Absolute Love Spellbook

humans believe that there is some sort of “noble suffering”, that the pain and destruction inherent in “growing up” is, in some way, proving of their right to be treated like an adult, that only after going through a trial of self-inflicted pain, only after burning away and ripping off pieces of yourself, on purpose, only after having tortured yourself into compliance with the existing system will you be permitted a taxed form of freedom within said system, subject, as always, to perpetual, invasive, all-consuming surveylence and judgement; any divergence from the “we hurt ourself so now you have to hurt” narrative met with immediate punishment. Hell, that's how parenting works, “we (parent) suffered to get here and to have you, so now you (child) must suffer in turn to validate our suffering” Surprising: still very hard to conceptualise of living. Still feel like this is all going to break, like this is too good. People understanding our magic? Accepting us as a mage? Rebuilding connections with R, did not expect that. Realised also that while we are interested in Octavia as a person, yes, Octavia and Kaleidoscope are two different things. We are KaleidoscopicCrucible, we are the creature that melts down the souls of others and reforges them in fractal form. We are the carrier of the meme. Pro hyperstitioneering. 2016 Freya would haaaaaaate 2025 Freya. Suppose it turned out we did have a religion, or a belief system, just turned out to be Kaleidoscope not any of the standard ones. Magic is a programming language, and mage pools can be accessed. Online, nearline, and offline. We are a psychmage specialising in collective power and change. Generally focused on cities, not suburbs, actual cities, with a second specialisation in hypnosis and one-to-one mind magic. generally we pull on collective power, raves, clubs, that sort of thing? Those are really good sources for it. Any place where there's a lot of emotional expression, means there's a lot of power. No shit like if you put us in a suburb, we will actually full on collapse; our mental health goes to shit, our access to anything kataward from this frame basically reduces to nothing, half our headmates can't front, and crossframe instantiation and mimetics basically fall off to nothing for lack of access to the right magic. used to live in chch, actually. That place is nasty; the magic is still there, technically, if you actually measure it you get a non-zero result, somewhere between 0.45 and 0.67LR, but it's... inverted, it turned in on itself and has started to attack itself. Problem with that is, when you draw on it, it's not like doing it in a 0LR mage-nulled environment; we've been there, they're bad, but bad for lack of magic, chch because the magic is corrupted, sure you can draw on it for smaller working but (A) nothing long-term or complex can be sustained on it, and (B) it'll get into your system and fuck you up with continued use of it. Hell, we're only just now able to pull rfom the Wellington pool, since we got all the nasty CHCH shit out of us. Wellington's nice, Wellington hovers between 0.92 and 0.95LR, depending on the day, the lowest we saw it get was 0.886LR, but that's because us (a mage), Elle (a sleeper with magic potential), and Thea (a girl exposed to magic for the first time) were all in the one apartment, and we were pulling all pretty strongly from the city. the earthquake killed chch as a city, you kill the city, you kill the magic. worst place we ever saw was Hanford, WA (0.12LR, and even then, corrupted to the point where nothing could be done with it, it would just be rejected outright). The nuclear site, nuclear stuff fucks with magic really really badly, not normally, you could work, say, in a nuclear power plant as a mage and have no issue, but when it starts poisoning the land, like in Hanford, it kills and warps the magic. Nuclear weapons sites, too, flicker erratically from 0LR (mage-nulled) to the underlying land's thaumeter rating, which can depend based on what the land was originally. The best place we ever saw was Seattle, we got a solid 1.00LR almost all the time, except a few nights in Delridge where it dropped into the 0.5-0.61 range for reasons we couldn't quite figure out. oh and, fuck most institutional architects. Hospitals, and psych facilities too, are (deliberately) mage-nulled zones, and that shit fucking ripples, yall. Which is a fucked up thing too, since psych facilities tend to have one of the highest concentrations of aware mages anywhere in the country, but the lowest levels of functional magic, due to staff and architecture. Mage skills tend to track to (presumed) psychosis / dillusional thinking, our theory on that to be honest is that the dysphoria caused by the skew between what is actually real and what human Consensus says is real sends half of any newly aware mages right into one hell of a dysphoric state, because of course it fucking would, they're suddenly able to interpret and think within an entirely new, 4th, spatial dimension, that's going to lead to ripples. But sleepers tend to see that as something to be “fixed”, because of course they do, goddess fucking forbid their precious Consensus get shattered. Course by marginalising mages they just concentrate us in one place, and mage power does not increase linearly with the number of mages in a place, it increasers logarithmically. Dumbasses. 0LR is not a natural state, even deep space has a very low (somewhere in the range of 0.15 to 1.2) LR field due to stars. stars are nexuses (nexi?) of life, they're the birthplace of everything else, so they have their own thaumic fields, of course. Planets, too, Mars has something like a 0.008, lower than the base field of deep space due to (A) pollution from decaying RTGs and probes and the like and (B) distance to anything fully alive. Luna is somewhere in the 0.4 to 0.5 range, due to proximity to Terra and past stuff combined with collective, egrigore-style instantiation of lunar magic.