Pierside, Magic, and Me · 3:51am Aug 6th, 2016
More Pierside info and stories!
This time I'm going to change things up a little, and link the stories (along with the ones from last week) above the cut. That's for two reasons:
One is that Axis of Rotation suggested that some people might have missed the stories last week, buried at the bottom of a long blog post.
The other is that if you don't read this week's blog post, one of this week's stories is pretty much spoiler level two: some information that might let you put together things from the first few chapters before the book gets to them, if you remember the stories. If you do read the blog post, it's spoiler level three: some things the book treats as reveals in the first two chapters are obvious or outright stated. Now, it's only the first two chapters, but I want people to have options.
So, this week's free stories are:
(Spoiler level three) The Scars You Live With (1295 words) - Eleven years before the events of Pierside, there are some things Ezzy won’t talk about.
(Spoiler level two/three) Stepping On Stage (1982 words) - A year before the events of Pierside, Ian Rathsly tries to get a date.
And last week's, if you missed them:
(Spoiler level two) Never Look Back (987 words) - Fifteen years before the events of Pierside, Maddy West says goodbye to her parents.
(Spoiler level two) Building a Life (5706 words) - Two years before the events of Pierside, Ezzy is confronted by the uncertainty of beginnings.
This week I'm blogging about the magic in Pierside, which isn't very interesting by itself. But I'm going to consider a question TheJediMasterEd asked. I mean, he didn't ask me, but he has asked it. The rest of the blog is spoiler level one by itself: nothing I wouldn't put on the back cover in terms of information. At worst, it'll make some exposition in the book seem redundant.
This post is based on something TheJediMasterEd has brought up several times, though he’s never directed it at me specifically. A version of it came up once in comments on a blog post I made, so I’ll quote it here:
You could then call this a fourth category of the fantastic: "If I had my way..."
You might argue that that definition works well for certain fantasy stories, but that it doesn't fill up all the negative space in the fantastic left over by the first three definitions.I could venture that it does, for when you use magic in a story--when you break the bonds of physical law--your only guide is your view of right and wrong, whether you mean to use it or not.
Scary thought, that: show me how magic works in your universe, and I'll show you how you think this universe should work.
Well, it'd make for a grand party game, at any rate.
My first reaction, on thinking of my setting, was “God, I hope not.”
See, I don’t feel very personally attached to my magic system. It’s a fine magic system, I think, but if you asked me to come up with a magic system that shows my philosophy, or my view of right and wrong, or pretty much anything about me, this would not be the magic system I would come up with.
On the other hand…
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that wasn’t true. But it’s not the magic system that says something, because it’s not the magic that I find interesting. You might have noticed that my first two prequel stories didn’t touch on it at all-- and this is despite the fact that the existence of magic is (sort of) common knowledge that’s affected the history and social make-up of the setting.
What I find interesting is people. And thinking about it, how my magic affects the people in my setting is something that probably does say a lot about me. So, I thought I’d go ahead and lay it out and see what you guys think, if you’re interested.
The magic in my setting is wielded by people called Elevati. Or, it was until about twenty-five years before the start of Pierside, when the “last” one died. As the back cover copy of the book indicates, that’s not exactly the case.
There was never anything secret about it; Elevati ruled parts of the world and did a number of great and terrible things. So the stuff I’m about to tell you is all information people in the setting could find in a book or might be taught in school. None of that "the Jedi are real?" after twenty freaking years of being gone bullshit.
Of course, most people don’t read books or remember what they learned in school, so most normal people would have bits and pieces of this information, often filtered through novels or the recently growing movie industry. I usually compare it to our understanding of knights or pirates or the American old west: everyone knows about it, almost everything most people know is wrong, and even a lot of “facts” are historical guesswork, surface observations, or trying to interpret obviously biased primary sources.
But these are the “facts” as well as they’re known:
Elevati are people born with magic powers. The legend goes that the first one stole it from the gods, or God, or monopolized it in the world around them, depending on the individual’s theology. For the most part they’re immortal, and while they can be injured they heal near-instantly and can regenerate their entire body within a half a day or so. They each have one specific power granted randomly from a wide range of possibilities: mind control, pyrokinesis, stopping time, transforming into animals, etc.
They’re immortal for the most part because there is a weapon that can kill them, a gun that can only be fired by another Elevatus. Before the Gun there were other weapons, a spear and a dagger, but they’ve been lost or hidden for at least two centuries. These days people would only bother to consider the Gun.
There’s also an exception to their healing: anyone, mortal or Elevatus, cutting off their hand puts them in a coma that appears peaceful, but is actually tortuous. (This supposedly represents the hand that stole the magic, according to the common story.) Because of this, while Elevati rarely know or care about each other personally, any mortal who has cut off the hand off an Elevatus is usually considered an enemy by all of them, which is a very bad position to be in.
Elevati powers don’t work on other Elevati, including themselves, even passively. Fire controlled by an Elevatus won’t burn other Elevati. There are also magical pendants that mortals can wear which will block Elevati powers, but those also have to be created by the Elevati themselves, so they’re rare and hard to come by.
More Elevati can be created by a ritual performed by an Elevatus that allows one to be born each year for twenty years. There’s no way to control where these children will be born or who their parents will be. There’s no particular reason for Elevati to want more Elevati, so it’s rare for one of them to perform the ritual, and even at the height of their population there were around a hundred in the world. But they do sometimes have personal or religious reasons for performing it, and also a lot of them are nuts, so every few centuries one of them would go off and do it.
In the past Elevati ruled the world, or at least large portions of the developed parts. Some with the more aggressive powers used outright force to take and keep city-states, or those with more subtle powers might use hundreds of years of Machiavellian scheming, being immortal and all. And of course however they got there they were kind of difficult to depose, since overthrowing one meant either getting another Elevatus to kill them or cutting off their hand and making the revolutionaries a target for other Elevati. They covered a pretty understandable range from “wise and helpful ruler” to “you do realize there is a finite number of subjects you can kill before you run out of subjects, right?” Most of them fell solidly in between, especially allowing for historical revisionism.
So, that’s the magic in my setting. As a system, it’s not something I think about a lot. It’s just kind of how this world works. But I’ve written a lot of words about this world, so obviously there are things about it that are interesting to me. And as I said above, that starts with how the magic affects the characters.
The biggest one is that Elevati are people born with magic powers, and there’s no way to control or detect where or what powers. There’s no Hogwarts where they learn to do magic, and no School for Gifted Youngsters where they learn to control it. A little pyrokinetic is born to normal parents and learns to control fire at the same time they’re learning to hold a rattle or walk or speak.
This is obviously a problem for normal mortal parents. First off, some Elevati unintentionally orphan themselves. And it’s extremely hard for even guardians with the best intentions to teach them discipline or fully empathize with them. It’s hard to spank a two year old who can summon superhuman strength, or give a time out to a kid who can teleport, or explain right and wrong in a way understandable to a six year old who can read minds. Some guardians end up utterly controlled by their own kids, or otherwise good people end up resorting to extreme abuse to try to control them… and that’s not getting into those with already abusive or opportunistic guardians.
This leads to Elevati having a well-earned reputation for being mentally unstable and/or dangerously maladjusted.
So on top of the other problems with raising a young Elevatus, most parents would want to keep their nature hidden to avoid both fear and prejudice and/or powerful people who want to try to control their kid. But this adds another layer of guilt/shame/paranoia to the toxic mental stew the Elevati deal with, helping to keep the vicious cycle going. The other option is that they're open about it, which can lead to resentment towards the normal mortals who fear them or assume they're crazy, whether those people are right or not.
And the most important thing is that the Elevati are mentally human. Often painfully, with all the mental fragility and resilience that comes with that, and with all of their own hopes, dreams, and desires. Those who ruled the world did so in a number of different ways, and for different reasons. The ones who didn't used their powers to help mortals, or pursued dreams that had nothing to do with their powers, or tried to eek out a normal life in hiding, or cut themselves off from the rest of the world deep in the wilderness. Questions about how to use their powers, or the Gun, or whether to make more Elevati or pendants can take a personal or philosophical bent, or a combination, depending on the Elevatus.
So the combination of powers, life situation, psychological reactions and coping abilities, personality, human talents, and dreams is luck of the draw for Elevati, and they each have to try to play the hand they were dealt as best they can for themselves, while the results can impact the world around them in ways both global and personal.
And that, I think, probably says a lot about how I think the world should work.
Arrgh! Darned summer. So much real world stuff I have to do and so much writing stuff. The Writeoff just gave me a link to Brandon Sanderson's lecture series, and your stuff, and writing, and all of the things the wife has lined up for me to do, or else.
I need 48 hour days and Immortality.
This is very interesting. I'm excited to see these systems at work :D
Also, I love the hand thing.
That's interesting. Just to get this straight: they don't regenerate a cut-off hand, ever? Does this then effectively kill them, or are there other ways for them to get out of the coma?
Huh. A very interesting system, this. I'll definitely need to check out the short stories.
Your Captcha anti-spam system displays the image in a way that makes it impossible to answer the questions and make a comment on the site. Here's an expanded version of my comment.
Oh. So that's what Ezzy is. An Elevati.
And if she didn't keep it secret, someone would try to control, contain or kill her.
It's a good thing for her she has Maddy ... but is that going to be enough to keep her safe?
Feeling like you're a misfit in the world acquires a whole new level of meaning when you really are.
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They don't regenerate it, so... sort of. The movies like using Elevati as villains, and that's their go-to happy ending.
But the hand will regenerate seperatly, so the Elevatus could always be woken up at some point, and they'd probably even less sane and none-to-happy with whoever did that to them.
So if the Elevatus was unpopular enough (so that absolutly no one would want to rescue them) and the person or people responsible for cutting off their hand were popular enough (so that they were sure no one would wake the Elevatus just to sic him on them,) and the hand and/or Elevatus was well hidden or protected (so that random other crazy people wouldn't try to wake the Elevatus for crazy person reasons,) then it would effectively kill the Elevatus.
...Until one of those conditions changed.
I think you're onto something about the magic reflecting one's view of how reality does or should work. In my stories, I basically assume that "magic" is simply the term for forces and interactions we haven't discovered yet in real Earthly science, mostly the forces which set the rules for quantum effects including entanglement, and the kind of Magic which relates to Friendship is based on moiric (destiny) effects and the ways in which personal worldlines are or can become entangled.
Magic can have very gross or very subtle physical effects depending on what the caster is doing. In All the Way Back, Luna and the Lightning Drake are channeling forces (including semi-magical fusion and fission boosted metabolisms, respectively) into instant combat effects (beams and shields), at a level of power capable of bringing down part of a mountain on their heads. In Her Special Gift, on the other hand, Pinkie Pie channels her power, the magical resistance lowered by Contagion, in what is essentially a Sex and Love based blessing to literally charm Cheese Sandwich's life, so that he doesn't die in any of the future worldlines she can access.
This represents both my belief as to how the Universe actually works (it's ultimately understandable through reason, and how I wish it worked (one could protect one's beloveds by wishing strongly enough). Both are also extrapolations of vanilla canon -- and expressed in the same character: Twilight Sparkle studies magic scientifically, and she is the focus of a very strong moiric magical effect, the Magic of Friendship, which links together the destinies of the Mane Six.
I also notice that this can extend to direct combat magic: the most obvious example being the Rainbow of Harmony, but there's even a vanilla-canon example not directly involving Twilight Sparkle: the ability of Princess Cadance and Shining Armor to combine their power to make a ultra-strong version of his already super-strong shield spell. That's explicitly the Magic of Love (and presumably Sex as well), and the fact that Cadance and Shining are lovers is highly-relevant to it.
I use this explicitly in An Equestrian Gentlemare, where Sunset Shimmer notices that she can amplify her magic through Sex and Love with Flash Sentry (at the point when he still loves her). I also explore the limitations of this sort of magic (she can't do it with just any partner, it takes time to do, and because Flash isn't a mage and Sunset is concealing her true nature from him, he can't actively cooperate). Hmm, I'm probably saying something about the problems caused by lying to your lover, here.
Blog catch-up!
I suppose I haven't earned an opinion on this, but if I had to say what the secret to writing is, it's that--people.
I also believe it's where the adage "write what you know" really applies. You can fake factual knowledge, but I don't think you can fake people. If you do, it's what readers will smell the quickest. Real characters come from, I believe, a real familiarity with other people. The more you pay attention to those around you, the better a writer you will become.
You know to be honest I wasn't too interested while you were describing the Elavati, until here. I'm intrigued now. I think it's because once you mentioned how much of a personal struggle it is to be one they became immediately way more relatable to me. And this might just be a result of the narrowed focus on them by the blog (in other words, it's not a theme of the book), but I feel I'm starting to grasp the edges of a metaphor about life via the Elavati here.