262 - Problem Solving
“Go ahead,” urged Sonata. “Dig in!”
“I, I shouldn’t,” murmured the earth mare weakly, looking at the cabbage Sonata was holding out to her with an expression of trepidation. “There are so many other hungry ponies here…”
“Snap, you need to eat something,” insisted the earth stallion beside her.
It wasn’t hard to see what made him say that. The mare was leaning against him, not so much in a gesture of intimacy, but because she didn’t look like she’d be able to stand otherwise. She was painfully thin, and Sonata was almost sure she could see the other mare’s ribs under her coat, which was notably sparse. Even so, the mare made no move to accept the food she was being offered, instead glancing at the stallion propping her up. “I ate at the banquet Mr. Legis made for us two days ago,” she pointed out, though her tone of voice made it sound like she was confessing something shameful.
“You had a carrot and half of a bowl of yogurt, and I saw you throwing it up later!” The stallion’s voice was tense, making the words come out harshly, but to Sonata it was very obvious that he was worried rather than angry.
The mare flinched, looking at the ground. “I’m sorry,” she muttered, sounding like she was about to cry. “I just couldn’t stop thinking that every bite I took was taking food out of somepony else’s mouth. And with how bad Mr. Legis injured himself to make all of it for us, I felt so guilty…”
“He made that food for you too, Snap. You didn’t need to give it away to other people,” insisted the stallion, and the expression on his face told Sonata that he’d had this conversation – or one just like it – with her more than once. “There’s no reason to feel bad, so please…I’m begging you, just eat the cabbage, okay?”
But the mare, Snap, only seemed to wither under her companion’s prodding. “Maybe we could just carry it around for a while, in case we see someone else who needs it more than me?”
That was all Sonata could take, turning slightly and glancing back at where Lex was still scribbling on his clipboard as she whispered. “You heard all that, right? Can I do my thing?”
She got her answer a moment later, and she looked back at the couple. “Listen, um, Snap, was it?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” cringed the earth mare. “I’m Snaptastic. I already knew your name, so I didn’t think to offer mine.”
“Aw, it’s okay.” Despite the starving pony in front of her, Sonata couldn’t help but grin, taking it as a compliment that the other mare had known who she was. Yep, we’re totes hitting the big time now! she cheered internally before getting back to business. “So listen, your boyfriend is pretty clearly totes worried about you…”
Both ponies cringed at that. “Um, Daybright is my cousin,” offered Snaptastic awkwardly.
Sonata laughed. “Oh wow! Oops! Like, major fox paw on my part!” But the admission didn’t dispel the awkwardness like she’d intended, as the pair simply glanced at each other in confusion, causing Sonata to tilt her head questioningly. “What? What’d I say?”
“Faux pas, Sonata,” called Nosey from where she was still clinging to Lex. “It’s pronounced ‘faux pas.’”
“Really? That doesn’t sound right.” She frowned for a moment, then shrugged it off as she turned back to Snaptastic. “Anyway, how long has it been since you’ve eaten? I mean, like, for realsies eaten?”
The other mare seemed uncomfortable with the question, giving a weak twitch that might have been a fidget. “I don’t know,” she muttered evasively.
“Nine days,” interjected Daybright. “And that was only because I said I’d throw my food away if she didn’t eat anything.”
That was enough for Sonata to glance back at Lex, who nodded at her. Satisfied, she turned back to Snaptastic, holding up the cabbage. “Aw, that’s no good! After that long, you must be totes starving!” Without waiting for a reply, she kept going, added a slight melody to her words. “You shouldn’t waste it, so why not taste it? It’s gonna taste so good, I’d bet you’d enjoy the flavor. I really think you should, you’d be doing us a favor.”
It was only just barely singing, but it was just enough for her to work magic into her words, letting her weave magic into the lyrics, laying a suggestion on Snaptastic to put whatever was bothering her aside and eat the cabbage. As she felt the spell settle into place, she let the song end and gave her an expectant look. “So, whaddaya say?”
Snap hesitated, before swallowing nervously and reaching out to fumble for the cabbage. “I…I guess a little wouldn’t hurt.” Tentatively, she brought it to her lips and bit off a leaf, chewing it slowly. Daybright looked shocked, but his face broke into a smile immediately, helping her to hold the vegetable steady as she went back for a second bite.
“There we go!” beamed Sonata. Not waiting around to watch the other mare eat, she waved to the pair as she turned and made her way back to Lex. He wasn’t that far, being only a stone’s throw away, but she still wiped her foreleg across her brow in an exaggerated manner as she reached him. “Whew! The last one’s always the hardest, huh?” she asked, nodding at the empty wagons and bags scattered about.
When all she got was a noncommittal grunt from him as he kept his eyes on his clipboard, the pencil still scratching away, she changed the subject. “So, the train looks closer now.”
But Lex didn’t respond. Instead, it was Nosey who answered. “He said it was about an hour away, but that was a few minutes ago.” She shifted her weight slightly, as though she was about to separate from Lex’s side, but seemed to change her mind at the last instance.
That was enough to give Sonata an idea, smiling at Nosey. “Hey, you want me to use my magic to calm you down again?”
“Huh?” Nosey blinked, and Sonata had the satisfaction of seeing Lex’s writing come to a sudden halt, his eyes now peering at her instead of whatever he’d been writing.
That’s right, look at me! “Well, I mean, you’re still all over Lex because you’re freaked out about what happened, right? I’m sure that’s gotta be crimping your style, you know?” She waved a hoof at the camp. “Everypony’s excited, big event happening. You must be dying to get out there and interview some people, right?”
But rather than seeming excited at the prospect, Nosey blanched. “Um…I don’t-”
“It’s a good idea,” interjected Lex, his pencil resuming its writing. “You should use this as an opportunity to try and recover from what you’ve been through.”
“Ah…yeah. Of course.” Puffing herself up, Nosey plastered a grin on her face. “I was just going to say, ‘I don’t see why not.’ Hit me.”
Grinning, Sonata sang a quick ditty, and a moment later Nosey was walking away from them. Sonata watched her go, waving when the blonde mare paused and glanced back at them, and after a moment Nosey disappeared into the crowd. Sighing in relief, Sonata moved into the space her friend had vacated, snuggling up against Lex. She could have just taken the other side of him, of course, but this was better; now Nosey could get back to being her old self and she got Lex all to herself again! “So, what’cha workin’ on?”
“I’m diagramming some initial hypotheses for transforming Aria into a pony.”
Sonata couldn’t help but fold her ears back at that. First Nosey, now Aria? You were just hugging me and saying how worried you were if I was okay a little while ago! Why am I old news all of a sudden?! Unable to help herself, she didn't think before she spoke, saying something she knew would get a rise out of him. “So…you seem to be cool with all sorts of brain-twisting magic lately. What’s up with that?”
Again, Lex’s writing came to a complete halt, and he slowly turned his head to look at her. “What?”
The warning tone in his voice was audible, and Sonata knew she was heading toward another fight, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “I’m just sayin’. I mean, you know I enchanted those farmers I met with-”
“In order to facilitate the fair and peaceful purchase of excess food in their possession so as to secure the health and safety of everypony here, when they wouldn’t otherwise have done business with you.”
“And then I heard you totes made Spit Polish into some sort of special-needs pony.”
“Which in no way abrogated his free will or personal identity. The impediments I placed on his cognitive abilities are the mental equivalent of shackling his ankles; they diminish the peak ability that his mind is capable of performing at, but do not create any alterations to its substance.”
“Plus you were fine with me using magic on Snaptastic to get her to eat just now.”
“Of course I was,” snorted Lex peevishly, keeping his voice low. “Her refusal to nourish herself, even when there were sufficient provisions for everypony, was completely lacking in a rational basis and had reached the point of putting her health at risk. Corrective action was necessary, and the invasive nature of having your magic plant a thought in her head was counterbalanced by the overall chance of success as well as the negligible time requi-”
“Also, Nosey-”
He gave her a flat look then, clearly annoyed with this entire conversation. “You asked her before you did that, and she provided you with informed consent. That obviates any sort of moral objection on my part.” He paused for a moment, tilting his head as he regarded her with a frown. “Does that answer your question in a comprehensible manner?”
Huffing, Sonata tossed her mane from one shoulder to the other. “Oh yeah, that’s totes reprehensible.”
“Comprehensib-” His correction was cut off as the train whistle rang out again, and he glanced behind him for a moment before turning back to her. “We need to make some preparations before that arrives here.”
Sonata’s ears perked up. “We?”
He frowned at her again, clearly not understanding why she focused on that particular word. “You and me. Aria’s best kept inside the train station where her unpalatable demeanor won’t be an issue if whoever’s on that train isn’t hostile, while still being a nearby auxiliary force if they are. Severance will obey whatever commands I give it. Everypony else will need to be managed one way or another, so that just leaves the two of us to coordinate our actions.” He paused, then added, “You are my spokespony, after all.”
“I…yeah, I am.” She suddenly felt as dumb as her sisters always told her she was. Lex wasn’t trying to ignore her, he was just acting like he always did: moving from one issue to the next and losing sight of everything else. The problem was that all of a sudden her sister and her bestie were crowding him all the time. Even if he didn't notice, it was pretty upsetting. It was like making a really nice sandwich for yourself for lunch, and then seeing someone else grabbing it and acting like they were about to take a bite out of it.
"Sonata?"
"Huh?! Yeah! I'm paying attention!"
He gave her a long look, clearly not convinced, but pointed away from the camp. "I said, we need to retrieve those gemstones that Garden Gate lost while she was fighting. If whoever's on that train is hostile, they'll be helpful."
"Got it." She smiled, still feeling a little bad about how she'd acted as she helped lead him back to last night's battlefield. She'd need to have a talk with Nosey after the stuff with the train was taken care of. As bad as she felt, having her sleeping in the same tent as them and leaning on him all the time had to stop.
Nobody takes my sandwich!
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Sonata is adorable as always so that's a good trade-off for delaying the train's arrival. At least we have confirmation of Lex being on top of the tasks at hand(hoof) as well as his promise to Aria though I wonder how he'll accomplish that in three days time when he's only at the hypothesis.
Hi everypony! Just a quick announcement to say that I'm going on a brief vacation for the next few days, so there'll be a delay in new chapters.
Expect to see chapter 263, and the arrival of the train(!), on Thursday, August 9th.
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Have fun~
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Vacation? Who does that!?
Its the Taco -Noggin Chew Chew.
Sonata finally gets some of the attention she's been craving, and only has to use a little mind control to do so! I suspect Lex doesn't believe in the slippery slope...
Speaking of preparing for a hostile encounter, is Lex going to raise his cleric anytime soon?
9081869 When I started writing this chapter, I fully intended to have the train arrive. But I wanted to work in a little bit more with the camp ponies reacting to everything that's happened, as well as address the use of mind-affecting magic a little bit more. Next thing I knew, that had become the entire chapter! I tried to wrestle it back, but it just wouldn't go, and so I stopped fighting it.
But the next chapter will have the train arrive, and take things from there.
9082244 I've got a fun scene in mind for what happens next with how the Lex/Sonata/Nosey scenario is unfolding...
9083322 Lex doesn't believe in the slippery slope for himself. That's really what that comes down to, as he's supremely confident in his own ability to manage power in (what he believes is) the correct manner. And of course, he sees Sonata as an extension of himself in that regard.
As for the gem with the resurrection spell...well, there's still a lot going on. But we'll get there, don't worry.
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He killed Kelemvor with Mask, then did steal the tablets, but I could have sworn they were grabbed back from him for most of the book and he just kept chasing after them. Like I said, I barely remember and even the wiki is of little help. But I'm sure that Cyric "getting there under his own power" was mostly from having a god for a sword.
Yeah, they were also pretty incompetent.
Between them and Finder, I loved reading about divine screw-ups.
She failed her stretch goal, but she still comes out ahead. Going off the Shar's wiki page "Shar eventually made allies of Bane and a patsy of Cyric in 1374 DR. Together, their followers attempted to conquer Myth Drannor while the Church of Shar attempted to wrest control of magic away from Mystra through various means. Shar's plots were defeated but she did absorb most of the divinity of her son Mask." Or that time Shar tried to just straight up destroy the world with the Cycle of Night and she was barely stopped by her own followers, but she still got a powerful artifact of pure annihilation out of it. Shar is smart enough to make sure she always comes out ahead even if her main scheme doesn't pay off.
He can still power his followers, but from what we've seen in the novels, getting serious stuff done requires a god to go out into the planes. Heck, part of why Bane was able to conquer the Goblin Pantheon and not Cyric was that Cyric was in time-out.
Right, he was smart enough to just spam contingency plans of resurrection so that one of them would pay off.
I was solely going off the wiki, but when you say every major god, did Cyric get any powerful allies or followers?
Ugh, that entire cosmological development was deeply disappointing. I always thought Vhaerun was way too interesting for what they did to him!
He's managed to hold onto dominant market share amongst evil individuals. Unless AO changed the rules again, power comes from worshippers, which means for an evil god, your fellow evil gods are really more of a threat than good gods. Good gods just want to fight and kill you, but no one is going to convert from Cyric or Shar to Torm or vice versa. But Amongst evil gods, when your clerics murder a bunch of rival clerics and wave their weapons around, it seems to be pretty good at converting lay followers to your religion, and that seems to be what Bane is doing really well at. He seems like the dominant religion in almost all the major evil-dominant areas on the continent these days.
Like I said, your mileage may very. It seemed to me like Bane was acting like he knew what Szass was really up to, but he'd probably do that even if he had no clue.
Yes, the Akashic Records! That's exactly what I was going for. In Pathfinder it actually exists, and there are spells that can take you there.
Yeah, I can see the problem here. I think the answer is that "interpreting the data" is what is fantastically hard, beyond even the gods most of the time (or they wouldn't get surprised), not "accessing the raw data." That would explain Vision pretty well I think, you can grab a piece of the Akashic record, using your mortal mind as a primitive query function, but you'll never be able to really turn that piece of data into understandable knowledge more than a few vague hints.
I think that really fits with what we've both been talking about, making "raw data" of only middling difficulty to gather, but "interpreting said data" the really challenging bottleneck. It also fits with the idea of outsiders being fundamentally insane. Sure it has its downsides, ask those poor nutters Midnight used to care for, but it does mean your perspective lets you act as the data analytics team for a Commune spell!
I think this is a good example of a humanoid brain trying to interpret an exact moment of time and space. Are they able to factor in the proper quark spin and gamma radiation, etc, for that minute, or is that why they're imagining all the key characters as talking spoons?
Or the Storm King. I mean, petrified and then having the statue smashed is pretty final. On the other hand, most of the time, those individuals getting stoned/banished to something are either battlefield magic, or at the very least containment of a threat to public safety like Discord or Tirek, rather than primarily punitive actions (or rehabilitation either).
I do wonder about that. In this version of Equestria, prior to the Everglow Incursion, was serious crime a problem in places like Manehatten? My impression was that it was not. I actually thought Lex's main dislike of the Regal Sister's hands-off approach was less that there were problems caused by lack of a formal criminal justice system, and more that they don't organize things properly to manage things like a welfare state, infrastructure and healthcare.
Interesting. It sounds like your'e saying that Twilight thought Discord was corrupted by chaos magic, and was hoping to "purge" him of it enough that he would stop acting crazy.
That's right, Xiriel was pretending to be military and deputized Spit Polish I believe. His name just sounds like a staff sergeant or something.
I think that's a pretty logical assumption to make, it would be incredibly powerful to use the enemies soldiers against them. Unless you think Sombra could only make so many helmets or something.
That's right, I need to keep an eye on that.
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I was referring to the end of the last book (Waterdeep), where Cyric killed Kelemvor during the fight against Myrkul on top of Blackstaff Tower and then grabbed the Tablets and ran. Now, Godsbane (though the sword wouldn't be named that until later) did help Cyric out, but all we knew at the time was that it was a sentient sword with some notable magic powers. Moreover, remember that Cyric defeated Godsbane in a mental battle shortly after acquiring a blade (apparently being the first person to do so, since every previous wielder, such as Atherton Cooper a.k.a. Sneakabout, eventually became addicted to it), though he didn't break its will as much as he'd thought.
Yeah...no. Shar was ultimately one of the biggest losers of The Sundering, with quite a few of her more notable plots either failing or coming undone leading up to that. To reiterate:
Although she's not down-and-out at the moment, she's suffered several setbacks that have seriously curtailed her ability to threaten the Realms overall. She's certainly not walking away from the most recent upheaval as one of the big winners. It's why the wiki says:
Actually, the current status of things suggests that the gods are more hands-off now than they've been in a while. From that same page on the wiki:
It does go on to say that this isn't completely without exception, but it does seem to be the general rule now.
More notable, however, is the circumstantial evidence that Cyric is no longer imprisoned after all. From that same page on the wiki:
Now, there's a caveat in that (as indicated by the citation on that page) this is from the Living Forgotten Realms organized play campaign, so it's canonity is questionable. (I seem to recall an earlier adventure there where the PCs were supposed to redeem, or possibly kill, Shar herself.) However, it's worth noting that the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide (i.e. the closest thing we have to a Forgotten Realms campaign setting for Fifth Edition) makes no mention of Cyric being imprisoned in its write-up of him. So the question of whether or not he's still locked up is dubious.
Which turned out to be somewhat moot anyway, what with the Sundering bringing dead gods back en masse.
Hm, I thought he did, but I can't seem to find anything about it now. I was fairly certain all of the gods had exarchs in the 4E cosmology, but I can't seem to find who was Cyric's.
Well, take heart in the fact that he's apparently back now thanks to The
RetconningSundering.I don't agree with that take on it. Rather, I think it looks that way because Bane came back and was able to quickly recollect most of his old worshipers, putting his house in order fairly quickly. That's not too surprising though, because Cyric had been a Chaotic Evil deity trying to take over a Lawful Evil deity's holdings (it's no coincidence that he had a lot more success with former worshipers of Bhaal, Leira, and Myrkul...at least before Kelemvor took over the latter's portfolio; Bhaal and Myrkul were Neutral Evil while Leira was Chaotic Neutral). Hence, it wasn't that hard for him to come back and retake most of his faithful who, due to alignment differences, were never happy with Cyric (or alternatives such as Shar or Talos) in the first place. Given that he was a greater power rather than a lesser power the way Iyachtu Xvim was, it would have been more surprising if he hadn't been able to do this.
Bane only appears in one scene in (I believe) the second novel of the Haunted Lands trilogy. I've read and re-read that scene several times (it was the template for Lex's interaction with the Night Mare in chapters 44 and 45), and I don't see any indication that Bane knew what Szass Tam was up to.
The problem here, of course, is that having this be a demiplane makes it cosmology-specific, whereas the divination spells we're discussing work just as well in every cosmology which doesn't say otherwise. (This is part of the problem between wanting to make a game that can function as a universal "toolbox" for making your own campaign while at the same time pushes its own campaign world as the default.) Even leaving aside the idea of having what amounts to the universal memory of existence be a demiplane (which strikes me as being for a lack of other good options, much like with how AD&D had the "Demiplane of Time." It was Chronomancer - itself acquired from Mayfair Games in a settlement before TSR published it - that made it into a "Temporal Prime" that overlayed the entire cosmology...which seems to be what Pathfinder did with their "Dimension of Time"), this doesn't work as an explanation for any campaign that doesn't adhere to Golarion's cosmology, which is a point I've raised before. The game rules, it seems, want to have their cake and eat it too where assumptions of setting (which is really an extension of the idea of "how things work") goes.
A few things here. First, the idea of "outsiders being fundamentally insane" is in danger of being overstated. It's not a question of their thoughts being incomprehensibly warped; they can be not only intelligibly communicated with, but also reasoned and negotiated with. Rather, because their alignment is an inherent part of what they are, they tend to have a fixed outlook on certain fundamental issues regarding the nature of existence (i.e. philosophic questions on the nature of good/evil/law/chaos, which to them are likely to be more practical than philosophical). To an extent, they don't have free will to change their mind on these issues...or rather, they do, but for them it's very much the equivalent of grabbing one of their arms and ripping it off, since embracing such a change means that it alters their physical form as well (i.e. their bodies and souls are a single unit, rather than two separate components that are joined together the way mortals are).
Second, if I understand you correctly you're suggesting that divination spells work perfectly, but that mortal (or even divine) minds are incapable of fully understanding what's being communicated to them? If so, I'm not entirely sold on that idea, if only because there are divinations (that don't rely on contacting a deity or other outsider per se) that can simply fail to provide an answer at all even when cast successfully, such as augury. Even at it's best, there's still a 10% chance that the spell will simply fail to return a "meaningful result," which you'd have to stretch to interpret as some sort of failing of the human (or demihuman) mind. Further, take a look at that spell's listing in the "spells of intrigue" section of Ultimate Intrigue. Despite the spell itself making no mention of a god or deity, the listing on that page says:
This seems to subtly indicate that, unless told otherwise, divinations should be treated as coming from deities (or, presumably, similar entitites).
Not in d20 terms. That's just an application of make whole to fix the statue, and then change him back with stone to flesh or break enchantment or something similar, like limited wish.
In this story, prior to the new material that's been introduced in this fic or its predecessors, I'm presuming that things were as they were in the show, so seasons one through four happened just as we knew them (though Lex was lurking about in the background of season four; I like to say that was him that we saw at the end of Castle Mane-ia). Though, to be completely forthright, I've made one or two subtle changes (e.g. the open normalization of homosexual relationships, hence Drafty and Cloudbank, rather than it being a vague, arguable interpretation like it is in the show). As such, crime wasn't really a big deal in Equestria prior to now.
As such, criminal justice was only a small part of Lex's planned reforms. He's much more focused on economics and the role of government in public life. He does have thoughts on how criminality should be dealt with, but that doesn't form the base for his objections to how the Royal Sisters have been running things. He's much more upset about their laissez faire attitude toward governance than anything else they've (not) done.
That's my interpretation of it. Of course, this conflicts with the fact that not all dark magic shown in the show functions like this, hence why Princess Celestia can use King Sombra's magic in The Crystal Empire, Part 1, and then Twilight does the same in the next episode. (For that matter, Equestria Girls has been subtly pushing the idea for a while now that the natives of that world have very little tolerance for magic, going crazy if they possess more than a little.)
The problem is, how was he making them? Are we really going to suggest that he was spending time in a forge, hammering out each one individually? I suppose you could say he was having some enslaved ponies do it, but that's still awkward; not only does it raise questions about magic item (mass) production, but where exactly did he get enough to enslave the crystal ponies to begin with?
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I did forget about that. That was fairly badass.
Those are all fair points. You gotta take risks to get ahead. She still has most of Sembia under her sway though post-Sundering, even if a city or two has broken free.
I did not know Selune got promoted. Yeah, that is a pretty big setback for Shar.
Huh. Looks like AO is quietly admitting his "make the gods squabble over filling each pew" strategy is a failure.
A shame too, micro-managing gods was one of my favorite things about the setting!
Interesting. I'll take it as canon myself. I wonder why the same group would free Cyric and ally with Mystra?
Elminster needs to stare directly at the fourth wall and says "Oops."
That's fair. Other than Xeno, most of Cyric's followers seemed like they were kind of resigned to him. On the other hand, goblins are neutral evil, so I'd say it's more of a jump-ball between Cyric and Bane to pick them up, and Bane came out ahead there.
Hey, the demiplane of time is awesome! (I'm generally of the opinion that demiplanes are like deities, the more the better, even if some seem ridiculous, obscure or redundant).
Well 2nd Edition certainly does, "Golarion infused" everything.
But what makes the Akashic Record different from say Heaven or the Elemental Plane of Fire? There are a lot of planes that seem kind of implicitely relied upon for the material plane to work. (Heck, I believe that at one point all suns in Golarion were actually gates to the Elemental Plane of Fire).
Yup, that's some good vintage lore, and it does good to clarify their mental state.
Sure. When I said "middling difficulty," I only meant in comparison to interpreting the data. It's still pretty hard to acquire the data, which is why a lower level spell like Augury often returns nothing at all.
I think it indicates that the spell Augury should be treated as coming from deities. That spell was originally only for clerics in the core rulebook, and I totally agree that many divination spells do make use of deities to make things easier for mortal minds, particularly the lower-level ones. I certainly agree that a lot of divination involves beseeching divine beings of various types for help. I just don't think they are the only path, especially for arcane casters.
One the one hand I could point out that this procedure seems harder than a Raise Dead, but on the other hand in the comics Sombra sets out to do exactly this after he petrified and smashed Amore, so there's certainly Equestrian precedent.
Is it really vague? I thought it was pretty explicitly normalized. Either way, I appreciate your clarity.
Ah, glad I was on track. Unfortunately for Lex he hasn't had a chance to try out any of his primary ideas yet, and it will be hard to do so any time soon. I'm sure he has some great ideas for public universities, but it will be hard to kick that off in a refugee camp.
They've been mixed on this. Certainly true for SciTwi and Sunset. On the other hand, Gloriosa used like 5 of the 7 amulets for weeks without becoming visibly corrupted, and Wallflower Blush and Instagram Girl never seemed to be affected by their magic at all. I mean, they did bad things with their magic, but was their corruption having their thought processes polluted by magical influence, or the more mundane aspect of the Ring of Gyges paradox?
I kind of assumed the Crystal Ponies created the physical helmets, and he just set the enchantment. He could even cast one big spell on a giant pile of helmets, we're not talking about d20 magical item creation rules here.
I think in the original Crystal Empire he just created enough for guards while he shackled everyone else. He could have hidden away in a workshop and crafted the helmets for months, or cast the spell on regular helmets. Given that average ponies appear to have had their memories stripped of the Crystal Heart even though we saw in flashbacks that most of them weren't wearing helmets, Sombra appears to have some limited ability to affect minds without helmets.
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That's largely a legacy of Sembia being a "protectorate" of the Netherese. With them gone, her hold over the country is quickly weakening, and is likely to vanish near-totally in short order.
From what I read on a quick skim, they usurped the bonds keeping Cyric in place to revitalize Mystra so she could fully reintegrate herself as a greater deity. Essentially, they couldn't help but free him in order to restore her. There was some more stuff in there about how (I think) Cyric's madness was part of the reason why the Spellplague was so chaotic (which is something 4E kept saying, about Cyric being a mad god, completely ignoring the ending of Crucible: The Trial of Cyric the Mad).
I wonder how much any of that is still true post-Sundering, what with how much the pantheon was shuffled.
You must have loved the Demiplane of Electromagnetism, then. (Yes, that was a real demiplane back in AD&D 1E; by 2E, it was already listed as slowly crumbling away, which explains why we haven't seen it since.)
There is, to me, a highly-implicit reading in the nature of a demiplane - as opposed to a "fully-fledged" plane - that it's not contributing anything to the fundamental nature of material existence the cosmos the way a plane does (or, to use an alternate understanding of the planes, reflecting an archetypal aspect of that particular mode of existence). It's simply too limited to accomplish something of that nature.
In all honesty, things like this make me miss the Great Wheel cosmology as it was back in AD&D, because it had a few differences from how it was presented later that helped it make a lot more sense. For instance, the Astral Plane only connected the Material Plane to the Outer Planes; it didn't reach everywhere. Rather, the Ethereal Plane was the bridge between the Material Plane and the Inner Planes, and even then it was divided between the Border Ethereal (that region of it that touched each of its coterminous planes) and the Deep Ethereal (the greater Ethereal Plane itself), with the latter being where demiplanes were located. That more firmly established the link of the Inner Planes being physicality (i.e. matter and energy), the Outer Planes being belief/spirituality, and the Material Plane being where they met. Even the so-called Transitive Planes had their role, as the Astral Plane was held to be "thought," and the Ethereal Plane was a sort of "possibility" plane where the elements mixed without forming anything stable (to be fair, this latter interpretation wasn't stated outright the way some of the others were; but it still fit with things like demiplanes, which weren't really fully-fledged planes in their own right).
The only demiplane, in this arrangement, that seemed like it was something fundamental to the cosmos was the Demiplane of Shadow, and even that was iffy; the only in-depth treatment on the subject was an article in Dragon magazine (#213) that noted that there were two giant vortices in the sky - one each to the Positive and Negative Energy Planes - that it implied were part of the reason the plane formed and was the way it was. And of course, there was nothing to explain why it became a fully-fledged plane of existence in 3E (i.e. we don't know if that was supposed to be in-character or a retcon...the events of Die Vecna Die! make either possible).
All of which is a long-winded way of saying, I don't see the Demiplane of the Akashic Records being fundamental to some aspect of the cosmos (let alone the cosmos beyond Golarion's cosmology) simply because of what it is. That's why the idea of a Dimension of Time/Temporal Prime was so much better than a Demiplane of Time (and likely why the authors decided to go about with that alternate listing in the first place); an overlay that's present on all planes of existence works a lot better than some minor quasi-plane tucked away in some out-of-the-way corner of existence.
I don't think they're the only method by which divinations can function either; hypercognitive effects which increase your personal ability to perceive information in your vicinity and/or analyze it better work just as well. But insofar as actually answering questions you have requires, to my mind, an actual consciousness at work. As there's comparatively little game lore to suggest any sort of pantheistic sentient to the planes themselves (though that does come up a bit with regard to the Abyss), that pretty well leaves us with gods and similar cosmic entities.
Insofar as it being "harder" than raise dead, well...bear in mind that if you want to come all the way back with raise dead, you'll also want some restoration magic to take care of those pesky permanent negative levels. So that's a comparable investment to fixing a broken statue and then transmuting it back; it's just that this way makes you use auxiliary spells up front instead of on the back-end.
And of course, I'll reiterate that I don't think anything besides the show can be conclusively said to be canon.
In order for homosexual relationships to be explicitly normalized, there'd need to be unambiguous depictions of homosexual couples/romance presented in the show. To date, we've seen nothing of the sort (though a recent instance comes at least somewhat close). Consider:
The end result is that we've never seen anything that conclusively, inarguably demonstrates that Equestria (and indeed, the entire world) is anything but heterosexual in its population. The show has had plenty of straight characters who were openly demonstrative of their heterosexuality, i.e. Rarity swooning over Trenderhoof in Simple Ways (and, with no reason to presume any sort of bisexuality on her or anyone else's part, Occam's razor again leads us to ruling that possibility out unless there's something to suggest it, rather than asserting such a thing due to a lack of evidence against it), to the point of having straight weddings onscreen, but gay characters have had no such depiction, save for the interpretable-but-not-conclusive examples listed above.
In point of fact, Lex is actually somewhat conflicted on the issue of standardized education. He recognizes its benefits in theory, but at the same time he remembers just how much he hated going to school, and how he never learned anything there that he either didn't already know, or learned so fast that he didn't immediately become bored. He actually attended Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns, and was utterly miserable there, feeling both intellectually stifled by the curriculum (which he found jejune in the extreme) and even more socially isolated than normal. He ended up withdrawing after a single year there. Hence, he's hesitant about enacting such a thing again, even though he holds that public education is extremely important (how else will the public ever become smart enough to understand just how good his ideas are?).
Let's reiterate:
In other words, we first got villains who were native to Equestria and could handle high amounts of magic. Then we got villains who were natives of that world who used too much magic and went mad, and more recently we've been getting villains who only received a small amount of magic and so never transformed/went crazy (the two seeming to go hand-in-hand for native characters). In other words, we don't see that much anymore because the stakes keep getting progressively smaller as the Equestria Girls media goes along (hence why I remain skeptical about how, if Vignette Valencia kept using her phone, it would have resulted in "squish city." That was a questionable assumption at best).
There is, unfortunately, no way to know. What we can say is that we see helmets worn by the crystal Royal Guard, and they look nothing like the helmets Sombra uses. In fact, nothing seems to approximate their design in any way, making it dubious (albeit not impossible) that they were preexisting items that Sombra simply co-opted to enslave the crystal ponies. Likewise, if he didn't need the helmets to use that sort of enchantment, then why use them in the first place?
How would Lex feel being compared to a sandwich?
That is a comparison that makes no logical sense! To compare me to an edible foodstuff is a travesty!
9221586 Well, maybe it would depend on the kind of sandwich?