In Which Caroline Organizes a Town Hall

[headcheerbleeder]

Who: Everyone
What: Caroline holds court and everyone hashes it out over how to organize.
Where: The Heartstone.
When: After the leadership post on the network.
Warnings/Notes: Conversations may get intense due to the baggage characters are bringing to any conversation about authority, particularly structural authority. Threadhopping is encouraged; my notifs are off and you can treat this like a network post, just with face-to-face interaction. The mods reserve the right to shut down threads or the post entirely if it gets out of hand.

Caroline and Stacia have, by now, made little portable deer-hide cushions for every person they've counted up in the camp, all fifty three. It's taken them a while, and in the meantime, Stacia was on the mirror network announcing her candidacy for leadership, and Caroline was in the background making little tutting and tch noises. This is why she doesn't do the internet.

Finally, she gets her own mirror out and makes an announcement, then arranges the little cushions for everyone in a wide, multi-tiered circle, staggered so everyone has a view towards the center, all at perfect fifteen degree angles to the one next to them. She sets six little campfires to ensure everything's well-lit. And she folds her arms and she waits.

Comments

[hourglasshalfempty]

:Hmm. Some element of your condition?:

[he'll play along]

:Possible. Or - :

[a horrifying thought occurs]

:No:

[he reviews their interactions, quickly, with a mental sensation not unlike flipping through a rolodex, not that he knows what one of those are.]

:Hellfire:

[hasapoint]

:It’s not unrelated to being a creature of the mind, but no.:

[As it dawns on him Need laughs in his head. Not cruelly - well, maybe there’s a shade of malice - but the strength of his reaction feeds the faint, easy amusement she feels so much of the time. She borrows a second of someone else’s sight to see if it showed on his face.]

:I said something stronger when I found out. No, it’s not possible to lie convincingly in Mindspeech. Listen - I’m actually a sixteen year old prodigy.:

[The words come through without issue but the connotations are weird and wrong. She may have been a prodigy with a sword at sixteen, she doesn’t remember, but there’s no other sense that that statement could be true. Rather that it’s closer to a joke than an attempted deception.

She’s also deliberately showing more of those connotations and letting them linger for longer than she normally might. If one can outright lie in Mindspeech it’s in one or two words on a topic the speaker might be expected to be conflicted about, and is still difficult.]

[hourglasshalfempty]

[There is a glower. He controls himself quickly, but it is, distinctly, a glower]

:Well - I suppose I can be thankful it didn't occur to me to try and lie to you: [this is so embarrassing, how did he not notice]

[hasapoint]

:It wouldn’t have mattered. You’ve picked up on how to shape your thoughts, but you don’t have the Gift to send them my way. I can understand you because I’m in your head.: In case he’d forgotten somehow.

She considers and doles out a pearl of information. :I can lie in other ways. If I chose, and I had more of my magic available, I could create sounds and speech out in the physical world. I think I used to more often, once. Some people can’t hear me Mindspeak at all.:

[hourglasshalfempty]

:Convenient. Then this kind of mental ability isn't universal in your world?:

[hasapoint]

:It's not. Someone has mind magic or they don't, and some of those who have it only have the barest scrap, not even enough to listen to other Mindspeakers. Just enough to hear one person connected to them.:

[Like her, or a Companion. Heralds who can't hear their Companions talk are quite uncommon.]

:It may actually be that rather than lacking Mindspeech in a straightforwards manner someone who can't hear it at all has some kind of block or anti-Gift, but they can be read like anyone else. Hard to say.:

[hourglasshalfempty]

:What makes the difference between one of these Gifts and magic, exactly?:

[hasapoint]

:I don't mind telling you, but do you really want to talk about it here and now instead of watching the meeting? I suppose it's as safe as anywhere.:

[He might get more people coming up to talk. She'll notice in time to pause and wait it out, but she knows that can be annoying.]

:...Well, looks like I've been spared by the dyheli. 'For now', hah, and I'm not to talk to him again.:

[unsaid: whether she messed with Alloran's memory of the encounter or decided he was too much of an alien to risk that. Raist doesn't need to know she can alter memories.]

[hourglasshalfempty]

:The meeting's largely breaking up. I could have told them they wouldn't accomplish anything meaningful; the real issue seems to have been conflicting cultural expectations and people getting ahead of themselves in an effort to feel they have control over the situation:

[hasapoint]

:It's an old song, and they've sung it again. My dear, you're so cynical.:

[That observation is as approving as a smile.]

:And I suppose my fears were unfounded. Old proverb, older than I am: better to prepare and look foolish than not to prepare and look dead.:

[hourglasshalfempty]

:We have a similar one, and I'm quite fond of it:

[hasapoint]

:Tell it to me? I’m sure there are more elegant ways to phrase mine but, eh.:

[hourglasshalfempty]

:There are variations. The one I grew up with is "better to have and not need than need and not have." The dwarves say "better a heavy pack than a quick death." And the elves say "Cutting back is easier than growing," which makes rather more sense in their own tongue - it's a very contextual language.:

[hasapoint]

:Hm. I like that.:

[She knows her name is just one of those words that appears in different forms in most languages - that's part of the point of a lyke-name, she's been called hundreds of words that mean need - but it's still amusing hearing it unexpectedly.]

:As to your question, there are multiple Gifts often regarded as magic. Exactly how many depends who you ask, they're lumped together or split apart sometimes and there is overlap and interconnection. The three most generally recognized categories are Mind Magic, Healing, and True Magic. Mind Magic is purely mental and takes no tools or rituals. Healing takes the energy from one person and greatly influences the natural healing processes of a body; knowing how it's put together helps to guide it, but it's not necessary. True Magic, the closest to what you understand as magic, can duplicate some of the effects of the other kinds, but it's much more difficult and not as subtle.:

[Not that she uses tools or rituals or special words in her magic. At high levels, in Velgarth, those are obsolete.]

[hourglasshalfempty]

:We also differentiate between healing and true magic - we call it High Sorcery - but that's because healing is a gift of the gods, one that's vanished from Krynn. I think I've mentioned it before? High Sorcery is a refinement of the wild or primal sorcery that filled the world in the days just after creation. The three gods of magic taught mortals how to harness and shape it, and founded the three Orders of Wizardry.

We don't have anything like what you describe as mind magic. There are techniques that can replicate some aspects, but they're spells and rituals of High Sorcery. Possibly a true cleric, if any existed, could do similar.:

[hasapoint]

:Hah. One of the subsets of True Magic is called High Magic. The unversed think of it as the only 'real' magic, and it is the one with the most power and fewest rules attached, the one that takes the most study, the one that can best mimic the other kinds. A Healer can lay hands on a wound and coax it to clean and close without even knowing that the heart pushes blood through the body. Meanwhile a mage can create spells that heal and even enchant objects with healing spells, but if she doesn't know what she's doing, at best the spells are unreliable. If she forces it and causes the body to change without knowledge, disaster. The body is a stunningly intricate construction and must be listened to in places, overridden in others. It's such a lot of work and Healers do the service so well that most mages don't bother to learn all that much. Of course, sometimes you get someone with both Mage-Gift and Healing-Gift, and she can be extraordinary.:

[Need herself is a very good mage-healer but not a Healer.]

:Hmm. Our gods as a whole haven't had such a heavy hand in what humans and our creations do with our different forms of magic since before my time. Religions restrict and meddle and claim the gods feel this way and that, and there are some straggler and upstart gods who do, but overall they've long agreed to let us set our own course and interfere in only limited ways.:

[hourglasshalfempty]

:Hmm. Divine healing doesn't seem to have required any knowledge in particular, though many clerics were medically adept. The cleric implores the god for, in effect, a miracle; the god delivers according to the cleric's piety and the plausibility of the miracle.:

[it always sounded a bit like a protection racket, to him, but given that he's fond of his own goddess, he generally keeps that to himself]

:I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Are the clerics of your world not granted divine powers?:

[hasapoint]

:I see. Certainly priests can appeal to their gods for a miracle and that may include striking some bargain for healing, but our gods prefer to work indirectly. Part of my purpose involves, hah, answering prayers for certain of them.:

[There's flakes of memory here, too fast to really track. The clearest involves Kethry with a shattered spine, bleeding into the snow as Tarma weeps and pleads and holds her limp hands around Need's hilt.]

:They aren't. When a god gives me power to heal someone, it's the same as the power I take from ley lines or people. Priests who are mages learn spells particular to a god's followers, perhaps. Divine magic is different in degree from human magic, but not in kind. Urtho proved that it's within human capacity to create a new species from nothing, even, I'll give him that. Or it was.:

[hourglasshalfempty]

:Creating life? Now that is truly blasphemy:

[Raistlin is being wry]

:Or so I was taught. Divine magic is different in kind, because of the nature of the gods. A mortal imposing their will on the world as mages do is fundamentally an unnatural thing, tolerated only because the gods of magic speak for us in the divine courts, and govern us accordingly. Mortals are part of the world, not set above it as gods are. Gods are of the world and yet not, part and apart, and it is in their fundamental nature to be what they are. Mortal magicians, on the other hand, choose their natures. It's the difference between actually being a storm, and merely being able to blow as hard as one.:

[that's what they taught him, anyway]

[hasapoint]

[Need chuckles at his tone.] :How about making that life to worship its creator and struggle greatly to question him at all, even long after he's gone?:

[Some images of gryphons and tervardi. ...It's probably a good thing that Urtho didn't become a lich.]

:I understand that it's different for you, but that seems uncomfortably separate to my perspective. For me, magic is a byproduct of life. Living things generate it the way wood generates heat and light as it's consumed by fire. Some of those living things can sense it, and if they can sense it, they can use it. Our gods, the greater ones anyway, only judge us for so much.:

[hourglasshalfempty]

:Your gods sounds eminently sensible. Though far be it from me to judge. Mortal that I am:

[if the gods haven't been bothered to come out of their sulk in three hundred years since the Cataclysm, they're not going to bother to reach out and zap him across dimensions]

:My experience, of my own magic, however, has been that it does not come from within me, except in the sense that I take it into myself when I memorize the spells that hold it - except here. That is what I meant when I said my magical seemed to have fundamentally changed. I can run out of magic now, with spells uncast - that shouldn't be possible, normally. Magic doesn't run out. Only the wizard's strength fails:

[hasapoint]

:You've had a Cataclysm? It can't be the same as ours.:

[She keeps much about the Cataclysm from coming across just yet.]

:Fascinating. The change for me is in the physics. And in Magesight not working.: [She's really, really put out by this! In Velgarth you can't work magic if you can't See it! which comes through a bit.] :A High Mage who's something called an Adept might say something similar about only the wizard's strength having limits. One of the hallmarks of High Magic is the ability to harvest magic from elsewhere instead of only relying on a personal reserve. The more highly she's ranked the more potent the sources she can tap. Adepts can take magic from the most powerful sources we know, but handling it like so is an effort.:

[hourglasshalfempty]

:Not unless your Cataclysm involved the gods lobbing a great big flaming volcano down in the middle of the continent, no. According to legend, the Kingpriest of Istar offended the gods by seeking to set himself as either their equal or superior, depending on the version you hear. They retaliated by destroying him, the city of Istar, and half of the continent. And since then, they've kept to themselves, abandoning the mortal realm to its own devices. All save the gods of magic, but they care only for their own.

Nowadays, most people believe the gods never existed, or if they did, they're never coming back. Except mages, but no one asks our thoughts on the subject, and we might not share it if they did:

[hasapoint]

:It certainly didn't. I might say the opposite, actually. That is... extreme. Surely a lightning strike would have been enough, or something more creative and localized if lightning might be taken as natural.:

[Need doesn't approve of these gods, is coming through almost as clearly as if she'd out and said it. Being from Velgarth, and being an immortal entity who's friendly with horse angels and various actual gods, she has absolutely no compunctions about judging.]

:All right. Why wouldn't they ask mages?:

[hourglasshalfempty]

[Raistlin doesn't really have an opinion about the Cataclysm one way or another; it happened, and the gods are gone, save for the moons of magic. Since he has no idea that the gods are going to return in his lifetime, he's never given particular thought to any of them other than his patrons]

:Because most of Ansalon isn't entirely convinced mages aren't the reason that the Kingpriest fell. Mages are unnatural and dangerous, and anything they have to say on the subject of the gods, or the Cataclysm, is bound to be suspect in some way, or serve some agenda. Even the White Robes aren't fully trusted, and they're about as sanctimonious a bunch of a hall monitors as you're ever going to meet: