Hey there! Briefly — yes, physically challenged wizards are a lot on my mind. Yes, there are deaf wizards. Yes, there are non-audible recensions of the Speech (on Earth and absolutely elsewhere, because there are lots of species who don’t work in audible sound): yes, there are human wizards who exclusively sign — there are some of them in the upcoming Games Wizards Play, in fact. In one chapter Nita notes this for the first time and thinks (a) “Wow, have I been sheltered, how has this not come up for consideration before?” and (b) Wow, he looks like he’s dancing, how cool is that?! — because the nonverbal recensions of the Speech really put a human through their paces, physically speaking. One great master of that aspect of the Art who we see in passing is a jazz dancer of tremendous skill, and watching him just gives Nita chills, thinking (in passing) of her mother.
I need to do a post about this later in more detail. But in brief: yeah. 🙂
Tag: Young Wizards
Is Ronan an Abstainee? It seems like his Ordeal didn’t involve the Lone Power.
No, he’s not an Abstainee. It was involved, all right.
You don’t necessarily have to have a one-to-one face-to-face up-close-and-personal-with-the-LP Ordeal — i.e., a confrontation with one of Its self-aware avatars or embodiments — for It to have been involved. Sometimes It just seems to prefer to manifest personally, and sometimes not. (Doubtless this choice is based on which It thinks will freak the wizard out more — the personal touch or the impersonal.) An Abstainee’s Ordeal will simply involve events that were not specifically set up / tailored by the Lone One as a specific challenge to them. And they may look quite anticlimactic, indeed non-Ordeal-ish, when they’re reviewed.
But then, frankly, so may the Ordeals of non-Abstainees when they get down to comparing them. This is why there’s… not exactly a taboo or prohibition against inquiring about what somebody else’s Ordeal was like, but a general suggestion, an agreed etiquette, as it were, that the subject is likely to be extremely subjective… and that no beings but the Powers, the Lone One and the wizard who went through a given Ordeal are qualified to accurately assess or judge what it cost to get through it. Normally the understanding is that if you want someone to have details about your Ordeal, you’ll volunteer them. (Or make them available to Manual access.) If someone doesn’t want to tell, you don’t ask.
Anyway, a fairly commonplace marker for Abstainee status is when you’re notified that the Lone Power’s sitting this one out. Mamvish’s case would be typical. This may be an attempt to get the wizard in question to start taking themselves too seriously. Or it may merely be a sign of pique, since Evil really hates the prospect of not being treated with what it considers proper respect…
Reminder that there is a chat window open for all YW fans, or really anybody who wants to talk. It is open nearly 24/7, you just need to start talking so it pings whoever is in already.
What if after Deep Thought deduced the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, but had its Answer largely snubbed by the people of Magrathea, it decided to manifest as the Transcendent Pig and wander the universe, in search of someone who would make better use of the Answer?
The two have similar levels of knowledge and senses of humor, after all…
So I was watching that new show Wizard Wars (very entertaining, a bit like Chopped but with magic tricks instead of food, 10/10, would watch in the wee hours of the morning again), and I just couldn’t stop thinking about Nita and her card tricks, and then I started thinking about illusionist/magician wizards.
Wizards who keep spell components up their sleeves instead of in an otherspace pocket. Wizards who find talking the Universe into another state as easy as talking an audience into believing a trick. Wizards in tough situations using illusion to supplement actual spells as a way to conserve energy but still be effective. Wizards pickpocketing the Lone Power and handing the poor, confused LP back the watch he was wearing just a moment ago.
Wizard magicians refusing to use wizardry onstage in order to preserve ethics and authenticity. Wizard magicians agreeing to using wizardry onstage in order to keep risky tricks safe. Wizard magicians with good relationships with their decks of cards and sometimes their own tricks will surprise them with a helpful twist. Wizards talking to the doves they have in the secret pockets and the rabbits in hats to keep them calm, explain what’s going on, and maybe persuade them to do an extra flap or hop to keep the audience entertained. (Oh man, wizards who are the animals used in tricks, that’s a whole nother ball game)
Just
Magic and wizardry working together seamlessly
Headcanon: Years after the books, Kit and Nita have twin boys. Nita insists on naming them Frederic and Edward, despite Kit’s reservations. (She’s always *naming* things and it never ends well.)
Fred is a powerful wizard with a knack for manipulating energy spectra and a near irresistible charm. He loves helping people and going to new places.
Ed is a quiet, gentle wizard who focuses on healing and maintaining balance. He has a powerful affinity for water and anything living in it, but downplays it around his parents so he won’t freak them out.
Years later, Kit asks Tom and Carl if they are the way they are because of their names, or if Nita named them because of what they are. Carl tells him that it’s a chicken and egg question. Tom adds that maybe it’s just a matter of symmetry. Phred and Ed died for Nita and Kit. Nita and Kit brought Fred and Ed into – or back into – the world. It works out.
I finished the Last Olympian today, which was pretty delightful. All of my favs (except Charlie) made it out in the end! And damn Clarisse. Although the whole time the statues were running around New York I was distracted by So You Want To Be A Wizard Feels.
I agree so hard with that last part. The whole time I was just thinking “this is all a big ripoff of Young Wizards and I bet everyone’s going to say YW ripped this off when it finally gets that movie and that well make me so mad.”
sometimes astronomical timescales fuck me up:
Planetary nebulae are brief (~10,000 years) phases in the lives of stars below 8 solar masses that mark the transition from being an AGB star to being a white dwarf.
that “brief” is longer than the entirety of recorded history. holy moly.
oh don’t mind me I’ll be over here crying
The dimensional rift at the top only opens on foggy days…
“I told you this was not a bright idea.”
"You told me! Excuse me, but what you said was ‘Yeah, sure, I’ll trial one just to get Darryl off my case, he knows what I prefer in manuals but he’s not gonna believe it until I take the thing out on a test run!’”
"Yeah, well, did I or did I not hear you agree that this was probably a good thing because once one of us had done it then he’d stop bugging you about it too?”
"…Didn’t think you were going to take me seriously!”
“Oh didn’t you. So that’s my fault, is it! And what about this tiny little screen? Huh? How was I supposed to take that itsy bitsy i-with-a-circle-around-it seriously? Come on! It should have been a giant flashing red glowing text from one damn side to the other saying WARNING, DO NOT ENGAGE TRANSPORT FUNCTIONS WHEN LOCAL DIMENSIONAL RIFT PROBABILITY EXCEEDS 80%! But no, I get to catch the heat because some designer somewhere, somewhen, somewhatever, doesn’t want to spoil his pretty app’s screen real estate with some nasty blatant warning about how you could destabilize the worldgates for a whole damn city!” A moan and the sound of a head being clutched. “Carl is going to pitch a total Tunguska over this one, and Rhiow, oh God Rhiow won’t leave a stitch of skin on my body, I can feel the claws right now. We are in so much trouble.”
"Look, Neets, I’m not sure that — ”
“Don’t talk to me, don’t talk to me right now or I will— Oh God, how do I get out of this thing? It’s locked up. Please tell me I have not bricked a WizPhone, someone’s gonna be all over me for that. And Dairine, Dairine’s gonna laugh for weeks, she will never let me forget this, and neither will Spot, you haven’t been laughed at until you’ve been laughed at by a sentient computer. And look where we are!!”
"Look, I just stuck in this coordinate set because it jumps right out at you in the Google/Charmr interface, it’s a landmark, those pins always show up first and how can you blame me for—”
“Very easily, this is me telling the universe, I Blame Kit For This, Right There, He Did It! And now I have to figure out how to—”
"Neets.”
“—get us out of this mess, and with hardware I don’t understand, no less, because if we don’t gate out of here the same way we went in things will just get more unstable, you can’t leave one of these apps running with an incomplete transit transaction, Darryl was real plain about that, and if we—”
"Neets.”
“— mess up the London gates at rush hour people are going to wind up everywhere from Chur to the Crossings instead of home for their dinners, and then Sker’ret’s gonna—”
“Neets.”
“What??”
“The capsule next to us?”
“Yes, what?”
"There are a couple of guys in it. And one of them is really staring at us.”
"Uhh…”
“Probably because this capsule was empty a minute ago? Because the Jumpr app has the usual safety offset built in, you saw that in the docs, and we couldn’t be in here it if it hadn’t been…”
"…empty…”
“Yeah.”
“…”
“…Shit.”
***
“…the best locked room murder ever seen, John. Bar none! Not merely a locked room but a glass locked room! Impossible to get into or out of once the capsule has left the boarding platform! No outside witnesses because every other capsule was empty because one of the suspects had rented them all! A full dinner laid out, twelve guests all with motive, at least three different possible causes of death before we even get near the autopsy results, and for once, for once the evidence untampered with! Oh, John this is going to be memorable, you have no idea—”
"Sherlock.”
“—been waiting for some decent intellectual stimulation all week, finally this will—”
“Sherlock.”
“What, John?”
"Those empty capsules on either side?”
“Yes, exquisitely observant as always, John, you—”
“Not so empty at the moment. One of them, anyway.”
“What? Ridiculous, the Eye has been static for hours since the murder and there’s no possible way anyone could—”
The sound of a throat being softly cleared as someone points at the capsule in question.
“…Oh.”
***
“No, you hold down the bottom button and the power button at the same time —”
“I am never getting one of these. Never. Never.”
“Oh God, now his friend has noticed too.”
“Why do these things take so long to reboot? It’s magic, for God’s sake, can’t a wizardly thing boot faster than this? Hurry up!”
“At least you didn’t brick it.”
“This is not much consolation when we’re giving the locals nervous breakdowns!”
"The short guy doesn’t look nervous. He’s interested but he’s not freaking out. The other guy kind of looks like he wants to claw his way through the glass, though…”
“Yes, yes, stop showing me the damn Apple already, I know who built you, can you just hurry the hell up—”
"Is there sort of an emergency hatch in the top of these things?”
“Oh thank heaven, yes, here we go, sweet Powers how many apps have they installed on this thing? Where’s the — okay, here we go —”
"Uh oh, I really don’t think he should be trying to climb up that—”
“Right, return journey, point of origin, countdown no, offset check yes, availability yes, why does this thing have so many options, finally, here we go, you ready? Now.”
***
"Sherlock.”
“John, come on, give me a hand, we have to find out how—”
“Sherlock.”
“—impossible, we have to discover what—”
“Sherlock. A little observation please?”
“What, John? What are you—”
A throat is cleared again.
“…Impossible.”
A long sigh. “So was the elephant, as I recall.” And then a thought. “Trick of the mist?”
A prolonged silence. “…When you eliminate the impossible…”
“Yes.”
“Well. …Time to consider this later. In the meantime, we’ve got a lovely crime scene that isn’t going to deduce itself…”
***
And somewhere else, some thousands of miles away?
“I am not giving that app any stars at all.”
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