[American Magic] worldbuilding thread

[Arakawa]

Random snips edition.

Gradually restoring myself to writing inspiration. I mentioned before where Forbis' name comes from, but now I can try and show it:

http://pastebin.com/63MLPc7C

That Oracle is shaping up to be an important secondary antagonist at some point.

[Jason_Miao]

Idle question: is your other thread current on chapters?  I read this, but it's been far too long since I've read anything of the main story, so am unsure if I'm missing any context.

[Arakawa]

The other thread currently has everything from Lost Twins that was ready-to-post. I'll make sure to have more soon-ish, but it wouldn't really give additional context for this beyond touching on some things pertaining to Christmas Elves and their rather peculiar espionage ability (being able to do work for anyone without their consent and without being detected).

(Late night rambling follows....)

As to how their clan system works... I can only assume at the moment that there is a lot of politics, and it is fairly nasty. One variant worth exploring as to what happened in this case:

Spoiler: ShowHide

the normal Forbis clan prophecies are actually traditionally rigged, and Pa Forbis caught wind that due to politics X Y and Z people P and Q for expedient reasons W and V were going to bribe their regular Oracle to produce a bogus result that wouldn't be in his daughter's favour. He managed to justify using an Oracle (Beatrice Fiorelli, featuring in the snippet) who was at least genuine and unbribeable. But also about as stable and safe to deal with as a vat of nitroglycerin. I can only assume that P and Q earlier tried to see if Beatrice might, in fact, be bribed, to which she did not react pleasantly.

The precise question of how much control an Oracle has over prophecies is interesting to address, since I described the possibility of an oracle getting bribed just now. The Oracle sees a right-brained, non-verbal slice of some arbitrary slice of past, present, and future (maybe including multiple possibilities and conditions) which they have to actually interpret coherently to understand or communicate to others. A bogus Oracle can lie about what he/she sees, and will eventually have any real ability to make sense of the raw data he/she receives correspondingly rot away. A middling-good Oracle will stick to the truth, but not really have any control over how it's expressed verbally -- which may result in useless prophecies, or it may not, or it may result in prophecies that are true but more trouble than they're worth. An excellent Oracle can see with enough clarity that she can -- without departing from the truth -- determine what to reveal and what to conceal and what the most useful way to put it is -- but there's still a lot of guesswork due to the fact that the prophecy itself may affect the future that is being predicted. Either way, this means there are two kinds of oracle that can, in principle, be bribed: the very bad oracles that are "making it up" anyways, and the very good oracles who can dig around -- in a vast and complicated timescape -- and have a good chance of concocting more or less what the person paying wants to hear from that raw material.

This snippet would probably be in the next story entitled What's Fit to Print. Beatrice (the Oracle in this snip) is entirely absent from Lost Twins, but has an increasingly important role going forward from there.

Anyways, time for me to stop messing around and post some story.

[Arakawa]

Haven't come back to this in ages, but it still keeps bouncing around in my head.

The main problem is that the big picture whole story (as opposed to the Lost Twins part) is a bit too grandiose to make a manageably sized project, and needs to be compressed. Irony, since we were just complaining about fic pacing in the other thread. Still figuring out what to do about it.

The two attached drabbles are bits of fic from way further in the story; they're not too spoilery, and I'm not really looking for detailed feedback. I don't even know if there's anyone around to provide feedback nowadays.

But I do need to share something since the Muse is hurting something fierce.

_{I wonder if Muphrid is still around....}

[Muphrid]

Well, good morning.

Without more context, these things make no tremendous impression on me, outside of that you've built an intricate and deep world--which I did know.

If you're looking for some help trying to organize things in the big picture, I'd be happy to give it a shot. I spent a little time trying to organize a big, multi-novel story, but I wasn't quite feeling it, so that one's on the back-burner.

[Arakawa]

Hello Muphrid, glad to hear from you again.

I have two arcs planned fairly clearly, and then a tangled ball of ideas where I don't know where to start tugging to have it unravel into a sensible story. (The Beatrice scene fits neatly into one of the planned arcs, but the Stonemeyer scene is a mess of intersecting elements -- the Disjoint Ones, Powell's backstory with regard to immortality, and a power structure for the city and the broader United States that I haven't figured out completely.) Since I don't know how the ball of ideas is laid out, it's also hard to figure out what I should be setting up in the two earlier arcs (besides their self-contained stories).

I'll start by writing a synopsis of the two arcs that I do have a clear grasp on and see what I can do to write stories that are not ridiculously long.