#hyssopfall

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Were Hyssop’s venom glands affected by the accident at all? When he’s stressed, does steam come out of the split in his face too?

The incident that split his face also damaged the muscles involved in controlling venom release and swelling in the area damaged the glands themselves, causing his body to leak venom into his wounds. So they removed them.

While the magic causing the problems solved a lot of the issues in his face it didn't restore his venom glands so he still doesn't have them.

Most don't notice, not only because there's so much else strange about him, but because his general demeanor makes it seem like he's simply never felt threatened or angry enough to display venom steam.

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Do you have a family tree of you Saratoan characters? I'm having trouble figuring out how they connect to each other

I don't think a family tree would help since many aren't related and I haven't drawn every generation of the families mentioned, but here's as quick a rundown as I can give:

BoneLatch and CarbonTheory are sisters (three other sisters were also shown only recently, WashView, AnglePull and GhostFrame), and FateLock is their great grandmother.

Unrelated to that family, HyssopFall is FlickPin's great uncle, and RainBook is FlickPin's very young son.

Unrelated to both those families, PenWell is the one in charge of the building and legal entity that provides housing for CarbonTheory and FlickPin so is frequently seen with both and their friends and relatives - he's like honorary grandpa. PenWell knows FateLock personally they've know each other a long time. He has a brother, ClayWire who has been drawn only once so far. He had more family but they are deceased, only alluded to at present.

PenWell and ReedWalk were best friends, Reed is now deceased

Character!DimeSpin is not related to Pen they are just the same ethnicity (half the same ethnicity)

Because they live in the same house I do intend to depict Flick and Carbon talking in the future - the culture clash 160-year generation gap between Carbon and Pen is just too funny to me so I keep drawing them talking haha

BoneLatch and DimeSpin are best friends

HyssopFall and AtlasKind are best friends

AtlasKind and HyssopFall trained DimeSpin in spellwriting at one point and they occasionally talk

There are older characters I may or may not draw again but they aren't blood related to anyone above. I drew an Atau once who had a fully fuzzy head and neck I might bring her back because it was funny but if I do I have no idea if she knows any of these people.

The funeral director goth girl will also be drawn again. She's not anyone's blood relative but she knows PenWell in a professional capacity.

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Character reference for Hyssop

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A man who really knows how to uplift those around him

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Is that spellwriter that Hyssop apprenticed with still around?

Before anyone asks - the master's death was extremely mundane, he died of a heart attack after being a chronic workaholic for decades.

The journeyman would be about 180. Hyssop and Atlas don't really stay in contact with her, but she's still tangentially connected to the profession so they still hear about her.

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How did Hyssop and Atlas meet? I know they would have been kids but were they friends immediately? or did they know eachother since they were joeys? Love these old men

Atlas was about 20 and working as a delivery boy for a few random shops including an ink shop that supplied the local spellwriters. Hyssop was 28 and had recently started apprenticing with said spellwriters (20/28 is well within the "sub-adult" age group)

Atlas at the time was just that kind of hyper-outgoing person to never pass up an opportunity to befriend someone in his cohort - this is just one of dozens of instances of him yelling at other kids asking them to play games with him - but this was the most enduring result.

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Do HyssopFall and AtlasKind know that the spell failed because the magic pigment didn’t give it an entry point? Because you wrote that AtlasKind gave himself that wound on purpose and I’m wondering if it’s because they realized what happened or only knew a wound for some reason was needed.

To them it's the best theory but they lack the absolute certainty I can indulge in as the author.

They discuss it every few years and propose alternate hypotheses all the time, because neither of them accepts that explanation as gospel.

It's the logical basis of Atlas's spell, but he questions if it didn't turn out right because it's logic was off base and lead magic down an alternate path that the first spell didn't follow.

Spellwriting is like when you leave a social interaction overthinking what someone said and why they'd say that, except you can't ask for clarification - just having to deal with that ambiguity forever because coming up with a reasonable explanation doesn't necessarily rule out some batshit reason because the "person" in question does things for weird reasons in addition to logical ones.

Which is frustrating for them since it's their job to know for sure how a spell will perform when activated.

This is how their master overworked himself into a heart attack haha

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I'm so curious about spellwriting in your world. Do you mind questions poking at it or is it not developed enough for that? I so badly want to pick at Hyssops spell and what happened with it, did he miss an obvious bit that magic took literally? Did it mistranslate something in a really weird way? I would be that person studying magic like a mad man

He unknowingly left out a crucial step in the process, and magic, unlike a totally unintelligent process that might simply stop dead at that point, came up with it's own solution to get to the next step in the process and proceed.

The reason he didn't realize the step was missing is because he didn't realize it was necessary for the spell's potency to gain access to the interior of the body through a physical entry point. Magic can pass through solid materials so it didn't occur to him to include how or where it was allowed to create that physical entry point, he thought it could just go where it needed to be as it often does in other spells.

That's partly because of their own bodies - part of the spell relies on the magic system that supports Saratoan skin pigmentation, but that pigment also acts as a soft barrier to magic trying to pass through them. It went so hard for the mouth because of the lack of pigment there.

It's sort of like if you sent someone to go to your house and leave a package inside but you didn't know your doors were locked so it never occurred to you to give them a key or add "find key under fake rock" to the instructions, so they broke a window to get inside rather than just stop and say they found a flaw in your instructions and they can't proceed.

It's easy to think Atlas' spell failed too because he has scars as well, but his were planned. He accepted that apparently the spell needs a wound and wrote the exact amount of damage he felt he could live with into the spell and wrote in the logistics of healing it as quickly as possible.

His failure was that it didn't come out as potent, and he remains unsure if the spell somehow works on a more wound = more better kind of logic or if the process of the spell rewriting itself in Hyssop lead to something more effective than either of them know how to write (since it had to invent so many extra steps the version actually in his body isn't exactly what Hyssop actually wrote). He mostly thinks it's the latter but is too afraid of the former to let anyone else continue the experiment.

(this is also why Hyssop is totally willing to tease him about having a "lizard tongue" Atlas' scars aren't a reminder of a traumatic experience, it was more like a planned surgery situation)