it's just a 20 minute meeting. If they go over they can continue on the regular meeting day?

Permalink

It's probably not a bad idea to do that that way, given that there's likely to be research that needs doing; she's on her way over to the office now.

 

She arrives several minutes before 2:30, accompanied by an unearned, unfounded, and unwelcome feeling of impending doom.  Has she mentioned she hates talking to people.

Permalink

Her assigned advisor is also a TA, has a lot of kitch on her desk, and seems to sound eternally tired.

"Hello Alex! Come on in. I, uhhhhh... I pulled your file up but I don't know what we're talking about today. Are classes going okay?"

Total: 592
Posts Per Page: