[American Magic] worldbuilding thread

[Arakawa]

This is a thread where I plan to post miscellaneous notes as I try to flesh out the world and backstory of "Lost Twins", generally covering topics that don't have direct bearing on that story. The first set of articles will be given in no particular order, as you will see.

I'm posting the notes as text attachments to restrict them to forum members at the moment. Think of the words in square brackets as links in a wiki (to topics that I've thought about). Interested people can ask to 'click' a link and I'll write up and post a corresponding article.

Topics: magic, thaumaturgy, Stephen Locksley

[Arakawa]

By popular demand -- bloodline magicians.

(Obviously, dealing with someone named Prodigy Williams is going to cause a certain feeling of inadequacy for Simon.)

Update: opening to a guest reader.

Spoiler: ShowHide

** DONE <<bloodline magicians>>

*Bloodline magicians*, or bloodline wizards, are people with innate magical abilities beyond those available to an ordinary [[human being]]. The ability amounts to a constant internal [[power source]] for magic, similar in power and nature to a minor [[fairy]] being, along with the [[jurisdiction]] to manipulate it for a variety of effects. This internal magic is a hereditary trait, which leads the bloodline magicians to form a clannish and isolated culture, with something of a superiority complex relative to ordinary humans. Unlike ordinary [[magicians]] who generally only find magic worth using for specialized tasks, bloodline magicians are able to access magic for trivial or mundane purposes, and therefore have a large repertoire of spells and techniques that deal with mundane, day-to-day tasks. This further contributes to their society's isolation beyond the [[veil of ignorance]], as they cannot maintain their preferred lifestyle on the open.

Historically, the isolation of bloodline magicians in the West was also guaranteed by a hostile treatment from the [[Church]], which considered them to violate the [[moral condemnation of magic][religious prohibition on magic]]. More recently, relations between the [[Church]] and bloodline magicians have significantly improved, with recent religious thinkers considering their innate abilities not to fall into the category of morally reprehensible magic, and some bloodline magicians such as [[Charles WS Williams]] even becoming prominent clerics. The thaw in relations has become, however, a cause for some hostility between Christian confessions, as some still maintain that bloodline magicians must renounce their abilities to become members of the Church, whereas other confessions do not have any such requirement.

In New York, the bloodline magic society numbers around 150,000 people, which corresponds to a fair majority of the people knowledgeable about the [[hidden world]] and able to interact with the [[Greater Bolg]]. They form something of a merchant class, acting as economic intermediaries between the Bolg and the greater human society.

Because [[fairy][fairies]] have a very similar inherent power to bloodline magicians, they are able to learn bloodline magic techniques, and this contributes to a certain interaction between the otherwise impenetrable fairy society and the human beings. Over time this has led even originally hostile fairy beings such as [[Lady Hudson]] to become essentially assimilated into the bloodline magic aristocracy.

On the other hand, bloodline magicians are usually not able to replicate the fluid, spontaneous nature of fairy magic. This is not because they have an essentially different power source or jurisdiction, but because their nervous system does not have the provision to perceive and direct their power in the way fairies habitually do. Very gifted bloodline magicians are able to train the ability, which makes them able to produce new effects and spells; these are then linked to specific, short incantations and symbols (which are largely arbitrary*) and taught to other bloodline magicians according to the broader discipline of [[Imitation]]. All of the 'spells' the bloodline magicians know are passed down this way, and originated either from gifted ancestors, or from unusually cooperative fairies. The process of acquiring a spell vocabulary is tedious and time-consuming, requiring their society to have a separate education system.

[* The arbitrary symbolism of the spells makes it difficult to disrupt them with [[Disputation]], but not absolutely impossible.]

Some of the spells are directed towards altering the properties of physical matter, which gives bloodline magicians greater flexibility in crafting [[potions]] and [[artefacts]] than ordinary magicians. However, non-bloodline magicians can generally replicate these particular abilities with reasonably affordable equipment.

The precise nature of the power source has been the subject of some theoretical analysis. Bloodline magicians are able to elicit far more power than they could plausibly draw from their immediate environment, according to basic estimates taking into account conservation-of-energy. However, the power they are able to elicit also follows difficult-to-explain rules of exhaustion and recovery, whose limitations appear to be arbitrary, and have not been successfully related to any of the rules governing energy transfer.

The most common theory states that the people carrying the internal-magic trait form an extended family whose members donate energy to one another, and therefore are able to accumulate power as a collective entity, effectively forming a large, collective organism, which (according to calculations) would be able to accumulate energy at the rate required to power the observed level of bloodline magic. A key requirement for a bloodline magician to wield maximum power is therefore remaining in [[harmony]] with as large a portion of the bloodline magic community as possible. Certain facts make this theory attractive: it explains, for instance, why in its internal conflicts the bloodline magic society does not have powerful, solitary murderers, but it does have a tendency towards producing warlords or covert movements who make certain to gather a number of extremely loyal followers before starting their conflict. However, quantitative data only roughly matches the theory, so it should still be regarded as tentative.

Another theory is simply that bloodline magicians have hereditary access to a private [[ley]]; due to the fact that the ley system serving the Earth can normally only be accessed with the aid of untrustworthy [[demons]] and the occasional [[fallen Yama]], however, it is not feasible for researchers to verify the existence of such a ley, or investigate for what purpose it would have been set up.

Out of the main characters, neither [[Simon Molloy][Simon]] nor [[Drake Powell][Powell]] are bloodline magicians. Powell is particularly proud that her skill with [[cantrips]] allows her to match the fluidity of a bloodline magician, with only a minor expenditure on equipment.

Characters in the series who are bloodline magicians:
- [[Professor Jenkins]], a former colleague of Powell's at Princeton University. His specialty lies largely in the theoretical underpinnings of magic, which are sufficiently high-level to be common between bloodline magic and other fields.
- [[Prodigy Williams]], a twelve-year old student at the 'fancy' bloodline magic boarding school in Salem, who has already advanced to the last class of her studies. She travels frequently to New York in order to take additional lessons from Powell (in spite of Powell's knowledge of bloodline magic techniques obviously being purely intellectual).
- Prodigy's guardian [[Gryph Lyons]], who Simon is referred to for some supplementary [[Mesmerism]] lessons; Prodigy and Lyons epitomize in some ways the condescending attitude that bloodline magicians often have towards anyone from outside their culture.

Changelog
- <2014-03-07 Fri> Initial stub

[Arakawa]

Another fairly crucial thing to discuss.

[Muphrid]

Are there any theories as to why ordinary humans are susceptible to the veil of ignorance?  Or how it came about?

[Arakawa]

Are there any theories as to why ordinary humans are susceptible to the veil of ignorance?  Or how it came about?

So, I'll think about this, but there's a reason why I described it as "poorly understood". It's similar to the effects of extremely powerful Mesmerism, which can misdirect human attention (causing people not to notice fairly obvious things, or to bury memories of certain events), but can be defeated very easily if the person knows that they are subjected to Mesmerism and is actively trying to identify what is being hidden. This is why people who see the hidden world once and have an actual motivation to continue paying attention to it, will not have any problem continuing to see it, whereas everyone else will gradually forget what they saw (only to have it resurface as relevant if they get involved again). There's a different theory which describes "involvement" of objects with one another on a magical level as a basic aspect of reality rather than a metaphor, but makes basically the same conclusions about the veil of ignorance as the Mesmerism explanation.

However, what is causing the veil is not known. It could be anything from a seal array hidden on Earth, to some kind of influence coming from outside the three-dimensional visible world. This falls under the general problem of identifying what is generating a magical effect (merely from studying the effect), which is not always solvable.

Thus the veil should be considered as something like the ancient giga-artefacts around the setting (e.g. Hurricap's Dome beneath New York), albeit without a physical presence. It's there, it can be studied and interacted with, but there is no information about how it got there (in the case of the veil: what's generating it on a continuous basis) besides legendary or religious sources of questionable accuracy.

In general, any thoughts on the choice to have the hidden world be hidden by a magical effect, rather than just a really efficient system of secrecy like in Harry Potter-verse?

[Muphrid]

Well, making it a magical effect means that you have to go to great lengths to make it not seem utterly convenient.  And maybe, no matter what you do, it will seem convenient anyway.

Now, if this effect is only manifested against human beings, then I think you're stuck with saying that it is what it is and nobody knows why.  If it affects other creatures, perhaps in other ways or unique ways, then it could be considered part of a larger phenemenon, which then seems less convenient and more organic.

One way I could imagine a system of secrecy is having magic be an open secret on a small scale, but make the true extent and capabilities of magic be somewhat protected and secret.  So, say, a minor bit of mesmerism to pull off a swindling or to steal someone's wallet?  Known danger, on the order of getting mugged or having your car keyed.  Something that could destroy the very fabric of reality?  Inconceivable, but the world's most powerful magicians know such things could exist and what could lead to them.

The latter approach makes the world somewhat different from our own even on the surface of things, though, so that has some obviously unattractive points.  Total secrecy, of course, is something I'd consider untenable, even with magic to back it up.  Or at the least, I think HP having done it first means that you have to find some creative spin on it no matter what.

[Arakawa]

Say during a formative time of human evolution occurred during a large magical influx, enough that it would be poisonous to anything that was affected by it. Humans survived by becoming inured, then immune, to the effect. As a result, they can't really pierce the "veil" hiding magical creatures except during major events.

In advantage, humans that can't pierce the veil also have a high resistance or limited immunity to magic directly. They can't get most magical diseases and when someone casts a "flesh-to-stone" spell on them, they only feel a little stiff, and can't remember the event well enough to describe it.

Actually, you've just jogged my memory; I was originally going to go a similar route, though a bit more subtle.

Looking at my older notes, I remember a scene of Powell explaining to Simon that perception of the hidden world would be, for most people, something like the enhanced sense of smell a dog has; not actually useful. Moreover a dog can smell all of the heinous chemicals that are wafting around in a crowded city, but doesn't understand them; a person with the same sense of smell would be constantly reminded of the nature and amount of pollution they are inhaling, and gradually crack under the stress. Similarly, without the veil of ignorance people would first and foremost be aware of many possible-but-unlikely dangers from the magical world that they have no control over, and it is healthiest to simply ignore these. Ordinary people can be affected by magical effects regardless of whether they're aware of their nature or not; however, certain matters of symbology pose a danger to magicians, because knowing what a symbol means (or that something is in fact a magically significant symbol) can affect whether or not it triggers. Therefore, for someone who does not grasp symbology from being immersed on a substantial basis in the magical culture, non-awareness is indeed the safest solution, and the veil of ignorance provides that.

Now, this isn't exactly what I'm going to end with (it would be more warranted in a more HP Lovecrafty type of universe), but I'm musing in this vague direction.

[Arakawa]

One way I could imagine a system of secrecy is having magic be an open secret on a small scale, but make the true extent and capabilities of magic be somewhat protected and secret.  ... The latter approach makes the world somewhat different from our own even on the surface of things, though, so that has some obviously unattractive points.

Not necessarily. Mesmerism is merely an enhanced version of perfectly ordinary misdirection, which is employed perfectly openly by mundane stage magicians. This is enabled because perception (obviously) works a bit differently in the fictional world, and mundane human capabilities are a bit different, but Mesmerism should be thought of as an extension of the way we can learn send cues that unconsciously direct someone else's attention in real life; not some categorically different phenomenon.

So you'd have to delve pretty deep into the psychology of perception, in either the real or not-real world, to conclusively determine the extent to which mesmerism is or is not possible.

Likewise, there are countless putatively-supernatural occurrences even in the real world which people don't bother to investigate. Television mediums came up lately in an unrelated connection. Do you actually know if they actually bend anyone's spoons? (Likely you don't really care whether they do or not. If a medium did successfully bend some spoons over the television, it would hardly shatter your view of reality anyways.) Is that all they do, or is there more apropos and useful stuff they're capable of? (You've never investigated.)

So, there is some room here. Certain things (the goblins and magical races) are indeed very well hidden; others tend to leak to the real world (e.g. why folklore describing the past takes magic for granted), but never in a way that's conclusive or motivates anyone to pay attention or bother to distinguish what's real from what's fictional. Like the mediums that may or may not actually bend spoons, but few people care either way.

Thus when Simon goes through the veil, everything he runs into is at once familiar (goblins and elves exist in the popular imagination; so do genies and ghosts and magic; and their image is obviously influenced by the actual goblins and elves and magical phenomena at some point), and also deceptively different from what a naive knowledge of the popular imagination would lead him to expect. So, some of his preconceived notions are true (even some striking details), but they are true for entirely different reasons, others are completely wrong, ...

[Arakawa]

Another point raised by the veil is the issue of whether some well-known fantasy literature from the real world exists in the fictional world. One idea I'm thinking of as a headcanon (something that may not ever be addressed, or need to be addressed in-story), is that they would exist, but be somewhat different in content.

So, Lord of the Rings in the fictional world would have to have a more nuanced treatment of goblins and fictional races, maybe incorporating more of a commentary on how Tolkien saw the social situation in the hidden world; rather than the armies of orcs just being invented out of whole cloth to provide guilt-free enemies to kill, that aspect of the books might capture real-life fears that some Dark Lord could find a way to magically enslave a population of Greater Bolg to his will and form an instant army, or something along those lines, and produce a more difficult situation; perhaps this would provide additional motivation for why the heroes want to take out the Dark Lord by the risky quest of destroying the Ring, instead of chancing to fight a war by main force; or, I don't know, a lot of possibilities here which I'll leave the fictional counterpart of Tolkien to work out....

(The loose end that bugged me about the Lord of the Rings plot is what happens to the vast population of orcs after Sauron is taken out; they are said to be "driven off" and disappear entirely as far as the plot is concerned, but in real-life wars defeated nations don't just vanish; there's always the problem of how to deal with their populations. Addendum: the notion that goblins are more neutral beings, but with particular negative traits that are exploited by a Dark Lord, would put them more on a comparable footing with other races, since Sauron employed exactly these tactics to produce the Ringwraiths (by appealing to characteristic human vices).)

And Harry Potter, say, would be something like a controversial political satire; the Potterverse characters would either be fictional (like the protagonists of the books), or they would be plausibly-deniable but recognizable caricatures of actual political figures in the British bloodline magic society. So, Rowling would be a bloodline witch, or a squib, or something, who decided to protest the political situation in magical Britain by writing a series of boarding-school novels that become popular in the ordinary world, that also happen to ridicule major political figures in the hidden world. (A sort of "no one can name the capital of Elbonia, but everyone in the world is going to know that their president is a Cornelius Fudge style buffoon" debacle for the British magical-world politicians.)

This notion should serve to give an additional data point on how knowledge might percolate between the hidden world and the outside world, without actually breaching the veil.

[Muphrid]

So in some ways, it is your intention that this world be different from our own, that magic itself isn't something merely hidden from our world through various means, but the existence of magic means that some things that happened in our past would've necessarily turned out differently in this world.

I think you're attacking the veil problem by trying to figure out its consequences to the fullest extent; this is definitely one way to make it seem less convenient, but working all these details into the narrative requires them to be at least somewhat relevant.  Now, I guess that depends on how relevant the veil itself is.  If Simon still has trouble understanding it, or if dealing with people who are still on the ignorant side of the veil poses a challenge, then it strikes me that these remarks about LotR and HP could be quite useful for Powell to explain to Simon how things work and how the influence of the magic community has shaped non-magical culture.

[Arakawa]

then it strikes me that these remarks about LotR and HP could be quite useful for Powell to explain to Simon how things work and how the influence of the magic community has shaped non-magical culture.

Well, this is something that would have to be explained in a different manner in-story, and probably not through Powell-exposition. So, say, if Tolkien wrote an additional novel describing the fall of Numenor, Simon would mention it next to Lord of the Rings like it was common knowledge.

(What would Tolkien use to title a novel describing the fall of Numenor?)

So, after some thinking, it turns out that Tolkien's novels get brought into the picture in a relatively organic fashion (in the story that I posted a rough scene from on IRC, the one where Simon speaks with a demon). A certain situation is going to remind Simon of the basic idea/moral of Lord of the Rings, which will prompt him to summarize the books in a way that happens to reveal pretty clearly how the books differ in that universe.

This also resolves my qualms about the bit in Lost Twins which confirms the existence of LoTR, which I'd been contemplating to delete. (Because that raises the inevitable question of how Tolkien handles goblins; the exact same LoTR would be a weirdly racist story in a universe where there are actual goblins. But now I get to address that exact issue.)

Rowling is probably best not to mention directly in the books, whatever I decide with regards to HP behind-the-scenes, though if it ever seems apropos I might bring up British magical politics in a way that an imaginative reader could puzzle out, say, which political figure corresponds to Voldemort, and why Rowling would have written him that way. It's unlikely to be apropos, though.

[Arakawa]

Posting some brief notes-to-self as I polish the worldbuilding logic behind the last chapter of 'Lost Twins'. The import of all this will gradually become more clear.

The Ley System

Spoiler: ShowHide

With rare exceptions, the phenomena represented by magic do not constitute an exception to basic laws of physics. This is most noticeable in that magic obeys energy conservation laws; while magical disciplines often provide energy transmission methods of an almost perfect efficiency, they cannot actually perform manipulations that increase or decrease the amount of energy in a closed system. Even more vexingly, magic is just as subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics as any other phenomenon under the sun.

Fortunately, besides the high-entropy, energy-scarce environment of the visible three-dimensional world, there are also higher-dimensional (material, immaterial, and conceptual) low-entropy, energy-rich realms which our world is situated within. Unfortunately, these realms are also the native realm of dangerous Yamas, Disjoint Ones, and even more eldritch and difficult-to-understand beings and phenomena, such as the infamous Man-Eating Integral that claimed the lives of three students at a Caltech physics seminar, before finally being wrangled into submission by the professor.

Contrary to popular misconception, a ley (or ley line) is not a large-scale, three-dimensional landscape structure used to transmit energy, but an invisible conduit extending from the vicinity of the Earth into these higher (fourth, fifth, conceptual, etc.) energy-rich dimensions. The confusion arises because some ancient civilizations did, in fact, employ large geometric structures (either naturally occurring landscape forms or megalithic constructions) as a crude reference point for tapping the energy available in particular ley lines, with a degree of subtle symbolic complexity employed to get around the fact that it is impossible to indicate an object in the higher dimension by directly pointing to it*. Because ley lines can be changed, most existing megaliths (e.g. Stonehenge) are in fact completely inert due to a lack of ongoing maintenance (rituals and small-scale adjustments) to keep them aligned.

(* It sure makes more sense than the theory I heard in childhood that Stonehenge is just a stupidly big astrological calculator.)

Of course, the relatively recent increase of subtlety in the study and understanding of magic has led to a large degree of miniaturization, with modern systems for tapping leys compared to Stonehenge being akin to a multi-core processor chip compared to the gigantic vacuum tube computers of yore. The Hazardous Materials Warehouse contains a low-end General Electric stone array, somewhat resembling a large billiard table, but rather than connecting directly to extradimensional leys, it is most frequently configured to convert energy from the electricity grid (for small-scale use) or at "second hand" from stone arrays elsewhere in the city, and is generally used to provide power for transporting large objects into and out of the warehouse without having to disassemble the roof.

Because some of the higher dimensions are timeless or entirely conceptual, an understanding of how energy (or, to be precise, entropy) works there is best obtained by a contrived analogy. It is well known that every whole number has exactly one prime factor representation, so that its conventional form and its prime factor form can be understood as different states or phases of the same number (like liquid vs. frozen water). Computationally, however, it is far easier to multiply a series of primes than to obtain the prime factors of a base-ten number. Thus, from a certain point of view, the prime-factor form of a number is a lower-entropy state of the number relative to its base-ten representation.

The precise way in which an energy concept of this kind is translated into real-world energy depends on the way that any time-like properties of the conceptual realm wind up mapping to linear time in the visible world.

Planetary Geography

Leys occur more readily at the bottom of a gravity well; indeed, planets and suns can be thought of as naturally-occurring arrays that make access to higher dimensions more feasible. Theoretically speaking, the range of magic that is available in interplanetary and interstellar space would be far more limited, with a greater advantage allotted to non-energy-consuming disciplines such as Disputation. (At a practical level, the difficulty of using magic in space has primarily been encountered in prehistoric times when there was warfare between Earth and Lunar civilizations. See: Earth-Lunar relations.) The bundle of leys corresponding to a given planetary body can be visualized either as a bundle of parallel "fiber-optic" style tubes that branch and connect to one another before arriving in visible space; or as a set of channels descending through distinct concentric 'spheres' to the surface of the planet (expressed with reasonable accuracy in medieval 'geocentric' diagrams of the solar system, although those contain a certain conflation of planetary bodies with Earth-based ley systems that, in fact, their position relative to the Earth happens to govern). Both visualizations may be employed when trying to symbolically navigate the ley system e.g. in drawing a magical diagram.

To the extent that science has been able to study ley systems of other planets, it appears probable that the ley system of Earth has an unusual configuration with features that make the planet more conducive than usual to supporting organic life. (For example, some leys may power large-scale fields that make key chemical reaction sequences in the genetic system comparatively less likely to produce deleterious mutations.) This suggests that other planetary bodies may someday be terraformed (or, in a less pleasant possibility, induced to spontaneously bring forth strange and aberrant ecosystems of their own) through large-scale alterations to their ley systems (and, conversely, that conventional technological proposals to terraform or colonize a planet that fail to take the peculiarities of its ley-system into account will inevitably fail), although humanity's lack of facility with the higher dimensions, and the present lack of meaningful communication between the human and Yama civilizations, precludes this being pursued as a practical option at the current stage in history.

Thus there are two categories of leys available in the vicinity of the Earth -- those which are 'drawn down' by the gravitational field of Earth, and those which correspond to the gravity well of the Solar system. It is theorized that there may also be galactic leys which correspond to the gravity field of the Milky Way Galaxy, but these are either very weak, lost, or kept carefully secret by the Yama.

Types of Ley Lines

The most important type of ley is called a true ley and it draws down what appears to be an inexhaustible (if strictly rationed) energy supply from dimensions which are beyond the capacity of humanity to study directly. It is thus the subject of some (completely evidence-less) debate whether the energy supply from true leys is literally infinite, or if it is simply produced by power generation in a higher dimension which still has directionally increasing entropy, but an immensely larger scale of available energy for power generation.

True leys form the system that the Yama are theorized to spend most of their attention maintaining, and they probably form an important component of the Earth's life support mechanism. Comparatively few of these are human-usable or even known about; most secret and esoteric societies are basically sustained, in economic terms, by passing down ancient and strictly guarded access rights to particular true leys that were presumably acquired before the Yama instituted their overall no-communications policy. Since then, the only known way to acquire new access rights to leys has involved dealing with Disjoint Ones, or demons, with all the associated dangers and headaches; it is not known how the Yama react to this, but presumably they do not approve and the Disjoint Ones are doing the equivalent to leeching electricity from a grid without paying for it.

A reservoir ley, on the other hand, is basically a closed, extradimensional device for storing energy. It is in fact possible, if an incredibly difficult and impressive feat, for human magicians to set them up and fill them with energy obtained elsewhere, but the vast majority of these leys were instituted by Yama (for specialized functions) or Disjoint Ones. With a bit of cunning in terms of specifying constraints for how the energy is used, it is possible to use a fixed-size reservoir to power fairly sophisticated applications: for instance, the demon-designed summoning system effectively uses a large reservoir of gravitational potential energy as a 'counterweight' when transporting a material being to a high-potential-energy location (e.g. if teleporting from a location at sea level to the top of a mountain), binding them to return their potential energy to the reservoir when the summoning is reversed. (If the summoned being travels to a low-potential energy location, the order of events is reversed: potential energy is sent to the reservoir when answering the summons, then re-used when returning.)

*There is also the issue of how the summoning system deals with conservation of momentum, which will probably get covered if I ever write more detailed notes on teleportation.

Finally, there is also the phenomenon of the empty ley, which is effectively a ley not apparently connected to anything, or connected to a region of very high entropy. Energy sent to an empty ley would drain to an unreachable location, so it is generally unwise to connect to them; since long-term overuse of these infinite energy sinks would alter the energy balance of the Earth, eventually forcing an intervention by the Yama. It is not clear what this would amount to, whether this would be silently corrected by an increase in the output from true leys, or if the Yama would take a more organize and direct approach to stopping the energy wastage.

Some leys have very peculiar properties that put them in categories of their own, and the method in which they are used can be very crude and direct. For example, the US Army's cold ray prototype works by connecting a region of three-dimensional space (in the form of a directed beam, but this is an arbitrary choice intended to simplify manual aiming; more precise targeting modes are also available) to the opening of any of a system of cold leys that function as heat sinks, causing temperature in the indicated region to rapidly decrease with no visible cause. Because these "cold leys" are frequently cleaned up or closed, while new ones appear unpredictably (their purpose is unknown -- it is not clear if this is a natural or artificial phenomenon, or if the distinction has much meaning for higher dimensions), most of the development cost of the weapon involved developing a computer-based system with the flexibility to connect to a large and unpredictable variety of available leys. One of the advantages of such a weapon is that it cannot be stolen and used by small-scale violent organizations, as its usefulness depends heavily on frequent information updates.

While it may be possible to develop a more large-scale version of the cold ray concept that would amount to a weapon of mass destruction, a device that can measurably alter the energy balance of the Earth would, once again, likely attract unpleasant attention from the Yamas.

[Arakawa]

With me throwing around all these races it might be good to give a taxonomy. While there is a bewildering variety on the surface, there are not that many underlying categories.

• Humans are obviously human beings; an intelligent godlike soul incongruously fused with a sophisticated ape-based meat robot, and capable of pompously grandiose scales of ambition that confuse and horrify other, more grounded intelligent races. Incidentally, it is scientifically proven that there is an afterlife, but it is not very clear what that entails (what the soul actually is, or what its existence apart from a body is like). Moral degenerates across the centuries have sometimes argued that this means murdering people is OK if it is done for the sake of higher interests. In the other extreme, magicians possess many potential ways of killing people, but resort to them very rarely -- not out of any higher moral sentiment, but because of an overwhelming and ineradicable superstition that killing people with magic is terrible bad luck.* Only military-type orders of magicians where the individuals were trained to consider their own lives as expendable are correspondingly psychologically equipped to ignore this intuition.
• Fairy-type beings (actual fairies, ghosts, genies, nature spirits, and an immense variety of other entities ranging from the majestic to the utterly verminous) are subcreated from human beings; what Powell refers to as 'detached aspects of the human mind'. While capable of forming 'bodies' that are a sort of solid hologram, they do not have a real corporeal existence. The ones who are actually known as 'fairies' are often very proud of this fact, regarding humans as inferior beings, with the most pompous regarding human lives as expendable. Fairies are not indestructible, but not precisely destructible either, neither dead nor alive in any sense of the world. Rather than killing one, one would merely cause one to not exist in a particular place and time; and someone else could easily cause the fairy to resume existing in a different place and time. They gather and expend energy in a huge variety of ways -- being almost entirely magical beings -- and have their own complex society, largely separate from the human one. Loosely speaking, fairies are similar to the incredible variety of 'imaginary' gods and youkai (ultimately arising from human belief) that infest the Touhouverse.
• Other semi-fairy beings with actual bodies (Christmas Elves, Bolg, giants, bloodline magicians) can be thought of as subspecies of humanity with additional fairy traits or fairy species which have been fused to an organic biology. It is the considered opinion in Western tradition that bloodline magicians are completely human for all intents and purposes (if possessed of peculiar abilities), Christmas Elves are non-human, though they possess a human element sufficient to qualify them to participate in religious activities that presume a human soul, while Bolg lack souls in the conventional sense of the world. (Giants are not considered at all as they died out thousands of years ago.) More recent progressive thinking has denounced this considered opinion as racist rubbish that reflects medieval social realities far more than it does any objectively real category.
• Disjoint Ones, more commonly known as demons, are horrendous aberrations against reality, best described as pieces of Primordial Chaos that were Named at some point by misguided human beings and are now loose in the world. Besides the minimal personality that is implicit in their names, they are deeply conflicted and lack free will; they will repeatedly go back on any decisions and resolutions they make on a sheer whim, and awareness of this fact causes them immense suffering, leading them to tend to behave in an erratic, destructive, and generally bewildering and evil fashion.
• The Yama are a mysterious group of higher-dimensional beings, which are primarily known about due to their role in maintaining the Earth's ley system and thus ensuring its ability to support organic life. Why they do this is unknown. Their civilization appears to have deliberately suspended contact with humanity even before the beginning of recorded history. Residual Yama lore (whether accurate or apocryphal) is far more developed in Buddhist traditions (which identify them as rational souls who have 'incarnated into' or identified themselves with particular concepts) than in the West; Christian tradition tends to regard them suspiciously as a somewhat less rude (and thus, more dangerous in the long run) subspecies of demon described in tradition as 'ruling the upper air' (to wit, the higher dimensions), thereby discouraging any study of them.
• Angels are identified as a benevolent variety of Yama in some religious traditions, and dogmatically asserted as a separate category in others. If they exist at all, they seem to hang out with the Yama much more than they do with humans.

So, the basic races or types of being are human, fairy, demon, or Yama; everything else is understood by varying the basic underlying properties of these races or combining them into hybrids.

(* It is interesting that this taboo recurs in other cultures, though by no means all (the Aztecs and upper-class Italy around the time of the Borgia family -- in terms of on-the-ground behaviour rather than professed moral ideals -- are the most famously cited exceptions). Folklorists have identified the particular superstition against killing with magic in the West, however, as a degenerate form of an earlier medieval folk belief -- much fought-against by the actual Church -- that there are four categories of vile sinner that God, for whatever reason, takes an unusual mercy on and temporarily refrains from smiting in their iniquity, letting them ply their trade in peace while they remain on this Earth. These are: thieves, so long as they do not fornicate; fornicators, so long as they do not resort to magic (love potions, &c) in pursuing their goal; magicians, so long as they do not kill; and murderers, so long as they do not steal.

From a sociological perspective, this may have reflected a glaring and growing disconnect between ideals of acceptable conduct in Church tradition versus in popular culture. Whereas a priest or preacher would militate against any positive portrayal of fornication or magic, a trickster-magician [often clearly descended from earlier pagan trickster-god archetypes] or a serial seducer (along the lines of Don Juan) might easily be made the star of a vulgar ballad. However, a seducer who employed magical means rather than making his conquests 'naturally', or a magician who stooped to killing people when pursuing his goals, would be equally despised by men of God and by the vulgar man-on-the-street.

The former type of character would invariably receive a negative portrayal resulting in his comeuppance, while the latter would invariably be a Dark Lord of some sort, to be slain by a hero -- whether wielding a sword or a wand. Lest we lionize medieval popular opinion over-much, both of these characters would also be summarily lynched or burned if found operating in the real world rather than inside a work of fiction; a priest on the other hand, if given the choice, would generally be more inclined to overcome his revulsion and make an effort towards trying to convince the person to abandon their ways (and even let them off if the attempt fails), rather than execute them.)

[Arakawa]

Christian tradition tends to regard them suspiciously as a somewhat less rude (and thus, more dangerous in the long run) subspecies of demon described in tradition as 'ruling the upper air' (to wit, the higher dimensions), thereby discouraging any study of them.

A further potentially-interesting note: Powell's old friend and rival Dennis Thorn* dabbled heavily in Asian religions and esoteric magical disciplines, before taking a completely unexpected veer off into the most strict tradition possible of the Eastern Orthodox Church, renouncing all magic and becoming a monk in the California wilderness. However, one peculiar feature of his religious reasoning, that may reflect a continued Asian inspiration, has involved a dogged defence and popularization of a rare but traditionally precedented Orthodox teaching of the tollhouses, a peculiar view of the afterlife in which the soul must reach Heaven by passing through a series of highway toll stations heavily guarded by horrifying demons (or "tax collectors") that will stop the soul and try to drag it to one of the realms of Hell, asserting that the soul has put itself into debt by committing the sin under the corresponding demon's jurisdiction. (Other people have conjectured quite reasonably, though this is nowhere a feature of the oldest and traditional teachings, that the demons could just as easily capture some human souls by presenting plausible but false visions of Heaven that happen to be appealing to particular human vices.) The defence of this teaching has earned him a reputation in some circles as a courageous defender of authentic teachings, and in others as a vile heretic introducing elements of ancient Gnosticism into the Orthodox religion, and generally produced reams of ugly arguments among religious forum idlers, even long after his death. However, the tollhouse teaching, whether Christian or Gnostic seems to shed a very oblique, dim and ominous light on both the immediate course of the human afterlife, as well as the world of the Yama, and their current relations with humanity.

However, the tollhouse apocrypha, in spite of their consistent lineage (traceable all the way back to Ancient Egyptian thought about the afterlife, and consonant to the image of the Yama as taking the role of afterlife-judges in Buddhist thought), and even if they reflect a certain underlying truth, are clearly much-damaged first by the occult and eldritch bias of the primarily Gnostic sources of the most detailed accounts, and second by the clumsy attempt by the later Christian writers (e.g. the Vision of Theodora) to adapt the doctrine into a crude sort of morality tale where Theodora's good deeds are weighed against her evil deeds by demonic officials, and the prayers of her spiritual advisor become gold in the other world, which is used to pay off the demons at those stations where Theodora's good deeds prove insufficient. The last feature of the model, in particular, has been accused of being a degradation or abuse of earlier religious teaching, corresponding to a decadent period in the life of the Church, something of an Eastern mirror to the infamous Western papal abuse of the treasury of merit and indulgences.

For the end result of this story seems to be an absurd, and entirely blasphemous from the point of view of Christian logic, assertion or metaphor that God entrusts the immediate judgment of the human soul upon death to platoons of demons (Yama), and provides divine help when overcoming them only in the form of legal assistance (to wit, angelic lawyers who are the only beings who know how to argue against the accusations of the demons, the human soul itself being unable to get a word in edgewise amid their calumny) and bribe money in the form of the prayers of the Church. For many modern Christians this doctrine is also problematic for being even less charitable than usual regarding the fate of unbelievers (who do not get any defence from God, and fall immediately into the hands of the demons).

(* full disclosure: Father Thorn is heavily, ahem, inspired by the real-world life trajectory of Fr. Seraphim Rose of blessed memory, whose interests before he became an Orthodox monk are basically the closest thing this mundane world offers to a career as a magician. This may become a controversial aspect of the worldbuilding given that some elements in the Orthodox Church insist on regarding Fr. Rose as a saint (which I don't dispute -- if he's not a saint, who is, nowadays?), which process traditionally requires that his biography be carefully whitewashed and any questionable elements in his life be retconned out (which I dispute as counterproductive to the basic message of Christianity). That is a whole other discussion entirely.

The description of the tollhouse controversy and the eccentric detail of the teaching, in fact, apart from the bit about the tollhouses possibly being run by Yama (which are beings I invented / based instead from Buddhism) rather than straight-up demons, is almost entirely non-fictional. Don't believe me? Have a read.)

[Arakawa]

Actually, now that I re-read the Theodora account with the impious eye of a C&Cer, I notice a blatant inconsistency.

At one point it says that heretics are so bad they don't even get a trial, and are dragged off even before the first toll station.

And elsewhere it says the nineteenth toll station is specifically devoted to judging heretics, and it specifically mentions it as judging major sins of apostasy (which you'd think would end up getting the 'dragged off without a trial' treatment) as well as minor doubting.

Why would the demonic bureaucracy have a nineteenth toll station with provision for dealing with heretics if none of them are ever going to make it that far? Unless, of course, that amounts to a glaring inefficiency in their system which none of the writers or visionaries were comedic enough to actually pay attention to.

_{(This is pretty much the same sort of bad sign that led me to immediately conclude Robert Munro's Journeys out of the Body books were stuffed with fiction, because whatever the conjectured astral world is like, it probably doesn't follow ham-handed pulp science-fiction laws of foreshadowing and unexpected plot twist.)}